Obviously in crazy lockdown times, particularly the first one (how many were there?) I had swathes of empty time, much of which was filled with extra reading and also following up writers on my iPad. Here are a few of the writers I encountered in that dark time.
Somebody somewhere, maybe in a journal or newspaper, quoted a poem from 1919 by FW Harvey. It is long and could be said to be rather tedious but the first line worked for me and has remained in my head. ‘From troubles of the world, I turn to ducks.’ A river runs along my front garden and there are mallards, coots and moorhens a plenty. Frequently there is a heron or egret and on golden days a kingfisher. The ducks often sit in a familial group on the grass. Out walking on those early lockdown days for our statutory exercise, filled as I was with fear and sadness, I could indeed see the appeal of standing and watching the silly antics of the ducks and weirdly it helped to know that their lives were carrying on regardless of our trauma. Oblivion was sweet.
It would have been an excellent plan to commit to reading all of Proust during those stretched hours and days and indeed a friend of a friend did just that. I am in awe. I laboured my way through volume one and in the end I would have sold my soul for a full stop. The sentences are so long, complicated and convoluted that you lose the will to live and decide that you don’t actually know what happened in the last half a page. (Do you care?) Marcel Proust was I think totally horizontal when he wrote these volumes and at the end of the first volume I stopped. Enough. I don’t have sufficient years left to use them for this. End of.
Rainer Maria Rilke was a name I had never heard of. He was an Austrian poet and novelist and an important voice in German language literature who lived in the decades around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Reading about and around him, I learnt that he has long been very popular in America and each generation seems to find him anew for themselves. I was taken by this moment of terrible clarity as he reminds us of a simple truth: ‘Because to be here means so much.’ As I watched ghastly pictures on the BBC news and those wretched daily numbers of infections and deaths, the truth rang out of those few words.
One of my favourite authors, Susan Hill, who I have read for years, introduced me to Mary Oliver. She was an American poet who died just a few years ago. She lived in New England and had a powerful connection to the natural world which she wrote about with a delightful innocence that also held a strong conviction. Some lines of her poetry really hit the spot during the pandemic: ‘Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.’..and…’Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’
I actually read far less fiction during that time than usual, for some reason non fiction in a variety of guises felt far more accessible: biography and autobiography, books about the landscape, travelogues, diaries and slim volumes of poetry.
So Mary Oliver was definitely a find. I have now read her books of essays as well as poetry. In time of trouble I will turn to ducks, just to make me smile. However, Marcel Proust and I do not seem destined to become really well acquainted. There will just remain that redolent fragrance and taste of the madeleine, in future Proustian moments. Times remembered, in this case really difficult times.