I
hate to be dull but that's exactly what I'm going to be so bear with
me for a moment, because yet again I've learnt something new which
may not be new to you but I'll pass it on anyway, although this piece
of information is not as new to me now as when I first learned of it,
a little over a year ago, and probably late at that because surely I
should have acquired this scrap of knowledge long before middle-age.
Are
late thirties considered middle-aged? They were once, but still...?
But
that's another topic, one I haven't got time for, because if this is
indeed middle-age then I'm losing ground: only picking up scraps that
I should have learned sooner. The circumstances, however, in which to
find them – organically and actively or from passively reading
matter - didn't occur; the former, exceedingly rare being an
introvert, and the latter, well, timing is everything and although
you can hunt for books they tend to find you rather than you them,
which I've always thought is something to do with being in the right
frame of mind for whatever it has to impart, even if receptive you
only critique or openly sneer.
Anyhow,
where was I? Lord of
the Flies. No, but I
will be. Sort of. Because I haven't read it. Yet. Not by the time
I've written this article – edited it and finalised it - anyway. By
the time this is published, most definitely (it's the eighth stop on
my journey) but by then it will be beside the point (and will have
paled to a lesser significance) whereas at present it's very much the
point, the whole point. Sort of.
Again
with the sort of. Isn't that a contradiction? Writers do that, you
know. We contradict ourselves all the time – in print, in
opinion-giving, in plot. And it's far better as writers to recognise
our own failings than have readers recognise them or invent them as
they commonly do whether you're dead or alive. Yes, mistakes of that
sort are ours to own or deny but the narrator is not the author,
unless they've said so specifically. Who am I? A hybrid. Strange that
I've come out with that when I hold certain views that are best left
unsaid, because I'm not some raging feminist either and you'll think
I am if I do. I can assure you I'm not. I just find myself more and
more in agreement with Flaubert: I don't love humanity.
Piggy.
Yes, pigs, the lot of them; but wait...you've got me all
wrong...Piggy as in character, goes by the name of, and shares a
common condition as well as an uncommon experience with H. E. Bates'
Mrs Betteson: that of wearing spectacles and using them to make fire.
Of course I thought, what presence of mind at a time when your mind
is normally in free-fall, until I learned via Julian Barnes that if
those glasses are for short-sightedness then whichever way they're
held they'd be 'unable to make the rays of the sun converge' (p.76-77
Flaubert's Parrot).
William
Golding obviously didn't realise that; did H. E Bates? Was Mrs
Betteson short-sighted? I don't remember, but I think so; the sense
of the prose, that I recall, made it seem that way. Is Julian Barnes'
Geoffrey Braithwaite, a English retired doctor, correct? Or have I
been duped again, believing everything a narrator tells me, for it
must be true, mustn’t it? It has to be either universally
acknowledged or a theory that is at least scientifically sound,
doesn't it?
And
why did I feel I had to mention his narrator was a doctor? Does that
fact give the information more merit? Subconsciously it must do, on
the lines of surely he would know; be less likely to blindly accept:
sun and glasses (irrespective of prescription) equals fire.
Hmm,
isn't that how cults start? Another's word accepted as Gospel (until
you find otherwise) when what you should really do is question
everything. I know, who's got the time?
So,
truth or untruth I've removed one mental note and replaced it with
another (or at least I hope it's been imprinted somewhere) because it
might come in useful, and if it did would save me many fruitless
hours squatting and peering short-sightedly at a pile of twigs under
a burning sun.
Picture credit: Portrait of G A Escher, 1935, M C Escher (source: WikiArt)
All posts published this year were penned during the last.
