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"Look up at the dome," Van Buren instructed the young scholar. "And roll your eyeball round to the left." "I was going across to that pub for lunch," Eliott told the helpful attendant, "When I saw this thing like a bird flying sideways through the sky. At least I thought it was the sky. But then at lunch it kept wafting back and forth across my page and I realized it was inside my eye." "One really shouldn't read in pubs," cautioned Van Buren, "The light is so poor." He gingerly pried back Eliott's eyelid with dry fingers and peered deep into the left eye. Good old Van Buren, he'd been able to flush the rarest of seven teenth-century obscurities out of forgotten stacks and was going to be remem bered specifically in Eliott's acknowledgements. "Does it hurt?" he asked. "Not a bit. That's the odd thing. Do you see a hair in there or anything? Though I'm sure I'd feel a hair." "Hmm. Roll it up and around. Now over that way. Not a thing. Do you think perhaps you've been overtaxing your eyes? It's quite possible, you know. You've been going at those books rather devilishly these past three months. Why not give things a rest? Go to a park, enjoy our English spring. If your eye is still troubling you tomorrow, you might pop over to Moorfield's Eye Hospital." Tomorrow. Wasn't that just like them. They took a week to launder a shirt. They were always going to parks. Van Buren spent half his lunch hour trudging

If I weren’t going to be in Europe in September, I would love to join in a celebration of Barbara Pym. I just finished A Very Private Eye, and I found it very engrossing and poignant — especially the spirit in which she met her ‘years of neglect’.

Though both contemporary fiction and current literary theory are often concerned to tell us that plot is passe, few of us are actually prepared to relinquish the idea of narrative pattern: the process of narration is too closely bound into our sense of humanity. Even from an existentialist perspective, which accurately identifies the reliance on stories with bad faith and inauthentic living, stories remain a human necessity: fiction is "deeply distrusted and yet humanly indispensable"' or " 'fiction' designates an apparently unavoidable tendency to reconstitute the self in more comfortable categories."2 We know, of course, that we cannot expect our lives to respond to easy plotting, but we nevertheless feel a recurrent need to narrate the events of our lives to ourselves and to each other, to give shape to the disorder of lived experience. We use narration to identify possible patterns, to assess causality, to hold onto a self-definition, to make connections between our own lives and the lives of other people. We even, I would argue, feel an individual human need for the closure that our literary texts ostensibly withhold: that is, for the sense of some affirmed destiny which governs and makes sense of the contingency of daily lives, what Frank Kermode has called "a need in the moment of existence, to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end."3