Peaceable Land 2 - Bin Pizza
Now just take it, take the box...
Strolling to pub and park after last Saturday’s England game the sight of an overpass made me remember that the night before I had peed between two bins there, then spotted a pizza on one of the lids, then eaten it.
Marcel Proust, you might know, was a very great French novelist and is associated with moments in which sensation provokes memory. In the most famous scene the taste of a madeleine recalls to his narrator indulgent childhood Sundays with his aunt, where they ate the same cakes.
I draw the contrast, and risk my dignity, to make a point. Proust’s discovered memory makes his inner life more luxurious, like folds in rich curtains. Mine badly damaged my self-regard. Perhaps some things are best not touched.
That’s certainly an instinct. My friends who also studied at Durham were reluctant not only to go back for graduation, but even to take trains that passed through. I’ve had to visit Edinburgh a few times and on the first couple shut my eyes through Durham. Eventually looking out felt like this poem:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.— A Shropshire Lad, XL by AE Housman
In certain states, as if we were just bruises, all contact of the outer world and our inner one is sore, sore once a crossword clue for tender. I was very excited to ask the NS editor about a line in one of his books: “the real must necessarily violate the ideal.” Sadly it was not a line he remembered.
But those states, or whatever they are, interest me greatly. And they don’t just occur when the world touches memory. Imagination, and many other parts of us, suffer for that contact too.
To show the imagination point, here is my own favourite bit of Proust. The famous one (the madeleines) comes just forty pages into the four thousand of his masterwork. Mine is also in the first volume, but, come on, is a bit later than that. The narrator has long dreamt over an aristocrat from a painting, Madame de Guermantes, then sees her in person and is upset. Sorry for the long quote.
It was she! My disappointment was immense. It arose from my not having borne in mind, when I thought of de Guermantes, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of a tapestry or a painted window, as living in another century, as being of another substance than the rest of the human race. Never had I taken into account that she might have a red face, a mauve scarf like Mme. Sazerat;… this image, which, naturally enough, bore no resemblance to those that had so often, under the same title of 'Mme. de Guermantes,' appeared to me in dreams, since this one had not been, like the others, formed arbitrarily by myself, but had sprung into sight for the first time, only a moment ago, here in church; an image which was not of the same nature, was not colourable at will, like those others that allowed themselves to imbibe the orange tint of a sonorous syllable, but which was so real that everything, even to the fiery little spot at the corner of her nose, gave an assurance of her subjection to the laws of life
Suffering at ‘subjection to the laws of life’ is unwise, unattractive, and unrealistic, but can’t always be helped. I think it is wider than just remembered vs present, or imagination vs reality, or beautiful vs ugly, or indeed than happy vs sad. If we like, we can go deeper later, but that’s a start. You wanted a beautiful night in a park. Instead you must face bin pizza.
GM
Bulletins
My friend looks to sublet a room in her nice Clapham flat for six months at £1,200 + bills.
Afterbirth
It was largely in tact, it was vegetable, there was the cardboard box between it and the lid’s surface, and I had tried a 9% Belgian lager.
A hilarious scene from Tony Blair’s autobiography, and perhaps London’s only ever case of justified knife crime:
I was preoccupied with antisocial behaviour, and was personally completely intolerant of it. I remember when our home was in Stavordale Road, near the Arsenal Tube station in Islington, and I had to go out to dinner. I walked down to the station. As I passed the end of our street, a bloke was urinating against a wall. I stopped. ‘What are you looking at?’ he said. I said, ‘You, you shouldn’t be doing it.’ He took out a large knife from his coat. I walked on.
I knew pretention, and therefore I, was safe in the NS office was when a colleague tried to claim madeleines as their favourite meal deal snack. (I thought Mr False Pretence, you do make sense.)
To hear the poem recited try the glorious video ‘Greatest Question Time answer of all time’. After watching scroll down and enjoy the top comment, ‘A different class of human from the others’.
Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad in a house less than five minutes’ walk from where I grew up, in Highgate. There’s a blue plaque. Half the poems are shitting on London, though.