you never stopped the writing, as if even when you could not be understood, you still had something to say.
I reach for another box, an earlier one, and in this action I pass my hand back over a decade to where you are readable again. Here, there is the surprise of encountering events of history, suddenly intruding into your intimate correspondence. This to your brother on 15 June 1940:
I heard yesterday that Paris had fallen. I am indeed thankful that the sacred and beautiful treasures of mankind may have been left in peace. That noble Venus (in the Louvre is she not?) may outlive our crazy times now—all being well. Last night I was reading at Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’, and seeming to learn something of the perspective of Religion and Art, of Time and Eternity –
‘All breathing human passion for above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
a burning forehead and a parched tongue’
That Venus surely may preach on now the abiding
Truth and Beauty for many a long year to come,
‘When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st
beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
I kept the 71 st Anniversary of my birth this week. My love for you all always!!!
Yours ever Arthur S. Cripps
Most of the letters, though, are about your daily life, the pattern of weekly and annual events that informed your days and years in Africa.
There were some rather enjoyable new year Sports and Horse races on Saturday. I made no show or rather a very bad show in the 100 yards (I tried running bare foot like one or two of the others as I had no proper shoes), and wasted ray entrance money…Gouldsbury, my R.C. friend in the native commissioner’s office at the Range, won the high jump…
I take your letters back to the front desk and carry two more boxes to my table. The windows of the library are bruising into evening and I can see the street lights outside have come on, illuminating the leaves of the trees that hang above them. Opening the first of the boxes I find a large brown envelope which I tilt onto the table, emptying its contents onto the dark wood. A cascade of photographs falls out, a scattered pile of white-bordered rectangular images, curling at the corners. Moments of your life in no particular order. I feel a sense of relief at seeing these photographs spread before me; somehow it is in these images that I am convinced you will come even nearer to me. The camera never lies, apparently, and I have come to this library with a faith in its impartial eye. But the photos I find are awkwardly abstract, their stillness robbing them of life, the arbitrary moment existing in its own space only, with no before or after offered. The photograph on the cover of Steere’s book, however, is the only one I have ever seen of you, so it is still a surprise to suddenly have so much of you in one go: years and decades passing through my fingers as I sift through the pile.
In themselves they are ordinary photographs, sometimes badly framed or focused, of people standing and sitting, but their age, and their connection to you, makes each one a fascination. The faces of the people are modern, no different to those around me in the library. Yet I know the distance between them and me, of time and ideas. In the early ones the eyes that look back at the camera have no knowledge of modern warfare; the trenches of the Somme and the camps of Auschwitz have not happened for them, the atom has not been split. Inside their heads they inhabit a different world of ideas to the one I know, and that innocence is in itself beguiling.
I find one of you at Oxford, a posed studio shot taken by Hills & Saunders, your eyes impassive, looking out of the frame. You wear a high wing-collar shirt and cravat with a dark waistcoat. You look healthy, young, with full lips and neatly parted dark hair. I trace the
I reach for another box, an earlier one, and in this action I pass my hand back over a decade to where you are readable again. Here, there is the surprise of encountering events of history, suddenly intruding into your intimate correspondence. This to your brother on 15 June 1940:
I heard yesterday that Paris had fallen. I am indeed thankful that the sacred and beautiful treasures of mankind may have been left in peace. That noble Venus (in the Louvre is she not?) may outlive our crazy times now—all being well. Last night I was reading at Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’, and seeming to learn something of the perspective of Religion and Art, of Time and Eternity –
‘All breathing human passion for above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
a burning forehead and a parched tongue’
That Venus surely may preach on now the abiding
Truth and Beauty for many a long year to come,
‘When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st
beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
I kept the 71 st Anniversary of my birth this week. My love for you all always!!!
Yours ever Arthur S. Cripps
Most of the letters, though, are about your daily life, the pattern of weekly and annual events that informed your days and years in Africa.
There were some rather enjoyable new year Sports and Horse races on Saturday. I made no show or rather a very bad show in the 100 yards (I tried running bare foot like one or two of the others as I had no proper shoes), and wasted ray entrance money…Gouldsbury, my R.C. friend in the native commissioner’s office at the Range, won the high jump…
I take your letters back to the front desk and carry two more boxes to my table. The windows of the library are bruising into evening and I can see the street lights outside have come on, illuminating the leaves of the trees that hang above them. Opening the first of the boxes I find a large brown envelope which I tilt onto the table, emptying its contents onto the dark wood. A cascade of photographs falls out, a scattered pile of white-bordered rectangular images, curling at the corners. Moments of your life in no particular order. I feel a sense of relief at seeing these photographs spread before me; somehow it is in these images that I am convinced you will come even nearer to me. The camera never lies, apparently, and I have come to this library with a faith in its impartial eye. But the photos I find are awkwardly abstract, their stillness robbing them of life, the arbitrary moment existing in its own space only, with no before or after offered. The photograph on the cover of Steere’s book, however, is the only one I have ever seen of you, so it is still a surprise to suddenly have so much of you in one go: years and decades passing through my fingers as I sift through the pile.
In themselves they are ordinary photographs, sometimes badly framed or focused, of people standing and sitting, but their age, and their connection to you, makes each one a fascination. The faces of the people are modern, no different to those around me in the library. Yet I know the distance between them and me, of time and ideas. In the early ones the eyes that look back at the camera have no knowledge of modern warfare; the trenches of the Somme and the camps of Auschwitz have not happened for them, the atom has not been split. Inside their heads they inhabit a different world of ideas to the one I know, and that innocence is in itself beguiling.
I find one of you at Oxford, a posed studio shot taken by Hills & Saunders, your eyes impassive, looking out of the frame. You wear a high wing-collar shirt and cravat with a dark waistcoat. You look healthy, young, with full lips and neatly parted dark hair. I trace the
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