After the excitements of Advent and Christmas, January is quiet, like the frosts and mists that steal up on the peninsula in midwinter. I ought to have had time to write this January blog during the month itself. But it got overtaken by other things: writing that I'd not had time to finish over Christmas, large Cathedral matters I had to give time to. And our minds and prayers have been occupied by what has been happening beyond our shores, terrible events in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and elsewhere.
Here in Durham, we have had a tragedy. Winter took its toll on a student who fell into the icy black waters of the River Wear in the small hours of a January morning. Durham's river banks are lovely beyond description, but they are a trap for the unwary who don't know the topography. In the dark, they pose hazards that have taken their toll on no fewer than three young student lives in the past 14 months (and nearly took a fourth just last week). The Cathedral owns sections of the river banks, though not where this latest drowning took place. In an intimate city like this, any grave incident makes you stop and think. We have been talking with the University, the Police and the Local Authority to see what needs to be done to make sure no-one else loses their life in a place of exquisite beauty. It was a shocking reminder that even beauty has its dark side.
January feels like 'ordinary time': gentle and steady. No-one affects to like January very much. But in the Cathedral it is still Christmas until the feast of Candlemas on 2 February. So there has been light and colour to enjoy. During these forty days, the crib has been in position, as have the Christmas trees under the Victorian Scott Screen. At Epiphany, we celebrate the revealing of the infant Jesus to the world and develop the rich theme of how something so tiny as an infant can have significance for the entire cosmos. Incarnation makes me think of Hamlet: 'I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space'. It goes on 'were it not that I have bad dreams'. Epiphany feels like a season of good dreams, imagining our world as it would be if this infant King reigned, with all its wrongs righted and tears and pain brought to an end.
Our development project Open Treasure continues through the month. The cloister buildings are enveloped in scaffolding. Behind, mostly invisible, we are treated to bangs and thuds and the whine of machinery as the contractors continue the long and noisy job of preparing these ancient buildings to house our wonderful treasures such as Cuthbert's cross, the Durham Gospels and three copies of Magna Carta. There is mud everywhere, and much of it finds its way into the cloister, the Cathedral and our homes. The chantier (is there an English word for a works site?) has eaten up precious parking space in the College, so visitors' cars get left in front of the Deanery gates, much to the annoyance of its occupants. But these are the trials of progress. Spirits are high as we see this great work move forward. By summer, the fabric conservation will be finished. College Green will return to its verdant normal, in time for the Chorister School to entertain its speech day guests for tea underneath the branches of the spreading beech trees.
Meanwhile, the days get longer, though ever so slowly at first. But there are snowdrops on the river banks and in the Deanery garden. The golden sunlight that illuminates the pillar opposite the Dean's stall at morning prayer around solstice time has gone for another year. It's a welcome sign that the sun is climbing back up the sky towards the zenith, and with it, the sap is rising in the trees. And in our spirits, I trust. Ready for Lent when it comes in February.
About Me
- Aquilonius
- Pilgrim, priest and ponderer. European living in North East England. Retired parish priest, theological educator, cathedral precentor and dean.
Showing posts with label epiphany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label epiphany. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 February 2015
Saturday, 4 January 2014
Christmas by the Fireside: on reading ‘Stoner’
I may already have read my best novel of 2014.
The 12 days of Christmas always offer welcome reading time. After finishing Rosemary Sutcliff’s beautiful trilogy on Roman Britain, I read Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room. Meanwhile, my son and son-in-law were both absorbed in another book which seemed quietly compelling judging by the attention they were giving it, John Williams’ Stoner. I asked one of them whether I should read it. ‘Yes, you must,’ was the reply, ‘you really must’.
I had never heard of John Williams, but had picked up some of the excited literary gossip in last year’s papers about Stoner. First published in 1965, it seems not to have attracted much attention until it appeared as a Vintage paperback in 2012. But when writers of the stature of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan say of it, ‘a terrific novel of echoing sadness’ and ‘a beautiful novel…a marvellous discovery for everyone who loves literature’ you know you are on to something special.
Coming to it after Toby’s Room, I realised that I had gone from a good novel, even a very good novel, to a great novel. The first thing to strike me was the quality of the prose: clear, spare, unadorned, each word and sentence exactly right for the task it had to do. Like the author, his central character Will Stoner is an English lecturer at a Midwestern university whose love is language. Williams’ writing has the craftsman’s mastery of shape and form that comes, I imagine, from a lifetime’s immersion in the world’s greatest literature. When you read prose that has luminous clarity, you realise how opaque so much writing is by comparison.
But I doubt that love of literature is enough to achieve this by itself. It’s the novel’s intelligence that elevates it above the ordinary, even the very good. Its sharply observed take on education, literature and the politics of the academy can perhaps be put down to the author’s experience as a practitioner. Memorable depictions of landscapes or of natural phenomena such as the cycle of the seasons can perhaps be learned from the great poets, though that would not guarantee that they were fresh and vivid.
This book is intelligent in a more profound way that I want to describe as a kind of wisdom. I am thinking of the insights the author brings to human character, how public persona and private life play off each other in the formation of identity, how he notices and finds words for the complexities of love, passion and estrangement, or the gentle decline of a human being in his or her last years of ageing and suffering by which we come to terms with mortality. Stoner’s marriage to a woman of elusive emotional make-up is a masterpiece of psycho-sexual observation. It is all done in a register of plain, straightforward prose that puts you in awe of the capacity of simple words to convey the vicissitudes of the human heart. You feel it's wonderfully accurate writing.
