The Idea of Home by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

civilians. They were irreverent, unsanctimonious, unself-aggrandising and largely unsung. But their competence and dedication has won Australia many friends in the tattered corners of the world. Like journalists, aid workers travel on the tides of disaster. We come and we go, unsure if we leave any permanent trace behind us. Near the end of her life, Martha Gellhorn reflected on this as she addressed a gathering of young journalists:
    All my reporting life, I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and I have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don’t need to worry about that. My responsibility is the effort. I belong to a global fellowship of men and women who are concerned with the planet and its least protected inhabitants.
    Some of us — Greg Shackleton, my Wall Street Journal colleague Daniel Pearl — will die making that effort. The least we can do is pay attention. It is too easy, for most of us, to ignore injustices in far away countries, to push them to the back shelves of our conscience like unread books. But in this interconnected world, that behaviour becomes increasingly perilous. Because the membrane that divides the prosperous and peaceful world from the poor and war-ravaged one is weakening. We see it in the woes of the global economy, which have spread like a blastoma, penetrating into even the healthiest tissues and causing dysfunction.
    What’s coming environmentally will be much worse. And no flags, no borders, can protect us.
    When my father died, an Australian flag draped the coffin at his funeral. My immigrant father loved that flag. As for me, I prefer to imagine the possibility of a future when we won’t require national flags at all. I glimpsed it for a moment, that night at the Sydney Olympics: that moment when we only needed one flag, bedecked with doves of light.

FOUR
A HOME IN FICTION
    A few years ago, on a crisp autumn day in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I attended a lecture entitled ‘Singularities in Algebraic Plane Curves’. For reasons that I will not go into, it was necessary that I attend. I slumped into the room, armed with a doodle pad. My plan was to sit politely and let the talk sail over my head. I would use the hour for meditative reverie; perhaps, if I positioned myself wisely, a discreet little nap might be possible.
    On the pad I carried that day, I have a few fragments of the sentences the mathematician used:
    A formal power series about the origin is an infinite sum
    Homomorphism is an isomorphism if and only if the matrix is inevitable
    This is like poetry, I thought, and I leaned forward to hear more. The mathematician was eloquent. She was passionate. And when I set aside my firm belief that I could not comprehend her, something strange happened. It wasn’t that I understood her work, but I understood her vision. I realised I had lived, until that moment, in an airlock, and that she was prising open the heavy door, just a crack. In the sudden brief shaft of light, I glimpsed a sliver of the world beyond, the world in which she lived. When she looked at the old maple beyond the lecture room window, at the great swoop of bough arcing out from massive trunk, her consciousness overlaid a pattern on that branch that was elegant and sensual. I could imagine, for a moment, what it was to see with her eyes, to feel with her heart, to inhabit a space in which the language was notparticular and national, but infinite and universal, a world in which every object sang to her with its own particular music, chiming out in delicate arpeggios and thundering chords.
    I know now that it is a beautiful world, but I also know that I can’t live there. If she has lungs, I have gills. I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life. I am sure though that our work, the