your life – your previous life – resembles that ordinary miracle witnessed by Fred Burnaby, Captain Colvile and Mr Lucy somewhere near the Thames estuary. They were above the cloud, beneath the sun, and Burnaby had just been emboldened to take off his coat and sit complacently in his shirtsleeves. One of the three saw the phenomenon first and drew it to the attention of the others. The sun was projecting on to the bank of fleecy cloud below the image of their craft: the gasbag, the cradle and, clearly outlined, silhouettes of the three aeronauts. Burnaby compared it to a ‘colossal photograph’. And so it is with our life: so clear, so sure, until, for one reason or another – the balloon moves, the cloud disperses, the sun changes angle – the image is lost for ever, available only to memory, turned into anecdote.
There is a man in Venice I remember as clearly as if I had photographed him; or, perhaps, more clearly because I didn’t. It was some years ago, one late autumn or early winter. She and I were wandering in an untouristy part of the city, and she had gone ahead of me. I was starting to cross a small, banal bridge when I saw a man coming towards me. He was probably in his sixties, and dressed very correctly. I remember a smart black overcoat, black scarf, black shoes, perhaps a small moustache, and probably a hat – a black homburg. He might have been a Venetian avvocato , and he certainly wasn’t giving tourists a glance. But I gave him one, because at the bridge’s low zenith he took out a white handkerchief and wiped his eyes: not idly, not practically – it wasn’t, I’m sure, the cold – but in a slow, concentrated, familiar fashion. I found myself then, and later, trying to imagine his story; at times, I was half planning to write it. Now, I no longer need to, because I have assimilated his story to mine; he fits into my pattern.
There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. I remember my first visit to Paris in 1964; I was eighteen. Each day I did my cultural duty – galleries, museums, churches; I even bought the cheapest seat available at the Opéra Comique (and remember the impossible heat up there, the impossible sightlines, and the impossible-to-comprehend opera). I was lonely in the Métro, on the streets, and in the public parks where I would sit on a bench by myself reading a Sartre novel, which was probably about existential isolation. I was lonely even among those who befriended me. Remembering those weeks now, I realise that I never went upwards – the Eiffel Tower seemed an absurd, and absurdly popular, structure – but I did go down. I went down exactly as Nadar and his camera had done a hundred years previously. I too visited the Paris sewers, entering from somewhere near the Pont de l’Alma for a guided boat tour; and from the Place Denfert-Rochereau I descended into the Catacombs, my candle lighting up the neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls.
There is a German word, Sehnsucht , which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something’. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C. S. Lewis defined it as the ‘inconsolable longing’ in the human heart for ‘we know not what’. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something – or, in our case, for someone. Sehnsucht describes the first kind of loneliness. But the second kind comes from the opposite condition: the absence of a very specific someone. Not so much loneliness as her-lessness. It is this specificity which incites consoling plans with the warm bath and the Japanese carving knife. And though I am now equipped with a firm argument
There is a man in Venice I remember as clearly as if I had photographed him; or, perhaps, more clearly because I didn’t. It was some years ago, one late autumn or early winter. She and I were wandering in an untouristy part of the city, and she had gone ahead of me. I was starting to cross a small, banal bridge when I saw a man coming towards me. He was probably in his sixties, and dressed very correctly. I remember a smart black overcoat, black scarf, black shoes, perhaps a small moustache, and probably a hat – a black homburg. He might have been a Venetian avvocato , and he certainly wasn’t giving tourists a glance. But I gave him one, because at the bridge’s low zenith he took out a white handkerchief and wiped his eyes: not idly, not practically – it wasn’t, I’m sure, the cold – but in a slow, concentrated, familiar fashion. I found myself then, and later, trying to imagine his story; at times, I was half planning to write it. Now, I no longer need to, because I have assimilated his story to mine; he fits into my pattern.
There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. I remember my first visit to Paris in 1964; I was eighteen. Each day I did my cultural duty – galleries, museums, churches; I even bought the cheapest seat available at the Opéra Comique (and remember the impossible heat up there, the impossible sightlines, and the impossible-to-comprehend opera). I was lonely in the Métro, on the streets, and in the public parks where I would sit on a bench by myself reading a Sartre novel, which was probably about existential isolation. I was lonely even among those who befriended me. Remembering those weeks now, I realise that I never went upwards – the Eiffel Tower seemed an absurd, and absurdly popular, structure – but I did go down. I went down exactly as Nadar and his camera had done a hundred years previously. I too visited the Paris sewers, entering from somewhere near the Pont de l’Alma for a guided boat tour; and from the Place Denfert-Rochereau I descended into the Catacombs, my candle lighting up the neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls.
There is a German word, Sehnsucht , which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something’. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C. S. Lewis defined it as the ‘inconsolable longing’ in the human heart for ‘we know not what’. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something – or, in our case, for someone. Sehnsucht describes the first kind of loneliness. But the second kind comes from the opposite condition: the absence of a very specific someone. Not so much loneliness as her-lessness. It is this specificity which incites consoling plans with the warm bath and the Japanese carving knife. And though I am now equipped with a firm argument
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