This is one of those books where nothing much happens, yet everything happens. The career of an agricultural labourer who discovers literature at college and becomes a university lecturer could be told in a few paragraphs. The brilliance of the novel is in uncovering the rhizome under the soil, prising open the interstices of everyday existence that make this ordinary story extraordinary. It lays bare the hidden, unsuspected elegiac character of human life for all to see, maybe even its tragedy. I found myself asking: does Williams mean this of any human life like yours and mine? What if he had written his story about me?
Take the key moment when a literature lecturer reads Shakespeare’s 73rd Sonnet and asks Stoner to explain it:
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Stoner can’t get beyond the words ‘it means…’. Desperately trying to capture what is hovering on the margins of his experience for which as yet he has no vocabulary, he simply repeats them. But Williams’ laconic description of this disclosure that is happening to the student as he struggles to understand makes you realise that it’s a life-changing epiphany, a transfiguration. You know that this will be the text for the rest of the book. A lesser writer would have piled on the prose, indulged the emotions, attempted to dissect that moment of recognition, padded out the detail, and referred back to it later in the book. Williams is content simply to drop the pebble into a pool, allow the waves to travel outwards and trust to the intelligence of the reader to make the connections. This is literary restraint at its best.
Stoner is a minor miracle of writing. It reminded me of Flaubert's saying about language, that it's ‘a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars’. Or, as someone said of Chekhov’s short stories, you could think you were holding life itself, like a fluttering bird, in your cupped hands.
This may be the one book I read in 2014 of which I'll confidently say, if you ask me: yes, you must read it. You really must. Trust me. It's marvellous.
The 12 days of Christmas always offer welcome reading time. After finishing Rosemary Sutcliff’s beautiful trilogy on Roman Britain, I read Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room. Meanwhile, my son and son-in-law were both absorbed in another book which seemed quietly compelling judging by the attention they were giving it, John Williams’ Stoner. I asked one of them whether I should read it. ‘Yes, you must,’ was the reply, ‘you really must’.
I had never heard of John Williams, but had picked up some of the excited literary gossip in last year’s papers about Stoner. First published in 1965, it seems not to have attracted much attention until it appeared as a Vintage paperback in 2012. But when writers of the stature of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan say of it, ‘a terrific novel of echoing sadness’ and ‘a beautiful novel…a marvellous discovery for everyone who loves literature’ you know you are on to something special.
Coming to it after Toby’s Room, I realised that I had gone from a good novel, even a very good novel, to a great novel. The first thing to strike me was the quality of the prose: clear, spare, unadorned, each word and sentence exactly right for the task it had to do. Like the author, his central character Will Stoner is an English lecturer at a Midwestern university whose love is language. Williams’ writing has the craftsman’s mastery of shape and form that comes, I imagine, from a lifetime’s immersion in the world’s greatest literature. When you read prose that has luminous clarity, you realise how opaque so much writing is by comparison.
But I doubt that love of literature is enough to achieve this by itself. It’s the novel’s intelligence that elevates it above the ordinary, even the very good. Its sharply observed take on education, literature and the politics of the academy can perhaps be put down to the author’s experience as a practitioner. Memorable depictions of landscapes or of natural phenomena such as the cycle of the seasons can perhaps be learned from the great poets, though that would not guarantee that they were fresh and vivid.
This book is intelligent in a more profound way that I want to describe as a kind of wisdom. I am thinking of the insights the author brings to human character, how public persona and private life play off each other in the formation of identity, how he notices and finds words for the complexities of love, passion and estrangement, or the gentle decline of a human being in his or her last years of ageing and suffering by which we come to terms with mortality. Stoner’s marriage to a woman of elusive emotional make-up is a masterpiece of psycho-sexual observation. It is all done in a register of plain, straightforward prose that puts you in awe of the capacity of simple words to convey the vicissitudes of the human heart. You feel it's wonderfully accurate writing.
This is one of those books where nothing much happens, yet everything happens. The career of an agricultural labourer who discovers literature at college and becomes a university lecturer could be told in a few paragraphs. The brilliance of the novel is in uncovering the rhizome under the soil, prising open the interstices of everyday existence that make this ordinary story extraordinary. It lays bare the hidden, unsuspected elegiac character of human life for all to see, maybe even its tragedy. I found myself asking: does Williams mean this of any human life like yours and mine? What if he had written his story about me?
Take the key moment when a literature lecturer reads Shakespeare’s 73rd Sonnet and asks Stoner to explain it:
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Stoner can’t get beyond the words ‘it means…’. Desperately trying to capture what is hovering on the margins of his experience for which as yet he has no vocabulary, he simply repeats them. But Williams’ laconic description of this disclosure that is happening to the student as he struggles to understand makes you realise that it’s a life-changing epiphany, a transfiguration. You know that this will be the text for the rest of the book. A lesser writer would have piled on the prose, indulged the emotions, attempted to dissect that moment of recognition, padded out the detail, and referred back to it later in the book. Williams is content simply to drop the pebble into a pool, allow the waves to travel outwards and trust to the intelligence of the reader to make the connections. This is literary restraint at its best.
Stoner is a minor miracle of writing. It reminded me of Flaubert's saying about language, that it's ‘a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars’. Or, as someone said of Chekhov’s short stories, you could think you were holding life itself, like a fluttering bird, in your cupped hands.
This may be the one book I read in 2014 of which I'll confidently say, if you ask me: yes, you must read it. You really must. Trust me. It's marvellous.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)