I keep thinking of that line from C .S. Lewis, from one of his Narnia books and I decided that I needed to find out which one. So I looked up the phrase on the net and found among the references, me. I used it in a blog last October, so I must have been in East End, SK, working on the first draft of this book I am struggling with.
Some people question whether reading too many books does you any good . How much is too much? The argument is that because you remember so little, if anything, from them (most of them), it's a waste of time and you have nothing to show for it. I read a rebuttal of that negative attitude in the NYT a while ago, arguing that you do retain something, maybe just the wisp of a memory of pleasure, maybe an attitude, a tone, a phrase, a name, a character . That's a lot, really. There's a warning about eating too much: a minute on the lips, a year on the hips, something like that. So with books you have read. Something sticks, somewhere, not on the hips, maybe in the subconscious, perhaps in the soul.
So with this Narnia memory: farther in and farther up. When I wrote about it last October, I didn't take the time to find out which of the series it came from. Now I did, and as I say, I met myself. The source that quotes me went on to inform me/us that the phrase comes from The Last Battle. Of course it does, and that's why I remembered it. I was, still am, working on my book about aging and as I keep circling the Departure Lounge, the notion keeps popping up. Farther in and farther up.
No where to go but up? What a lovely thought! Well worth the time. Stay with me?