The Year of Magical Thinking

I think there is a book called The Year of Magical Thinking. That title catches something about the present moment. Without realising it and incapable of facing it, I am being driven crazy by two things, one old and one new, which I conflate or confuse, ‘magically’.   Neither of them will ever go away.   In one case this is the best guess of the best-informed people. In the other it’s the demonised, despairing fear of those who can’t imagine a way out.

Trump and the virus are the two components of the looming apocalypse, two diseases that have so far induced mainly paralysis in those whom we would like to count on in fending them off. I wish I could write usefully about what it’s like to live with all (or most) of your usual routes blocked. The sudden prohibition of physical movement is easier to manage than the limits on thinking imposed by nascent authoritarian governments in Britain and America. But at least we probably understand better than we used to the plights of the German and Russian populations of the 1930s.

My own answer is a kind of surrender, or, more palatably, an escape inward. Normally I would turn to art. Now this must be carried on at at least one remove (I don’t think I have seen ‘at at’ in a sentence before).   So I have shut myself off in the hut we built a couple of years ago at the bottom of the garden to take the overflow of books from the house. We had long needed to get rid of these books that I couldn’t make up my mind to do without. The opportunity was finally provided by a gigantic ceonothus which, like all its tribe, threw out branches with the thickness of trunks, that it couldn’t support and allowed to sag to the ground.   So it took up more and more space, a whole sub-region of its own. Its displays of bloom became more astonishing as it ate up more of the garden; then, after a last outpouring, it died.

That cleared the way for the hut, a wooden building of exotic cedar, not ceonothus-wood, but nonetheless a reincarnation of that awkward and insidious plant.   Esther imagined the hut as a windowless cupboard without enough room to sit comfortably among the stacks. She didn’t see the need for yet another study. Colin, who helped us plan it, came up with the useful principle that to make sense of the expense, the building should be as big as the space allowed, not inconspicuous.   On the drawings he called it ‘garden library’, which probably eased its passage. So here we are, three years later, and the hut has assumed a new role as another world, the only foreign destination I’m allowed since I got the letter from the hospital advising me not to leave the house for any reason.

The garden is small, sixty feet long, not counting the jungle of camellias E has made of the yard beside the extension. The hut eats into the sixty feet, but this distance has expanded since the virus and now takes longer to traverse, looking at clouds through the branches or a plant never noticed before or a bloom that wasn’t there yesterday.

The hut is ‘another place’. I guess you could do this with different rooms too. In my first flat in my first job I had a study that I seldom went into. When I wrote my dissertation in a huge rush, I did it at the kitchen table staring at a blank wall. I thought I needed something like a prison cell and never considered working at the beautiful old desk my parents had given me at thirteen to make me take study more seriously.

For its first year the hut had been an embarrassment. Now that I had this beautiful work space, I wasn’t writing anything worthwhile.   I had struggled with a book project for two years, amassing more and more material which remained stubbornly in the form of a featureless pile. Esther pushed the idea of writing smaller pieces, but I was stuck on the grandeur of big designs, a book which synthesised a great deal and emerged as one thing.

Dreadful to say, my subject was Scale, scale in buildings, in plants, in books, in everything under the sun from microscopic to galactic. I could get the size of nothing right – the first chapter wandered on for sixty-five pages and incorporated models of the solar system, Bruegel’s paintings of the Tower of Babel and Lutyens’ Liverpool Cathedral, bigger than St Peter’s but stuck at the stage of a giant model.

It took me a year to accept that Esther had found the solution – a building the size of a hut rather than a cathedral, a blog rather than a book.  I think she had been leading by example with her own blog (at esthermenell.com) for a whole year before I recognised the writing on the wall and began to copy her.

So the virus should have crowned the new mode with an extra validation. The world had shrunk and miniatures were more the thing than ever. But no, from believing in the blog with a foolish faith, I had slumped back into complete disbelief. How could such tiny things matter in a global cataclysm that was sweeping all before it?   I had been defeated by questions of Scale yet again.