De Australische schrijver John Birmingham werd geboren op 7 augustus 1964 in Liverpool, Engeland. Zie ook alle tags voor John Birmingham op dit blog.
Uit: On Father
“Andrew had snuck a small bottle of whisky into the room and at some point we poured one out for the old man, toasting him from disposable plastic cups liberated from a coffee machine.
He was shrunken in death.
Diminished even beyond the ravages of his long struggle. Grey in pallor, sunken-cheeked, mouth open but eyes mercifully closed. I stared at the dressing on his chest, the last he would ever need to close up the maw of the gaping wound that a runaway ulcer had eaten into his flesh. The cancer was still in there, I thought. His killer.
And now, finally, it was defeated. It had run wild through his body, up and down his spine, through his flesh, into his bones. But now it had nowhere left to run. It would go with him from this place to another place and it would burn. I imagined it, sentient and cruel, screaming as it died in the fire of the crematorium.
Disturbed and aberrant thoughts, but satisfying.
That feeling of vengeful contentment recurred a week later, when I knew he had indeed been given to the flames. And it was even more satisfying then.
I suppose I should have realised that something was amiss, given the powerful irrationality of such thoughts, but I did not otherwise suffer from the magical thinking that Joan Didion described as stealing over her in the year after her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died at their dinner table in front of her while she mixed a salad. I liked to think of myself as an empiricist. The material realm had always been more comfortable to me than the spiritual. Life might not run in straight lines, but the angles would always be measurable.
Over the following days and weeks, however, I slipped into a waking fugue state, passing from grief to depression; or from mourning to melancholia, as Sigmund Freud once put it. I was bereft, unmanned. It was not simply a matter of suddenly finding myself wailing uncontrollably behind the wheel of my car as I drove back from the supermarket with pet food or garbage bags. I was always haunted, always lost. Like poor emo Hamlet, the outward measure of my sorrows did not begin to gauge the depths of misery beneath:
For they are the actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
Before I was done with grief I would fall from the normal and expected purgatory of bereavement to a lower level of Hell, into what J.K. Rowling calls the “deadened feeling”, which whenever it appears for Paulo Coelho “demolishes all the old things it finds in its path”.
Grief is an ocean, fathomless and wide, and on the surface its most impelling forces arrive in waves. I was first inundated by a surge of howling grief a few hours later, when alone. I had driven back to our house to feed the cats and pick up a few things to take down to Byron Bay. Jane and the kids, and some of their friends, and Sophie, our ageing Labrador, were all still there. I drove into the garage, turned off the engine and sat, not moving, under the empty house.”
De Engelse dichter Philip Larkin werd op 9 augustus 1922 geboren in Coventry. Zie ook alle tags voor Philip Larkin op dit blog.
De literaire wereld
II
De vrouw van Alfred Tennyson
Beantwoordde
bedelbrieven
fanbrieven
….scheldbrieven
….brieven met vragen
….brieven over zaken
….en uitgeversbrieven.
Daarbij
….zag ze toe op zijn kleren
….zorgde voor zijn eten en drinken
….ontving de bezoekers
….beschermde hem tegen roddel en kritiek
En tenslotte
….(nog afgezien van het huishouden)
….voedde ze de kinderen op en gaf ze les.
Terwijl dit alles plaatshad
Zat de heer Alfred Tennyson als een dreumes
Op zijn poëtische potje.
Vertaald door Peter Verstegen
Zie voor nog meer schrijvers van de 7e augustus ook mijn blog van 7 augustus 2019 en eveneens mijn blog van 7 augustus 2017 en ook mijn blog van 7 augustus 2011 deel 1 en ook deel 2.