Recent reading: Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach. HC/DJ, 166pp., $27 CDN! A longish short story bound in boards. Two young English newlyweds, on their wedding night, in the honeymoon suite of a creaky old beach hotel:

"[A] certain way he had of looking away from her and going silent. It was the brooding expectation of her giving more, and because she didn't, she was a disappointment for slowing everything down. Whatever new frontier she crossed, there was always another waiting for her. Every concession she made increased the demand, and then the disappointment. Even in their happiest moments, there was always the accusing shadow, the barely hidden gloom of his unfulfilment, looming like an alp, a form of perpetual sorrow which had been accepted by them both as her responsibility. She wanted to be in love and be herself. But to be herself, she had to say no all the time. And then she was no longer herself. She had been cast on the side of sickliness, as an opponent of normal life."

And there I stopped reading, and gazed a while out the window, at the bright backlit cartoon animals across the street from the coffee shop (Telus Corporation's geckos, flamingos, and little pink piglets). Rain was falling, lightly, through the green trees, onto the sidewalks and hurrying commuters, some of them awkwardly bent as they wrestled umbrellas out of their briefcases and purses to block the shower.

A very clear memory of sitting up in bed by myself some distance from Vancouver. Noisy vomiting clearly audible over the running water in the bathroom.

Mismatch city. Lots of sympathy for both parties. Decades later, the big box of coming-out books that offered retrospective clarity.

Desire's a funny thing, the source of more black comedy in my life than I might readily admit.

Finished Chesil Beach pissed off and furious at its aging single male protagonist, at his anger and wounded pride and confusion.

"He would never attend the concerts, or buy, or even look at, the boxed sets of Beethoven or Schubert. He did not want to see her photograph and discover what the years had wrought, or hear about the details of her life. He preferred to preserve her as she was in his memories, with the dandelion in her buttonhole and the piece of velvet in her hair, the canvas bag across her shoulder, and the beautiful strong-boned face with its wide and artless smile."

I identify with this point of view, with its hopeless weak lyricism, and its need to suspend the past as if under a transparent glass bell. McEwan doesn't, but he's a lot more hard-headed than I am in matters of the heart. More of a realist. And I recognize that realism's strength every day -- have reconciled myself to it, you might say -- though perhaps more intellectually than emotionally. "L'amour est un oiseau rebel; il ne jamais jamais connu le loi." As for those decades-old memories, which Chesil Beach brought back tonight with violent, unwelcome, and completely unexpected force, Wittgenstein's cryptic admonition will have to do: "What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence."
- posted by cjb @ 7:05 PM