July 2002
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Sorry to be a little late with the column this month - I moved house on July 1st, and I spent the weekend fitting a cat-flap and rigging up shanty towns for the animals, all of whom are furious. They don't believe there is any other world than the world they have left behind - and in that they are not so different from the rest of us.
Why is it so hard to push outside of what we know? Why are we nostalgic for the past? Why do we talk about the good old days and never the good new days? Why do we remember life better than it was, so even the miseries we have left behind take on a kind of golden glow, as though we were not really that unhappy?
When we change things we take risks - and all change brings with it unsettlement, and I suppose that habit is comforting.
Bad habits are just as comforting as good habits.
When we make a change, it's so easy to interpret our unsettledness as unhappiness, and our unhappiness as the result of having made the wrong decision. Our mental and emotional states fluctuate madly when we make big changes in our lives, and some days we could tight-rope across Manhattan, and other days we are too weary to clean our teeth. This is normal. This is natural. This is change.
My animals want to go back home. They don't care that I have brought them to a wood and a river. They only see frightening shapes. The smells are wrong. But in a few weeks, and certainly in a few months, they will love it here. I know that, and that's why I hold them steady. I know it for myself, just as you know it for yourself, but for us, it is harder to hold steady.
Last night I came to this empty house at dusk and lit a fire and sat on the floor and ate a cold supper and drank a glass of wine. I felt tremendous peace, and I did wonder why the furniture van was going to turn up. Stripping everything away is a measure of how much we accumulate and how little we need. I want my books and a sauce pan, and not much else.
Of course, moving house is always about other things too - inner houses, outer houses, as the Buddhists say. We move for practical reasons, but we also move to move on. We have to move ourselves on, and all unfamiliar situations have a way of taking off the road we prefer to travel.
Last night I thought I had come through a dark wood to this place - it was a dreaming house, and I was dreaming it. I thought of Dante and the beginning of the Divine Comedy - 'Midway through this life of ours, I found myself alone in a dark wood - the straight way lost.'
Sometimes it is necessary to get off the Via Diretta. I want to open my life to new things. I suppose I have been doing that for about a year, which is why I am here at all.
But in the middle of the decorating and the visits from the phone company, I am finding great peace. It won't last - there will be great tumults in a minute - but in the middle of all those conflicting emotions, or like a current beneath them, is a sense of rightness and a sense of being.
Meanwhile - my documentary on Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO is transmitted on BBC2 this month - the 27th I think - but check the papers because transmission times change. I hope you'll like it - fans of Joely Richardson and Saffron Burrows will be delighted to find them playing Vita and Virginia.
Fans of The PowerBook in Australia might be delighted to know that we are bringing it to the Perth Festival in January 2003.
Meanwhile - I'd better think about writing a book... Movement. Change. But always a book - that's the point of it all, at least for me.
Back in August - hopefully with a study to write in, and not this stone step in the garden.
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