12/12/12

'the shelves of glass and china; the warmth of ownership and life, has gone off all these things; these are all ghostly things now.'

Little r asked me: "what is that?!"

Well, it's something called a typewriter. Not something that you really see nowadays but in the old days this is how some people used to write stuff. Before the computer, that is.

" Who is he?"

He's a writer called John Cheever.

"Is he the same Johnny from Barney or a different one?"

No, he's a different one.

"Why is he sad?"

Now, that's a tough question, little one...

Why is anyone sad? It's not clear at all. Perhaps there's a quotient of sadness and it gets parceled out the way other things do, by some Great Utilitarian Planner. Not the kind of overpowering sadness that has the redeeming quality of revealing something, an initiator of some sort of understanding of previously unknown things, a turning point in a life...but the dull and dim picture of a quiet life that is devoid of any great mystery or any sense of adventure. Who knows why the light suddenly falls away, why a face ten years ago beamed with the freshness of an inner brilliance and now, all of a sudden, is more sullen, less flexible, and in a way not a face at all but a grey mask...

'The parks on Sunday night. The light withdrawing from the sky and life on the walks darkening and intensifying.'

The despair of Sunday, with its unmatched stillness and aloofness. The world, which had been a veil over you, is removed. No-one can take too much reality. There is no line any more between the seasons, marking out subtle changes. Winter, you feel, is an illusion. You wait for the cold to break from the skies but it's all calm in heaven, nothing stirs. The dry spell is on us, the dust patiently accumulating on the windowsills, your hands as dry as paper. Elsewhere there is the ferocious melting of ice, continents sinking in dark waters, but here, in the heartlands, miles from sea, mountain, there are only fixed horizons and the slow death of the heart...

'I think I learned to listen to the rain in the lapses of a quarrel...It meant infinity. It fell on the quick and the dead and on the unborn. What a profound pleasure I took on hearing it fall.  How clearly I saw the complexity of the ground where it fell..