The Pages

by Murray Bail

  I wrote again.

  I followed with a postcard, ‘I’d like you to be here now.’ I emphasised, ‘If you see what I mean.’

  To Lindsey I explained I was on my way home, at least heading in the right direction. First, I had to finish a bit of research (‘the special atmospherics’). I gave a description of the middle-aged German women having lunch in restaurants who have this habit of wearing hats as they wield their knife and fork, huntsmen-looking hats, often with a tall feather. It looked as if it was about to snow. And, because my brother would read it, I listed the crops I had managed to identify in passing.

  — At a place called Bureten as I walked along a path strewn with leaves I paused. I took a few more steps, then I stood still. It was something the violin-maker had said, a quote or more likely a misquote – people giving a quote invariably get it wrong – which his friend, the bald picture-framer, translated for me, although it was not from any philosopher I knew. He said, ‘Without moving a centimetre, one can know the whole world.’ And I recalled then the picture-framer telling me his friend had never stepped foot outside Germany. In fact, he only rarely left his house on the edge of Mittenwald, which doubled as his workshop, mostly to enter a nearby forest to select a spruce or a maple to be cut down for his violins.

  The most ordinary and unoriginal ideas can stop us in our tracks.

  When a glimmer of clarity comes into view it is like a sliver of diminishing light, and it is essential to stop everything, stay still, be patient, in order to continue ‘seeing’ it. Nothing moved in amongst the trees. At that moment I realised there was no reason to be on a path in a forest somewhere in the middle of Germany, and that all of my deliberate and lengthy wanderings had been a waste of time, an indulgence, an example of evasion. ‘The further one goes, the less one knows’ I have written in my notebook. I had picked it up from somewhere. Normally I steer clear of the Delphic utterance. It was more a matter of returning home, back to the old homestead (those enormous skies), staying in the one spot, staying put. Without moving a centimetre I would come to regard my own self as a place to travel through, slowly, and, in an interested manner, examine, and through myself and myself alone attempt an explanation of the broader world. I’d be better off.

  And no longer travelling I also took to mean not studying the works of others. At home on the land I had seen with my own eyes hybrid ewes and calves – misfittings, mismatchings, mistakes, errors of nature – animals struggling with five legs or three, pink eyes, and so on. Our father told us of a lamb born in the district with two heads. These aberrations were discussed in front of our mother at the dinner table.

  Hybrid creations are not singular; they do not last.

  I remained standing on the path, still not moving, until the weather turned nasty.

  There and then I should have phoned Rosie saying, ‘Listen, stop! There’s no point in coming here. I’m coming home.’

  Aside from wanting to see Rosie, and be comforted by her, I had the idea of showing her my progress, how I had changed, I mean how I had improved, how I had become wiser. I realised I shouldn’t be there, not in Germany, I had nothing to show for my years away, nothing in me had any substance; Rosie would quickly see this.

  But I had already phoned her. ‘I have been waiting to hear your voice,’ she said. We spoke for an hour, easy and intimate, and she agreed to come. She was on her way.

  — Rosie stayed with me in Germany less than five weeks.

  I met her in Berlin and wore new cords and a heavy brown coat to the knees. The cheap trousers, old shirt and boots were out of the question. I had also shaved.

  As Rosie entered the terminal I saw she had on just a thin cardigan. Didn’t she know it was winter in Europe? It irritated me – her provincialism. I immediately put my new coat onto her shoulders. After buying some gloves we took a walk in the Tiergarten.

  We hadn’t seen each other for – I had lost count. Rosie was thirty-two. She still lived in the same apartment on Macleay Street. Why hadn’t she married? (Maybe she had.) How would we go on speaking again? Above all – I remembered – back in Sydney her easy acceptance of everything that came towards her. In that sense a modern woman. Over the five or six years her face had become more complex. And larger hips – pensive voluptuous woman. I hired a little car. Taking our time we drove from one place to another, Leipzig, Freiberg and the inevitable hotel over a water-wheel.

