Respite through Downton Abbey

She had no faith in her ability to produce anything else without recreating as best she could, that sense of connectedness and interdependency.

Having endless hours in which to create is hardly useful if most of those hours are spent in a paralyzing [half]-torpor of loneliness, overwhelmed by anxieties about that loneliness lasting forever … Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

Friends,

When I am immersed at night in Downton Abbey in my room, I forget that Jim is dead; I half-believe he’s sleeping back there in the bed and when I finish it’ll be time to return to him. I know I love these films because the characters are presented all together in such real feelingful ways. Sometimes the feeling he’s there or the forgeting at least happens when I watch an Austen film too. So for a little time I know some sense of a comfortable existence, one not so filled with so much that is barely endurable and or beyond me and I shrink from …

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Mr Mason advising Daisy (everyone has someone good to turn to)

It is many months since I lost the comfort of his real talk — perhaps last June for a short while when he seemed to be recovering from both operation and the cancer seemed not to be spreading. Eight months. Yes we would talk at 5 in the morning to 6, but it was far more me talking and he uttering only in response. Already he had erected a kind of barrier as he never did express to me his agon in dying. I wish he had. I would rather have had his inner life ravaged than withheld — but he did often withhold over the years so this privacy was in character.

Friends who are widows tell me they imagine the husband talking to them and this imagined conversation helps, but I cannot be sure what Jim would have said and don’t like to invent words — often he surprised me slightly even to the end by the full throttle of his witty dismissal of all the world would say and respect about whatever and he seemed to validate my deepest impulses. Trouble is he could do that for he would do for me what I hate and now cannot escape. As to the DMB I’ve fallen into the dragon’s teeth but outside is a only slightly flexible vise

Sylvia

Author: ellenandjim

Ellen Moody holds a Ph.D in British Literature and taught in American senior colleges for more than 40 years. Since 2013 she has been teaching older retired people at two Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, one attached to American University (Washington, DC) and other to George Mason University (in Fairfax, Va). She is also a literary scholar with specialties in 18th century literature, translation, early modern and women's studies, film, nineteenth and 20th century literature and of course Trollope. For Trollope she wrote a book on her experiences of reading Trollope on the Internet with others, some more academic style essays, two on film adaptations, the most recent on Trollope's depiction of settler colonialism: "On Inventing a New Country." Here is her website: http://www.jimandellen.org/ellen/ No part of this blog may be reproduced without express permission from the author/blog owner. Linking, on the other hand, is highly encouraged!