A Balkan Passage
I
In early years, as one goes through a book with many pictures, the anticipation of the general world colours each glimpse of landscape, people, animal, house, building, street, river and sky in the book. Whether the content is marvellous or dull, it is charged with the current of an abiding emotion that derives from fascination or at least plain interest; and the larger world that waits to be discovered becomes at least partially formed and enriched through these pictures. At the same time, that larger world now holds out many more possibilities than before and, since the early years are usually unregenerate in their holy innocence, almost nothing intervenes of deception, disillusionment and the like as photographs in a book are studied in their starkness. A plethora of dreams and feelings conjures itself up and replenishes itself upon every view of these pictures, which take the attention more than words. It matters not that the book is about a bygone era, for every representation in it has, and will have, a realization in the world that is waiting out there.
When written words, however, begin to matter more as the years pass, then the attraction that some pictures once exerted becomes in its turn a matter of absorption. One wonders how a single large book lying forlornly in a bookshelf corner could take up hours of one’s attention and how one could be so immersed when it was not boredom that had to be forgotten. It is not always puerile gullibility or fantasy that can explain the effect of pictures in the early years. Before the influence of the larger world tames and sobers the mind, one makes an identification with images in a certain book in the framework of a singular yearning as if, it seems from present vantage, for another world that had once been experienced. Hour after hour one turns over the pages in utmost procrastination, regarding each photograph with the devotion of an animal stalking its prized prey in the tall grass. If the pictures have become familiar and expected through countless leafings of the book, the attention to them does not diminish by an iota with each scrutiny.
In later years, then, the regard one has upon this preoccupation of early years gives scope for intense reflection. To reflect on an absorption in the pictures of a book in the past is to accept that some images are forever inviolable even if they are regarded in ignorance. It is this inviolability that defines a fundamental quest for the rest of one’s life, and to describe the book now is to commit oneself to an ekphrasis that tries not to conflate the yearning of the present with the yearning of the past. This is perhaps an almost impossible task, but what matters is that the reflection on an absorption or gaze in the past tends to produce an uncommon inspiration towards one or more creations in the present. These creations may be no more than individual idylls or flights of a mystical imagination, yet they have the possibility of containing aspirations that draw from the stock of humanity’s own goals.
II
The book held in the hands of childhood was one of an old hardbound series titled “World Library”, and it may or may not have been a coincidence that the volume on the Balkans in that series was the single one present on the bookshelf. On the jacket of that book, sunshine spread itself over water, terrace, bridge and house. Only bleak hills of limestone beyond the bridge on the river chose to refuse with absolute obstinacy the sunlight on a day that must be a holiday. Upon the terrace on the edge of the river, umbrella canopies were unfolded in bright colours, below which more young people than old stretched their bared backs upon a grainy surface. Farther down the rocky bank was a species of what appeared to be short alders in dusky and abundant foliage.
The river gave off a hue of deep aquamarine for most of its body; it moved with unabated restlessness towards the bridge, such restlessness as must discourage all thought of a plunge into the water for a greater measure of luxury on a day such as this. Nevertheless, some of the young people stood in trunks on a brittle-seeming, pitted rock close to the bank for an intrepid, but wisely not prolonged, dash into the current. The waters evoked the notion of a river drawing off filaments along its body that swayed and turned to ease themselves into lighter hues, some of which foamed with a blanched passion.
Prosen, your writing is amazing.
How beautifully you write Prosenjit !