The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan

Author:Richard Flanagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 1997-03-26T05:00:00+00:00

For a short time, a very short time, perhaps twenty minutes in all, Sonja found the encylopaedia interesting. For a much longer time, she simply read it out of respect for her father. She began with Volume One and resolved to read the entire encyclopaedia page by page, volume by volume, however arduous a labour this might prove. Bojan felt this to be both a wise and industrious use of the books. Sonja read some hundreds of pages dutifully, before she found it impossible to stop her eyes glazing and skidding over words then sentences, then entire articles, then large sections. She realised it was possible to read such writing closely and for it to mean nothing and for it not to have enlightened her in any way whatsoever, and as she slowly came to admit this to herself, the futility of her ambition became ever more apparent.

Still, for some months they would each morning sit at the pink marble-laminex kitchen table eating breakfast. In front of each would be two bowls, one with steaming hot golden polenta, the other empty. Sonja would fill the empty bowls with the thick black turkish coffee. Then each would put their spoon in the polenta, and with it full of the bright yellow cornmeal, place it into the dark sweet coffee, and then leaning over the bowl, put the syrup-covered polenta into their mouths. Bojan would glance the Sporting Globe, folded into an easily handled quarter and held out at arm’s length from his eyes, because that was the way some of the older blokes held their papers at smoko, because it seemed appropriate and right to do, even if he could only make sense of the occasional sentence and some of the pictures; while Sonja would have at her side a hefty volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She would read dutifully, rather than with any enthusiasm or interest, and occasionally he would ask her where she was up to, and she would reply, ‘Volume Two or, ‘Volume Three, Cr to Da, page 1,562’, and to prove her dedication and to assure him that this was not folly, ask him curious unanswerable questions, such as: ‘Do you know there are over 782 types of crustaceans?’

‘Bugger me,’ Bojan would invariably say in his best Australian and sometimes laugh, at his own ignorance and out of his pride at her command of such facts. But he also was laughing at the inanity of wisdom, for Bojan was no fool, and he thought, rightly, that such things were generally useless to know, but he also thought, wrongly, that the difference between failure and success in life was the possession of a sum of such useless knowledge. Sonja would smile back, and be reminded, as she always was by the sight of her spoon of heaped golden polenta sinking into the blackness of the coffee, of the sun setting into the night.

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