I heart Anthony Trollope. Over the past few months, I’ve been reading the six Palliser novels. I went slightly out of order, so I’m currently finishing the series with the fifth, The Prime Minister. Although I have hundreds of pages of reading pleasure ahead of me, I’m already a little sad at the thought of leaving these characters behind forever. In my imagination, the Duke and Duchess of Omnium will soon be shunted off into a Limbo of lost characters, just short of the Paradise of fresh sequels. I picture them hobnobbing up there with the cast of Serenity and Lord Peter and Lady Harriet Wimsey, bemoaning their premature demises.

I’ll also miss Trollope’s gentle yet apt snarkiness. Take this description of a young man from The Prime Minister: “I would not say that Ferdinand Lopez was prone to do ill-natured things; but he was imperious, and he had learned to carry his empire in his eye.” I’m pretty sure that Trollope had a two-year-old in mind when he wrote this, and if I didn’t know better I’d say he had foreknowledge of my two-year-old.

So there I was tonight, sitting on a plane, completely absorbed in the question of whether Ferdinand Lopez would stand for Parliament, or back down in the face of Arthur Fletcher, when I happened to look out the window and see that we were flying at an extremely low altitude directly over the center of London en route to a landing a Heathrow— so low, in fact, that I could make out the very Whitehall to which the characters in my novel were aspiring, along with the Tower Bridge and the City. I gratefully closed my book for a few minutes to admire the spectacular view, set against the backdrop of a grenadine sunset.

I worry, sometimes, that I’ve spent half my life with my nose in a book or a web browser while Life in all its drama has been unfolding, unnoticed, before me. I am always resolving to live more in the moment, and less in fiction. I don’t think I would have enjoyed the view half as much, though, if I hadn’t been able to picture the Pallisers and their friends pursuing their fictional lives in the streets and drawing rooms below.