  Rosie wasn’t interested in museums. Cathedrals she had to be dragged into. The castles on the Rhine left her absolutely cold. Instead of tramping the cities she preferred the towns and hamlets, as they are called, and in our overheated rooms she lay on the bed or sofa offering her raised hip, reading, sometimes topless. I noticed her looking at me. I had forgotten how little Rosie spoke. And now in Germany she seemed to speak even less.

  I had the feeling Rosie was on the verge of telling me something. She seemed to be measuring my reactions.

  She believed we had all the time in the world.

  Of the eleven notebooks, nine of them I threw away at Bureten. Before I had second thoughts I chucked the rest.

  They say the philosopher must set an example, if only to himself.

  I started a new notebook.

  Isn’t it a matter of putting both hands over the eyes, then after a while removing them?

  — It was near to – hardly matters where – within earshot of another river – early afternoon. Rosie was driving. A mass of blackness flowed out from the floor of the forest, and within the branches and leaves too, and the river was black or at least very dark, I’ll always remember that. The road was about the same width as the river, and a similar glossy blackness, which gave the appearance of a river drained of water alongside the real river. The clouds and sky itself were dark. It was about to snow. A hare ran across the road. With my rural background I could explain to Rosie the difference between it and the common rabbit.

  Rosie and I had settled into an easy intimacy. From the first day in Berlin we slept together. Now as she drove I removed my hand from between her legs and pointed to the restaurant. It had a glassed-in terrace jutting over the river. In the midst of darkness the glaring white of the tablecloths had caught my eye.

  Because Rosie was happy, I felt happier – by that I mean, carefree.

  The temptation is to think and write vaguely, anything to avoid the difficulty of precision.

  Although we were warm enough, I ordered cognacs.

  Thought can only exist parallel to nature.

  ‘I think I shall have,’ she put on a la di da voice, ‘some river fish.’

  When she felt like it Rosie could be funny. Now she had a relaxed bright-eyed look.

  Except for an elderly couple further along, the rest of the tables were empty. Light snow began floating down. There we were, in the warm restaurant, looking through the window at it.

  ‘Have a gander at the waiter’s ears, how big they are.’

  Rosie turned. The waiter also had small eyes.

  ‘I’m sure I’ve seen him in a film somewhere.’ She frowned for a second, then shrugged.

  As I looked at her, I smiled.

  For no apparent reason she said, ‘I feel completely safe here.’

  It was another way of expressing contentment.

  ‘And it might amaze you to know, since you think you know everything, that I’m mad about all this snow. You don’t believe me?’

  ‘The first time I saw you was on the roof in a bikini, covered in suntan oil. It’s not a sight I’d forget in a hurry.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  It was that sort of conversation.

  After the bottle of Moselle we selected pastries. I ordered a cognac, then another. At this point, Rosie who had been talking freely became pensive. The snow continued to fill in the hollows on the other side of the river. When considering the cold regions of the earth I wonder what we are doing there. How we manage to survive. The importance in the harsh environment of the family – ‘the family-unit
,’ I said aloud.

  ‘You must admit it’s pretty nice here.’

  ‘Why “must admit”?’ she asked.

  I’d thrown out the old notebooks with their dodgy propositions and dependence on other thinkers. Because I was beginning anew I felt fresh. I was keen. Rosie was with me. And the snow had transformed the river scene outside into one found on picture postcards.

  It was then that I decided to say I was thinking of returning to Australia within weeks, and not taking my eyes off her asked if she would join me on the property.

  ‘I’ve only just arrived!’

  This was Rosie avoiding commitment by being light-hearted. If I waited she would do a switch into seriousness.

  ‘What would I do all day? The answer is yes.’

