{Looking Backward, Looking Forward}[7th December 1988]

[Redbook6:65-66)][19881207:0952]{Looking Backward, Looking Forward}[7th December 1988]

19881207.0952

Whether this is characteristic of Circle development I do not know, but it could logically be so: I realise that whereas my main aims in the first quarter of my life (in education) were forward-looking – to develop what I (or my family) already had, and to start new things personally and publicly – my main aims in the second quarter were backward-looking, since I was always either carrying on with projects I had started in the past (such as the writing of fiction) or nostalgically trying to recapture my own or my family’s past (fantasies of big houses, and more practical plans to live in a [C]-type of cottage with a few fields, etc.).

The practical consequences of this may not have been too brilliant. I have been aware for some months now that many of the decisions made in haste at a time of great stress when we were about to leave our flat, were in fact decisions made long before or trying to capture times long past: to buy a Land Rover caravanette (a long-held ambition), to live on a smallholding (ditto), even to live in Scotland. All these plans were made for quite different circumstances, and have since (while playing their part in development) proved a distraction from my present purpose. I am not even absolutely convinced that I shall write any more fiction:* it is possible (definitely not certain) that as a method of discovery it is no longer necessary as (and if) I am on the Inner Circle and in closer and more open contact with the sources of these ideas. And as a method of communication (which is its minor purpose) I have long known that my fiction was relatively inadequate, in a non-fiction-reading age.

The positive side is that I now feel that I am most definitely beginning to look forward again – being on the Inner or Integrative Circle (I hope).

The point of this rather self-important stuff is mostly to make a point about temporal orientation in Circle development.

*How could I write such a terrible thing? <890105>

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