Old favorites

In Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, the narrator, on picking up a book of philosophy he'd written years before and then essentially banished from his mind, thinks,

It's always a strange experience to read one's own writings again after an interval. They so rarely fail to impress.

I certainly wouldn't say that's true of my own writing--cringing is surely my response at least as often--but when you've written more than 1,000 blog posts, you're bound to occasionally come across something you'd forgotten writing and are glad to rediscover.

Such was the case with this post from 2007 about, among other things, Sei Shonagon, Iris Murdoch, and Achilles, which ended with a topic I thought was well worth revisiting today: prompted by Murdoch's nomination of Achilles as one of her two favorite characters, I put together an off-the-top-of-my-head list of my favorites. Here's how I described my thinking then:

Unlike her, I think if I put together a list it won't consist of characters with whom I particularly identify; rather--like Odysseus--they'd be characters who I can't stop thinking about, who seem forever capable of revealing new surprises.

And, after Odysseus, here's who I came up with:

Bjartur from Independent People

Tess from Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Lieutenant Amanda Turck from James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor

Bartleby the Scrivener

Jayber Crow, from Wendell Berry's books about the Port William Membership

King David

Barnby, Uncle Giles, and Tuffy Weedon from A Dance to the Music of Time

First Sergeant Milt Warden from From Here to Eternity

Lyra from the His Dark Materials trilogy

Sir Lancelot

Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky from Anna Karenina

Huckleberry Finn

Philip Marlowe

Mrs. Aubrey from Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows

Rose Ryder from John Crowley's Aegypt series

Nearly four years on, who would I add? Again, off the top of my head:

Niccolo, Dr. Tobie, and Katelijne Sersanders from Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer

Roberto Bolano's Arturo Belano

David Gately from Infinite Jest

Trollope's Madame Max Goesler

And you?

{An administrative note to close: Work and travel have finally caught me out, and I'm taking next week off from blogging, which I don't think I've done in . . . three years? The annex will still be active, though, and you can follow that either through Tumblr itself or through your Google Reader. See you all in a week.}