Brightly Directed?
It’s a bright and sun scorched morning. Duke and I begin our usual outing through the neighbourhood. Bereft of children, with one in London and one ensconced in the third week of gymnastics summer intensive, there is a glint in the hound’s eye as we step forth. Less company, more space for obstreperous meandering and intensive sniffing I’m sure he is thinking.
As it happens, the slow pace of our walk taken in such a familiar setting, belies the feeling summoned by the imminent approach of international summer travel. There’s a sense of time rushing by while life dissolves to make way for the arising of the European experience. Underneath it all I hear those voices of the insistent suitcases which won’t tolerate the cold shoulder for much longer.
It has been two years since we were in London. Last summer the draconian quarantine shenanigans kept our trip purely French in nature and of a shorter duration than we are accustomed to. With the prospect of five weeks free from the bonds of our American life in sight, that golden feeling of summer and time stretches ahead, glimmering up around the corner.
Meanwhile the last threads of the school year weave themselves together. We’ve had summer tests, Rhythmic Open Championships, piano recitals and exams; all those things which make for recognisable structure in a child’s unfolding life. There’s just no substitute for such patterning, one of the great strengths inherent in a traditional school system of course. When you’re doing it yourself those same structures must be created, solid as the oak trees. Only thus can serious learning and development occur, through the drop of water put in the pot each day.
Talking of learning, I’m reading Hugh Kenner’s masterful work The Pound Era. It’s taken me in all sorts of directions; his early chapter on Henry James is fascinating, particularly when he delves into the perspicacity with which James viewed American culture. However his description of the extent of Pound’s* reach in terms of language transmutation from Greek, Latin, Old English and Provençal to Chinese, Italian, French and more is humbling, giving rise to lament for all we have lost.
I would challenge anybody to read the chapter Motz El Son and not come away with their perceptions simultaneously exploded and chastened. One particular sentence has stayed with me. When talking about London in the early twentieth century, Kenner describes how in 1909 and 1910, regular non-academic people would sign up for courses on Dante and the Troubadours as a matter of course. Similarly, inexpensive pocket volumes of bilingual Dante with Italian text, notes and facing English translation were widely read. Ten years later the intellectual landscape had changed irrevocably. As Kenner comments:
‘The collapse of that public, its supersession by folk absorbed in introspection and politics, is an unwritten story’
Food for thought. Perhaps our relentless march is not towards some gloriously bright future after all.
But for now all is well in our tiny fragment of existence, invisible to the naked eye of time. Before too long family will be reunited and the bright rays of unforgettable summer days will be all that we can see.
*Reading Pound in the light of his interview with Allen Ginsberg in 1967. See the 1968 issue of Evergreen where the interview is written up by Michael Reck for the detail.
