Adieu to Possession

I have finished Possession by A.S. Byatt and now am moving on to Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and then the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe ( I know you pine for these details.)

But I thought I should leave you with a quote from Possession. It fascinates me because I have always been intrigued by the intimacy of sleeping with someone. I don't mean sex, I mean sharing the experience of sleep, which in many ways, to me, is even more intimate. Another story that discusses this intimacy is "In the House of Sleeping Beauties." Here it is:

One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud's bed, where they had been sharing glass of Calvados. He slept curled aginst her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

They did not speak of this, but silently negotiated another such night. It was important to both of them that the touching should not proceed to any kind of fierceness or deliberate embrace. They felt that in some wy this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their seperate lives inside their seperate skins. Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it...

Neither was sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other.

Neither dared ask.

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