nyahahahaha. after browbeating su-lin i'm now putting this back up again.

su-lin sent me some of the notes she'd made while watching a byatt documentary on the writing of the whistling woman (which all of you seem to have read already! i should too, shouldn't i? but it's probably best for me to get through the first three books before i start. i think - *defensively* - i didn't really like frederica in the first book *duck* although i know most of you really do. but i've only read half of virgin and that was ages ago so maybe if i started again now i would? - i thought she was rather - precociously manipulative in virgin and besides, the seas of blood chapter was a little scary.)

but, the thing in su-lin's notes that caught my eye was this:

i said to jenny, (her editor is jenny uglow) i can't write frederica, i can't see her, and jenny said, well maybe you've outgrown frederica. think of it, a quartet conceived as a quartet, written over thirty years, so that you aren't the same person writing it as when you started, and your frederica not the same person, not the same person you first thought her. think of having people in your head, all this time, who can't grow with you, all that happens is you get to know them better and better as you grow till you know them so well you leave them behind. when she finished the book: i won't miss frederica. i don't need her any more. because i thought, there was remarkable coherence in frederica. to byatt it was thirty years. to me, coming to byatt in jc, it can't have been more than five or six. you hold a person in your mind. much harder to ensure she's the same person without the external checks of reality.

and that's what makes me wonder. having people in your head. real ones. but ones you have not seen and won't see for years - and having no external checks. so that they haven't grown with you, and how real that image you have in your head is, and asking if the person you cared so much for is still real for you, and if not does that make your love real, or is that a stubborn illusion? that makes me hurt tonight.