"To show a woman loving a man one should show her cooking a meal for him or opening a bottle of wine for the meal, while she waits for his ring at the door." This paragraph has been on my mind for the days since I first read it; it is a moment again where Lessing reaches to film for a way to apply layers of complexity to a single image (in this case, orange slices). Anna makes this sound melodramatic (he looks the other direction, thinking of something else) but the idea that affection is expressed through everyday chores seems both sad and lovely. It strikes me that the examples Anna gives are all practiced in isolation - the women are alone doting on the men, waiting for doorbells to ring or peeling oranges (while men ignore them). These are very concrete expressions of an abstract capital-L Love.
A sample from the Golden Notebook reading project. Catch up with the live read here.
I'll shortly post a piece about some of the ideas behind this site, and my chats with Bob Stein and Chris Meade about the Future of the Book.
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