Where the grain lies

​​"...At first Anders continued to tell her what he knew, under his breath. Sometimes he was a tourist guide, sometimes a sawmill manager. He could, for instance, have told her about Defects in Timber. ‘Cup shake’ is a natural splitting between two of the annular rings. ‘Star shake’ occurs when there are fissures radiating in several directions. ‘Heart shake’ is often found in old trees and extends from the pith or heart of the tree towards its circumference.

….When the heart breaks, he thought, it splits like timber, down the full length of the plank. In his first days at the sawmill he had seen Gustaf Olsson take a piece of solid timber, drive in a wedge, and give the wedge a little twist. The timber broke down the grain, from end to end.

That was all you needed to know about the heart: where the grain lay. Then with a twist, with a gesture, with a word, you could destroy it.”

Page 37, ‘The Story of Mats Israelson’, from ‘The Lemon Table’, Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes

 
Julian Barnes, he of the stunning vocabulary and erudition, the master blender of sarcasm and subtlety, the chronicler of  pain par excellence, the giver of amazing insights, has finally won the Booker Prize. I am so happy.

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Oliver: "I was dozing, I confess. Et tu? O narcoleptic and steatopygous Stuart, he of the crepuscular understanding and the Weltanschauung built of Lego. Look, can we please take the longer view? Chou-en-lai, my hero. Or Zhou-en-lai, as he later became. What do you consider to have been the effect on world history of the French revolution? To which the wise man replied, "It is too early to tell."

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Oliver: "So there I was, two-wheeling out of your sight past glinting steel silos crammed with the crushed blood of the Minervois grape, while Gillian was doing a fast-fade in my rear-view mirror. A gauche term, don't you find - rear-view mirror - so filled with plod and particularity?  Compare the snappier French: rétroviseur. Retrovision: how much we wish we had it, eh?

But we live our lives without such useful little mirrors magnifying the road just travelled. We barrel up the A61 towards Toulouse, looking ahead, looking ahead. Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. The rétroviseur: essential for not just road safety but the race's survival. Oh dear, I feel an advertising slogan coming on.

Page 19
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Mme Wyatt: "People are surprised that Oliver had a nervous collapse after the death of his father. But he so hated his father, they say. Why did not that death release him from that emotion and make him happy? Well, how many reasons would you prefer? ......the death of a parent you love is in many ways simpler than the death of a parent you hate or to whom you are indifferent. Love, loss, mourning, remembering - we all know the scheme.

But what is the scheme when this is not the case, when the parent is not loved? A tranquil forgetting? I think not. Imagine the situation of someone like Oliver, who realises that for all his life as an adult, and for many years before that as well, he has lived without knowing what it is like to love a parent. You will reply that this is not so extraordinary, not so uncommon, and I will reply that this does not make it more easy."

Page 86
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From 'Love, etc.'

Photo from Google Images

Pretense

A friend once told me about this African tribe in the film ‘Amistaad’ that did not have a word for "should". How they only do what they want to do.

Came across this fascinating section in this book - 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters', by Julian Barnes. This particular story is a series of letters by this actor Charlie who has gone into the Amazonian jungles as part of a film crew - they're filming along with a group of Indians whom they've convinced to act in the movie, via an interpreter:

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"Monday. Here's a funny thing. While the Indians appear to understand roughly what we're doing - they're happy to do retakes and don't seem at all put out by this great big eye being pointed at them - they don't seem to understand about the idea of acting. I mean sure they're acting their ancestors and they're quite willing to build us a raft and transport us upstream on it and be filmed doing this. But they won't do anything else.

If Vic says could you stand in a different way or use the pole like this and tries to demonstrate they simply won't. Absolutely refuse.

This is how we pole a raft and just because a white man is watching through his funny machine we aren't going to do it any differently.

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And the second one below - set me thinking - why and how we changed into a society that learned to pretend to be somebody else - and how pretense has become a part of our very lives, not just acting. It is in fact a survival skill now, being absolutely truthful would get us into much trouble.

Maybe pretense became necessary as we evolved into a bigger, more complex society? But what about the price we pay for it, being forced to behave in a false way so often? What is it doing to us?

But even if we did start off with absolute honesty, there's no going back now, is there?

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"The other thing is even more incredible. They actually think that when Matt and I are dressed up as Jesuits, we actually are Jesuits! They think we've gone away and those two blokes in black dresses have turned up! Father Firmin is just as real a person for them as Charlie, though I'm glad to say they like Charlie more.

But you can't persuade them about what's going on. The crew think this is pretty stupid of them but I wonder if it's fantastically mature. The crew think they're such a primitive civilization they haven't even discovered acting yet.

I wonder if it's the opposite and they're a sort of post-acting civilization, maybe the first one on the earth. Like, they don't need it anymore, so they've forgotten about it and don't understand it any longer. Quite a thought!"

Page 243, Upstream

'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters', Julian Barnes