I published The Sense of an Ending in 2011, when I was 65. My previous novel had come out six years before, and was the longest I had written. This was to be my shortest. Various things change you as a person and a writer as you age. You think more about time and memory; about what time does to memory, and memory does to time. You also mistrust memory more than when you were younger: you realise that it resembles an act of the imagination rather than a matter of simple mental recuperation.
“We seem to be in a Catch-22 scenario where we haven’t explored the deep ocean because we don’t appreciate what a remarkable, mysterious, and wondrous place it is, and we don’t know what an astonishing place it is because we haven’t explored it,” she argues. Meanwhile, she writes, “we are managing to destroy the ocean before we even know what’s in it.”
Yes, there are some heavy-handed metaphors about vision (see: the optician, the book’s title, etc.) and sentimental bits. particularly when characters recall childhood memories. But there is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Leky’s vision of perpetual love compelling. Of course, that’s because I err on the side of hope.
In “A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication”, Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer, a psychologist and a statistician, argue that visual thinking, by revealing what would otherwise remain invisible, has had a profound effect on the way we approach problems. The book begins with what might be the first statistical graph in history, devised by the Dutch cartographer Michael Florent van Langren in the sixteen-twenties.
We browsed and as usual that one I hadn’t read.
At showtime we lay down between the stacks