I interviewed this woman tonight who had her first book of poetry published at age 78. Her poetry is fantastic, and she was fantastic, although I don't think her fantastic-ness is coming off in the article quite as well as it should. Anyway. She basically took a 30-year break from writing poetry to be a bustling married person, and she was saying something about how the poems her 20- or 25-year-old self would have written were so completely different from the ones her 75-year-old self has written. I asked if she ever tried to get in touch with that younger self when she was writing, and she kind of stopped fidgeting and looked me directly in the eye and said, "No. I leave her alone." It felt all profound and stuff.

And then, later tonight (tonight has been rather long), I was looking for something entirely unrelated when I found an old notebook I kept in Israel. It wasn't a diary or anything like that -- basically it looks like I used it to copy down the magnetic poetry fragments that my roommates and I wrote on the fridge, to write baaaaaad poetry of my own (the magnetic stuff was better, truly) and to copy down quotes from books I was reading. Weirdly enough, out of those three categories, the quotes are the most revealing of my 19-year-old self and what she was thinking and feeling at a time when a lot of things were changing for her. Some of them still speak to me; others, not so much. One interesting one, from Carol Shields' book "Swann":

"I want to live for a time without irony, without rhetoric, in a cool, solid metaphor. A conch shell, that would be nice. Or a deep pink ledge of granite. I've tried diligence, done what I could, applied myself, now I want my sweetness back."

That one makes sense -- I definitely felt at the time that I was losing sweetness at the rate of a barrel a day back then... and, in retrospect, I'm not sure that isn't actually true. Another, from some psychobabbly-sounding book by Jeanette Winterson whose title I didn't write down:

"In this antisceptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch the light off and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I will be perched on top with the phone saying, 'Yes, I'm fine, of course I'm fine, everything's fine.' The trunks shudder."

Hrm. And then, the big payoff, a phrase I think all. the. time. and never know where it came from:

"Tendrils of Virginia creeper crept down as far as the window-frame, and progressed on little circular suckers across the glass, at huge vegetable speed."

A.S. Byatt's "Possession," folks: huge vegetable speed. Honestly, that phrase crosses my mind at least once a week and I never truly believed I'd find its source. My 24-year-old self thanks the 19-year-old self profusely for writing that one down.