20 february 01

Last night I brought my dad with me to a reading at the 92nd St Y. We heard A.S. Byatt and Peter Carey, authors of two of my favorite books (Possession and Oscar and Lucinda, respectively). It was fantastic to be part of an audience who collectively sighed and gasped upon hearing that a filmed Possession was currently being edited, and again when it was announced that Tom Stoppard would be reading at the end of March. These are both exciting things, it's true.

 *        *        *

There's a bit in Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead that I wrote out in tiny capital letters on the back of my closet door in high school (together with a whole lot of other stuff). It goes like this: "We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."