A Meeting of Styles

Tsvetayeva, the great letter writer, from her correspondence with Pasternak:

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!

I have been delighted to meet many bloggers. But a meeting in writing – I think it is what I always dreamed of. A meeting of writing, and of styles, remembering what Barthes wrote:

Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author’s personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of words and things take place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed.

An investigation of style … wasn’t that what I replied when I was asked what my contribution was to be, were I to look back on everything I had written  (not here, but elsewhere)? A stupid answer. An embarassing one. But nevertheless, the word style is enough to move me tremendously. Style … and a meeting of styles – to cite another across blogs, obviously or secretly … yes, the meeting is, as Tsvetayeva said, above …