I hate to bring up Jane Eyre again

Well, no, actually, I don't. I love Jane Eyre and I am enchanted to bring up Jane Eyre as much as possible. If I had a private income, I would devote the rest of my days to (not teasing Mussolini like Dorothy Parker because he is dead) raising Jane Eyre awareness nation- and then world-wide. I would distribute copies to all the schoolchildren in the world. I would creep in to English teachers' offices and add Jane Eyre to the syllabus. Even Caribbean literature and Indian literature classes. Everyone could use a chance to read Jane Eyre again. I would visit George Bush in the Oval Office and refuse to let him leave until he had finished reading all of Jane Eyre. (Which would pretty much leave the country without a President until the next election, but hey, I think that's all to the good.)

I was sitting in my chair just a minute ago humming the theme to "Pan's Labyrinth" and trying to decide what I wanted to do next. It is 8:40 in the evening and I want to be in bed by eleven, so I was contemplating what two- or three-hour activity (that's the second dangling hyphen I've used in this post. Does that seem right to you?) I could engage in. If I were being virtuous, I'd write my paper, because I still have one more paper and there are 1400 words of it not yet written, minimum. If I were being thoroughly lazy and mindless, I could watch a movie, because I have many movies and I haven't seen all of them and it is jolly to watch movies. If I had ANY THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD AT ALL, I could work on my own writing, but then I'd have to come up with some thoughts of my very own.

It was pretty joyless, and I had to keep humming the "Pan's Labyrinth" theme song over and over again in order to prevent myself from sinking into a deep depression and remaining confined to my desk chair for the rest of my life. And then Jane Eyre saved me!

Because I remembered I had it.

I made a shrieky noise of glee and lunged for my bed, and then it occurred to me that if I told the internet about how good Jane Eyre is, then someone might remember how good it is and read it all over again! And because I love my neighbor, I decided to hold off reading lovely lovely Jane Eyre for long enough to make a blog post about it and bring it forcibly to your attention.

This is how good that book is: It wrung a wholly involuntary shriek of glee from me after a day spent miserably researching for and then writing 900 words of a paper on the interaction between imagination and reality in two poems from the Modernist period (Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" and Yeats' "Beyond Break of Day", if you're interested).

P.S. Jane cracks me up. Mr. Rochester says, "Oh! you have been very correct - very careful, very sensible," and she says, I reflected, and thought, on the whole, I had. And later he asks her, "Were you jealous, Jane?" and she says, "Never mind, Mr. Rochester, it is in no way interesting to you to know that." I love this girl. She is the standard to which I aspire. So in case anyone is thinking that I only love Jane Eyre because I adore Mr. Rochester (and I do adore Mr. Rochester), you are so wrong. It is actually far more because I want to be Jane Eyre.