Dancing Fish and Ammonites: history, ballast, time, memory, cats

Penelope Lively's Dancing Fish and Ammonites is the memoir of a beautiful writer. I started off entranced by her thoughts on old age -- perhaps there is some benign mechanism that aligns diminished capacity with diminished desire -- oh, perhaps! I was bored with the specifics of remembered friends, entranced again with her perspectives on the changes wrought in her lifetime by feminism and the seismic change in acceptance of gay people, bored again by an examination of objects (mostly very old objects) in her house. She is so very interested in history, context, placing oneself within a story lest one become "untethered" in some way. (Because who wants to be light? Who wants to be free?) Another word that repeated often throughout the book was: ballast.

Poetically and startlingly, I closed the final skimmed pages and looked up to see my three cats sprawling in the sun. Utter hedonists, the lot of them, unreflective, with no sense of time whatsoever. They seem to be doing quite well.