A Certain Slant of Light by Duncan White

Author:Duncan White [White, Duncan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holland House Books
Published: 2021-09-15T22:00:00+00:00

I don’t know how many times I went out of my way to pass the shop again but not once in the weeks and months afterwards did I find the window illuminated. When I returned in order to take this picture, the shop name (which struck me as quite incongruous given the circumstances and which I can only assume was intended to expressed a playful if misplaced sense of Parisian glamour) put me in mind of a passage I would later read in Smith’s book devoted to the illustrious lives of Auguste and Louis Lumière and the films they made at a time when the streets of London had made their interminable advance this far into the fields of Middlesex. Of all their films, Smith writes, I am to this day most haunted by a particularly granular street scene captured on what must have been a perfectly sun-filled morning in late July 1897 showing, of all things, a wall falling down. I often see the demolition in my dreams, Smith writes. I see the workers hack away with pickaxes while another man winds away at a jack. The wall, which must be a foot thick and two yards high, sends a cloud of dust into the air as it crashes down, revealing beyond where it stood the remains of an abandoned home. Louis, in great agitation, pacing up and down arms waving, overseeing the operation like the conductor of some grand symphony, runs through his apparently improvised routine until it becomes apparent that the world has without warning, turned back on itself. The pickaxes swing in reverse pulling at what they had taken apart, the dust evaporates, the wall flies up and, the scene, restored proves as much as anything that all of our works are haplessly absurd and of no real consequence. I cannot hide my astonishment, Smith writes. It is the origin of all romantic stories to bring down the world and set it right again as if nothing ever happened. But that is the problem exactly, writes Smith. Nothing would be as it was.

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