Up for Air
In the last two weeks I've finished another edit of Ghost Maps, suitable for viewing by jacket-copy people, put together three different grant applications and a fellowship application, and assembled two journal submissions.
And now I can come up for air.
In junior high school -- or perhaps earlier -- my reader contained a story I still remember. The boy was on holiday, bored on a beach with a bored mother up at the villa. He saw the local children diving on one side of the great rock -- and coming up at the other. He dove and searched and searched until he found the tunnel mouth. Pracited holding his breath, jumping with a rock in his arms. And at last tried the tunnel. Which was of course heart-bursting, sight-blackening, blood-in-the-ears long. But he made it. Went back to the villa and lay down. Did not tell his mother.
I did not and do not understand the boy's desire.
I heard a rerun of an interview with Steven Ambrose, the historian, recently. When asked why he became interested in writing about WWII, Ambrose said that he'd been born too late for WWII and too early for Vietnam, and never 'had the chance to see if I was a coward.' I don't understand that either, but I think it is the same desire.
It fascinates me, this desire. I don't share it, I don't understand it, but it fascinates me.
And now I'm laying on my bed in the villa, waiting for the spots in my vision to clear. Tomorrow will be a soothing day of signing letters and sliding manuscripts into manilla envelopes, the little creak of the postage scale. And easing back into my normal writing life, into Zeugma, and into this space.
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PS: Does anyone know that story? A fair probablity it was in the series of readers that starts with A Lizard to Start With.
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Late breaking news! Pat tells me the story is "Through the Tunnel" by Doris Lessing (wow!), written 1954.
2 Comments
Erin, I read that story too! Can’t remember just where, but I recall being left with a sense of the boy’s having been changed, deep inside—wounded, I thought. Maybe it was the knowledge that he could have died, something that hadn’t been real to him before. And he’d had this terrible revelation and he went home and his mother didn’t even notice. It was a bleak and rather lonely story, but one that I’d read again if I could find it.
I know the same story. I want to say it’s Robert Cormier, because I have a feeling that I have it in the house. But I’m not finding anything on amazon. Our readers were called things like “Weaving, spinning”, etc.
It’s one of those tales where something happens and the boy grows up with this experience. It changes him. Why climb the mountain? Because it was there. I think that growing up for girls is a different thing.