It's the wordlessness that is most attractive about them, and the rest of their quietness, that makes them such a good alternative to the endless bloody books and records.
Although two of them have figures in them they are not demanding of our attention but absorbed with something else. They have in common geomtrical compositions of rectangles and slanted lines. While the Hammershoi in the centre is resplendent in the frame that suits it so well, it is the richest in its detail, which isn't bad when you're up against Vermeer. Gwen John's is one of a number of the artist's room in Paris, others of which have the window open, letting in a little bit of the outside world as the Hammershoi does and so we move, from left to right, from outside looking in, through inside with a glimpse outside, to a pale, closed interior.
It isn't a triptych, of course. Or wasn't until I made them so.
I should have more to worry about than the shadows made by the table and piano legs going in different directions from apparently the same light source.
The books recently have been Graham Swift back catalogue before the new one arrives. The Light of Day was the usual masterclass and Learning to Swim some early short stories. The title story of the latter was some kind of light relief, being only about marital dysfunction and without a corpse or bereavement. Swift's default setting is to have one or the other as a thematic element that presumably either puts the lives of the living into more precarious relief or points up how in the midst of life we are in death. With Ever After looking equally morbid still to come, as well as the essays in Making an Elephant, we will hope that all the characters in Here We Are make it to the end.
In the meantime, I took my old Beethoven book off the shelf because I can't remember reading it and it is an anniversary this year.
None of which is to suggest that Graham Swift is anything less than a brilliant writer. But they all have their recurring motifs as well as their facility. Julian Barnes, for obvious reasons perhaps, meditates on lost love at greater length sometimes than his stories might require. It's hard to appreciate how good they are at it until you realize how hard it is to do.
Swift is not the first fiction writer to make me think I'd like to have a go. It was William Trevor some thirty-five years ago; it was Yukio Mishima maybe twenty-five years ago, which was where Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto had led me. What one doesn't realize is that they've made it look easy and, actually, you might be better off trying to imitate Dickens or even just Harold Robbins.
The first 1500 words of Flowers for Aunt Daisy had lost all discipline by the time I abandoned the evening's work last week and so I'm left with the choice of feeling defeated or returning to the scene of the mess.
I knew I couldn't do it but I still had to try. It's like wanting to be able to play a musical instrument but having neither the requisite talent or application to do it properly. Poetry surely is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
How could Hammershoi apply paint to canvas delicately enough to capture the effects of the light like that.