Writing Lessons on BART

The end of the English Patient, and I cannot stop shaking. So beautiful an ending...

....People fall in love with her. She still remembers the lines of poems the Englishman read out loud to her from his commonplace book. She is a woman I don't know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.
And so Hanna moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cup and a glass dislodges. Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkled at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.

--The English Patient, p302

So the book ends. This way. Each grows old apart, in two worlds.

Implosion of time and space: This is one of the most beautiful thing that Ondaatje does time and again. He takes bold leaps across place and time. The first time I read this passage, I had to read it again... because it was confusing. But then one realizes that he has compressed distance, not time, in this last passage. A glass falls in Canada, and a fork is picked up in India. Wow. I really can't find the words to discuss this any more other than the fact that it is an act of genius to compress distance like this.

There has been many other occasions when Ondaatje compresses time. but this time, this is rare, this compressing of distance. The time is unified. It is simultanoues, it is the distance that is imploded. Two characters, two places, two incidents, linked only by the will of the writer, and this compression carried through by the weight of the entire book that came before it.

I can't talk anymore. Whatever else I say is futile. It is too beautiful to dissect. I just wish I can write like that too.

Labels: Writing Lessons on BART