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I am very pleased with today. The sky is the same color as the rather sad snow under the trees in the woods. It is warm enough to take long walks without mittens, so that is what we have been doing.

What are you reading these days? You always used to have something fascinating tucked in your bag, something just ahead of me. I always aspired to be you, although I am quite convinced that if I had ever gotten two books ahead, you would have been the one aspiring to be me. I am reading several books at once, as usual. (I have had some revelations on this matter, which I have presently tucked into an unseen corner of my mind. I will bring them out presently and show them off to you, but not today.)

Aspects of the Novel, by E.M.Forster, is taking up most of my attention. It's very exciting to read a set of lectures and understand everything he is talking about and know about all (or almost all) the subject matter as a matter of course. Topped off by stretching all of the edges of my thoughts and organizing my lifetime of reading into sensible themes. I am very grateful to him. Thad can attest to it. I have been giggling over nearly every paragraph. 

I am in the section about people right now. He says life for humanity is divided pretty much into five categories: Birth, Food, Sleep, Love, and Death. Which seems pretty accurate to me. It is exciting for me to see it so laid out, because I am greatly enthralled with the first four, and I expect my interest in Death is growing, too.  His points were of course in context of novels as much as human experience. Birth and Death are pretty much mysteries, novels don't care much at all about Food and Sleep, and so are mainly taken up with Love. Where real people, he claims, can spend possibly no more than two hours a day on Love (or so?), while we dedicate as much to Food, and about eight to Sleep. (For me it is nine.) So let us think about that for a while. Everyone knows I love food almost as much as I love Thad.

I think Forster was thinking mainly of romantic love, although he acknowledged it's little roots slinking into every bit of life and all the motivations for everything. So I let my mind run off on the tangents he wisely chose to ignore. I am choosing to redefine it as all love, especially familial, and to prove how we may perhaps spend less than two hours a day dedicated to it, or the desire to be loved, it is the cause of all we do. Work and careers and all that, being too vague and unnecessary (behold, how many books are written about the rich!) to be one of the Main Facets, takes up at least as much time as sleep for most people, but the motivation for it, at least beyond maintaining existence, is out of love for the people in their care or the desire to be loved and valued by others. Isn't it? Or am I romanticizing humanity again?