Athena by John Banville Page A

on the contrary provoked in me a kind of suspenseful agitation, a tremulous, poised expectancy that was all the more fraught because there seemed nothing to expect. As I worked I talked to myself, only half aware that I was doing so, putting on voices and playing out dialogues under my breath, so that often when I finished for the day my head resonated with a medleyed noise as if I had been since morning in the company of a crowd of garrulous, mild lunatics. The room toowas disorienting, with its cramped wedge shape and single, disturbingly square window and invisible door. It’s a wonder I did not go off my head in that first period of solitude and unremitting concentration (perhaps I did?). I could have worked elsewhere in the house, for the place had many big empty airy rooms, but it never occurred to me to shift. I had Francie help me (he was less than gracious) to carry up an old pine table from the kitchen on which I set out my reference books, my powders and potions and glass retorts (I exaggerate), and unfolded on their green oilskin cloth the tools of my craft: the tweezers, scrapers, scalpels, the fine sable brushes, the magnifying glass and jeweller’s monocle; some other time, perhaps, I shall essay a little paean of praise to these beautiful artefacts which are an enduring source of quiet pleasure and consolation to me. So see me at play there just as in the days of my glowing if not quite gilded youth when it pleased me to pretend to be a scholar. Then it was science, now it is art.
    I have considered many things since your going, and I have come to some conclusions. One is, that I was lost that radiant Florentine morning in the infancy of the
quattrocento
when the architect Brunelleschi disclosed to his painter colleagues the hitherto unrealised laws of perspective. Morally lost, I mean. The thousand years or so before that epochal event I think of as a period of deep and dreamless slumber, when everything moved in enfolding curves at a glacial pace and the future was no more than a replay of the past; a long, suspended moment of stillness and circularity between the rackety end of the classical world and the first, fevered thrashings of the so-called Renaissance. I picture a kind of darksome northern Arcady, thick-forested, befogged and silent, lost in the glimmering, frost-bound deeps of immemorial night. What calm! What peace! Then came that clarion dawn when the architect threw open his box of tricks and Masaccio (known to his contemporaries, with prescient andto me gratifying accuracy, as Clumsy Tommaso) and his henchmen clapped palms to foreheads in disbelief at their own short-sightedness and got down to drawing receding lines and ruined everything, spawning upon the world the chimeras of progress and the perfectibility of man and all the rest of it. Illusion followed rapidly by delusion: that, in a nutshell, is the history of our culture. Oh, a bad day’s work. And as for the Enlightenment …! How, fed on these madnesses, could a man such as I be expected to keep his head?
    Anyway.
    In the first days in that secret room I was happier than I can remember ever having been before, astray in the familiar otherwhere of art. Astray, yes, and yet somehow at the same time more keenly aware, of things and of myself, than in any other of the periods of my life that have printed themselves with particular significance on my memory. Quick, is the word: everything, myself included, was quick with import and intent. I was like some creature of the so-called wild poised on open ground with miraculously refined senses tuned to the weather of the world. Each painting that I lifted up and set under my enlarging glass was a portent of what was coming. And what was coming, though I did not know it yet, was you, and all that you entailed.
    Or did I know? Perhaps when I peered into those pictures what I was looking for was always and only the prospect of you, a speck of radiance advancing towards me from the