Henry Green wrote a memoir Pack My Bag on the eve of world war two: he was convinced he would die and he wanted to die up to date, having said it in so many words. I like his sentences; they keep you awake. Like Gertrude Stein but slightly more punctuation. Halting. Lurching. Tense & lyrical.
As we listen to what we remember, to the echoes, there is no question but the notes are muted, that those long introductions to the theme life is to be, so strident so piercing at the time are now no louder than the cry of a huntsman on the hill a mile or so away when he views the fox. We who must die soon, or so it seems to me, should chase our memories back, standing, when they are found, enough apart not to be too near what they once meant. Like the huntsman, on a hill and when he blows his horn, like him some way away from us.
Some way away, is right. Henry Green felt far away. At his private school, his public school, at Oxford. You can be isolated from anything. Let's agree to agree.
