#thetoymakers

I love Room With A View! Note: it's been a number of years since I last read it. It's elegant and tender and hopeful, I think. Though someone once said of Forster (if I recall correctly) that "like Mozart, he is never sadder than when he is smiling," and they might have a point. Still! I think Room With A View is an extremely charming, wise, wry look at how we fumble our way through human relationships, and how we can learn to fumble better.

I delayed in answering this partly because it kept threatening to turn into an essay on how "straight romance" (in the sense, I presume, of romance unconnected to philosophies of living, and having nothing to do with the sexualities of those involved) is an illusion and delusion, and would be supremely uninteresting in dramatic and narrative terms. That aside: I find it hard to comprehend how anyone could read Forster -- Forster! -- and come away with that impression.

One of the reasons I like reading Forster so much (to say nothing of one of the qualities on which his popular reputation rests) is how he insists on the interconnectedness of how we relate to ideas, to nature, to sensory experiences, to our own bodies, to other people. These, I would argue, are always inextricably bound up together for Forster. It matters that Mrs. Honeychurch asks Lucy for a kiss when the latter is ill-humored. Freddy's horseplay matters (I adore Freddy.) The swimming in the English lake matters, and the blood on Lucy's postcards in the piazza, and the relaxed nonchalance of Beppo, driving the English up into the hills around Fiesole. Sententious as the remark is in context, it really does matter that Lucy, who has at a conscious level been very bound by social expectations, plays Beethoven passionately. It matters that George, who is so sullen and surly about most social expectations, is also a man of passionate filial devotion, despite the unfashionable quality of that virtue at the dawn of the twentieth century. The fact that Cousin Eleanor can still recognize and honor the courage that she was once trained out of exercising matters.

Cyber monocle, an extremely lavish ship named "Mrs Merdle" and a cape. I'm in.