Familiar Love
Our son is home from university during his Easter vacation, and the house is full once again these days. As we spent our Christmas and New Year in a wonderfully cold England, some time has passed since we have gathered together under the Californian sun.
The hound is in heaven. With more beds to choose from and more walkers and walks to be had, his eyes glint with a bumptious happiness from time to time. A family dog at heart, as all well-loved pitbulls are, his contentment at the completeness of the pack is palpable and adds texture and depth to the simplest of moments. I watched him snuggle up into his lifelong bond of loyalty next to our son on the sofa a couple of nights ago and a deep comfort washed through me. Such are the irreplaceable fixtures of family won only through a love which marches steadfast alongside life’s vicissitudes.
As the minutes flash past, I’ve been sitting in the happy midst of time present with time past lingering all around. Memories of early days in Los Angeles resurface and I sense their presence. I’m reading a new biography of Scott Fitzgerald and my mind is drawn into Gatsby’s irresistible orbit. Haunting memories and their unfindability isn’t expressed much better anywhere than in Chapter 6 of this great, great book, in spite of Gatsby’s own delusory dreams and schemes. It’s the words with which Nick Carraway closes out the chapter that you can’t forget; almost Virgilian in their power.
Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something - an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment, a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had remembered was uncommunicable forever.
The simple happiness of recent days, where our daughter whiles away time with her big brother and four gather around the dinner table rather than three, brings to mind A Portrait of Jane Austen, the biography by David Cecil which I mentioned a few weeks ago. In the early chapters, he describes late eighteenth century England, the stage on which the scenes of Austen’s early life at Steventon unfolded. During this formative period, Jane and her family enjoyed sunny and positive circumstances both in terms of the stability and good sense of contemporary culture and as regards the strength and closeness of their family circle; a circle which would prove to be of vital and lifelong importance to Jane herself.
Of course this favorable setting was merely the environment, it needed the brilliant mind of Austen herself to alchemise her experiences into the works we know and love. Shortly before I picked up Cecil’s biography, we’ d been reading Emma and I’d been struck by the closing sentence of a passage describing the view from Emma’s window which I will quote in full here:
Emma went to the door for her amusement and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman traveling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarreling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough, quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
It was immediately clear to me that there was quite a bit of Jane herself in that final line. I smiled later when I read Cecil’s words after he quoted this exact passage to illuminate his description of Austen’s view from her own window in later life, ‘Jane Austen’s was such a mind; for Emma we may read the name of her creator, looking out from the hall window of Chawton Cottage and finding herself ‘amused enough’.
As we sit around our dining table and talk of this and that and chuckle at a great deal more, I can’t quite believe that I am the mother of a twenty year old and an eleven year old. There is nowhere in life that I feel the interconnected nature of all things and the illusory nature of time so strongly as in my own role as a parent. We see the lights of life refracted not just through our own gaze but almost through that of our children’s also. The older they become, particularly our son, the more I feel my youth with its choices and decisions just behind me, as if it were yesterday. In reality, those times are fading further and further away. Now that our daughter is eleven, the next few precious years will race down future’s tracks, making a mockery of time’s supposed linear regularity. It is a startling illumination of the fluidity in all things and of the poignancy of the present.
