Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online Page A

other writers who are providing me with my greatest pleasures, as I pounce on a new work by Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Adam Thorpe, Matthew Kneale, Lawrence Norfolk, Anne Tyler, Jane Gardam, a bunch of others . . . Or as I light on one of the newer, younger writers, with the recognition that – yes, here is the sort of thing I want. I suppose that this is the reader in me taking command. But it is also, I think, a writerly satisfaction in seeing it done by others as I would wish it done – in seeing the show kept on the road. Maybe elderly athletes enjoy watching the hundred meters in the same spirit.
    Out with acquisition, excitement, and aspiration except in tempered mode. And, on another front, I don’t in the least lament certain emotions. I can remember falling in love, being in love; life would have been incomplete without that particular exaltation, but I wouldn’t want to go back there. I still love – there is a swathe of people that I love – but I am glad indeed to be done with that consuming, tormenting form of the emotion.
    So this is old age, and I am probably shedding readers by the drove at this point. If you are not yet in it, you may be shuddering. If you are, you will perhaps disagree, in which case I can only say: this is how it is for me. And if it sounds – to anyone – a pretty pallid sort of place, I can refute that. It is not.
    Certain desires and drives have gone. But what remains is response. I am as alive to the world as I have ever been – alive to everything I see and hear and feel. I revel in this morning’s March sunshine, and the cream and purple hellebore just out in the garden; I listen to a radio discussion about the ethics of selective abortion, and chip in at points; the sound of a beloved voice on the phone brings a surge of pleasure. Yesterday, I rejoiced in the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy (for the third time) – that singing color, that exuberance (and he is seventy-five); I am reading John Lanchester’s
Capital
, slowly because it is the sort of capacious novel I like and I don’t want it to end. I think there is a sea change, in old age – a metamorphosis of the sensibilities. With those old consuming vigors now muted, something else comes into its own – an almost luxurious appreciation of the world that you are still in. Spring was never so vibrant; autumn never so richly gold. Maybe that’s why Hockney is painting like this, now. People are of abiding interest – observed in the street, overheard on a bus. The small pleasures have bloomed into points of relish in the day – food, opening the newspaper (new minted, just for me), a shower, the comfort of bed. It is almost like some kind of end-game salute to the intensity of childhood experience, when the world was new. It is an old accustomed world now, but invested with fresh significance; I’ve seen all this before, done all this, but am somehow able to find new and sharpened pleasure.
    On a good day, aches and pains in abeyance. On a bad day – well, on a bad day a sort of shutter comes down, and the world is dulled. But I know that it is there, the shutter will roll up, with luck, the sun will come out.
    The stereotypes of old age run from the smiling old dear to the grumbling curmudgeon. In fiction, they are rife – indeed fiction is perhaps mainly responsible for the standard perception of the old, with just a few writers able to raise the game. Muriel Spark’s
Memento Mori
is a black comedy, with a group of elderly plagued by sinister phone calls: “Remember you must die.” No stereotypes, but a bunch of sharply drawn individuals, convincingly old, bedeviled by specific ailments, and mainly concerned with revisions of their pasts in terms of will-making and the machinations of relationships. Kingsley Amis also went for comedy, in
Ending Up
, with a group cohabiting in a cottage and busy scoring points off each other – funny, but with a bleak undertone. Saul