And I envy the rose

It's odd, this process of revisiting a book I wrote half my life ago. I've never wholly bought into the notion of continuous consciousness - in any sense above the genetic, I am not the child who bore my name fifty years ago, neither the youth of forty years ago - but adults at least should remain, within tolerances, more or less the people that they were. And yet, and yet...

I would've been coming up to thirty, when I was writing The Garden. I'd already known it all, twice at least: once in adolescence, once in maturity. I couldn't believe that there was more to learn. I'd already had a friend tell me that we were too young to be going to so many funerals, and I thought that was the key-signature of my life, right there. I thought I was defined. Immutable at core. And I was writing about what I was, books that treated with my life, with the great themes, love and death: and where could I possibly go from there?

I made some odd choices, I think, in the writing of this book. I can feel my anxieties coming through the page, the need for recognition, for acknowledgement, wrapped in a tentative disguise and a bully half-confidence that shouldn't convince anyone and may not have been intended to. I'd do it very differently now - but if I wrote it now, I'd be doing it as a stranger, with all the distancing that implies. Perspective isn't always what you want. The copyright page will call it a revised edition, but really I've barely meddled. I can't touch this, in any sense that counts. It is what it is, I was what I was; we've both aged, and only one of us has moved on. It does feel odd.