Moon Tiger

by Penelope Lively

Precisely. The power of language. Preserving the ephemeral; giving form to dreams, permanence to sparks of sunlight.

Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested. I well remember the moment at which I discovered that history was not a matter of received opinion.

History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out. It is the front-liners who are the exception – those who find themselves thus

placed whether they like it or not and those who seek involvement.

Sylvia rises with an effort (the chair is low and she is stouter than she would like, alas)

It is amazing how quickly this can become an effort. One day all is well; the next it is a struggle.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. 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.

We do not remember childhood – we imagine it. We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was.

crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness.

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders and fought by boys.

Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realise that? It’s the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.’

There was once a city in Egypt called Memphis. I shall devote a good deal of space to Memphis, in my history of the world; it is a salutary tale, the fate of Memphis, it nicely demonstrates the fragility of places. In pharaonic times Memphis was a sprawling acreage of houses, temples, workshops – an administrative and religious centre, the seat of government, a magnet for artists and craftsmen: Washington, Paris and Rome all rolled together on the banks of the Nile. Dikes protected it from the inundations of the river. It sounds paradisial – a city of palms and greenery on the richest silt where Upper and Lower Egypt meet, with majestic temples and sphinx-lined boulevards; the hub of an intelligent complex society completely out of step with the rest of the world, constructing ashlar buildings when Europe was living in caves, recording itself in the most decorative script ever known, practising one of the most imaginative, impenetrable and perverse religions of all time. And what is Memphis now? A series of barely discernible irregularities in the cultivation and an immense prone statue of Rameses the Second. How indeed are the mighty fallen.

History is disorder, I wanted to scream at them – death and muddle and waste. And here you sit cashing in on it and making patterns in the sand.