JUDY KRAVIS

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Saturday 6 October 2018

L.P. Hartley, The Eustace and Hilda Trilogy

With one chapter to go in the Eustace and Hilda trilogy I feel like an (unfamiliar) child who doesn't want to leave home. The home in question is that quiet, limited place that existed before I was born or when I was very young, without politics or any world events I could begin to think about. Eustace does not do world events, his slim gilt soul, created, as his friend Anthony says, by his sister Hilda, can only accommodate the world he knows and the other, much larger, fed by reading, of his fantasy. As he slips about among versions of how things will be, if Hilda marries into an old and landed family, if he himself becomes a novelist gliding among the aristocratic ex-pats of Venice or Rome, I can feel myself abandon every current contemporary difficulty, whether Brexit or the local bollixes who make ragged my own dreams.

I come back reluctantly. A sentence from W.G. Sebald (After Nature) forms a cushion under my return to this life. Sometimes a sentence is enough.
                 Our brains, after all,
are always at work on some quivers
of self-organisation, however faint,
and it is from this that an order
arises, in places beautiful
and comforting, though more cruel, too,
than the previous state of ignorance.

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