Welcome, small one. I looked forward to your coming. Now that you're here, named, having a face and fingers and your ten toes, I wish I was there with you, that I could meet you and hold you and tell your parents how beautiful. Soon, I hope. You are a gift to us. First son of the first son. You don't yet know what you mean to us. But I hope you will. I hope you never doubt it. And I hope you like us.
I've been feeling bad about the books that lie unblogged in my wake. I've also been reflecting on the one-line review as a particularly artful and expeditious reading record. The harbinger of one-liners, Twitter is bagged for eroding language and maiming expression, but it could equally prove a useful discipline, a healthy moderation. Brevity, after all, is the soul of wit. In the spirit of Twitter, then, herewith some 140 character (count them!) reviews of my recent reads.
Served with a mint julep and a jazz band, Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s greatest, shatters America’s gleaming dreams on the dark shore of modernity.
In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel remarkably makes both Thomas Cromwell and historical fiction rich, rounded, beguiling, believable and likeable.
Brutal sins long hidden surface on the southern coast in The Broken Shore, Peter Temple’s bleak, bluntly understated slice of modern gothic.
My Brother Jack calls up classic Australian types, the literate prig and the larrikin digger, to chronicle a young nation’s wars and wounds.
Too busy to post anything substantial this week, so before another Friday arrives clamouring for its poem, here are some things I've been reading, thinking about, writing in the last sennight:
And that was my week.
Today is “Maundy” Thursday. Maundy is a fifteenth-century English word that (probably) comes, via Old French, from the Latin “Mandatum” - commandment. Mandatum novum: a new commandment. While celebrating the passover, Jesus gave his twelve followers what he called “a new commandment”: “Love one another. By this all men will know that you are my followers.”
Later that night, one of them betrayed him to the authorities that wanted him dead; all but one fled from him when the army turned up, and before the next dawn that one had three times denied that he ever knew him. With his new commandment, Jesus instituted a new order, a new way of being, and of being known. Within twenty-four hours he was dead, his followers scattered. Instead of love, lies, fear, and betrayal.
But it was not the only new commandment he gave. Another, and much more contested, was that spoken over the unleavened passover bread he was tearing up to share with them: “Hoc est corpus meum.” This is my body. With this simple metaphor he writes himself into sacred history, past and future. He accepts the death that follows hard upon this feast, and founds with these frail men a new order in which love and death are one.
Amid the usual trash and guff, this headline caught my eye today:
Slain father kind, brave.
The journalist's truncation here becomes poetry. An epic note is sounded and an almost Sophoclean cadence falls. These four words are each rich; together they hold volumes. All the vowels are long, and the comma slows the pace still further to make the last word toll in a little silence. There is quasi-rhyme between the second and fourth words, and still stronger rhyme between the first and the fourth, giving the phrase a circular quality, a solemn echo, the sacredness of verse. The beginning and the end share a cognitive rhyme too: his bravery connects to his slaying in a way his kindness doesn't. His kindness is an aspect of his fatherhood, as much in its suggestion of gentleness, as in its link to “kin,” and both are encircled by the more dramatic assertions of his courage and death. The absence of verbs makes the phrase more like direct speech, an address to a “bleeding piece of earth...ruins of the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times.” Yet there is a narrative here. That he was kind makes his slaying the more tragic, makes him the weaker victim. That he was brave gives nobility, dignity to his death, redeems it from the anguish of simple loss and makes us think “here cracks a noble heart.” It's a headline, not an epitaph, but it has an unintended beauty. It both demands and creates a moment. It's a window in the quotidian through which light breaks.