Parties, photos and our literary DNA

OK. After several requests and not a few demands – here's the picture – Sheila and I routinely out for a night….! Unfortunately the picture doesn't show the whole me – which included multicoloured trousers, pink gloves, luminous striped socks and lurid lime green plastic shoes. That one might yet be emailed to me, in which case, for a small fee…….

Must be a new lease of life. Or we've suddenly become socially in demand. Whatever, we are just back from another party in Aberdeen. Not fancy dress this time – a significant birthday of a good friend. But we are back in Aberdeen later this week for a 90th birthday party.

Three parties in 12 days. And each of them special because the person whose life is being celebrated is special and integral not only to our lives but to that sense of who we are, that derives from the giftedness of those relationships that define, enrich and impinge on our lives in many welcome ways. I believe deeply that we are persons in relation, and that individuality only matters when it is encompassed within the shared lives of those who move in and out and within our lives. Who these people are, how we met them, what led to the formation of such enduring connections of love, affection and friendship is part of the mystery of human relatedness, but also part of the graced gift that each person is who troubles to think any one of us worth getting to know.

So not much time for reading you'd think. True enough, but wee corners of time still found here and there. I've just finished Susan Hill's book about a year's reading of only the books already in her home. Along the way she dishes out wisdom and advice, opinion and prejudice, gossip and mini-memoirs – the book is a delight. And there are still a couple of quotes worth inserting here. The last one did get a couple of gentle correctives from Rick and Jason – you can see my comment response on Jason's blog here. Anyway, here's Ms Hill saying what I've long suspected – that the books we read deeply become part of who we are:

"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me?….What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."

 Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing (London: Profile Books, 2009), 201-2.