a nostos of sorts
When I got into work this morning I knew how this entry would begin. The first sentence was going to be There is a kind of wildness in me. A freshness, fierce and fleet of wing. I stayed in London last night and adventurously commuted to work from Kings Cross, on the Cambridge stopping service that wanders through fields and past small, misty, sunlit villages. I finished my book just moments before the train pulled into Meldreth station.
I've been re-reading the Earthsea quartet, which my parents gave to me when I was ten and which I must have read at least fourteen, fifteen times over the next few years. I found it the other week in one of the old boxes my parents brought up for me from home, and opened it for the first time in at least six years. To read it now is like revisiting any of one's old haunts of childhood; it seems smaller somehow, more familiar and less momentous, and fragments of it rise up before you like remembered glimpses of dream, the patterns of plot and character slipping comfortably and rightly into place as you progress through it. And yet the sweet keen of escapism is as poignant as it ever was, the yearning awoken by her prose for wind and forest and sky, for the old songs. And then there were the wholly new discoveries, the adult references and socio-political themes that I failed to really notice when I was reading it as a naive, self-absorbed, daydreaming pre-pubescent.
So, I finished it as the train drew in, and I manouvered the bike I'm borrowing from elise onto the platform with some difficulty and started riding it with surprising ease, considering the after-effects of the more rigorous of the weekend's activities and that I'd got up at 6.30am that morning. And flying down the High Street in Melbourn village, the only vehicle on the road, the ending of the novel singing in me still, aching and satisfying and sweet, I felt a delicious sense of freedom rising in me, an exhilaration.
Unfortunately, three hours in work has pretty much deadened it. Tiredness, computer hum and caffeine are making my head throb; I've switched roles to cover for someone's leave and have barely anything to do, and what I do need to do, I can't, because I can no longer receive my emails. My new piercings managed to get themselves slept on and pulled over the weekend, and hurt like buggery. My entire right ear is pulsing. But. The memory of that lightness this morning, flying on a borrowed bike through the cool summer morning of an English village, that's worth holding on to.