and there’s magic in all animate things. I had to give up on Nansen and his North Pole quest diary, Farthest North, when he started butchering the dogs. I didn’t have the stomach for it, couldn’t face the slaughter memories and those night sweats Nansen suffered in the years after he’d made his miles-per-dog calculations. He goes on to say that this might be the cost of any great challenge, you have to expose yourself to the horrors and strip everything down to a brute determination. Is it the same in the arts, that you have to shun and neglect the things you love – and that love you – to write something that might earn its ticket into the library of the dead? If that’s the cost of entry it’s not one I’m willing to pay, even if I had the words in me to dig out, that’s clear to me now. But I can live with my failings. And while that’s going on, I’ll try my best to swerve the Nansen horrors and not kill a living thing. Lately I can’t even step on a bug, I rehouse spiders and heave at the sash windows to liberate wasps. I’m with Kerouac in Desolation Angels, blubbing with Buddhist remorse when he kills the mouse that’s made a home in his forest cabin. I remember reading that passage when I was about fifteen and almost dropping the book in my lap; here’s a man who can say it’s wrong to kill a mouse, that’s an insight looking up at me from the page. And there aren’t many insights in Kerouac, more that glorious, gurgling flow of journeys and faces, books he’s reading, letters from friends, lost hopes, new hopes, cafe interiors and rambling chats with Cody. Insights are rare. So when they come along grab hold. And see that magic in living things, even in the ride-by glimpse of a walled rose.
