Jan Morris - Thinking Again

by the same author

HEAVENS COMMAND: AN IMPERIAL PROGRESS

PAX BRITANNICA: THE CLIMAX OF AN EMPIRE

FAREWELL THE TRUMPETS: AN IMPERIAL RETREAT

COAST TO COAST

CORONATION EVEREST

VENICE

OXFORD

CONUNDRUM

TRIESTE AND THE MEANING OF NOWHERE

A WRITERS HOUSE IN WALES

A WRITERS WORLD

EUROPE: AN INTIMATE JOURNEY

HAV

FISHERS FACE

DESTINATIONS

A VENETIAN BESTIARY

SPAIN

AMONG THE CITIES

THE GREAT PORT

THE HASHEMITE KINGS

HONG KONG

LINCOLN

THE MATTER OF WALES

MANHATTAN 45

THE MARKET OF SELEUKIA

SOUTH AFRICAN WINTER

THE SPECTACLE OF EMPIRE

CONTACT!

CIAO, CARPACCIO!

BATTLESHIP YAMATO

IN MY MINDS EYE

Copyright 2020 by Jan Morris

First American Edition 2021

All rights reserved

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With Kind Regards to Everyone

______________________________________

Ave et Vale?

My indulgent publishers, in both London and New York, published the first 188 of these diary entries in book form. Since entry 188 ended cheerfully but distinctly elegiacally, it occurred to me that perhaps that was the moment to stop writing my diary altogether.

However I am a strong believer in the strength of Routine, and conceiving and writing these inconsequential little pieces has become virtually mechanical in itself, like many another petty compulsion. My mother, who was partly of Quaker stock, would never dream of placing another volume on top of her Bible, and pagan agnostic that I am, I still find myself involuntarily touching wood (i.e. touching the wood of the Cross) to avert bad luck. And I dont know about you, but in my everyday affairs too there are personal routines, edging into such superstitions, that I feel I must honour.

For example nothing would induce me to go to bed without calling a last Goodnight to my Elizabeth, and at this moment I really have to re-read another chapter of dear old Anna Karenina before I turn the lights out. Rain or shine, sleet or snow, I have to perform my daily walk (and the worse the weather, the more strict the compulsion), while indulging in Wednesdays allotted marmalade at Tuesdays breakfast really would be more blasphemous than merely irreverent.

And this daily diary has edged its way into the roster. It has become a pleasant part of my life not a duty, nor even a chore, but a happy few minutes each day whenever I feel like it. Whether or not it goes well (and I know when it doesnt), I offer it to my readers, as to myself, with doubts and apologies often, but always with a smug conviction of Routine honoured.

So there it is. Not Vale just yet!

______________________________________

For most people around the world, it seems to me, these weeks around the beginning of spring 2018 have been one long, disorienting cock-up, and it has knocked many of our disciplines askew Tragedy to farce, incompetence to despotism, uncertainty to arrogance, all that is most miserable about the human condition seems to have entangled all our lives as the winter ends. The weather hasnt helped either, what with typhoons and forest fires and unprecedented snowfalls all over the place schools closed, electric power failed, trains and flights cancelled, melting snow turned maliciously into floods. Nature itself seems to have had enough of us, and has told us so.

Worst of all, though, has been the way humanity has turned upon itself. Across the globe in these unhappy weeks there have been reports of corruptions and cruelties, killings, betrayals, reputations ruined and sneaky disclosures gleefully trumpeted. Is nobody decent any more? Can I not trust my neighbour? Wheres God gone, if there is one? We dont know, we dont know, and theres the trouble. We have no certainties any more, no heroes to trust, no Way (in mystic capital letters) and no Destination.

But perhaps you will forgive me, on this wretched day, if I propagate an old thesis of my own once more. It is this: that the simplest and easiest of virtues, Kindness, can offer all of us not only a Way through the imbroglio, but a Destination too.

______________________________________

It being a sunny, boisterous day, for a change, I went for my thousand morning paces along the nearby waterfront of Pwllheli, where a hundred yachts are moored now and where long ago fleets of merchant schooners came and went.

My tune for the day, part whistled, part sort of sung to myself, was a song called Over There, which George M. Cohan wrote in 1917 to support American intervention in the European war. Its a fine confident march with a fine confident lyric, composed in the days when an American soldier posted overseas might be sure of a welcome wherever he went. He knew that whatever cause he was sent to support would be a just cause, and it was only proper that, as Cohan hymned it, he should not come home till it was over over there:

Over there, over there

The Yanks are coming

And we wont come back till its

over over there!

Cohan died in 1942, so he did not live to know the irony that attends the song now, but as I walk I sing it anyway, if only in my minds ear, to remember the greater days of a nobler nation.

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Necrophilia is not one of my failings, but I do like graveyards and memorial stones and such. I long ago wrote our own gravestone epitaph, which reads as follows: HERE ARE TWO FRIENDS, JAN AND ELIZABETH MORRIS, AT THE END OF ONE LIFE. The inscribed stone awaits the day under the stairs, and will eventually be laid upon an islet we own in the river Dwyfor below our house, smilingly to crack and crumble into nothing.

Lots of people, of course, of every religious persuasion, do not want your standard hearse, wreath, sermon and cemetery kind of end, and near us here there is a place dedicated to burials of a very much simpler kind. It is a patch of conifer woodland, off a quiet country road, which shows no apparent sign of being consecrated or, for that matter, of being a burial place at all. I went there for the first time the other day, because it sounded like rather my sort of necropolis, but, alas, found it more disturbing than comforting. The wood was certainly peaceful, as I wandered through its shades. There was nobody else about, and no sound but the breath of the wind through the trees. At first there seemed to be no sign of human exploitation either, but gradually I realized that here and there, half hidden among the tree trunks, were small rough-cut stones with names on them, and occasional small bunches of flowers. It was as though my eyes were just getting used to the dark and silent peacefulness those few scores of stones, scattered silent all among the trees, with their occasional remembrances