Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.

And when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.

It is like travel. You journey from the event and as it becomes more distant it becomes less potent and more poignant, like a remembered home. As the weeks go by the knife turns differently.

We all act as hinges – fortuitous links between other people.

From time to time my stomach still curdles, but not as it used to; I no longer shrink from the newspapers. Now why should this be? The world is no safer than it was twenty years ago. But we are still here; the monster has been contained, so far – with every year that passes the hope grows that it might continue to be contained, somehow; daily expectation of calamity is too exhausting to sustain. The monks at Lindisfarne must have whistled while they worked when they stopped looking out to sea; people made love in cities under siege.