Thank you Mr. Durrell

Lawrence Durrell is one of those few poets whose gifts migrate well to prose.

In my Favorite Books in the profile, I have listed The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell's enduring masterpiece. It is four books: Justine, Baltahzar, Mountolive, and Clea.

I have spent most of my life under the complete spell of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Couldn't really say why, but not because it's unclear to me; it's not unclear at all. I couldn't say simply because it's axiomatic to my mind and heart. How could I not? More on that in another post perhaps.

But The Alexandria Quartet is by no means SF, nor Fantasy. Why and how it gives me what I need, that usually I only find in stories of elsewhen, I can't say either. This really is a mystery, and it pleases me to be mystified and gratified all at once.

I'll let the author help explain, if explanations are called for. This is the beginning: the opening of Justine.

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes...

I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child—Melissa's child. I do not know why I use the word "escape". The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way...

At night when the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot by the echoing chimney-piece I light a lamp and limp about, thinking of my friends—of Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora—precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!

I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all! Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.

I should stop there. But because I'm self-indulgent and this blog, as Red Green would say, "is mine, and I can do what I want with it", more from a few pages on:

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another?

And:

Today the child and I finished the hearth-stone of the house together, quietly talking as we worked. I talk to her as I would talk to myself if I were alone; she answers in an heroic language of her own invention. We buried the rings Cohen had bought for Melissa under the hearth-stone, according to the custom of this island. This will ensure good luck to the inmates of the house.