Bibliopath #16: In which we get down to the bone
Dear reader,
I've written before how Helen Garner's Feel of Steel is a lodestone for me, something that I reread when I feel like I'm struggling as a writer, particular in my grasp of craft and voice. It is, therefore, something I've reread often.
I'm currently reading Garner's Everywhere I Look—like Feel of Steel, it is a collection of brief essays—some very brief. Garner is Australian, and now 74, and some of the essays are concerned with the introspection that latter age brings, but more of it is concerned with delight—with the continual surprise of grandkids, with the pleasure of friendships, with perfect similes about perfect moments within the ordinary.
Garner has a particular gift for paring moments down to a fishbone: in their sharpness, in their leanness. Hence my favourite sentence this week, the second last from this paragraph:
"What they thought of as a first course would have kept us going, in our etiolated Sydney existence, for days. Our stomachs were not big enough for their generosity. They looked at us, puzzled, over the mounds of fishy splendour in the centre of the table. They had the strong physical energy of a country life: three kids, a dog, a guitar, a fishing boat. We lived in our heads: self-starved, over-disciplined. And it showed."
She's describing a dinner at the house of Tim Winton, a fellow Australian writer—an essay of eight brief paragraphs of their 30 year long friendship.
The paragraph is on one level about generosity that she is unable to bear. But it shifts with that sentence: "We lived in our heads" is a paltry comparison to the listing of the physical apparatus of Winton's life. And then the sentence gets more anemic as it continues: the two ending phrases resemble their meaning, stacked together and yet faltering compared to the list in the sentence before. And yet each phrase, "self-starved, over-disciplined" each suggest much more than their word count—a life of self-inflicted monastic difficulty.
Thus the kicker: "And it showed"—is all Garner needs to bring both comparisons under full house lights, the extent of her self-realisation over their comparative lifestyles, because of this seafood dinner.
And you, have you ever had one of those moments?
Towards generosity and possibility,
Guan