I said to someone the other day, that I grow increasingly wary of the illusions people build up about each other through partial knowledge and a single medium, of how even our sincerest hopes and wants end up misshaping our object because need always blinkers. Iris Murdoch exhorts us to look, to really look. Am I really looking?

Lunching with a friend yesterday she said: But darling, must anything come of it for it to be worthwhile? Couldn’t a ravishing correspondence be enough regardless? And I think: yes, it would have been at one time, but I am beyond John Donne.