  Returning to the car she spoke in a way I had not heard before. ‘I was expecting you to write to me when you left Sydney. I don’t know why you didn’t. All I knew was that you were in London. Is that a big city, or is that a big city? I didn’t know what to do. I had to get in touch, which I did through Lindsey. I introduced myself. I like your sister. Anyway, I received – finally – a card. It had a London policeman on the front.’

  She reversed out onto the road.

  ‘You just seemed to bolt. I couldn’t understand, I still don’t. It was as if you wanted to forget our situation. Remember how we were? You once told me the word “natural” is not possible. I thought we were natural together.’

  The dark road followed the river. I just put my hand between her legs, where I knew it was as dark and alive as the river.

  ‘I can well understand you wanting to shoot through from the ghastly Mrs What’s-her-face – the Kentridge woman. There’s a terrible piece of work. But it’s not as if I’m a tarantula or anything.’

  I remember thinking that a life consists of curiosities satisfied. Also that complexities increase when things are obscured.

  Rosie kept talking, ‘You should know. I became pregnant, it was yours. If I’d managed to get you, what would you have done? There’s a philosophical question for you! I was left to make the decision alone. I would have made it anyway. But it was sad. It’s made me sad. I don’t really know why I did it.’

  I reached across to switch on the lights. It would be better to slow down, the road being icy.

  ‘What do your philosophers say about that one? No, oh! Shit!’

  Often I see the car swinging into a slide, and crossing the road it slid still faster, a dog on lino. Rosie gave a gasp. The stone bridge blocked the view. We hit, the car tilted forward and went over, and over again. Really, the thing was like a mad smashing animal. I was face down on the bank, my mouth filled with snow. The rented car upside-down floated away.

  — It would be better if I reviewed my life as a series of incidents, of sobering alterations – along with the observations, speculations and corrections, snatches of what had gone on in my mind, thought-thinking, and a few notes on what I have learnt more from study than ‘life’, even if I have trouble saying exactly what I have learnt. A certain doggedness – is it necessary? Make note of the acts of oafish ignorance, the examples of blindness…how I had spent too long on a certain way of life, or following a single line of thought. (‘Tunnel vision.’) The aims we set ourselves when young are still there but more and more out of reach. There would be a list of the good deeds and the bad deeds. Proper due can be given to my curiosity in general. Each entry need not be long. A single sentence should do it. One entry per page. These could be tossed up into the air and allowed to settle in any order, for they are random parts of a single life, mine. It is worth a try. For one thing it would avoid each small town and each and every river and sunset Rosie and I had seen in Germany; or the fact that my hair turned the colour of snow on the riverbank in Germany, and from that same moment I was a different, an altered, person. Or, ‘After he recovered in a pension in Vence, where for months he lay in a shuttered room like a dog, he returned to Sydney alone on 5 July, 2001, on news of the death of his father.’

  28

  WHAT ROGER Antill called his ‘philosophy’ cannot be taken seriously. Unlike his brother he had not spent years in study or sustained thinking on the subject; aside from Wesley’s drafts in blue ink he had hardly read a single sentence on a philosophical subject. Roger was a plain-thinking pastoralist running thousands of acres of merino sheep. He had dirt under his fingernails. Even the way his ‘philosophy’ came to him out of the blue has an amateur ring to it. Driving with Erica into town, Roger slowed and stopped in the shade under a tree. For a moment he rested his hands over the steering wheel and said nothing (gathering his thoughts). Dirt road, nobody for miles. With her big-city experience, Erica expected the sudden clammy-hand moment. He did – in an unexpected way. He reached across and took Erica’s hand in order, he said, to demonstrate what he considered to be, not just a philosophy, a practical philosophy.

