But when I am not indulging in this sort of nonsense, I can be very happy: like Rimbaud, I can have my Illuminations, sudden and unexpected. The charm of a group of young people seriously discussing the world they will have to cope with. The magnificent face of some stranger, glimpsed perhaps only for a moment. The joy when something I am writing is going right, is flowing, as from some involuntary source. This does not often happen. Joy in some triumph of Charles’s or of the children’s. The Backs at Cambridge on a winter morning under snow, every bough bearing its delicate loading like blossom.
Like Proust, I think I am recovering something of the freshness of the inward eye, though I am not sure (as Wordsworth was) that too much solitude is good for me.
From the bitingly cold short holiday on the Belgian coast, I have learned much. The eternal uplifting transformations of the sea, the benediction of Van Eyck. I hope they may stay with me.
Copyright
First published in 1974 by Macmillan
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Pamela Hansford Johnson, 1974
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Important to Me Page 24
