But when, in England, the air is crisp and there is only a mild breeze blowing, when there is springy turf under foot, as there is on the South Downs and in the numerous beautiful limestone regions of the British Isles in the summer months — then one ceases after an hour or two to think about anything in particular, one becomes an embodiment of kinetic melody. Unlike swimming, where the body is fully co-ordinated only when one is moving at speed, in walking the body finds its true rhythm only when there is all the time in the world. Normally we either find ourselves lacking the energy to carry out some daily task, or having more energy than we quite know how to use. But walking for some distance on a good day in England makes all such frustrations vanish as though they had never been.
Think of what it would be like to walk if one's feet did not touch the earth, if the breeze did not touch one's face and arms. Of course nowadays we no longer have to imagine it. We can watch films of astronauts in space capsules or on the moon, or read their comments about what it feels like to move in an atmosphere devoid of gravity. It seems to be an eerie and not particularly pleasant experience.
Men, of course, have always dreamed of flight. But why should we want wings when we have feet?
The hard climbs in the Alps, three or four hundred metres, sometimes as much as a thousand, straight up and without respite, are not exactly fun. But they form part of a whole, and better than the view from the top is the feeling in one's body as one finally reaches the top and starts to walk along a ridge. It is as though, for a walk to be fully satisfactory, there have to be hard bits as well as easy bits, climbs as well as descents. Not that descents are particularly easy. I remember on my first visit to the Dolomites taking a ski-lift to the top of the highest mountain in that region and then walking back down to the hotel where we were staying. It was a nightmare. Only someone as ignorant of the mountains as I was then would ever have planned such a walk. My toes and ankles were in a terrible state by the time I got back and I didn't even have the satisfaction of achievement.
The pleasure of a walk does not lie in having mastered something or pushed oneself beyond what one thought one could do. No two walks are the same, and it is the feeling that this unique event is happening now, that I am part of it, plus the simple feeling of well-being generated by a good walk which is the important thing. Instead of feeling ‘more!’ or ‘enough!’, instead of feeling that the end is too impossibly far away or too ridiculously near, there is only the sense that, for the duration of the walk, desire and its satisfaction are one.
A few years ago in the Alps I acquired a stick. A modest piece of wood, curved at one end, with the knobs left by the removal of the twigs barely smoothed over, the whole varnished a dark brown and fitted with a metal point. I am not sure how much help it has been in the mountains, but it has become almost as indispensable to me as a dog. Now, even on the gentle South Downs, with nothing but soft chalk underfoot, I find myself missing something if, having set out, I discover that I have left my stick behind.
There is a way of deploying a stick on a walk, down, twirl, one two three four, down, twirl, one two three four, which comes as naturally as walking itself. The stick becomes an extra limb and the twirl confirms one in the act of walking, breathing the air, responding to the earth underfoot.
I have often thought, as I walked with my stick, down, twirl, one two three four, down, twirl, one two three four, of that page in Tristram Shandy, which cannot be paraphrased, only reproduced:
Whilst a man is free — cried the Corporal, giving a flourish with his stick thus –
A thousand of my father's most subtle syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy. (IX.4)
The question at issue is whether Uncle Toby's desire and need for the Widow Wadman is greater than his fear of being trapped in an unhappy marriage. Trim's answer, like Toby's whistling responses to his brother, is strictly non-verbal, but the reader has no difficulty in making sense of Tristram's ensuing comment. The twirl of Trim's stick, like the twirl in the capital letter ‘J’ of Jan van Eyck's signature in the middle of the Arnolfini double portrait, is an assertion of freedom and individuality — Trim's, Toby's, and, of course, Sterne's. For the reader has no difficulty either in grasping the message Sterne is conveying: the novelist's bondage to grammar and syntax is very similar to the bondage Toby envisages would be the result of his marriage to the Widow Wadman, and, even if, in Sterne's case, he has to submit to it most of the time, he will, like Panurge refusing the easy option of talking in French, go on asserting his essential freedom, his desire to twirl the stick of his fancy rather than conform to the conventions of novelistic narrative.
Celibacy means freedom, but it also means loneliness. Sterne's cavalier way with the conventions of novel-writing may mean the release of the spontaneous, but it also means that he is constantly skirting the abyss of arbitrariness or even meaninglessness. It is Toby's uncertainty, his wavering between alternatives, his lack of his brother's dogmatism and self-confidence, which saves him and keeps him human, just as it is Sterne's own awareness of the ease with which freedom can turn into meaninglessness which keeps his book alive and saves it from becoming a simple exhibition of cleverness. Toby's whistling, Trim's gesture with his stick, Sterne's introduction of black and marbled pages into his book — all these are poised at the junction of triumph and despair, and they remain moving and interesting precisely because they somehow signify both. Sterne's art, like that of Rabelais, requires exquisite touch precisely because both of them take seriously the fact that, with the demise of genre and of the boundaries established by tradition, art now has to make its own rules as it goes along.
22 Boundaries (2)
Over my notebook I sit hunched up. Over my typewriter, a little more upright. My hand moves over the page. My fingers hit the keys. I am writing.
But where is this ‘I’ who is writing? In my heart, which beats strongly as I work? In my head, where thoughts are swirling? In my anxious belly? My straining hand? My tapping fingers? Clearly it is in none of these places. And my sense of the absurdity of the enterprise whenever I try to write autobiography, to explain to myself why I am what I am and where I have come from and where I think I am going, proves to me that it does not reside in my memory either, in any continuity over time.
And yet I know too that those persuasive critics and theoreticians who talk about the death of the author, who argue that it is writing that writes and not ‘I’ — these I know are wrong as well. For when I am not at my desk, hunched over my notebook, a little more upright over my typewriter, it is I who suffer and no one else. And I know too that I can do something about it, can turn that suffering, that frustration, that confused desire, into a state at least as pleasurable as any I have experienced on the football field or in the swimming pool.
But how? Not, it seems, by sheer determination, any massive effort of the will. Not by the daily grind of training. That is the oddity of art, that it is very like sport in so many ways and yet not at all like sport in so many others. For, given a certain predisposition, certain physical attributes, faith in one's abilities and the capacity for hard work, anyone can play tennis or swim reasonably well. There is no equivalent to that in art.