Dearest Carol,
Just hung up the phone with Lucy who was so glad to have spoken with you today, though sad too. You and Mike and Alison have been constantly in my thoughts. This week I have been teaching the closing scenes of The Tempest and it seems to express so much of what is happening with your lives. Transformation especially: "Nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange..." That part for sure. And Victor as Mike's magical spirit Ariel. Except that's you too. And Alison. And Charlotte. The blog shows how much you and Mike have and continue to transform other people's lives, make them richer (stranger? Well in a good way). And you live on a magical island and Mike would make a great Prospero, with his rough magic, except that he's not so much of a bully and he certainly has a better sense of humour. And of course the problem with that play is no balance: where are all the women? When I read the speech "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a dream" I cried and my class (the sweetest group of young souls) was very impressed. The Epilogue too "Now my charms are all o'erthrown /and what strength I have's mine own/Which is most faint...As you from crimes would pardoned be/Let your indulgence set me free." That too.
Today I also was teaching an excerpt from Bertrand Russell's "The Happy Life" and we read this: "The happy man...feels himself a citizen of the universe; enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found." That too made me cry. Reading everyone's letters it is clear Mike holds that passport.
Lucy and I said how we are ready to be there when it's time for us to be or when you need us to be. You know that of course. Oh Carol.
Love Janice
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