We have all known death. And we have all known grief. Every
griever is different, every grief a separate shade, but we know it when we see
it, and can feel it when someone else feels it, too. It is perhaps one of the
most common subjects for a book, but no book has touched grief in such a manner
as this one. Divided into three parts that appear to have very little, if any,
connection to each other, this is a work of art and a work of the heart. A book
that takes you through many levels…levels of thought, levels of feeling, levels
of perplexity. Such is Julian Barnes’s Levels
of Life.
True to its title, the parts refer to the various levels that
one encounters in a lifetime—‘the sin of height’; ‘on the level’; ‘the loss of
depth’. The book is spread out like a performance on stage—one where you have
to play close attention and watch for the patterns—setting the scene first,
creating the metaphors, weaving separate stories before the readers, to take
them, at last, to where the author wants them to be.
The book begins with ballooning, and ‘balloonatics’. There
is Colonel Fred Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards, famous actress Sarah
Bernhardt and professional balloonist Felix Tournachon or ‘Nadar’. The part is
full of images and ideas: the earthlings’ elation at being in the sky, the
ethereal feeling of being free from all earthly impurities— on a spiritual
level. And yet, there is the reference to the religious belief that God had not
created humans to fly, and so, as the legends went, harshly was punished whoever
dared to commit the ‘sin of height’. It
is this part where we get the first mention of the word ‘uxorious’ (used for
Nadar). For the sake of Barnes, I want to underline this: ‘uxorious’ is a man
who loves his wife (not a ‘lover of women’ or ‘a man with many wives’ as Barnes
fears it might come to mean.) And then comes the mention of photography, as
Nadar mixes the two arts—ballooning and photography—taking the first aerial
pictures of Earth from his balloon. As Barnes’s points out in the beginning of
each of the three parts, “You put together two things that have not been put
together before, and the world is changed.” And adds, in the second part, “…and
sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
The second part takes on from the heights of aspiration. “We
live on the ground, on the level, and yet—and so—we aspire…Some soar with art,
others with religion, most with love.” And love, he says, is the meeting point
of truth and magic. “Truth, as in photography; magic as in ballooning.” But
this is the love story of two people who were ‘on the level’ with each
other—Colonel Fred Burnaby and actress Sarah Bernhardt. Yet, as Burnaby later
rues, “if being on the level didn’t shield you from pain, maybe it was better
to be up in the clouds.”
The last part—the depth—is where we, the readers, are on the
level with the author. It is the part where he comes to his grief, where we come to his grief—his account of the
void, the blank page that his life became after the death of his wife; the love
with whom he shared his life for 29 years.
No one can define grief. In spite of that, or maybe because
of that, Barnes’s completely and utterly honest description is bound to touch a
chord.
His discovery that indeed, a person can sometimes relish the
pain that wouldn’t go is one of the most beautiful lines in the book. “If the
pain is not exactly relished, it no longer seems futile. Pain shows that you
have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavor of memory; pain is a proof of
love.”
You cannot take in the entire book in one go, though. It
takes some time to build up the relation between the three parts, but then,
like a balloon coming out of the clouds, you can build a clear picture of the
scene before you. There are flashes that come back to you—like the word ‘uxorious’
that comes back from the first part and is dwelt upon by the author in the
last; and the warning statement, “every
love story is a potential grief story.” Perhaps the best image is Barnes use of
Burnaby’s impression of the balloon’s shadow on a cloud as a ‘colossal
photograph’: he compares it to life—our impression of life as a colossal
photograph, a shadow cast by the play of light. “So clear, so sure, until for
one reason or another—the balloon moves, the cloud disperses, the sun changes
angle—the image is lost forever, available only to memory, turned into
anecdote.”
No comments:
Post a Comment