09 | July | 2024 | Thornfield Hall

Does my vote count in national elections? In 2016 and 2020, our unfortunately red state elected Trump, mainly because of the electoral college. I feared the same thing would happen in 2020, and it was the same in my state, but Biden won majority of votes in the U.S.

I’m not pleased with the majority of politicians, except Bernie Sanders, who is now growing old.

And we have two very, very old men running for president. Biden is 81 and Trump is 78. I’m not saying they’re too old to work behind the scenes, but they are too old to be president, not at the top of their game. Many columnists adamantly think so, as well as ordinary people.

Biden’s presidency has been stable, though his administration has done little for issues like gun control and climate change. As for Trump, he is a convicted felon. Financial fraud? Shouldn’t that be enough to keep him out of the presidential race? I paid little attention to his presidency, but was shattered by the his conservative candidates for the Supreme Court, who have reversed Roe v. Wade.

Biden has served his country, but he spoke in unconnected sentence fragments for a short time during the debate. This has made headlines that go on and on and on. Clickbait: should Kamala Harris take over? Or should the Democratic convention consider a great number of other candidates? Many op/ed writers have no confidence in Harris. This is sexist, but on the other hand no woman has ever been elected president in the U.S., so it may also be realism.

Biden does not want to step down. His family does not want him to step down. Many Democrats do not want him to step down. Many Democrats do want him to step down. My opinion: he probably should step down. On the other hand, he does not run the government alone. Many, many experts, aides, politicians, etc., have input. It will be okay, I think, but the country is in chaos.

At the beginning of Trump’s campaign in 2016, he said at the State Fair that he would build a wall to keep the Latino immigrants out. I thought he was joking. When I found out he meant it, I was stunned.

On a personal level, though, I was much happier during Trump’s presidency. I have had personal, or should I say interpersonal, difficulties during Biden’s regime.

Thieves stole the stuff from my bike panniers a few weeks ago. In London at the National Portrait Gallery, which used to be my favorite museum, a small group of people verbally abused me last fall.

The horror continues. Three years after my father’s death, the two executors and lawyer have not settled the estate. We were promised ir would be settled last August. Guess what? A year later… The law says three years is the limit.

So let us hope all turns out well.

But not all is well in the U.S. That is certain.

Love and marriage, love and marriage
They go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you, brother
You can’t have one without the other. -“Love and Marriage,” by Frank Sinatra

Every generation has particular ideas about how to conduct a love affair. My mother grew up listening to Frank Sinatra, and love and marriage did go together, she thought. I was so attached to her as a young child that I preferred Sinatra to the Beatles. One of the Beatles’ early songs, “I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” seemed crude after Sinatra’s smoothness. Much later, I stopped listening to both Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, but there is no doubt that their popular songs influenced my ideas about love.

The same can be said of novels. In E. Nesbit’s collection of short stories, The Literary Sense (1903), she explores the idea that reading novels can influence a real person’s love affairs. When actual people squabble with their lovers, they remember similar scenes in novels and the dramatic reaction of the characters. They often break up when they do not want to because of their knowledge of fiction.

In “The Unfaithful Lover,” the characters are referred to only as “he” and “she.” On a bitterly cold day in London, he asks, “Shall we walk along the Embankment, or go somewhere on the Underground?”

She believes that the Embankment would be more romantic but that he ought to insist on the railroad carriage. And so she says, “’Oh, the Embankment, please!’ and felt a sting of annoyance and disappointment when he acquiesced.”

Shivering with the cold, they stop in a cafe, and he confesses that he kissed another woman at a dance. She is not very shocked, but knows from novels that she should be. She says that she cannot forgive him. The squabble ends in their break-up, though neither wanted it. Literature scores a point.

All of the stories in this collection are thematically tied, and it is a clever idea, but limited. In one of the best stories, “The Second Best,” Nesbit breaks the formula. A couple who broke up two years ago have tea together. The woman is now a widow, and he is a successful lawyer, but they did not know each other’s history since the break-up. That is ironic and sad, but there is an unexpected twist. The ending is refreshing, a break from the formula.

When I was a child, I loved E. Nesbit’s children’s novels, but her adult work is inconsistent. She seems more self-conscious when she tries to write for an adult audience. But The Literary Sense is very clever and contains some of her best writing for adults. It is flawed, but definitely worth reading.

N.B. It is difficult to find The Literary Sense, but the Read Books LTD is well above the usual standard of print-on-demand, and this is actually a very attractive paperback.