Every year I get a Valentine’s Day present from my spirit guides that is more spectacular than the year before, and this year has been no exception. I wasn’t going to write about it, but just now I had a spectacular Buffynicity which I am going to share.

For weeks I’ve been intending to read “Green Hills of Africa” by Hemingway. I believe I might have read it in a former life. It contains a spectacular quote which inspired me when I was in high school.

“The reason every one now tries to avoid it, to deny that it is important, to make it seem vain to try to do it, is because it is so difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible.”

“What is this now?”

“The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if any one is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten.”

So this week I finished Darkness Visible by Golding, which was also very important, and today I started “Green Hills”, and read the following quote at the very beginning:

This was the tenth day we had been hunting greater kudu and I had not seen a mature bull yet. We had only three days more because the rains were moving north each day from Rhodesia and unless we were prepared to stay where we were through the rains we must be out as far as Handeni before they came. We had set the seventeenth of February as the last safe date to leave.

Which means that he was writing about February 14.

Happy Valentine’s Day!