Calligraphy Lesson

thought, too, about how, as the years go by, taking genuine delight in something becomes possible only when you can share that delight with somebody else.

Canetti begins Tongue Set Free

My handsome, intelligent, inimitable, delightful, prickly, unlucky Alexei Pavlovich, by the power of imagination invested in me I’ll make you who you are because I want to.

Sofia Pavlovna from Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit; Tatiana Dmitrievna from Pushkin’s long poem Evgeny Onegin; Nastasia Filippovna from Dostoevsky’s Idiot; Anna Arkadievna from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; and Larochka (Lara) from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago

there’s no need to cling on to life, because I am life.

There I go, presumptuously calling that teenager myself, though I’m not at all sure whether he’d agree to acknowledge himself in me as I am now: grey-haired, advanced in life, a sickly bore with a brazenly protruding belly.