In July, my father died and I discovered how much words matter and how little.  They were inadequate to so much of what was required.  To comfort my father and give him heart as he contemplated what was ahead; to give my mother courage, and my siblings, companionship; and to honour him at his funeral.

Yet we got by, even with the clumsiness, because words are also essential.  This quickly became apparent when we were planning the funeral.  None of us had had any experience of this, and each day brought another person asking for decisions on things we’d never expected to be asked, at a time when we were most unfit to decide.

One of the decisions was whether to have a celebrant or a priest lead the service.  My father was a very lapsed Catholic and probably hadn’t been to church, except for weddings and funerals, since he was a small boy.  In the hospital my sister had asked him straight out what he wanted, and he’d replied to the effect he “didn’t want all that religious rubbish.”

So a celebrant seemed the way to go.

However, as the day drew near, we found ourselves doubting.  My mother, not having a religious bone in her body herself, suddenly remembered my father crossing himself in reflex on entering the church at the recent Catholic mass of a friend, and she woke one morning feeling nothing but a priest could bestow the dignity and solemnity she now found imperative.

And this is how I felt too.  In particular, I wanted a blessing.  I once heard the writer Helen Garner speaking not long after the end of her marriage to Murray Bail, an event she fictionalized in The Last Days of Chez Nous.  She said how she’d been reading the Bible and had joined a church because “she wanted someone to bless her.”  Now I know what she meant.

In the end, the priest supplied the secular – a wonderfully apt poem by Bruce Dawe, which he chose completely unprompted – and we supplied the religious – the request for people to share in speaking The Lord’s Prayer and to receive Aaron’s Blessing.  In death, it seems only the telling of these ancient words, like beads on a rosary, can come close to doing what’s required.

Here, for those of you who may not have heard it for a while, or for those who may be needing comfort, are the words of Aaron’s Blessing from the magnificent King James Version:

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:
The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.

(Numbers 6: 24-26)

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Also in July, I started reading Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev.  Strange I should be reading a book with Fathers in the title.

I know very little about Turgenev, apart from the fact he’s in the grand tradition of Russian masters. It’s the first of his works I’ve read and I’m gratified to read in the Afterword by Tatyana Tolystaya (yes, a relative of Tolstoy’s) it’s regarded as his best.

She says, quite rightly, that it

has not aged to this day.

Written in 1862, and full of the realistic detail of a very particular moment in time – the end of serfdom in Russia – the novel could not be fresher or more alive.  It has that same quality Tolstoy has: the sensation of quickness — literally, life — pulsing through its ink.

There’s so much to enjoy about it.  For someone like me who enjoys pen portraits, there’s the wonderful, delicately comic portrait of the mother of Bazarov, the prat-cum-chief protagonist, for example.

Arina Vlasyevna was a true Russian gentlewoman of olden time.  She should have lived two hundred years before, in the days of old Muscovy.  She was extremely devout and sensitive, believed in all kinds of portents, fortune-telling, spells and dreams.  She believed in holy idiots, house spirits, wood goblins, unlucky encounters, the evil eye, folk medicines, Maundy Thursday salt, and the imminence of the world’s end.

The notes tell us, a propos of holy idiots, that the “mentally deficient were thought to be blessed by God and often lived off charity.”

He goes on.

She believed that if the candles at the Easter midnight service didn’t go out, then there’d be a good crop of buckwheat, and that mushrooms stop growing if seen by a human eye … She was afraid of mice, grass-snakes, frogs, sparrows, leeches, thunder, cold water, draughts, horses, billy goats, redheads and black cats …

That “billy goats” is priceless.

It gets better.

She hadn’t read a single book except Alexis, or The Cottage in the Wood, wrote one or at most two letters a year and had a good understanding of housekeeping, of drying food and making preserves, although she touched nothing with her own hands and generally didn’t like to move from her seat.

You can be sure that Alexis, or The Cottage in the Wood, was not a work to stretch the brain.

In her youth she had been very pretty, she played the clavichord and could speak a little French; but in the course of many moves of house with her husband (whom she had married against her will) she had lost her figure and forgotten her music and French.

There are many more bon mots from Turgenev and I’m only halfway.  More to come perhaps.

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Speaking of Tolstoy, also read great article by James Meek in the ever-reliable London Review of Books, about a swag of books just published on Tolstoy to mark the 100th anniversary of his death.

Was riveted by Meek’s discussion of The Kreutzer Sonata which Tolstoy wrote in 1889 about a jealous husband who murders his wife.  Meek puts his finger on one of Tolstoy’s most distinctive skills:

The Kreutzer Sonata has passages – notably the murder scene – in which Tolstoy’s most unusual skill, his ability to take time and divide it into a series of discrete moments that are perfectly sequential and yet do not look forward or back to each other, is deployed with as much brilliance as ever.  When the husband takes down an ornamental dagger to kill his wife, the sheath falls behind the sofa and he thinks, ‘I’ll have to get it out afterwards, otherwise I’ll never find it again.’  The moment has no narrative lead-in and no explicit consequence, yet by breaking with the narrative conventions of contingency, it produces the perfect simulacrum of actual time.

Meek also tells us that Tolstoy wrote the book after he’d entered his “ascetic-born-again philosopher-prophet” period, and that he agreed with the murderer that

… his mistake wasn’t so much killing his wife as getting married, and having sex; in a sinful society, he would have been better off remaining a virgin.

He then tells us of a macabre consequence of Tolstoy’s preaching in this case, recorded by Sofia Tolstoy in her diary.

On 31 August 1909, she wrote: ‘This morning we had a visit from a 30-year-old Romanian who had castrated himself at the age of 18 after reading The Kreutzer Sonata.  He then took to working on his land – just 19 acres – and was terribly disillusioned today to see that Tolstoy writes on thing but lives in luxury.’ (Tolstoy himself wrote in his diary: ‘An exceedingly interesting man.’)

*****

To read Meek’s article, click here.