My wife Jen and I were out exploring Winnipeg’s Little Italy neighborhood on what has been dubbed Open Corydon Sunday’s, a day where they block the stretch of street off from traffic and open it up for patios and play. During out time we ended up grabbing a coffee and a slice of cake from the bakery and making our way over to the one of the small squares. While we were sitting there enjoying our cofee and pastry, I started to reminisce about my recent trip to England, trying to describe to her the phenomenon of their secret or hidden gardens, enclaves and green spaces hidden in corners and old residences on seemingly every block of the city. Often you have to duck through an alley or through an old gated wall to get to them.
As we were walking to catch the river boat back to our car, we passed what is essentially an oversized little free library, a cubed building made of transparent red inviting passserby’s to take a book and leave a book at their leisure.
So of course I stoppped. The first book I see staring back at me is this one. A book about a lost garden set in England during the war. I snatched it up.
Some of the first words on the first page describing our main character’s arrival in London at Paddington Station, coincidentally the same place I arrived at on my journeyl
“What I recognized in this place, from the moment i arrived here, was something within myself that I didn’t even know was there.”
Words that seemed to strike at something familiar to my own spirit, thinking back on what was the culmination of a life long dream to finally make this trip happen. Setting foot on that platform led me to wonder about the thing I was seeking to recover in what was a pilgrimage to the places of my childhood stories. As the character goes on to ponder, “Can words go straight to the heart? Is it possible? Can words be as direct as the scent of roses.” Particularly, in a time where the world itself “can no longer be trusted.” Words in this case pointing to a passing and fleeting hopefulness and innocence now fading from view.
“I do not know how to reconcile myself to useless random death,” she cries. “I do not know how to assimilate this much brutal change, or how to relearn this landscape that was once so familiar to me and is now different everyday. I cannot find my way back to my life when all my known landmarks are being removed.”
Here the city becomes a metaphor for ones life, or the practice and function of memory. It is a stated description of a reality that seeks its sense from our willingness to see beyond the darkness. A willingness to see a world that we are also able to love. “This is what I iknow about love,” she muses. “That is is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost.”
If words have a power that constitutes life, a living breathing entity, and if the every change spaces that we occupy in the midst of time and circumstance is a metaphor for life, “There is (then) a vocabulary to existing, to taking up living space in the world, that cannot be translated over the chasm of death.” It requires something more. That is the journey this character is on.
If ever there were a question whether this character was someone I can relate to, she puts it to rest soon after as well in describing the luggage she brings with her. “I do not have much for being thirty-five years on this earth; mostly books, a few photographs. My clothes are few. But my books, my books are so many it looks as though I am on my way to open a small lending library.”
What she does in fact stumble over is a hidden library. One of those spaces that defines that nameless and hard to describe spirit that seems to permeate the landscape of England, bringing with it a language all its own. “Whoever made these gardens originally,” she wonders, “and whoever kept them going, reinvented them, knew what they were doing. And more than that, I think, looking over the ripple of fields past this meadow- more than that, someone loved this place.”
A wtiness to that something more.
A something more that finds its exprsesion in a single translated word. “There’s a word cut into the slate by a steady hand. A word buried and recovered, as this word always must be, because that is how it works in us, that is how it is read.
Longing.”
“it is a strange thing to find in an English garden,” and yet, as the her journey comes to uncover, it is what proves to be most revelatory and true.
It is also a hard thing to live. That longing is a double edged sword, just as the world itself torn between beauty and war. I love this description of the challenge of knowing such a revelatory force:
“I need to be right next to something, right up against it. No gaps. And if I couldnt be the one right next to knowledge, then I didn’t exist at all. That how it is with me.
This is a hard way to live, to feel.”
And yet, as we hear directly after, “There are many ways to tell a story.” In oopposition to or in sympathy with longing, that “great mystery” she describes.
All throughout the book we hear our main character dialoging with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, a story that seems to be illuminating her own journey with this book. It becomes a fascinating juxataposition and interpretive device, playing Woolf’s own wrestlings and restlessness across the main characters seeking for more, especially as it fuses together Woolf’s real life struggles and eventually death. The character in this book has this longing to write a letter to Woolf, and in the passing of this literary figure seems to have lost the opportunity. And yet this longing, this hopefulness, persists in seeking ways to imagine life beyond that chasm of death. “It is how we learn to speak about something that is disappearing as we say its name” that becomes the thing that can make known. The question of such knowledge remains though- “is it a trick, a false comfort” or is it true.
That’s where we find ourselves when our longings won’t let us go. That’s where she finds herself attending to these gardens, which become both literal and figurative in their naming, in their words.
“The thing about gardens is that everyone thinks they go on growing, that in winter they sleep and in spring they rise. But it’s more that they die and return, die and return. They lose themselves. They haunt themselves.
Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love. And this is what I have remembered of love.”
In this memory comes the imagination that seeks beyond the chasm, that finds in those lost gardens a story about resurrection. The giving life to a world that is at once unfamiliar and known. Places that, in the destruction, witness to that greater longing that we don’t always recognize is there.
The Stories of my Life 