I felt and feel, tho' left alone,
His being working in my own,
The footsteps of his life in mine;
Tennyson, writing about his friend, Arthur Hallam (In Memoriam, LXXXV). Quoted by Lyndall Gordon in her Guardian piece today, where she writes about 'a flair for friendship as a form of creativity', the biographer's life … and her school friend, Flora Gevint:
A more formless life is hard to imagine. And yet, as I remember the passion with which Flora urged her friends to be and do, I wonder if there are forms of action like friendship which leave no record but are as creative in their way as more public forms of creativity. … articulate as Flora was, and fearless in her truth to experience, she could not transmute life into art. Her skill was to shape people, not works; and this, I now see, was the pattern of her life - possibly, the pattern of many unwritten lives that are attuned to what Middlemarch calls "the roar from the other side of silence".
