This is me now (Look! Can you see)...

...So young and so precious
What will I be?
(Look into the future)
How will I seem then
(Hold up a mirror and still the same face looks back)
But really not so different
Only older but still
Me.
-Rob Ryan

My uncle came to visit the other day, and his last words to me were: "Think about your future!" In a way, he is right; for someone who believes so much in dreaming big, I've been noticing more and more lately that I really don't have any clear - or, indeed, realistic! - visions of what my life after studying will look like.




Sometimes, it feels like I have nothing to strive for. But...

...and I expend so much imagination daydreaming of a fabulous fairy godmother, that perhaps it is time to make my own magic and become my own!

What are your dreams, my darlings? Maybe you are already living in one...

What do you wish on the moon for?



Sabrina Fairchild: I might as well be reaching for the moon...
Baron St. Fontanel: Oh, you young people are so old fashioned. Have you not heard? We are building rockets to reach the moon!

Thomas Fairchild: You're still reaching for the moon.
Sabrina: No, Father. The moon is reaching for me!
-Sabrina



"I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
-Yeats



True Love.

Here is the thing - I don't at all feel that I need 'some beautiful boy to save me from my own ways' to complete me. I feel complete. And such solitary completeness seems preferable, to me, to a friend's Facebook 'About Me' section, which merely reads: "I love Matt [her boyfriend]." And nothing else. Rilke - love of my life, hero of my hours! - would have found this troubling too:-

"It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?); it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them... it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing; they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment... And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are."
-Letters To A Young Poet

I am content with who I am and who I am trying to become. But I feel that who I am needs to be in love - to love another wandering, poetry-loving soul in every way possible. Someone like Amos Lee would be nice...

High Adventure! Just like Belle...

I loved backpacking around Europe - it really was the happiest I have ever been in my life. My favourite place in all the world is Italy. I want to learn the language and return to explore the whole country - maybe even live there.

A small pug companion, called Souffle...

...and five little pigs.

One day, I shall own five little pygmy pigs called Rasher, Gammon, Hammer, Sausage and Porker. Children? Perhaps, I don't know. Pigs, definitely!

Work with a purpose.

I love to write and read, and I spend most of my time doing it - I'm probably best suited to copy editing books, or perhaps working as a representative for Cambridge University Press in Italy! Ideally, I will write and sell my screenplay, adapt Once On A Time for the screen, too, and use the profits as capital for the fabulous Rat Pack-style nightclub the camerado and I dream about!

A home.

I fell in love with Marble Hill House in Twickenham as soon as I stepped into the ballroom on a school History trip...

...but I would be equally ecstatic in Julie Delpy's Parisian apartment at the end of Before Sunset. Just my own little space, filled with my books, music and paraphernalia - with big windows and a view, too!:-

Poetry.

Like Viola in Shakespeare in Love, I must have it in my life. I must carry on seeing it in everything. I know I have already quoted Hazlitt on this, but he sums up its importance:

"Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions... He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else. It is not a mere frivolous accomplishment (as some persons have been led to imagine), the trifling amusement of a few idle readers or leisure hours -- it has been the study and delight of mankind in all ages... If history is a grave study, poetry may be said to be a graver: its materials lie deeper, and are spread wider... there is no thought or feeling that can have entered into the mind of man, which he would be eager to communicate to others, or which they would listen to with delight, that is not a fit subject for poetry. It is not a branch of authorship: it is 'the stuff of which our life is made'. The rest is 'mere oblivion', a dead letter: for all that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it...Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light."

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away... Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
-Carl Sandburg

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
-Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, 1862
[Who is yours?]

People.

I want more fabulous friends in my life - the kind who shall share champagne and stitches from laughing and heart thoughts, like the camerado, but she is a rare one. Today, indeed, the camerado found a video of us messing around with her camcorder four years ago, and we couldn't breathe for hysterics! So little of us has changed [except, thank the stars, my hair, and the camerado's rather, ahem, high-pitched tone!] - it's just forty minutes of us running around in the garden, performing sketches of mocking impressions of the various characters in our lives at the time. The - ahem again! - *unique* way we imagine our world has endured, and one of the dreams closest to my heart is that we shall continue to keep faith with it and each other. For more a-roving and mockery!

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me
O you
were the best of all my days.
-Frank O'Hara

Speaking of which, my friends are getting married! She loves magicians, so for the proposal, He is taking Her to a riverside cafe and hiring one to go around the tables performing tricks before finally approaching theirs, getting Him to go down on one knee as 'part of the trick,' and making the ring appear in His hand.

We've only just begun to live
White lace and promises
A kiss for luck and we're on our way...
-The Carpenters

Listening to: Jackson Browne's 'Hold On Hold Out' - stirring and sublime, particularly when he speaks at 5:27:-
"You're a hold out
Well, I'm a hold out too
But it took me all this time to figure out
Something you already knew...
See... I always figured I was going to meet somebody here
And I don't know why
Why should love come down and suddenly just sweep me away?
I want to fly
But there are so many things in my way
Anyway...I guess you wouldn't know unless I told you, but -
I love you!
Well, just look at yourself!
What else would I do?"
Reading: Anything about Italy - E M Forster's A Room With A View, Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus [very Florentine, you see!], and Goethe's diaries of his Italian tour.

Off to the seaside for a week with the family and my little brother's friends. I am looking forward to go-kart races, picking blackberries on the beach and elderflower fizz. But no Internet until I return! Arrivederci for now, my dear ones!