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If there was one development, one lesson which enabled a conventional,
married young woman from Hampshire to become a swinger, I think it
was this one which Ned had hinted at in his letter.
Aside from death and, I suppose, parenthood, there is no ending,
no stasis, and I had never realised it.
#
I seem to remember that there are are two words in Latin for ‘to
be’. One denotes a constant or permanent state. The other acknowledges
that being anything is temporary and transitory, that I may be one
thing today but I may well – no, must - be something altogether
different tomorrow. When I was ‘an adolescent’ (I inserted
the inverted commas after writing this. ‘A child’, ‘a
teenager’, ‘an adolescent’ – all meaningless
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classifications of imagined ‘states’…),
one of my favourite stories was a masterly confection by Isak Dinesen
called ‘The Dreamers’. I pictured it as a musical, and
even tried to prepare a treatment with the vague thought of sending
it to Lord Lloyd Webber.
It tells of three men who meet in a storm-buffeted mountain inn.
Each reminisces about the great passion of his life. For one, it
was a seamstress – and, presumably, prostitute - who fought
fiercely at the revolutionary barricades; for another, it was a nun;
for the last, it was Pellegrina Leoni, a great diva of the opera.
Each was accompanied by a fellow eternal creature – a Wandering
Jew. When at lengthy a caped and hooded woman sweeps in from the
storm and vanishes upstairs, each of the men recognises her as his
lost love. They attempt to question her, but she flees and, at length,
dies sooner than be pinned down and labelled.
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