Coventry by Helen Humphreys

Author:Helen Humphreys [Humphreys, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393073539
Publisher: New York : W.W. Norton, 2009.
Published: 2008-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

There was a day a few years ago, a cold day, when the wind snapped in the trees, and Harriet walked out with a cloud of breath slung above her. She wandered over the snowy fields outside Coventry, following the weave of old stone walls across the landscape. She was trying to write a description of the walls, had become obsessed with them, how they were made by human effort though they looked so natural. Harriet remembers that day as joyful, a rarity in her days. Somehow the walking and the cold and the weave of the walls and her foggy breath pulled her back to early childhood, to a feeling of being wholly present and wholly purposeful.

The stone walls are scattered like broken, human music across the countryside. Used to mark boundaries, they were made from clearing the fields. The size of the stones gets progressively smaller as the walls get higher. The large stones are all at the base of the wall, and the walls themselves are only as high as my waist. Perhaps this is as high as a man can lift a stone without strain. Perhaps this is as high as a man can lift a stone without having to raise his hands above his heart.

The walls are like language. They are like fine tracery with the light behind them, like lace, and, in a sense, they are no different from these words—each one lifted slowly into place and balanced on this page.

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