7:11 a.m.
Homemade Latte.
A quiet house.
Safari.
One overly ambitious thought.
I have a habit of underlining sentences I know I'll never forget. Not because I intend to revisit them, but because I like imagining some future version of myself opening the same book and thinking, Of course I underlined that.
This morning it happened again.
I was reading Alfred Brendel's Music, Sense and Nonsense when I came across a sentence attributed to an anonymous writer:
"When I glimpse the backs of women's knees I seem to hear the first movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony."
Ridiculous.
Beautiful.
The sort of sentence that would never survive an editorial meeting today. Yet I couldn't help admiring it. Not because it compares a woman to music, but because it reminds me that art has always borrowed metaphors from elsewhere. Pain becomes weather. Memory becomes architecture. Love becomes a sonata. Literature has never been particularly good at staying in its own lane. That, I suppose, is why I've always preferred novels to arguments.
During my undergraduate years I carried Jane Austen quotations the way some people carry lucky charms. One has followed me for years:
"I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures."
Two hundred years later, it still feels surprisingly contemporary. I've never understood why intelligence and tenderness are so often treated as opposites, or why reason has historically been imagined as wearing a necktie while emotion wears a dress. Human beings are considerably more untidy than that. University introduced me to philosophers who insisted everything was socially constructed, psychologists who blamed neurotransmitters, and novelists who quietly ignored both camps and simply wrote people as they found them. The novelists were usually more convincing. History, unfortunately, has not always been equally generous.
Reading about women who insisted on being heard despite every institution advising otherwise has always left me with a peculiar admiration. Not because they were flawless, but because conviction has an extraordinary way of surviving unfashionable circumstances. Progress rarely arrives dramatically. More often it accumulates through thousands of people refusing to accept that "this is simply how things are."
I suspect every generation inherits freedoms whose architects it has forgotten. Whenever conversations about women become abstract, however, my mind wanders somewhere much less theoretical. It wanders home. My mother has never written a philosophical treatise. She has never lectured me on ethics. She has never needed to. Some of the most enduring lessons I've learned arrived disguised as ordinary gestures. Waiting until I got home before going to sleep. Quietly leaving tea outside my room while I was studying. Pretending not to notice that I was pretending everything was fine. Care, I've realised, is rarely theatrical.
It usually sounds like footsteps in the hallway at two in the morning. Or someone asking whether you've eaten, despite already knowing the answer. The older I become, the less interested I am in grand declarations about humanity. I'm far more interested in small acts of decency.
Holding a door.
Listening without rehearsing your reply.
Speaking without trying to diminish someone else.
The world seems determined to reward spectacle.
I've grown oddly fond of gentleness instead.
Perhaps that's why I keep returning to literature.
Novels have always understood something social media occasionally forgets: people are almost never just one thing. They are contradictory, unfinished, occasionally insufferable, frequently kind, and forever changing.
Thankfully.
Imagine how tedious life would be if we were as simple as our opinions.
So here's to the women who have shaped my life, whether they did so through books, classrooms, friendships, or simply by being themselves.
And here's to my mother, who unknowingly taught me that respect is not an opinion one performs in public.
It's a habit.
Like making homemade latte before sunrise.
Or underlining sentences you'll probably never stop believing in.
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