Whoa new WordPress Dashboard layout. And now, from “The Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad:
“You must be a good swimmer.”
“Yes. I’ve been in the water practically since nine o’clock. The question for me now is whether I am to let go this ladder and go on swimming till I sink from exhaustion, or—to come on board here.”
I felt this was no mere formula of desperate speech, but a real alternative in the view of a strong soul. I should have gathered from this that he was young; indeed, it is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues.
The paragraph continues, but I’m so very struck by this statement. “[I]t is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues”—as one of “the young,” myself, it leads me to wonder if I really think in binaries that extreme, and whether to me dilemmas are so unremittingly black-and-white.
Emily Rutherford 