If you came this way
Still being afraid of reading a new book, I turned to Corfu while travelling this weekend. It is the perfect travelling book, being itself about journeys, and it was also the perfect accompaniment to my weekend contemplation of nostalgia.
Corfu is by Robert Dessaix, who writes beautifully, with sensitivity and a firm touch; it is just the kind of writing I like, in which nothing much happens but character is everything and single moments are elongated to span several pages. Ostensibly the novel is the story of an Adelaidean stopping in Corfu on his way back to Australia via London. He rents the house of Kester Berwick, a 'real' Australian author (real in the sense that he existed and the novel seems to describe the real-life version, although how much is invented I have no idea), only to find that his life intersects with the absent Kester in many ways. And there are historical and literary intersections, too, as he ranges about the Greek islands and contemplates Sappho, Cavafy, Odysseus' journey, Daphnis and Chloe, and the plays of Chekhov. It is also a love story while at the same time a complex meditation on love. It's heartbreaking and beautiful and while I thought about it a lot while contemplating the powers of nostalgia, and looked forward with eagerness to turning the pages in bed each night, the act of reading required a lot from me in terms of my own contemplation and consideration.
I wonder what the book is ultimately about? I have to wonder because it's difficult to decide. The love story is not a happy one, although that doesn't seem to matter. The narrator has been searching for something and he might well have found it. What struck me most in this re-read were the long passages about love and friendship, the desire and peril of intimacy, and the difficulty of enduring the mundanities of life. Although this has always been my favourite passage:
"I can see now that in knowing beauty - seizing it, I mean, and knowing it with a fierceness that leaves you unconscious of whether you've been ravishing beauty or been ravished by it - you must entertain bereavement. A poem, an orchid, a sky, a Daphnis, a Chloe -it doesn't matter what or whom you seize, for the instant you stretch out your hand to touch it, you hear the whisper: This will die. Not the poem or the orchid, not the beloved - not this Daphnis or this Chloe - but this particular moment of enchantment, this particular experience of the orchid's or Chloe's beauty. We fear that the beauty that is making us feel so alive might prove to be nothing but what it seems. Where there was a living body, so to speak (to echo Tolstoy's perception), we fear we might soon wake to find a corpse. And so, in a frenzy, as if with passion, we try to breathe new life into it - you'll be a wife, we say, you'll be a friend, a cherished being, a beautiful memory … but you will live. An illusion, naturally - and we know it. Beauty - an embarrassing word, but I can't find a vaguer one - and mourning go hand in hand. Tolstoy got it exactly right."
The main thing I learned this weekend was that nostalgia of necessity involves an impossibility of return. However much we long for something that is passed, we cannot ever have it back, because even if we could repeat the experience it would not be the same. Something dies. It occurs to me that I first read Corfu and all my other recent rereads while in high school. Perhaps I have unconsciously indulged in a nostalgic exercise in returning to some of the books of those years. Nearly ten years later, I do indeed come at them with fresh eyes, although I sometimes forget if I've written about them here before, if I may be repeating myself. And it is indeed true that what I have lost in loving these books and returning to them so often is the first experience of them, the ravishing of their beauty, if 'beauty' is the right word and it probably is for Dessaix's narrator never defines it. There is comfort in the familiar, but there is excitement in the unknown, in that first encounter between text and reader. Do I reread in some misguided attempt to regain that first thrill? I would hope not. Instead, perhaps I reread in the delusion that by doing so I breathe life into the book again.