A Midnight Clear: A Novel by William Wharton

Author:William Wharton [Wharton, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

The door to the attic is open and I can see the light from one of the flambeaux. Mother is sitting on the floor surrounded by at least fifteen paintings in big gilt frames. He doesn’t turn around when I come in. I lower myself onto the floor beside him.

“Look, Wont. Look at these paintings. They’re actually not much good, but they’re such a comfort. I can feel the calm and concern of some person who took the time to see and then make something to help me see with him. That’s love, Wont; sometimes I almost can’t believe there’s any love left anymore. These paintings make me glad I’m a human being.”

I look around at the pictures. They’re mostly forest scenes with pine trees and snow, or meadows with flowers in spring. There are two with deer browsing or looking up at us just the way the deer I saw did. There are also pictures of pots and pans, one of some vegetables falling out of a basket. I start out only worried about Mother sitting up here in the dark but then feel myself falling into it with him.

Up to that moment, all my experience with art had been limited to drawing. I never had an art course in high school; everybody was pushing me into math or science; trig and spherical trig, solid and analytic geometry; special classes at Drexel Institute. It wasn’t particularly hard but it wasn’t fun either; only more work, learning new games, tricks for nonthinkers, preparing myself to make a living.

But drawing has been a lifelong private joy. I’d draw on anything, hide drawings everywhere; my schoolbag, notebooks, even textbooks were filled with them. My poor mother would frantically clean out the drawers and closets of my room every few months and throw them out, piles of scratchings. I didn’t mind much; for me it was the process of drawing, not the drawings, that I loved.

I used to run around the art museum at the Parkway in Philadelphia but I never looked at the paintings on the walls. We were only interested in finding secret hidden doors or passages in the wood-lined rooms, getting scared by Egyptian mummies in the basement when we played hide-and-seek.

It’s hard to believe a person could get to be nineteen years old and never even look at a painting, let alone see one. But with me it happened. The shock of discovery was overwhelming.

It might only have been because I was so miserable, scared, the reality around me so unacceptable. I’ll never know all the reasons, but these intimate presentations of another world, another time, through a mind not my own, had an unbelievably profound effect on my deepest psyche. It changed my life. There, murmuring with Wilkins in the voice of lovers, after love, I knew an aesthetic experience. I dimly perceived what it was all about. I’d never be the same again.

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