Free The Lost Life by Steven Carroll Page A

of autumn. On, well, falling in love. But he has, and soon enough he’ll be off. It was all planned. All organised. Tickets. Places to stay, people to meet. The whole venture has acquired an inevitability that can’t be avoided. But he’s fallen in love, and now it is complex. And time is dwindling.
    And so as their mouths unglue and they look about, they are still confronted with the same problem. The problem that has plagued them all through the summer and into the autumn. Theproblem still unresolved, like a question left hanging in the air as they talk and wander back to town.

    Later, the sun sinking over the town, Emily Hale watches from a market stall as this Catherine (to whom she has become attached and whom she trusts, as she would one of her girls) kisses, briefly, her young man in the street. It is a brief kiss but filled with implication — that they would be more than happy to linger over each other in this way but not in the plain view of the street, with its market-day stalls. The restraint on the part of these two young lovers adds, she notes, poignancy to the brevity of the kiss, giving it a force and power that almost makes the kiss, to the observer, a felt experience. A ‘felt experience’? This phrase occurs to Emily Hale because Catherine has recently used it in her presence. And it seems to have stuck the way some phrases do, for it comes back to her now as she watches the young lovers, while also congratulating herself on being ‘up with’ the latest terms.
    If she were to tell Catherine this (and Catherine is oblivious to her presence, has no awareness of being observed at all — not by anybody who matters that is), one part of her would smile. For it is a fashionable phrase that the critics Catherine reads use now when they are talking about poetry — that the right words, used in precisely the right way by someone gifted in the use of words, provide the reader with a ‘felt experience’. It is also the test of great writing — if it is ‘felt’ or not. Catherine is happy with the phrase for she is sure she knows what it means and that good writing has exactly that effect on her: she feels as if she is there, in a story, with all these characters she cares so much about. And so, when a character bites into a ripe peach, one feels the skin break and tastes the juices, and with this feeling comes a hearty regard for the power of words. Catherine is continually told by those who write about poetry that words aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, the things people did and felt and the words they used to describe it were all one. Words had natural power. And mattered. Not in the modern world. But a ‘felt experience’ brings back the glory days of literature when words did matter, and with that brings back the promise that words might just matter again someday — somedaysoon, when people will tuck into a book as they tuck into a pie. Daniel calls it waffle because as much as he is one of these sensitive types who would be completely lost in a revolution, he not so much smells a rat as a dusty gentlemen’s club where everybody sits around sniffing all this ‘felt experience’ like they would a vintage port, while the ‘felt’ reality of the actual world goes completely unnoticed outside in the mines and factories where people are ground daily into early death.
    Nonetheless, when Emily Hale, from the safe distance of a market stall, watches the lips of the two young lovers reluctantly part, it is a felt experience. With the experience, comes a familiar yearning. And, once more, her heart goes out to this eighteen-year-old Catherine, to whom she has become attached, whom she has taken under her wing, a protectiveness that now has added urgency because she knows that the young man, whose lips Catherine would dearly love to taste again if they were not in plain view of the street, is leaving soon. Leaving for foreign parts, just as a young man once left her.
    They are a young