  He had noticed that the hand, everybody’s hand, followed the wishes of the mind, that is, thoughts, theories, moral positions, the passions et cetera. The hand carries out the wishes of a decision; it is the practical rendition of a philosophy. The hand wields the sword, squeezes the trigger, does the strangling, signals the execution; both are raised in surrender. It waves goodbye. Any theory of the passions is eventually performed by the hand – hands and fingers wandering over the other body. How many bones in the hand? Twenty-seven. All at work in the service of a thought, a philosophical position. We shake hands. We work with our hands. Roger Antill didn’t include agriculture, believing it is not philosophical enough. The pen is held in a hand. Philosophy depends for its creation on the hand. (Dreams and psychoanalysis do not! – Sophie.) Logic via medicine, the surgeon’s hand. And music – the composing and conducting of it, and the playing, or holding the microphone. How is the camera aimed, clicked or rolled? Counting on fingers – I bet it was the source of arithmetic. Signing of documents, applying to the face ideals of beauty; zipping up our bloody trousers. The hands of the clock. Hands cut off as punishment.

  Erica on the broad seat of the truck didn’t know whether to listen politely or laugh or nod encouragement – or come in early, and demolish his idea, shoot it down in flames, even if it was tentative, for this theory of hands, or whatever it was, had no philosophical basis. It was little more than detailing the obvious. (In Sophie’s opinion, Roger’s theory revealed a condition of obsessive disorder. Please go find a therapist, now.) But at the moment when Roger took her hand, and she allowed it to rest in his, a small warm bird, Erica, for all her training and devotion to logic, which over time encouraged a certain severity, her remote and masculine side, softened, and she proceeded to listen. He went on listing examples of hand-movements. She felt different. Something was going on. And through the windscreen and at the side remained the landscape, warm, golden and still, which she hadn’t until then seen before.

  29

  A PHILOSOPHER is a dissatisfied person.

  Only small parts of the philosophical person are fully developed. A certain childishness.

  ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

  The puzzle is whether to continue with the puzzle. The puzzle? What are we doing here? What can be described. Et cetera. Life is the intruder on thought. The impossibility of being true, of being good, of not inflicting harm, or altering another person – while at the same time retaining and reinforcing individuality.

  A study of ethics is more difficult than the emotions.

  All is separate; everything is divided; separateness is the general condition.

  Don’t say ‘philosophy’, say ‘provisional’. A provisional philosophy, always provisional, a suggestion, nothing more.

  I am incapable of distinguishing the truth. Nevertheless…

  Philosophy is the modelling of imperfect materials.

  The word insofar – attractive. To be used.

  Sheep never stop their eating. The importance of leisure.

  Philosophy doesn’t ‘exist’.

>   Work to one side of the conventional forms.

  Terrain – useful word. The terrain of thinking, the shape of words.

  The process of disturbing the mind is the mind.

  There is nothing ordinary about any thing.

  Philosophy as a natural force.

  We end up becoming.

  He picked up the word overseeable.

  How to make anything of all the sensations.

  The puzzle can never change: ‘How do I relate to the world and to that which I call my life?’

  Except it needs to be generalised.

  Words are a recent addition to nature. A laconic culture is little more than one step above the oral culture.

  Of course the philosopher can only despise photography. It is the enemy of philosophy, of what cannot be seen.

  One emotion is replaced by another.

  It has been said (Locke) that experience is like the furniture arriving in an empty house.

  Because of the impossibility of living without experience, thoughts and ideas are not special in themselves.

  From experience the emotions are activated.

  The contest in the emotions between the cold and the warm. These are waverings of the mind.

  Philosophy cannot exist without stubbornness.

  ‘Modesty is a species of ambition.’

  Can there be such a thing as intellectual love?

  Moral philosophy doesn’t necessarily explain how we should live.

  How is it possible to measure human thought against the fact, and the movement, of nature.

  It was the surroundings, various bric-a-brac, appendages, attachments, not a commitment.

  Is it anything more than self-absorption?

  Why loyal to some, not to others?

  ‘Without isolation there is nothing Noble or Lofty to be obtained.’

  Double, even triple, isolation. It begins to lead to indifference.

  Ambition is the source of all emotions.

  Many of the emotions are related to the past.

  The desire to love is stronger than the desire to be loved.