Yesterday’s note mentioned Patricia Highsmith, a writer I know little about. I picked up a copy of her early diaries and notebooks from the library and spent an hour with a tin of Book Darts at hand.
I was surprised by the number of passages I marked.
She wrote this before she was 30:
… if my experience should be shut off now, sexually, emotionally (not intellectually), but mundanely, practically, I feel I should have enough. I have stretched an hour into an eternity. It is all within me.
That’s astonishing to me, and I wish I could ask her about that. It seems to me she was saying that she already had, in her 20s, all the experience she’d need for her fiction.
After graduation, she made a list of things she wanted to learn about. The list included math, with this comment: “ — persistent curiosity, at same time a begrudging of time spent on this branch of knowledge for which I haven’t the least aptitude.”
We all have subjects like that.
I only had an hour. When my time was up, I wanted to read more.
Alexander Pope held that a little learning is a dangerous thing.
I just don’t see it. My ignorance is vast, and my ignorance of Patricia Highsmith is still vast. But it’s not quite as vast as it was when the week began. That’s not good, but it is better.
Maybe I’ll try one of her novels.
• Source: Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950, edited by Anna von Planta; New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2023, pp. 562-3 and 256.
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