by Jonathan Hull is a good book, maybe bordering on a great book, that touches on some of life’s most important things; love, loss, finding meaning, art, growing old and dying.The main characters are Julia, Patrick and Daniel. The story is set alternatively in the front lines of France during WWI where Patrick and Daniel fought side by side, Paris after the war where Patrick and Julia meet, and a nursing home where Patrick now lives.
Patrick and Daniel are both in love with Julia. Daniel is killed in the war, Patrick loses track of Julia and marries another woman – only to find Julia again on a visit to a memorial on the French battlefield where he and Daniel fought.
The most interesting thing about the book is the shifting between Patrick’s current state as an old man in a nursing home and his recollection of his young life as a soldier. In many ways he’s the same young man – now trapped in an old man’s body. He’s losing everything (as we all do) and lives his life remembering what once was. It’s a story about survival, hope, finding wholeness and meaning.
It’s not the sort of book I would generally pick up, but it was recommended to me, so I read it and found it very interesting, moving and well written. I’m really impressed at the ability of the young author to describe aging and war in such realistic terms.
I can’t summarize the book adequately, you need to read it to get a feel for the writing. I took the time to practice my typing skills and transcribe a few passages I liked from the book below.
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Speaking of love the author Jonathan Hull writes,
“But to touch it and hold it! What relief, if only briefly, until love wears off or slips through our hands. Strange how love – that most fickle of emotions – creates the illusion of permanence right from the start, just as beauty, so fleeting and elusive, can seem so timeless and infinite to behold.
If love doesn’t triumph, it ought to. For love is the one thing we have that feels more powerful than even death; the only respite from life’s wretched absurdity. The magic of love is not that it contains all the answers, it’s that it eliminates the need for so many pressing questions. For love makes us feel like gods – and that’s what we’re really after isn’t it?’
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A conversation between Julia and Patrick,
“At least you’re not normal,” she said.Julia and Patrick talking about why she paints,
“I’m not?”
“No, thank goodness. Don’t you find normal people boring? They conceal all the important things.”__________________
“I think just about everybody would like to be an artist, if they had the talent.” I said. “Art seems to get right to the point.”Julia on being overwhelmed by the beauty and intensity of feeling on her first visit to the Louvre,
She took a swig from the bottle and handed it back.
“What inspires your painting?”
“I guess it’s all the things that I want to say but can’t. Not with words.”
“And do you get to say them that way, with your brush?”
“I get to try and say them. That’s enough.”__________________
“I spent all day wandering up and down the hallways, staring at the Mona Lisa and Canova’s Psyche and Cupid and the Venus de Milo and Caravaggio’s The Death of Venice and hundreds of other works in all shapes and sizes and colors. My feet were killing me. And just before I was about to leave, I was staring at Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave, and I suddenly realized that every single work I had seen expressed the same thing, the same intense longing for beauty and immortality and justice and compassion. It was as though all of these artists from throughout history were in there in those long hallways crying out the same anguished plea in a thousand different languages. I burst into tears and started running. I just had to get out.”
I said nothing as I watched the beautiful woman with tears in her green eyes running from the Louvre and then through the Tuileries, disappearing in a crowd.
“After that I didn’t feel so alone anymore. Suddenly I realized that the deepest, most indescribable parts of my soul had been felt and understood and transcribed by these artists. But it made me sad too, because I realized that that is the best we can do: to express our longings and pain. We can never stop it.”__________________
On searching for wholeness,
Julia once asked me to what extent I felt I was really my true self in public, and all I could say was very little. She said it’s a pity what a gap there is between our public and private selves, probably the loneliest piece of no-man’s-land in the world, she called it. Then she told me that she was devastated the first time she realized how far apart everybody really was, even close friends.
“What about you and Daniel?” I asked.
“I think we were as close as two people can get, in the time we had.”
“Was it close enough?”
“It was close enough.”
“And that’s what we all long for isn’t it? To connect, if only momentarily, clasping hands across the chasm, which is why drinking buddies at the bar seem almost love-struck as they fall over each other in rapid and raucous agreement; why friends and lovers whisper in intimate code, attempting to bridge the divide with ropes and pulleys, and secret handshakes that belie their permanent solitude.”__________________
On facing our mortality,
I wish God still worked. Or at least I wish some of the substitutes were more reassuring; that there was some plausible alternative to unretouched reality, a way to skirt the messy stuff. A rebuttal to the darkness.
Let’s see, there’s materialism (if I’m a doomed creature at least I’ll be a comfortable well-attired one, God-like in my furnishings if not my chromosomes); there’s science (The idea that we might outsmart God, somehow pick his locks and take over the controls – hah!); there’s the woozy notion of salvation through self-knowledge, though it’s awfully expensive and besides it doesn’t stop the pain (Insight alone never does, on the contrary, it can strip wounds raw); and there is love, which also seems flawed, but not a flawed perhaps.
So if I can’t be writ large upon the heavens, if I can’t entrust myself to
God,
Then at least let me alight upon the soul of a woman,
If only briefly
Before I plummet.__________________
And once again on emotional response to art,
Finally she said, “Do you know why I was so upset when I visited the Louvre, why I ran out?”
“Why?”
“Because for the first time I realized what the Louvre says.”
“What does it say?”
“That our lives – all our lives – are a struggle between love and loss.”
“And which wins?”
“That’s what I can’t decide.”
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And finally once again touching on love and loss,
“I think most of us are haunted deep within by a sense of lost perfection, by this nagging feeling not just that things could be better but that they once were better; that we can actually, in our hearts, recall a feeling of joy that we cannot reproduce, and that is our ultimate agony. It’s not just that we can imagine utter happiness, it’s that we’ve tasted it; perhaps, as Freud would say, at the breast of our mothers. And having tasted it, nothing else tastes the same, which is why so much of life is so bitterly sweet.
I don’t think we ever stop trying to find it again, that sense of infinite well-being and security. Deep in our hearts we all long for a sort of Restoration. That’s what love offers: our only chance back to an ethereal communion we once enjoyed. And maybe that’s why love even at first sight feels so much like a reunion.
And without love? Without love we are like songbirds who cannot sing.”
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