Well, They Each Seem To

You Can Define A Net Two Ways, Depending On Your Point Of View. Normally You Would Say It Is A Meshed Instrument Designed To Catch Fish. But You Could, With No Great Injury To Logic, Reverse The Image And Define The Net As A Jocular Lexicographer Once Did: He Called It A Collection Of Holes Tied Together With String.

Great Books Are Readable Anyway. Dickens Is Readable. Jane Austen Is Readable. John Updike's Readable. Hawthorne's Readable. It's A Meaningless Term. You Have To Go The Very Extremes Of Literature, Like Joyce's "finnegan's Wake," Before You Get A Literary Work That Literally Unreadable.

You Would Think, Wouldn’t You, That If You Were The Child Of A Happy Marriage, Then You Ought To Have A Better Than Average Marriage Yourself – Either Through Some Genetic Inheritance Or Because You’d Learnt From Example? But It Doesn’t Seem To Work Like That. So Perhaps You Need The Opposite Example – To See Mistakes In Order Not To Make Them Yourself. Except This Would Mean That The Best Way For Parents To Ensure Their Children Have Happy Marriages Would Be To Have Unhappy Ones Themselves. So What’s The Answer?

Women Were Brought Up To Believe That Men Were The Answer. They Weren't. They Weren't Even One Of The Questions.

Does Character Develop Over Time? In Novels, Of Course It Does: Otherwise There Wouldn't Be Much Of A Story. But In Life? I Sometimes Wonder. Our Attitudes And Opinions Change, We Develop New Habits And Eccentricities; But That's Something Different, More Like Decoration. Perhaps Character Resembles Intelligence, Except That Character Peaks A Little Later: Between Twenty And Thirty, Say. And After That, We're Just Stuck With What We've Got. We're On Our Own. If So, That Would Explain A Lot Of Lives, Wouldn't It? And Also - If This Isn't Too Grand A Word - Our Tragedy.