Quintessential

‘What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we might be doing a at given moment , we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self…’

—-Basho.

‘Since the wilful Twenties, the committals of the Thirties, it seems to me that my life as a man and as a writer has been spent on crossing and re-crossing frontiers and that is at the heart of any talent I have…Frontier life has been nourishing to me. Throwing something of oneself away is way of becoming, for the moment, other people and I have always thought that unselfing onself, speaking for others, justifying those who cannot speak, giving importance to the fact that they live, is especially the privilege of the storyteller, and even the critic-who is also an artist. A sign of old age in myself is that, knowing my time is limited, I find myself looking at the streets and their architecture much longer and more intensely and at Nature and landscape. I gaze at the plane tree at the end of the garden , studying its branches and leaves. I look a long time at flowers. As I am always on the watch for dramatic changes in the London sky… I store up the procession of headlands and terrifying ravines..and all of the landscapes that have formed me. ‘

—V.S. Pritchett, As Old as the Century.

Camus: ‘ One of our contemporaries is cured of his torment by simply contemplating a landscape. ‘

‘…[t]hat not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.’

—-Joan Didion

‘These fragments I have  shored up against my ruins.’

—T.S. Eliot

Some of these words are tinged with despair whilst others suggest a cool equanimity in the face of the dissolution that time and the world bring about. In both there is an attention to detail and only a hair’s breath separates the different tempers. Pritchett’s fabulous essay is the perfect example of a slow-burning happiness, of a style of writing that conveys a rock-like understanding of the world: a serene accumulation of experiences, an age-old trust in the certainties of the world, a keen awareness that in time all that is superfluous will be worn away and only the simple will remain. Perfection lies in the cadence of the voice, the eagle-eye that picks out a word from the many possibilities, in the miracle of how a word evokes not just its own lineage of comprehensions, that deep store of transmitted meanings with their subtle gradations that is embedded in the language-consciousness of a writer, but also in the way in which a particular word will interact with both those that are not chosen as well as the silences between it and other words.  It is as if the sheer passing of time confers on the writer a deeper sense of his surroundings, a greater appreciation of life’s still moments. There is a way of knowing that derives from becoming increasing estranged from the world and one’s life and there is another that comes from finding one’s place, the meridian of one’s life, and growing ever more deeply in love with it. There are mapmakers who never leave home and then there are those for whom the lonely, high seas beckon. For the latter it is the fragments that are the ruins…