A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor

A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor, a middling novel for midsummer, middle of England, middle of the twentieth century,  8, Jessica Terrace, Swanford, Buckinghamshire, England, The World, The Universe, to be precise. 

I finished it up at the pond today, toasted front and back. One dip. Much collection of duckweed with the net between times. All trapped tadpoles returned. A jackdaw came down to wet his wings. I can be an impatient and a loving reader. I lose track of the names of people's mothers, but I'm touched by the tiny, sordid, intimacies of hands inside coats, the teenager's gaze, the pathos of her teacher; last scenes leave an indeterminate rush of affection. 

A short rhetoric for leaving the family, by Peter Dimock

A short rhetoric for leaving the family, by Peter Dimock. Everything about the title draws me, all four things: short and rhetoric, leaving and family. Rhetoric is not a word I use often, but I like to meet it, shelter there a while, cloaked in careful, pleasured vocabulary. 

I am writing, this season, a letter to the owner of the lands around us, from whose family I have bought before, several times. I take seriously the task of writing to him about my reasons for wanting to buy the fields that originally spread around the house I have lived in for a half-century. So I read a book whose hundred or so pages are an address to the narrator's two nephews. He is leaving them his money to enable them to leave the family, should they wish, and he hopes they will wish when they have absorbed, in ten years time, when they will be twenty and twenty-one, the full horror of their grandfather's involvement in the American military plans for Vietnam in the 1960s.  

Sometimes a reader is a translator. Signals are set off in personal history. Translator sounds too definitive, as if one language for another equalled one coin for another, and no change. Peter Dimock reminds me how remote I am from the general parlance. And that's lesson enough as we approach midsummer. 

Roger Deakin and Zadie Smith

In the same time lapse I read Zadie Smith in The New York Review of Books on Art for Our Sakes, and then work my way fast and respectfully to the Central Asia chapters in Roger Deakin's Wildwood, which do it for me every time. Art, novels, poems, have internal order. Beauty. Tragedy. Human, above all. Reading a novel by Edward P. Jones encouraged Zadie Smith to go to New York and give this talk. For our sakes.

Roger Deakin travels from Almaty, place of apples, capital of Kazakhstan, into the mountains where he meets Valery.

After rattling across several miles of this high savannah we pull up before a mound of wooden beehives, an old Mercedes van and a curvaceous wooden caravan sheathed in sheet steel that could have come straight out of La Strada. I fully expect to see Anthony Quinn ease himself out of it, yawning and stretching in long johns and a buttoned vest after a strenuous night. And I am not disappointed. It is Valery who comes out, looking every inch as good, his eyes slitted against years of steppe and desert sun, shining brown skin stretched over high cheekbones, his face benevolently lined. ... We're intruding on a peaceful, almost monastic life in one of the most beautiful places on earth. ... I'm sad to leave the solitary Valery, whom I instinctively like. When we shake hands, it is the two-handed lingering double-clasp kind with a deep look into the eye. The look says, 'We come from vast distances apart on this earth, yet I feel a natural, spontaneous respect for you. It is very moving, that we far-flung people from different tribes are clearly first natural friends, not enemies at all'. I nearly catch myself making the little speech, but restrain myself in time. 

As Roger Deakin in the hills of Kazakhstan, so Zadie Smith in New York giving a talk at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, confirm what's valuable in us humans on this earth.