There is a noiselessness available sometimes that needs to be enjoyed.
I noticed it this morning again, within 50 pages of finishing Proust. On rare occasions, one stops and thinks, 'surely this is the paradise we were always promised'. Those occasions are various. I can't remember if I felt it at the Thom Gunn reading in Cambridge in 1979, but maybe I should have. Having 4 winners out of 5 bets at Cheltenham a few years ago made me feel one step away from omnipotence. The horse that got beat was Might Bite that went on to win the Gold Cup. There was also a harpsichord recital in Handel's House to mark the 300th anniversary of the death of Buxtehude.
It's those sort of things that made me feel I was in the right place at the right time. But more often now it can be attributed to the quality of the silence and actually not trying to do two things at once, like listening to Stephen Kovacevich playing Beethoven Sonatas or the Fitzwilliams doing the Shostakovich Quartets while reading but just reading. It can depend on not having the neighbours' kids playing outside but they seem to be harmless enough.
It is worth having because it is somehow imaginably outside of time, beyond the world that includes Boris, Trump, plague and all the other insurmountable ills of the world. One can put the records back on, the lute music of Sylvain Weiss or the Harp Concerto by Krumpholz or anything like that, to look at the book of Times crosswords and maybe put a few more in.
Those of us who are not front-line workers don't deserve it. For the first time in history, bus drivers are recognized as more heroic than poets, pop singers or sportspersons. I feel guilty keeping myself in business by having a winner on the first day that jump racing came back. I feel guilty anyway but there is no point in me feeling bad when I've no other reason to. I'm not volunteering for misery if I can avoid it.
Once Proust is one of those enormous jobs one never thought one would achieve - and it was brilliant- is achieved, I will try to concentrate on something else. The immaculate quiet, when it is available, could be a great help.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.
