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Jul. 1st, 2021 02:42 pmFor reasons I was never put, from beginning to end, entirely in possession of, the book of choice for my flat to read aloud in the long swaddled afternoons of these coldest winter days I have enjoyed, the coldest to have tried my patience, since any residence of mine was ever howled around by Wellington's much-heralded June through August winds, has been The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.
The book's joys - had my time required a nicer parceling-out or the friends with whom I read pleased my heart less, I might have added, 'where it had any' - alternated for me between an audience member's, complete relaxation on the sofa nearest the heater and a settling off into closer and closer following of windy subtleties, approaching yet fending asymptotically off the threshold of sleep, and a performer's, that testing of my ability to pronounce each word in the shadow of its predestinate future, to englobe clauses in pockets of intonation as they, frequently, passed, to avoid every blind alley of potential emphasis, to which I relished being, in my own judgement, generally equal.
I will confess redundancy in raising a mirror to that which, itself a mirror hinged in figure as a book is, outside figure, hinged, is already capable of being brought to reflect upon itself, and thus unhinged. Sex jokes, hanging low, can be gotten off easily. To make the text in general absurd requires a mere salt of comic timing. Toward the beginning, especially, of each reading session, these were frequently supplied. But I was pleased to find that the more passionately and, often, rapidly, the sentences, this one's superior, are read, the more clearly in the voice's natural light they show. It is interesting to read an early text of ghosts. The defining fearsomeness of these is that they remain on the other sides of barriers - lake, class, window - from the viewer, somehow more frightening for their necessary distance: the peril lies in being drawn, or in the possibility - speaking of unhinged mirrors - that they are already nearer than they seem. I do not much respect the art of vagueness, yet it affects. That little which is concrete looms like something in a mist. And I do love, as well as the exact, the minimally-stated.
(But as my vote for next reading book, if we have one, I've gotten out The Haunting of Hill House and left it suggestively on the sofa).
The book's joys - had my time required a nicer parceling-out or the friends with whom I read pleased my heart less, I might have added, 'where it had any' - alternated for me between an audience member's, complete relaxation on the sofa nearest the heater and a settling off into closer and closer following of windy subtleties, approaching yet fending asymptotically off the threshold of sleep, and a performer's, that testing of my ability to pronounce each word in the shadow of its predestinate future, to englobe clauses in pockets of intonation as they, frequently, passed, to avoid every blind alley of potential emphasis, to which I relished being, in my own judgement, generally equal.
I will confess redundancy in raising a mirror to that which, itself a mirror hinged in figure as a book is, outside figure, hinged, is already capable of being brought to reflect upon itself, and thus unhinged. Sex jokes, hanging low, can be gotten off easily. To make the text in general absurd requires a mere salt of comic timing. Toward the beginning, especially, of each reading session, these were frequently supplied. But I was pleased to find that the more passionately and, often, rapidly, the sentences, this one's superior, are read, the more clearly in the voice's natural light they show. It is interesting to read an early text of ghosts. The defining fearsomeness of these is that they remain on the other sides of barriers - lake, class, window - from the viewer, somehow more frightening for their necessary distance: the peril lies in being drawn, or in the possibility - speaking of unhinged mirrors - that they are already nearer than they seem. I do not much respect the art of vagueness, yet it affects. That little which is concrete looms like something in a mist. And I do love, as well as the exact, the minimally-stated.
(But as my vote for next reading book, if we have one, I've gotten out The Haunting of Hill House and left it suggestively on the sofa).
