Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning.

Mahler

It’s nothing, she’d muttered. Just the street of the small daggers…

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.

I retreated from arguments as if I had those epicanthic eyelids that birds and some fish have, that allow them to separate themselves silently, almost courteously, from present company.

It was the hour with that tense new light that Marsh Felon now began searching for in books whenever the writer strayed from a plot to attempt a description of that special hour, perhaps remembered from the author’s youth too. The boy began reading every evening. It allowed him a deafness while his brothers talked. Even if he knew the thatcher’s craft, he was separating himself from them.

“A fish camouflaged in shadow is no longer a fish, just a corner of landscape, as if it has another language, the way we need to be unknown sometimes. For instance, you know me as this person, but you don’t know me as another person. Do you understand?”