A well-brought-up young woman sent George away and planned to flee to Greece

Lucy Honeychurch is young and very well brought up, which in 1908 England means she has been trained to want nothing out loud. On holiday in Florence, a strange, serious young man named George Emerson kissed her on a hillside covered in violets.

She went home and got engaged to someone else. Cecil is clever and correct, and he treats her like a painting he has bought.

Then George turns up in her village. He kisses her again, and tells her plainly that Cecil will never let her have a thought of her own.

She sends George away. Then she breaks off with Cecil, but tells no one, least of all herself, that it is because of George.

Instead she arranges to leave for Greece with two elderly ladies. It is a very respectable way to run.

Just before the trip, she finds herself alone with George’s father, an old man everyone in her circle considers vulgar. He looks at her and sees all of it.

Look at the order of those verbs. Transmute, ignore, muddle.

Those are the three things a sensible woman is taught to do with a want she has decided is inconvenient. Turn it into something more suitable, pretend it is not there, or tangle it up until even she cannot find the end of it.

He lists all three and then takes every one of them away from her. You can never pull it out of you.

Now listen to me. I have done all three, and so have you.

Transmute is the clever one. It is the want turned into a cause, a very well kept garden, a daughter’s wedding planned down to the napkins.

Ignore is the one we get praised for. Muddle is what happens after twenty years of the other two, when somebody finally asks what you want and you honestly cannot say.

And an old man, in a book almost nobody opens, says it is all still in there. Not faded, not filed, still in you.

He does not say it as a hope. He says “I know by experience,” which is the one phrase in English nobody young can ever say to you.

We are told the opposite every single day. That a want left unattended will quietly die of neglect, and that this is a mercy.

He says it does not die. It waits for you to stop calling it by other names.

Do not skim the last word. Eternal is a hymn word, a gravestone word, and he sets it at the end of a plain little sentence about poets, almost shrugging.

That is why it goes straight in. He is not singing to her, he is reporting.

You may know this book as a film full of Italian sunshine. The sentence is not in the sunshine, it is in a dim room in England, said to a girl with her trunk packed.

She is running away from herself when he says it. I know some of you have had that trunk packed for years.

Today. Copy his two sentences by hand, slowly, the whole thing, colon included. Underneath, write one line naming something you have transmuted, ignored, or muddled. Give it its real name, and do not show anyone.

Twenty years ago I copied this, from Henry James, The Ambassadors, 1903: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” A man in his fifties says it to a young one at a garden party in Paris.

When I copied it, I thought it was advice for the young man.

I read it now and hear that he is saying it to himself, late, without believing it is too late. That is the whole difference.