A Camera Eye

Resting for a little longer in the land of in between, the time has found us thinking, talking and reading this week. Gazing too; the painting Emptiness by Molly van der Weij, a detail of which accompanies this post, is one of my favourites; its depths are endless and its colours light.

My son is reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, I’m reading Ernest Hemingway and my daughter is reading her early reader books and enjoying bedtime Fairy Tales. Hansel and Gretel with its terrifying story of resourceful children pitted against a wicked world is her favourite at present.

In a way, these days of resting in place are a natural extension of our recent life in California and yet we all feel a palpable difference. Jolted from one dream to the next we exist in placid contentment. Far away from the endless summer, its ocean waves of blue roll with a gentle constancy in my mind, the doorway to our dream of home through which we will eventually walk.

With the reading of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms I have become gripped by his writing style. Discovery of his iceberg technique and of what one critic calls his camera eye* has been an exercise in illumination. In earlier years I have passed over Hemingway in favour of Fitzgerald. I’m looking forward to swapping books with my son and re-immersing myself in This Side of Paradise in the light of my reading of Hemingway.

I found myself thinking of this camera eye last night when we watched Christopher Nolan’s movie about warring magicians from 2006, The Prestige. With its non linear narrative and finely tuned depiction of appearances and their reality it reminded me of Hemingway and also of Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar. It’s a film that leaves you with the suddenly fresh feeling that our eyes perceive the world a little lazily. In a similar way, his later movie Inception grabs you by the lapels and gives you a good shake. You can’t really beat the beginning of that movie once you’ve seen the end.

As our days of confinement draw to a close we’ll be re-entering the world again. Time will gallop apace and the end of the summer will arrive with breakneck speed. We’ll move through the sequences of days and nights together, carrying a little of the quiet peace from these past days with us on our further travels.

Image, ‘Emptiness’ courtesy of mollyvanderweij.com

*Zoe Trodd ‘Hemingway’s Camera Eye: The Problem of Language And An Interwar Politics of Form’