Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Winterson Jeanette

Author:Winterson, Jeanette [Winterson, Jeanette]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781446402115
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2011-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

9

English Literature A–Z

THE ACCRINGTON PUBLIC library had a copy of most things. It had a copy of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932).

When I was sixteen I had only got as far as M – not counting Shakespeare, who is not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour. Black is all the colours and Shakespeare is all the alphabet. I was reading his plays and sonnets the way that you get dressed every morning. You don’t ask yourself, ‘Shall I get dressed today?’ (On the days you don’t get dressed you are not well enough, either mentally or physically, to be able to ask – but we will go there later.)

M was the seventeenth-century poet, Andrew Marvell. After my encounter with T. S. Eliot on the library steps, I had decided to add poetry to the reading list. Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

Marvell wrote one of the most wonderful poems in English – ‘To His Coy Mistress’. That’s the one that begins: Had we but world enough, and time …

World enough, and time: I was young, so I had time, but I knew I had to find world – I didn’t even have a room of my own.

What gave me great hope were the closing lines of the poem. It is a seduction poem, which is its charm, but it is also a life poem, urging and celebrating love and desire and declaring desire as a challenge to mortality itself.

We can’t slow time, says Marvell, but we can chase it. We can make time run. Think of the hourglass, the cliché of the sands of time slowly dribbling away, and all those Faust-like wishes of immortality – if only time could stop, if only we could live forever.

No, says Marvell, forget that, turn it round, live it out as exuberantly as you can. Here he is, much better than me:

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