Passage 26
Face and Fortune
Recently, at the instigation of my publisher, I had some photographs taken. I do not enjoy the process of being photographed. However, after I compared the new photograph with one taken twenty-five years ago, my feminine vanity suffered. My first instinct was to have the prints “touched up”. As I thoughtfully considered the photographs, I knew that a still more important principle was involved.
A quarter century of living should put a great deal into a woman’s face besides a few wrinkles and some unwelcome folds around the chin. In that length of time she has become intimately acquainted with pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, life and death. She has struggled and survived, failed and succeeded. She has lost and regained faith. And, as a result, she would be wiser, gentler, more patient and more tolerant than she was when she was young. Her sense of humor should have mellowed, her outlook should have widened, and her sympathies should have deepened. And all this should show. If she tries to erase the imprint of age, she runs the risk of destroying, at the same time, the imprint of experience and character.
I know I am more experienced than I was a quarter century ago and I hope I have more character. I released the pictures as they were.
Passage 27(94)
Readers Reveal Stuff of Dreams
Psychologists have confirmed what writers have always believed: that books are literally the stuff of dreams. A survey has confirmed that readers of Iris Murdoch or JK Rowling are more likely to have bizarre dreams than people deep into a history of the crusades. People with a taste for fiction experienced dreams that contained more improbable events, and their dreams were more emotionally intense. The survey also found that people who read thrillers were no more likely to have nightmares. But those with a weakness for science fiction were rather more likely to wake up suddenly with a cold sweat. According to Mark Blagrove of the University of Wales, the study is perhaps the first experiment to determine a link between the waking world and dreams. Dr. Blagrove and colleagues distributed 100,000 questionnaires about sleep patterns and literary tastes, and got more than 10,000 replies. They found that 58% of all adults had experienced at least one dream in which they were aware they were dreaming — and that women could recall more dreams than men. Older people seemed to dream less and have fewer nightmares. About 44% of children said their dreams were affected by the books they had been reading. Children who report reading scary books have three times the number of nightmares as children who don’t.