Dipping into Sylvia Townsend Warner’s diaries for the first time in years. I had forgotten the sheer excoriating agony she endured when her partner Valentine, for the second time, began an affair with the American writer Elizabeth Wade White. In the midst of it is this, all unpointed metaphor, dripping with meaning:
“There was a talk by F Hoyle on the 3rd, about the solar planetary system. The old theory of planets being matter from the sun is disproved, because of a disparity of hydrogen too great to be accounted for by loss in fission. Now they seem to have established that the sun was originally a double star, whose companion became a super nova, and blew itself to pieces. The widowed sun remains, surrounded by débris of its double, a few cold chips and solidifications, tethered to it and lightened by its diminished single light.”