Musings & Marginal Madness: Literary Friendships

            I have for a long time been aware that I am not a particularly social person.  I can be amiable in company, provided I’m not sleep deprived and there’s acceptable food in the vicinity, but for the most part, I prefer my own company, and even then I find myself quite trying at times.  My main issue with social interaction is the lack of reciprocal relationships to be found.  By that I mean, a relationship where both parties give so that one or the other is not eventually exhausted by the association.  I realize that my tendency towards reserve does not further my cause in this area, but as the majority of humanity does nothing to earn my confidence I see no reason to bestow it.  Besides which, as that sort of trust does not usually arise from passing acquaintanceship, I do not seek it there.  (It’s rather a self-defeating pattern when one stops to consider it.)

            However, there is one type of relationship that I have eternal appreciation for, although that is not to say I don’t value the others.  While most friends, after a long absence, require the social niceties of conditional updates and small talk, with varying degrees of actual interest in the answers, these friends remain constant in every way, fixed in their existence.  I speak, of course, of books.

            There’s something comforting in the fact that whenever you open a book the characters will be right where you left them.  (Provided you haven’t skipped ahead in the book, which, if you have, opens an entirely different monologue.)  No matter how long your absence, your literary friends will be there as soon as you seek them by opening up their story.

           As you may have surmised I recently did so: I pulled my collection of Jane Austen’s works off the shelf and skimmed through some delightful passages of Northanger Abby and Persuasion.  Initially, I had planned to reacquaint myself with just the latter, particularly Captain Wentworth’s compelling letter to his beloved Anne, as I had just watched my preferred movie version of their story and it had eliminated some particularly poignant phrases from his missive.  However, as I have seven of Miss Austen’s works compiled in the same book, I was sidetracked by the charming satire of Miss Catherine Morland and Mr. Henry Tilney, as it directly procedes Persuasion.  What amuses me almost as much as the witty wordsmithing of the novel, is the fact that if I lived in a society where marriage at seventeen was the norm, I probably would have been much like Catherine.  Fortunately, the intervening years since I was seventeen have encouraged some development of maturity and sensibleness.  Not much, mind you, but enough that I am now unlikely to take my fantastical suppositions outside the context of novels with any degree of seriousness.