Something Smothering

To placate is often to playact.   I have just completed the novel GREEN DOLPHIN COUNTRY by Elizabeth Goudge (764 pages in Capuchin) purchased during a remarkable holiday in Ely recorded elsewhere. It was only fitting that the dying tones of Richard Strauss' FOUR LAST SONGS were sounding from the stereo: live from tonight's London Proms performance - for this novel has affected me more than any other, I suspect. Implicated as I am in its 'mistake'. The homophone, the heteronym, the semantic disconnection. But I shake off any doubts. I do not in the end renew my vows of love. You see, I never abandoned them. So do not need to find them again. Nor to renew them. They will never be old. They were never young. They were and shall ever be so.  Something smothering, something embracing. Implacable love, implacable death.