Hazzard lights

This morning I woke late and slowly and heavy and smiling, blindly at everything, the sun and the distant trains, heavy with the discovery unflowering in me: my heart is full of love. Heavy with love, impersonal love that is personal, dripping from me, in me, and through. Love is like honey through a window, as the great songwriter once said. Out of bed I took up my book, working slowly, carefully through the last pages of Shirley Hazzard’s impeccable novel The Transit of Venus. I’ve read it twice before and only now realise why, early in the second chapter, it forewarns us with such a light confidence:

“In fact Edmund Tice would take his own life before attaining the peak of his achievement. But that would occur in a northern city, and not for many years.”

I always wondered, why would he kill himself? When he has devoted his life to this one woman and finally, by the end, she realises him. Thinking about the delicacy and quiet triumph in the description of their long, dry, separated love I glance across my desk with its starburst of opened notebooks. A prong of a specific tree given to me for meaning lies dying inaudibly in its glass vessel. It shades a shallow basket filled with candles and pens. I go back to the book, pick it up in my hands like an album carried from a wreckage in a world now lost and gone, by fire, by water, by the toil of time which places everything behind us like a mirror. Her work is so perfect. “‘I work. I think of you. These are not alternating propositions – I think of you always. Since writing you last, I’ve been to a show of drawings by Leonardo, a one-man industrial revolution.'”

Irreplaceable Shirley Hazzard, alone in her room, writing from a kind of understanding few can be bothered to share. I hear the ardour of her disciplined quietude beating behind the pages: “She would be better off in a home. Christian said this to Caro, who replied, ‘She has a home. You mean an institution.'” Like Jane Austen’s I ration her few novels, unable but afraid to wear them thin. Getting up out of the sunshine I say almost inaudibly to my companion, spilling the steaming cup of tea, If I could write like this I would never do anything else. Thinking of writing about her work I am “A big woman in violet [who] leaned against the mantel, empurpling the view.” These thoughts pass through me like tiny fishes, transparent in sunlight, as deep in love the echoed longing might come. If I could be beautiful like you, it wouldn’t matter, I read – or imagine. Turning the last page to the end I suddenly realise with a hot shock: she is about to die, the main character actually dies on the final page.

I paid insufficient attention to the last two or three lines. Beforehand as he is watching her go there are people grappling for their status and their airbearable possessions. And “The passengers passed through the disembodied doorway, one by one. There was a woman in pink linen: ‘Does this machine spoil pearls?'” They are “claiming, clutching, harbouring.” The man who tried to make her see, an ophthalmologist, climbs aboard without recognising her. His death has also been foretold. Everything deep, light, ironic and sweet. The love that is wisdom, the wisdom of love comes and takes a seat quietly, far back in the aircraft. Then:

“The roar could be seen, reverberating on blue overalls, surging into the spruces. Within the cabin, nothing could be heard. Only, as the plane rose from the ground, a long hiss of air – like the intake of humanity’s breath when a work of ages shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.”