THE END OF AUGUST

In a viewing room in Culver City, Los Angeles, May 1981, on a very comfortable private sofa, I watched a freshly-minted movie, The End of August: flawless sky, long sand, soft horizon, parasol framing the face, the sea, the end of August pristine for all time. From the novel by Kate Chopin, which I haven't read. The film has also vanished from sight. The beach remains.

My Sebald summer had interludes of Norman Maclean and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, as well as The New Yorker and Hortus. P was surprised I liked Norman Maclean. Sometimes an action tale, language as muscular as logging, as delicate as fly-fishing, so hard-won, is what the reading body needs.

I'm nearing the end of Austerlitz up at the pond. Watching bumblebees work the scabious. The end of August in Inniscarra. Wind from the southeast, a yapping dog and a truck permanently reversing. I'm learning the art of letting things slide off a duck's back, and sleeping better.

Austerlitz is as compelling as your own past, or anyone's, half-restored, half-escaped. I can't read too much at a time, then I have to turn away and watch a spider repair the damage I did to its web when I sat down. 

Since I was twenty I have tried to confirm with patient handiwork, as Sebald says in the introduction to A Place in the Country, my peculiar position, his peculiar position, theirs, ours, wanting to write all the time, keeping a diary, following a route, taking photographs, most of which deepen rather than clarify. 'There are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of things.'

Perhaps it would be better simply to set down .... a brief novel with the career of a young artist tragically cut short, and cypress-dark ending that sees everyone dead and buried, before laying aside the pen for good. The reader, though, would stand to lose much thereby, for the hapless writers trapped in their web of words sometimes succeed in opening up vistas of such beauty and intensity as life itself is scarcely able to provide.