Twenty odd years ago in Virginia I was having a conversation with a student friend when he informed me seriously that a kiss on the lips was sexual. No doubt about it, it was always sexual. Strange people these Americans. I don’t remember how this popped up in the conversation but he wasn’t going to have it otherwise. In that case, I said to him, I must have wanted to have sex with both my mother and my sister as I kiss both on the mouth. Here in Crete, if the conversation were to be continued and needed more examples, I must lust after ladies in their eighties and nineties as they purse their lips the minute they see you coming. I do remember in London when I shared a flat for a while with our friend Tom, his amazement when he saw me kiss my sister goodnight. “You KISS your SISTER???” He had never kissed his in his life. Strange people these English, but it has not always been this way. I read in a Dickens Christmas Story of a young girl pursing her lips in readiness for her father’s kiss and in “Anna Karenina” the adjutant pursing his lips in readiness for his general’s kiss. And think of Hamlet brooding over the skull of poor Yorick and the lips he had kissed a thousand times. Did this make Hamlet a horny little bugger and Yorick a paedophile? It is so nice to live in a country where people are still not afraid to be tactile. The way adults behave with children here and the natural way children respond would raise suspicious eyebrows in England with its terror of paedophilia where teachers are not allowed under any circumstances to touch a pupil for example. Even a friendly pat on the shoulder can be open to misinterpretation. Sad really that it should come to this. More and more regulations and laws are passed to try and stop child abuse, some totally absurd, like a mother who drives her children to school, if she should take anyone else’s kids, she has to be vetted. I know child pornography and child abuse is horrible and certain measures have to be taken to try and stop it, there have recently been two cases of women in positions of trust over children who have been found to be totally perverted, but Canute didn’t have much success trying to hold back the sea and punishment and the threat of punishment has never stopped human beings from all the other nasty activities they get up to. It would in fact seem an intractable problem. Even when I was a kid all those years ago, “Never take sweets from a stranger” was a maxim in the mouths of anxious parents but the pendulum has swung far too far. Children now must grow up afraid of their own shadows. Childhood hardly exists anymore though I suppose. By the age of three you are already being groomed for talent shows.
But on to Tolstoy and “Anna Karenina”, two thirds of the way through and I’m afraid I have grown distinctly bored with it. It’s no wonder I’ve never taken to the Russian classics. The greatest novel ever written is the heavy burden it might carry but Tolstoy is no stylist. Dickens beats him hands down when it comes to that. Of course it may be the translation that’s bland but I don’t see how this could be. It has been interesting to read after the Sofia diaries and to note how autobiographical some of it is, particularly in the character of Levin who I have no doubt is the man himself. But more of Tolstoy another time though, talking of style, think of Coward’s aforementioned “Brittle people, these Oliviers”. He could have chosen to use any of half a dozen synonyms; fragile, breakable, weak, frail, delicate, but he chose brittle which is just perfect.