PART IV
Invincible Summer
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
Regarde: Look, and savour
For years I had one word stuck above my writing desk, a quote from the French writer Colette: Regarde! ‘Look!’ Look around you. Forget your own ruminations, and drink in what you see. Colette’s mother, Sido, had instructed her to carefully observe the world and savour it. ‘Regarde, little darling, the hairy caterpillar,’ she would say, ‘it’s like a golden bear! Oh! Regarde! The bud of the purple iris is opening! Come quick, or it will open before you can see it.’ Regarde became Colette’s credo: Look, wonder, feel, live. As a child, she would wake at 3.30 am and wander in the woods near her house in northwest Burgundy, drinking from hidden springs and gathering strawberries and gooseberries in large baskets. This intense curiosity about the natural world endured to the end of her life.
This was especially the case with flowers. In her last days, in Paris in 1954, Collette recorded a message for students that began: ‘Throughout my existence, I have studied flowering more than any other manifestation of life. It is there for me that the essential drama resides, and not in death, which is just a banal defeat.’ Friends took her out to see the buds of spring, and she leafed through illustrated books of insects and flowers, asking to have her butterfly specimens taken off the wall so she could look at them more closely. On the afternoon before she died, she was looking through a book of lithographs with a friend as swallows swarmed outside her window in anticipation of a thunderstorm. Judith Thurman writes in her masterful biography, ‘The sky was as heavy as a pot cover . . . With a sweep of her arm that embraced the rustle of live wings in the garden and the images on the page, Colette spoke her last coherent word: “Regarde!”’
By keeping the word Regarde scrawled on a fading yellow note on my wall in my twenties, I was trying to remind myself to — as Australians would put it most bluntly — get over myself, and look around. Regarding, more than anything, is a huge relief: imagine all we would miss if we kept tripping down the infinitely curling internal and interminable staircase of self-examination. The word was also a constant reminder to wonder and to savour — something my son has also taught me, and something that I now see as a key to quiet joy.
Illness or isolation can clear the air for this kind of contemplation. When you are ill, you gaze at the healthy, wondering why they don’t bound about with unrestricted joy every hour, why they take the simplest of pleasures and functions for granted: feeling hungry, eating a meal, keeping food down without vomiting, having functioning organs, planning retirement, dreaming of a future.
What you do is think, and watch. You sit or lie in your bed, on a couch, or on a hospital trestle and think. As the formidable English social theorist Harriet Martineau wrote in 1844 in her book Life in the Sick-Room, ‘Nothing is more impossible to represent in words . . . than what it is to lie on the verge of life and watch, with nothing to do but to think, and learn from what we behold.’
We need to learn how to regard and pay attention, to mine our inner strength, and accept the possibility that we can emerge from pain and grow by moonlight — in times of darkness — that we can push ‘right back’ on winter and find inside a summer. We also need to seek and settle upon a purpose in life — something many people seem to discover once they fully open their eyes.
It’s in this way, I believe, that we can become phosphorescent.
Chapter 17
Thoughts for My Son: The Art of Savouring
I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played.
— Arvo Pärt, Estonian composer
THERE ARE SO MANY things I want to teach my son. To stand like a tree; to be true; to respect women as equal and also as magnificent, flawed, real human beings; to be kind; to understand the depths and shallows of the seas; to forgive fools; to carefully collect the good-hearted like shells on a beach; to find the part of the natural world that most brings him joy and explore every corner of it.
To file his taxes on time and learn to breathe properly over and under water, to be humble, to fold things the right way because I still get it wrong, to scrub barnacles from friendship when they form, to love his family fiercely and never take them for granted.
To find a purpose and honour it, to look for commonality with every person, to laugh at himself often, to hunt awe, to value silence and the discipline of logging off, to find ways to love his enemies, to learn to cook some things that make people happy, to eschew perfection, to seek the divine.
To dance whenever possible, to keep walking in rain and sleet and snow, to learn self-reliance, to not waste a second on the leers of cynics or the jibes of hateful people, to endure, to run and meander and swim and travel and allow himself to make mistakes and be honest with everyone and himself. And to recognise that even in the madness, the toxicity, the decay and rot of the world, music is made, and played, and danced to.
That, as Aslan revealed in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, behind every earthly law is a deeper magic that defies logic: a forgiveness of the unforgivable, a selfless gesture, a moment of grace. That this grace fuels galaxies, that the sun powers the planet and the moon pulls the tides, but the universe is largely unknown, spinning and vast, and that in itself is an ode to curiosity.
That he should study the craft of mathematicians, but also listen to the poets and learn from the bards. That he should respect the 60,000-year history of this country, listen to the lament of its original inhabitants, recognise their rightful, central place in our land, and lean against those who would block, mute, resist or diminish them.
And that’s just a start.
But the older he gets, the more I realise how much he is teaching me. He has what American poet Jack Gilbert would call a stubborn gladness. He’s only ten, but he delights in life, and it’s contagious. When he was a baby, peekaboo was the finest joke on the planet. Now, the greatest moments of his life have been: 1. When he had a bowl of delicious pasta, plain, with olive oil, on the Gold Coast. 2. When he had a ball of raw pizza dough in Washington DC. This was, for him, the highlight of a trip to America. He often fondly recalls that ball.
The rule at our dinner table is that every child must ask every visiting adult two questions, so that they learn to think about people around them instead of just batting away clichéd questions like ‘How is school? Often they ask about the day friends had, or what colour they like most, or the meal they’d eat if only allowed one more, for the rest of their lives. But often my boy gets weird. As his godfather, Woody, told me, ‘He thinks sideways.’ One recent question was: ‘If you were a piece of ham in the fridge and you had to find your way out of the house and get past the cat to go to another country, how would you do it? And you can’t walk and you don’t have arms; you can only wriggle.’ Then last night: ‘If you were a hamburger fighting a burrito, what strategy would you use to defeat it?’
When he was a toddler he developed the habit of going around the dinner table and asking everyone what their favourite part of the day was: ‘What yo- fav- part day?’ Around we’d go, then he’d launch again: ‘What yo- second fav- part day?’ Inevitably, his answer would be that exact moment. We could go to Disneyland, glide along several miles of water slides, jump on enormous trampolines or eat ice cream at the beach, but his answer would almost always be: ‘Dinner here now with all of you.’