Monday, July 1st I couldn’t
Monday, July 1st
I couldn’t tell whether I was dreaming or thinking, although considering the subject I must have been thinking while I slept, for I would certainly never think these things while awake. HWMNBN and I are so often thrown together, I reflected, and there is an ease between us that was unlike the ease I felt with anyone else. "I would still marry him," I thought. Reflecting on his girlfriend caused me no agitation at all; it would be perfectly suitable if he married her instead. But he and I, I realized, are closer than either of us know. It would be a bit incestuous, I thought, since my realization that he is really more of a brother to me than anything else. But I was filled with a powerful sense that our association was not finished yet.
Are they fools who marry or promise to marry? As is my way when awake, my mind wandered off down its own course. Those who promise to marry out of high school are idiots; I know of no instance in my generation where such promises have not been broken. Those who promise to marry out of college are less to, those who actually do marry out of college may no be idiots, but are letting themselves in for inconvenience when it comes to graduate school. Cambridge offers limited housing for graduate students who are married, but how do the spouses, at a college they don’t attend, feel? Men tend to find it more discomforting than do women, I read, but there were many support groups for Cambridge spouses. I looked up, and saw a notice about one of their meetings posted on the door of a little campus tobacconist’s.
The archaeology professors needed extra hands, not necessarily those of students, to help on their digs, and HWMNBN had joined one of these. Watching him lift shovelfuls of dirt into buckets, in a large cave underneath theground, surrounded by other archaeology students, one of the professors commented to a fellow academic on his relationship to me.
He had never seen anything quite like it. It was not the ordinary relation of a married couple, and yet, he said, he could not help feeling that he had never seen such respect between married people as we had for each other.
"Well, look at the train," said Professor McGonagall to Dumbledore, by way of reply. She glanced at the train, a drab industrial affair with rows and rows of empty flatbed cars. A second glance, and the cars seemed to grow and shimmer, until in their place stood bright-red passenger cars filled with students.
"And which sight is the true one?" Dumbledore asked. He pointed. The train was now toiling up a nearly vertical mountainside, the empty cars behind it dangling at steep angles.
"How could there be people in that?" he pointed out.
"And yet," replied McGonagall, smiling, "the students arrive at the station."
Someone had just come running up to her to inform her of this news, also that Draco Malfoy had been teasing Neville by putting a feather up his nose and that Neville as a result had a terrible cold. I gathered up my robes and went rushing off down to the train station, and found everything exactly as had been reported - Nevile sitting on the floor of the train station with a miserable bubbling groan, and Malfoy hurriedly hiding a long white feather. I was about to start in on a good lecture when I woke up, still convinced that the metaphor of the train was more apt than I could understand.
How do you mean "promise to marry out of high school"? I believe I may know a very fine counterexample indeed.
November 5th, 2002 at 1:57 amPromise, in high school, to marry afterwards.
Ooh, ooh, counterexample? That would make me happy. Perfidy depresses me and even more when it’s perfidy you can’t really complain about.
November 5th, 2002 at 6:32 amMy cousin and her high school sweetheart promised to marry later. She went off to college, he went and worked offshore. They went for like three years of just seeing eachother for a couple of weeks out of the year. Four years later, they’re married. She’s now studying to be a nurse and he… I can’t remember what he does… but they stuck it out and are happy.
November 5th, 2002 at 7:14 amTwo dear friends of mine from high school. I’m not actually sure that, when still in high school, they had promised to marry; but we could have guessed that they were going to, and when they did it was clearly Right.
November 5th, 2002 at 10:00 am