Let be

With the publication of The Mirror and the Light I am – and I want to say ‘of course’, with the fond exasperation and indulgence one uses when talking of a friend’s characteristic idiosyncrasies, but applying it to myself.  The phrase refuses to leave the sentence and so, let’s try again:

With the publication of the Mirror and the Light I am, of course, starting to re-read from the start, with Wolf Hall.  This is in part to refresh the memory, which Cromwell himself, with his Italian method, would not need, and also to prolong the pleasure. 

Some books are synesthetic experiences, the depth of immersion means they seep into other senses:  I think of some titles and there is a flavour so strong I can taste them.  With Hilary Mantel’s monumental trilogy the depth of immersion is all-encompassing: taste, touch, smell, sight.  So no, I don’t want to rush.  And not wanting it to end, I go back to the beginning.

This week we have all been uncertainly anticipating the coronavirus pandemic.  Like in a phony war, perhaps, we are anxiously trying to work out what we can do, where the threat may be, nervous energy and anxiety with nowhere to go.  So it is salutary (ironically the origins of the word mean not just something to make us feel better but specifically health-giving) to think of Tudor times.

In 1527 Cromwell loses his wife Liz to the sleeping sickness.  One year later his daughters also fall victim to the same mysterious, swift striking illness:  ‘merry at breakfast, they say: dead by noon’. Life expectancy was lower,  in fact life expectancy as an actual expectation probably didn’t exist.  We do, now, expect to live a reasonably long life, in the 21^st century western world.  Whereas in Tudor times there was no such complacency.  Every day was spent on a bifocal knife edge, any day might bring an illness or accident from which there could be no recovery.  And I do find it helpful to think of this:  the perspective of genuinely expecting 70 years or so is very new.  Both the luxury and the anxiety – the anticipation of all that future time and the worry about how to provide for oneself – are very recent phenomena.  Life presents itself in all its bewildering, changing complexity, but a sense of threat, uncertainty, our own vulnerability? These are nothing new.

Last weekend I stayed in Sudbury with my best friend and I walked her dog over water meadows, through fields and in woods which feature in Gainsborough’s paintings.  The landscapes seem timeless, the air is fresh, the slience punctuated by birdsong..  The tree trunks have that early spring green bloom on them – I do not know what that is but I see it every year – and blossom is starting to break.  It is beautiful and intensely of the moment. Another single pearl of precious immediacy to thread on to the string which is, after all, all our life comprises.  This moment, and this, and this .. like Ted Hughes’ Thought Fox:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf’

Two eyes serve a moment, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees.

Be merry at breakfast.