The boy who lives across from me is so cute. Welsh boys always get so excited when I mention that I'm learning it - they make me test out phrases on them and count to ten and recite the days of the week. They're so cute and endearing, and they're totally sweet to me (and sometimes sweet on me). I'm a little bit in love with all of them.

Anyway, the boy who lives across from my window (because I look into a "courtyard") is a Welsh boy, and I wave to him from my window and smile and talk to him when I see him about. He is so lovely. Anyway, this morning, as I was putting in my earings, I looked out my window and caught him walking about without his shirt on - his skin was clean and smooth and young looking. I caught his eye and started, and blushed and smiled at the ground.

In case you were wondering, there is nothing here but men. And I mean nothing.

"Our love was always ringed with dread
of death," the lovely dancer said.
"And so I danced the blackened core of night
With passion bright," the dancer said--

(Alun Lewis, "The Dancer")

Alun Lewis writes lovely short stories.

I feel like I want to sit down my man friend and have a really good talk with him, and explain that I have no great pretentions about any spiritual necessity for reading novels, but explain that I read fiction for the same reasons that people watch television or go to movies.

You could say that it's to learn about the human experience, but I don't really know or care if that's why - that's certainly why I study history but it isn't necessarily why I read fiction. (I keep typing novel, but the novel is a relatively modern form, fiction is more accurate.) Furthermore, I read literature with my eyes towards academic - I read children's literature because I like to trace the attitudes about children, I read books as evidence of a past world of thought.

2003-02-13, the dancer

before / after

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