An interesting woman indeed

Diana Athill

I'm not sure who it was that suggested I might be interested in reading Diana Athill's memoirs, but, curious, I went online and learned all about her. She died earlier this year at the age of 101. She was a skilled editor during her early years and began to write short stories and several other books in her 40s, and won several prestigious awards.

I just finished Instead of a Letter, written in 1962. I loved it, and I've got her most famous book on order: Somewhere Towards the End, written in her 90s. The New York Times published a revealing and fascinating obituary about her. There was one section in her book that resonated with me, which I share with you here.

  Marcel ... did not find objective reality a comfort. Once he leant out of a window in the Savoy Hotel, looked down on trees in which starlings were bickering their way to bed, and pavements over which people were hurrying, then slammed the window shut and exclaimed, "I can't bear it!"
  "What can't you bear?"
  "The thought that I might die in the night, and next morning everything would still be going on. All those bastards trotting up and down the street, and those silly birds chirping. It's horrible! Sometimes, when I'm at home, I wake in the middle of the night and start thinking about it, And then I have to telephone my sister."
  "What does she do?"
  "She comes over and makes tea for me, and talks. Sometimes I keep her up all night."
  He walked up and down the room, splashing whiskey out of his glass in his agitation, his mouth twitching, his eyes bilious: a sad little figure for whom the world would not come to an end.
  To me, on the other hand, the knowledge that everything will still be going on is the answer. If I die with my wits about me, not shuffled out under drugs or reduced to incoherence by pain, I want my last thoughts to be of plants growing, children being born, people who never knew me digging their gardens or telephoning their friends. It is the existence of other things and other people that I can feel the pulse of my own: the pulse. Something which hums and throbs in everything, and thus in me. (Instead of a Letter, pp. 236-7)

I look forward to reading more of her works, and I hope I've tempted you to check her out, if you didn't know about her before.
:-)