Love by Jeanette Winterson

Author:Jeanette Winterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Art and Lies

FROM A DISTANCE only the light is visible; a speeding gleaming horizontal angel, trumpet out on a hard bend. The note bells the beauty of the stretching train that pulls the light in a long gold thread. It catches in the wheels, it flashes on the doors that open and close, that open and close, in commuter rhythm.

On the overcoats, briefcases, brooches, the light snags in rough-cut stones that stay unpolished. The man is busy. He hasn’t time to see the light that burns his clothes and illuminates his face. The light pouring down his shoulders in biblical excess. His book is a plate of glass.

Art and Lies is a fragmented set of narratives. Three stories, Handel, Picasso, Sappho, but not the composer, not the painter, and somewhat the poet. Nobody finds love or comes near to doing so. Love is unreadable, untranslatable. Love as bafflement. Love as regret.

I don’t know why the last line is, ‘It was not too late.’ I don’t feel this book has hope in it.

I think I was lost when I was writing it and this was not a ball of string in the minotaur’s labyrinth. I think I was the minotaur.

They are on the same train, Handel, Picasso, Sappho, fleeing a city where anything anyone would want to keep has fled already.

There is a question at the heart of this book:

How shall I live?

I think I was asking myself and getting no answers. But sometimes you have to get lost – both as a writer and as a reader. Sometimes only the question can be asked and the answer is somewhere in the distance – maybe a long way in the distance.

What I know is that life is distance learning. The next thing is out of reach. We reach it. The next thing is out of reach. We reach it.

IT HAPPENED, LATE one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of his house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about this woman. And one said, ‘Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?’ So David sent messengers and took her; and she came to him and he lay with her. Then she returned to her house. And the woman conceived and she sent and told David, ‘I am with child.’

So David sent word to Joab saying, ‘Send me Uriah the Hittite.’ Then David said to Uriah, ‘Go down to your house and wash your feet.’ And Uriah went out of the king’s house and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the door of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord and did not go down to his house.

David said, ‘Have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house?’

Uriah said to David, ‘The ark, and Israel, and Judah dwell in booths

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.