(no subject)
[After the telephone drama with my aunt yesterday I slept till nine-ish today, read, had breakfast, internet'ed a bit, crawled back into bed, read some more, fell asleep & slept from twelve to around three-ish. *sigh* So much for Saturday. Did part of my Russian homework. Also sent a brief e-mail (Hi, googled you, congratulations!) to the very important former best friend, which probably was a stupid, sentimental and pointless thing to do, brought on by reading E.M.Forster and too many memories surfacing, and also totally inappropriate, because our (my) last contact was a long depressed & disappointed e-mail from me about the end of our friendship, but what the hell. We can't do less than not talk for another decade.]
On a slightly related note, few days ago I browsed through my teenage to early twenties paper diaries, which was at once interesting - retracing where one has come from and how much, or, in other respects, how little one has changed - and completely, utterly embarrassing. And not only because of the horrendous English.
I don't even want to know myself before I was 17. Oh. My. God. Child genius she certainly wasn't. I must have been pretty boring and generally... bland. Not really a personality. (But maybe that's the natural state of things at that age?) I can't even get a grip on who I was back then, before I at least sort of grew up. It does get better, though, after that. And fifteen to eighteen-ish me had, albeit in a rather on-and-off fashion one hell of a crush on David Bowie; I'd kind of managed to forgot how intense that had been over the Other Crush. Oh, and poetry from 1989-1993ish that is obviously bad and derived in all kinds of ways, but that I can't bring myself to hate, because I remember how good it felt writing it, enthusiastic and still so unashamed and unembarrassed. Endless images of the sea and beaches and mermaids, strange for someone who spent her first holiday on a beach on her Maturareise (not counting two brief trips to the seaside during two different holidays in London with the family when I was a child) I kind wonder if A. still has the copies I once gave her.
And again, not completely unrelated - I've reread Maurice and started to reread A Passage To India, and with all the reminiscing it struck me that E.M.Forster is the author that one way or the other has been with me the longest and probably influenced me the most, and whose work I can always come back to and discover aspects that I hadn't noticed when I was younger.
I must have seen A Room With A View first, because it has a late 1986 release date for Germany and this was before we even had a tv, much less a video recorder (I'm trying to remember who I saw it with, though. Fourteen, 5th grade? No idea.), but Maurice (early 1988 German release date, and in this case I even remember the cinema, watching it twice and being mildly uncomfortable because I was fifteen and Austria in the 80ies was very provincial and conservative and anything gay still rather taboo; the standard BRAVO/Dr. Sommer answer to the 'OMG am I gay?' question was 'It's just a phase, you'll get over it unless you're really unlucky') must have been the first novel I read, because I own the German translation, and I stopped reading English novels in translation... I guess around 16ish? I remember having A Passage To India on my English Maturaleseliste, possibly also A Room With A View, but according to my diary I read most of the other novels as well as the short stories a bit later, around nineteen, twenty. It's still difficult for me to put into words what exactly his writing means to me; perhaps the most immediately tangible thing and what always deeply impressed me was the emphasis on the importance of honesty towards oneself.
I just wish I could be more sure that I wasn't failing so abysmally at that.
On a slightly related note, few days ago I browsed through my teenage to early twenties paper diaries, which was at once interesting - retracing where one has come from and how much, or, in other respects, how little one has changed - and completely, utterly embarrassing. And not only because of the horrendous English.
I don't even want to know myself before I was 17. Oh. My. God. Child genius she certainly wasn't. I must have been pretty boring and generally... bland. Not really a personality. (But maybe that's the natural state of things at that age?) I can't even get a grip on who I was back then, before I at least sort of grew up. It does get better, though, after that. And fifteen to eighteen-ish me had, albeit in a rather on-and-off fashion one hell of a crush on David Bowie; I'd kind of managed to forgot how intense that had been over the Other Crush. Oh, and poetry from 1989-1993ish that is obviously bad and derived in all kinds of ways, but that I can't bring myself to hate, because I remember how good it felt writing it, enthusiastic and still so unashamed and unembarrassed. Endless images of the sea and beaches and mermaids, strange for someone who spent her first holiday on a beach on her Maturareise (not counting two brief trips to the seaside during two different holidays in London with the family when I was a child) I kind wonder if A. still has the copies I once gave her.
And again, not completely unrelated - I've reread Maurice and started to reread A Passage To India, and with all the reminiscing it struck me that E.M.Forster is the author that one way or the other has been with me the longest and probably influenced me the most, and whose work I can always come back to and discover aspects that I hadn't noticed when I was younger.
I must have seen A Room With A View first, because it has a late 1986 release date for Germany and this was before we even had a tv, much less a video recorder (I'm trying to remember who I saw it with, though. Fourteen, 5th grade? No idea.), but Maurice (early 1988 German release date, and in this case I even remember the cinema, watching it twice and being mildly uncomfortable because I was fifteen and Austria in the 80ies was very provincial and conservative and anything gay still rather taboo; the standard BRAVO/Dr. Sommer answer to the 'OMG am I gay?' question was 'It's just a phase, you'll get over it unless you're really unlucky') must have been the first novel I read, because I own the German translation, and I stopped reading English novels in translation... I guess around 16ish? I remember having A Passage To India on my English Maturaleseliste, possibly also A Room With A View, but according to my diary I read most of the other novels as well as the short stories a bit later, around nineteen, twenty. It's still difficult for me to put into words what exactly his writing means to me; perhaps the most immediately tangible thing and what always deeply impressed me was the emphasis on the importance of honesty towards oneself.
I just wish I could be more sure that I wasn't failing so abysmally at that.