I have a penchent for these, because no one could have been more in love than I with a high school teacher. I picked this up because it was on a list of books that dealt with the student/teacher romantic relationship. Beautiful, lyrical prose and a quasi gothic atmosphere, with all those windswept ocean landscapes and starry skies filled with birds of prey made Flanders Point a gem of a read. The ten years that separate them is an uncrossable gulf yet they cannot prevent themselves from teetering on its edge. If you hung them all on a clothesline and picked only three, you'd have enough to produce a spark, a thin column of smoke, maybe even a small flame."Īnd so it is for eighteen-year old Charlotte Delafield and her English teacher Brian Parton, who meet at a strict Connecticut girls boarding school in the 1950s. Internal changes, growth, expansion, opening, tapping into unconscious longings-well, most of those words describe an erotic relationship. "If you think in terms of teaching as a shared journey of discovery, instead of just a job, look what's involved: sharing of knowledge, hunger for understanding, desire for approval, opening of another spirit, penetration of one mind into another, the mystery of the unknown, the pleasure of success, mental intimacy in shared moments of revelation, maybe even climactic moments.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |