Strangeness

It's been more stop than start for me with the great-sonnet-read-through of late, but I have got to number 58 and have no intention of stopping completely at this stage. Apart from anything else the whole sequence is just so darned strange you feel obliged to read on to see if you can find something not entirely obsessive-compulsive. That strangeness is something I think everyone senses when reading the odd one or two in isolation but which becomes overwhelmingly, screamingly loud and clear when you're going at them in sequence and wrestling with each individually as you go. Does WS mean what he says? If he does, it's extraordinary; if he doesn't, what can be said about the power of an individual imagination to sustain this stuff through incendiary piece after piece and for it all to be just a performance for the theatre of the mind?

Though, here's a thought. I suspect we're all strange - I mean really very strange, in the WS vein, but without the talent - and it's not so much that we hide it as people translate that strangeness into some kind of normality to cope with it all. I spent a small part of the day enjoying the strangeness of some of those I encountered, and I noticed a distinct and genuinely friendly attempt on their behalf to make me less strange than I am.