The Present Chiefly

It's pointless to write about A Note In Music, now that I come to think of it, because it changes for me on every reading. A few brief thoughts about it, though. There is the obvious conflict between north and south, provincial and metropolitan, past and future, but it is difficult to determine who comes out of it better. No one, really. Grace - who is anything but graceful - does nothing, having once loved, yet there is the ghost of promise, of knowledge, of perseverence about her, as if she is on the brink of guessing at a secret which, Miss Lehmann obliquely suggests, may not in any case be there. I wonder whether Grace is named for a grace note, one which slides quickly on to the main pitch and is brought into being only to be an echo.
The note of the title is Landor: "But the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come."
At one point Clare concludes: "One must never let one's past actions bind one with remorse or regret, she said; but pass on at once and shape the future." Pass on she does, but into shapelessness; she goes to see Hugh off (in a hat like Mercury's hat), but it is she who vanishes. "Well - there was always a time of loneliness, depression, after the first excitement of the start, the bustle of departure." Quite. "He hoped to goodness nothing boring would happen to her" is quickly followed by the question: "Why live?" That is getting to the point perhaps rather too emphatically.
"The secret was to look to the present chiefly, to the future a little, to the past scarcely at all... " But I wonder whether the effect of the book, on me at least, is not to make one feel that that is their problem. The rootlessness, the drifting, the ennui, the nothingness is a product of not being secured in the past. It's a question Rosamond Lehmann asks. I'm not sure she answers it. But perhaps, if Uncle Zip is right, she kens the noo.

That last phrase, for those who didn't grow up as Scots Presbyterians, is a reference to the minister who tells his congregation that they will all be cast into Hell, and there they will wail to the Lord, Oh Lord, we didnae ken, and the lord will look down and He will say: Weel, ye ken the noo.

Perhaps it was the same minister who was explaining that in Hell there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth when a voice from the back pews asked: What if ye havenae goat ony teeth? Pause for thought before the response: Teeth will be provided.

sf: Other Days, Other Eyes (the Slow Glass fixup) Bob Shaw
crime: Love in Amsterdam, Nicholas Freeling
if you don't know it: The Healing Art, AN Wilson

reading: The Dumas Club, Arturo Perez-Reverte. I am going to write about Monte Cristo soon. It is the best thriller ever written. But I may also consider Raphael Sabatini.
lunch: too many chilli chicken legs and spring rolls, then lots of other chinese buffet stuff. dinner: leftovers.
music: Radio 3

train/car

Of course, I didn’t make the Easter vigil, but I did go to the morning service before going to work. Because it is Easter Sunday, when Railtrack, or Jarvis, or Network Rail, or somebody, or all of them celebrate Our Lord’s victory over death by moving sleepers around, I had to drive.

I prefer the train to driving because you can read, do the crossword, stare out of the window at more interesting things than the man in the next car picking his nose while stuck on Kilburn High Street and, above all, have no responsibility for anything other than buying your ticket, getting on and getting off. Alas, you can no longer smoke, but you can still drink. You can still drink, I can’t. I wish we had more trains like this nice one I was in the other day which had those compartments of six seats and a sliding door. But it goes between Vienna and Bratislava, which is of limited use if you want to go between Huntingdon and London.

I prefer driving (on my own) to the train because you have the car to yourself and you make the decisions about where it goes. You can listen to music quite loudly (I don’t have an iPod, because I can’t really listen and read at the same time). You can smoke all the time. But mostly, the only thing to like about driving – motorway driving, I mean - is that you can go very nearly too fast. Not too fast, of course, that would be silly. But as fast as you can while still retaining full control of the vehicle. That is if, like me, you are an excellent driver and drive very fast indeed, changing gears the while and never straying from your lane as you move round corners as if you were in one of those tilting trains, except without the coming off the rails bit, and always indicating and being in the correct lane, unlike those slower gits in front of you who are clearly in the wrong lane, but never being caught by speed cameras. For legal reasons I should point out that that is not because the very nearly superhuman reflexes and superior awareness of your surroundings characteristic of the excellent driver (such as I myself am) enable you to see them and respond appropriately, double-declutching your way out of trouble in the nick of time (brakes are for the inept), only to move back up to warp speed seconds later, but because you haven’t broken the speed limit. Obviously. And especially not by factors of 50 per cent and up.

I don’t know my own mind. Train, I think. Or car.

sf: A Better Mantrap, Bob Shaw
crime: The Judas Window, Carter Dickson (who is John Dickson Carr, of course, so you may get it under either name). A Locked Room tour de force.
If you don’t know it: Five Letters From an Eastern Empire, Alasdair Gray (in Unlikely Stories, Mostly)
Today’s music: Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach; Two Against Nature, Steely Dan; The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell; Early Concepts, Stan Kenton. In a car, you see.
Chicken Yakisoba for lunch; Roast Lamb for dinner.

Off to bed now, with a head full of quandary and (many points to anyone who can complete the line correctly)