Kindred spirits
Just recently I read the autobiography of someone I had imagined to be a sort of kindred spirit. She collects something I collect and thought no one else did. She also makes a transcendent experience out of an ordinaryish household chore that I have secretly always found a little bit transcendent myself. So I read the book with lots of anticipation, not only for finding other connections with her but also perhaps for discovering more things that I would love collecting and experiencing.
But it was actually a little bit of a let down. There is a sort of mean-spiritedness running right through the book – petty little anecdotes about people that it seems almost vengeful of her to have included, and long held resentments over small things that might have been forgotten with so much time having passed since they happened.
I hope shared collections and shared experiences of ordinary transcendence can exist without shared resentment and a shared petty vengeful streak. It would be unnerving to think otherwise.
But then again, maybe I was just in a mood when I read the book.
