But I’ve long loved this quote, and recently found it very helpful. I forgive a lot, just for coming across it, in context: For lunch, I may say, I ate and greatly enjoyed the following: anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil. (really good olive oil is essential..." (this goes on for another 15 lines) If I hadn't been so busy swimming naked in the sea, the sea, I might have wondered if I was now in a bad Thomas Hardy novel, and as I emerged from the deep another car drew up. It was the meditative James with an unknown youth.

And this is only one of many ingenious ploys; ‘resting’ actor friends who visit out of curiosity, and stay out of malice, get fitted in, too, like sad Gilbert, who thinks he’s in the Tempest plot, and saws wood in great quantities to prove it. My memory gets a little blurred at this point because people come and go from the house with extraordinary speed and with little explanation and now I find myself surrounded by Lizzie, Gilbert, Peregrine, Rosina, James and Titus. guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable. Later my guests were offered simple chez moi. What is more delicious than fresh hot buttered toast, with or without the addition of bloater paste? Or plain boiled onions with a little corned beef if desired?"What reality she has is elsewhere. She does not coincide with your dream figure. You were not able to transform her." So far, the book is very funny, and exactly conveys the tone and feel of a theatre world where people become, as it were, addicts of illusion, accustomed to manipulate or be manipulated. The journal is a useful device, telling us much of the history we need to know, and developing our ideas about Charles's character, as well as giving us an indication of his attitudes towards some of the other people who will enter the novel. It is also presented in a totally believable and authentic way. An amateur, unpractised writer, starting with a vague idea in retirement, may well start off with one idea, and go off at various tangents, being diverted by other ideas. However this early part of the novel does seem to be a little tedious and self-indulgent. It is rather too full of lengthy speeches and conversation; there are great long swathes of emoting from the characters, and it's all very angst-ridden. Nothing much seems to be happening, and a modern reader cannot help wishing this first part of the novel had been edited.

I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.He discovers miraculously, that his first love lives in the tiny village. (Critics have chastised the author for too many coincidences and 'bizarre' plot twists.) Charles feels that he has fallen in love with her again; or, that he never stopped loving her. She’s married in what he comes to consider an abusive relationship. Well, maybe, maybe not. Without giving away too much plot, I'll say that basically he 'kidnaps' her away from her husband and tries to berate her into loving him again. Here's the first thing I love about The Sea, The Sea: its title. Isn't it wonderful? Imagine how boring it would have looked on a shelf if it had just been called "The Sea." But with that profoundly simple decision to repeat itself, it suddenly drips horror and madness and obsession. It's just brilliant. Almost makes me wish Emily Bronte had called her book "The Moor, The Moor." He spends his time writing a memoir that is a kind of diary and autobiography mixed in with copies of letters he sent or received; basically that is this book. Of course, we can’t trust this unreliable narrator; even he tells us his letters are “partly disingenuous, partly sincere.”