Miscellanea from the dying days of summer
Dear friends
I’ve been spending some time in recovery from the process of writing my latest book. For the past few weeks, in the ever-lengthening hours between all the usual everyday work commitments, I’ve become something of a flâneur, a woman of leisure, idling, exploring, reflecting. I’ve been actively avoiding big narratives – in my life, in the world, in my writing. That seems fitting, as summer slowly fades and we wait for the new story of autumn to begin. This slow time too will pass, but to honour it, I wanted this week just to share with you a tiny handful of the things that have found their way into my suddenly empty head.
A few months ago, I bought a book which has sat unread on my bedside table ever since. That’s not such an uncommon phenomenon; when I’m writing a book of my own it’s all-consuming, and it’s so hard to find space in my word-filled head for the words of others. Anyway: this week I finally picked up The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, and I’m dipping into it very slowly, because it’s a very rich desert indeed. I’m finding it a bit of a mixed bag. I don’t like his made-up words at all, but I’m loving the descriptions of the emotional states he’d like them to convey. Here’s one that I recognised all too well:
longing to disappear completely; to melt into a crowd and become invisible, so you can take in the world without having to take part in it – free to wander through conversations without ever leaving footprints, free to dive deep into things without worrying about making a splash.
I’d say that’s the defining longing of my life. When I was a small child, a schoolteacher asked us to decide what our preferred superpower would be, if we could choose one. I remember that I replied invisibility. I would still choose it today. And I think that’s why Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire is my favourite movie in the entire world. If I should be given the opportunity to watch just one movie before I died, this would be the one I’d choose. Ever since I first saw it, I wanted to be one of those angels, offering invisible witness and invisible comfort to everyday lives and sorrows. Offering the deepest but most invisible love. Does that mean I’m more comfortable in the role of observer than participant? Always. But it’s more than that. The idea of such a state of witnessing, of such simple being in the face of sorrow as well as joy, holds some essential truth for me. I’m not suggesting it’s the best way to be, or even necessarily a good way to be, but it seems to be part of who I am. And yet, like all of us who choose to turn our writing into our living, I write to be read: in order in some way to be seen, to be witnessed in my turn. There’s a paradox there, I know. But it’s very much easier to show up on the page than in front of other people, in the flesh.
And now I have the longing again: I’m going to have to watch that movie for the dozenth time, tonight. I’m planning on it not being my last.
I seem to have managed to read, and enjoy, two contemporary novels for the first time in an age. I congratulate myself on this feat (I’ve been back in the world of the classics, recently) until I realise that both of them are actually set in the past, which makes me laugh at myself. Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter is also the first novel I’ve read in an age that’s written by a man. That wasn’t an active choice; it’s just happened that way. Women have been more likely to write about what I’ve wanted to read about, and almost all the male-authored novels that have earned a permanent place on my bookshelves over the years were written no later than the nineties.
The second of those books is Evie Wyld’s Bass Rock. I recommend them both to you, and for not dissimilar reasons. They’re subtle novels. They don’t shout or hector (I am so very tired of people shouting and hectoring) and they’re very traditionally British in tone. Which feels like a strange, and maybe even dangerous, thing to say – but then almost everything is dangerous to say these days, especially when it comes to perceptions of culture – but they are novels that are set in the country that I grew up in, when I grew up in it. Miller did actually live in such a country, as he was born just a couple of months before me. (The action of Bass Rock takes place in three different time periods, but it’s the central story, set in the post-war period, which resonated with me most.) A country whose houses were heated by coal or by homicidal two-bar electric fires; one that had barely recovered from post-war rationing; one which was reassuringly emotionally repressed – and, in the case of Bass Rock, was populated by women haunted by the prospect of male violence. It was a country where courtesy still mostly mattered, where community still very much mattered, and where the very slow growth of television (it was hard enough to get a radio signal) meant that people either talked to each other or read books.
It was very far from paradise, but there’s a phenomenology associated with it that I’m grieving, nevertheless. One that can’t be explained to someone who hasn’t lived in such times, or who has grown up in the age of computers and internet and smartphones and all the world’s knowledge available to us at the click of a mouse. I miss the sense of mystery, of so much of the world being unknown, unknowable with the antique technologies we had access to. I miss the uncertainties, the not knowing, the long and delectable processes of discovery. I even miss the thin layer of ice on the inside of bedroom windows in winter; I’ve never been able to sleep in a warm bedroom. They were times when we knew what to believe and what to trust, even if sometimes we were wrong. When we thought we knew what was real; when almost all of us agreed on what mattered and were bound together by it and weren’t embarrassed by it. And if I don’t stop here, I’m going to embarrass myself for sure. But I seem increasingly to be traumatised by the loss of that other country. Perhaps this happens to all those who grow old, but so much has been lost in the course of my lifetime. I’m struggling, really, to know how to be. I don’t know any more what it’s possible to belong to. What it’s possible even to want to belong to.
The end of summer, even when you long for it, seems always to be a melancholy time.
