scattyme (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} scattyme) wrote,@ 2008-05-14 22:17:00 |
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Eloquence
Thanks to those who commented on my last entry. I was really touched.
I haven't had the time or mental space to post since then. But spring has come here now, finally. The baby has taken to bopping around in my abdomen, particularly in the evenings. A very strange feeling.
A nightingale has arrived back at the quarry at Lys. Last year the nightingale - I'm assuming it's the same one - began singing in April and stopped sometime in June. I had never heard a nightingale before then.
After we had listened to it several nights running and exclaimed over how distinctive its voice was, I looked nightingales up on the Internet. There were sound recordings of bird songs available to download, and so we were able to establish that this was indeed a nightingale.
We've never actually managed to see it though. It's always in one or other of the larger trees that surround the quarry, up high, and their leaves are fully out now so you can't see a thing. But at night its song is often the only sound you can hear, and it rings out very clearly in the general calm. Does the nightingale know this, I wonder? Is it aware that it's much more eloquent than any of the other birds, despite being rather small and, according to the pictures I've seen anyway, a little on the drab side?
On another subject - or possibly not, in a way - Nuala O'Faolain died last Friday. If you aren't Irish you may not have heard of her. She was a journalist and writer.
A couple of weeks ago, thanks to a tip from queenie, I listened to her extraordinary interview on Irish radio with Marian Finucane, in which she described her reaction on learning that she was terminally ill with lung cancer. (The interview begins about 8 minutes in).
I say the interview was extraordinary because most people would not speak like that in private, let alone in public, but in terms of Nuala O'Faolain's own work there was nothing unusual about it. She had always been very honest, wrenchingly so at times in fact, to the point of causing extreme discomfort. Like all interesting thinkers she forced you to see things in a different way.
As queenie pointed out, when you hear the interview you tend to focus on the things that resonate with you most on a personal level. What struck me particularly was that literature and the beauty of nature no longer meant anything to O'Faolain, but music still did, and she was very thankful for that. She was worried though that it too would begin to lose its magic and so she was limiting the amount of music she heard.
Among the regrets she had about her life was the time she had wasted on alcohol, and the fact that so much of the dynamic in her family was based on the consumption of alcohol.
She was glad that she had never had a child, because she felt that she would have been a terrible mother.
Some of the things she said also reminded me of one of the characters in War and Peace, Prince Andrei. While he's dying he becomes very aware of how alone he is and his interest in other people, and desire to see them, begins to wane.
However, it seemed as though O'Faolain's desire for contact with others hadn't died altogether. In her last few weeks she managed to spend a great deal of time re-visiting favourite places, including Paris and Madrid, with friends and family. Apparently she had also been hoping to give a second interview if she lived long enough, because she was concerned that the first one might provoke other cancer patients to despair.
About ten years ago, in California, I went to a talk that she gave about her memoir that had just been published. I had the impression that most of the people at the talk had never heard of her and were just there because they were interested in Ireland. But as soon as she appeared and started talking, I could see that they were completely mesmerized. The memoir - which I must get hold of again when I'm next in Ireland - was called "Are You Somebody?" because of her status as a kind of semi-celebrity in Ireland - the sort of person you would vaguely recognize in a shop but be unable to fully place - and because of the long struggle she had in the course of her life with under-confidence.
When I read her obituary I was astounded by the variety of things she had done - a scholarship to Oxford to do a PhD in English literature, a documentary series on Irish TV, reporting on the revolution in Iran, loads of other interesting stuff. This was all downplayed by her to the extent that I had never put the pieces together before, despite having read her memoir and many of her newspaper articles over the years.
She said in the interview that when you die, all the vast knowledge you've gained in your life dies with you. Obviously that's not entirely true. Among other things it depends on how eloquent you are in your lifetime, and how honest. So if by some chance you're able to see this Nuala, thank you.
Thanks to those who commented on my last entry. I was really touched.
I haven't had the time or mental space to post since then. But spring has come here now, finally. The baby has taken to bopping around in my abdomen, particularly in the evenings. A very strange feeling.
A nightingale has arrived back at the quarry at Lys. Last year the nightingale - I'm assuming it's the same one - began singing in April and stopped sometime in June. I had never heard a nightingale before then.
After we had listened to it several nights running and exclaimed over how distinctive its voice was, I looked nightingales up on the Internet. There were sound recordings of bird songs available to download, and so we were able to establish that this was indeed a nightingale.
We've never actually managed to see it though. It's always in one or other of the larger trees that surround the quarry, up high, and their leaves are fully out now so you can't see a thing. But at night its song is often the only sound you can hear, and it rings out very clearly in the general calm. Does the nightingale know this, I wonder? Is it aware that it's much more eloquent than any of the other birds, despite being rather small and, according to the pictures I've seen anyway, a little on the drab side?
On another subject - or possibly not, in a way - Nuala O'Faolain died last Friday. If you aren't Irish you may not have heard of her. She was a journalist and writer.
A couple of weeks ago, thanks to a tip from queenie, I listened to her extraordinary interview on Irish radio with Marian Finucane, in which she described her reaction on learning that she was terminally ill with lung cancer. (The interview begins about 8 minutes in).
I say the interview was extraordinary because most people would not speak like that in private, let alone in public, but in terms of Nuala O'Faolain's own work there was nothing unusual about it. She had always been very honest, wrenchingly so at times in fact, to the point of causing extreme discomfort. Like all interesting thinkers she forced you to see things in a different way.
As queenie pointed out, when you hear the interview you tend to focus on the things that resonate with you most on a personal level. What struck me particularly was that literature and the beauty of nature no longer meant anything to O'Faolain, but music still did, and she was very thankful for that. She was worried though that it too would begin to lose its magic and so she was limiting the amount of music she heard.
Among the regrets she had about her life was the time she had wasted on alcohol, and the fact that so much of the dynamic in her family was based on the consumption of alcohol.
She was glad that she had never had a child, because she felt that she would have been a terrible mother.
Some of the things she said also reminded me of one of the characters in War and Peace, Prince Andrei. While he's dying he becomes very aware of how alone he is and his interest in other people, and desire to see them, begins to wane.
However, it seemed as though O'Faolain's desire for contact with others hadn't died altogether. In her last few weeks she managed to spend a great deal of time re-visiting favourite places, including Paris and Madrid, with friends and family. Apparently she had also been hoping to give a second interview if she lived long enough, because she was concerned that the first one might provoke other cancer patients to despair.
About ten years ago, in California, I went to a talk that she gave about her memoir that had just been published. I had the impression that most of the people at the talk had never heard of her and were just there because they were interested in Ireland. But as soon as she appeared and started talking, I could see that they were completely mesmerized. The memoir - which I must get hold of again when I'm next in Ireland - was called "Are You Somebody?" because of her status as a kind of semi-celebrity in Ireland - the sort of person you would vaguely recognize in a shop but be unable to fully place - and because of the long struggle she had in the course of her life with under-confidence.
When I read her obituary I was astounded by the variety of things she had done - a scholarship to Oxford to do a PhD in English literature, a documentary series on Irish TV, reporting on the revolution in Iran, loads of other interesting stuff. This was all downplayed by her to the extent that I had never put the pieces together before, despite having read her memoir and many of her newspaper articles over the years.
She said in the interview that when you die, all the vast knowledge you've gained in your life dies with you. Obviously that's not entirely true. Among other things it depends on how eloquent you are in your lifetime, and how honest. So if by some chance you're able to see this Nuala, thank you.
