Tag: helen garner

Lightly Child. Lightly.

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I hit a low point today. I felt I could not go on. It was like knowing that a free garden, calm and full of rest, lay on the other side of a wall. I knew where the gate was, I could walk through it whenever I felt like it. I was withholding release from myself. Then I had a coffee and a cake, went back to the desk, forced a solution, and kept going.

— Helen Garner, One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995

  • Portrait via Inside Story. “Garner Territory” by Zora Simic: “In one of the most remarkable entries, in the thick of torment, Garner envisions a new life for herself… “Sometimes we know what we want even when we think we want something else.” Another friend declares, “I think these diaries are the best thing she’s ever written.” I agree; they are her life’s work, and the ideal mode for a “writer who works off and is nourished by the events of daily life.” •
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.

So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.

— Helen Garner, from “Helen Garner on happiness: ‘It’s taken me 80 years to figure out it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm’” in the Guardian, February 4, 2023

Sunday Morning

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During communion a man played a long and beautiful piece on the piano. I asked him later what it was: Beethoven. He played correctly, and with feeling, but he is not ‘a good pianist’ and that’s why I enjoyed it so much, because it was hard come by and humbly offered.

— Helen Garner, One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995

Notes:

  • Photo: Hans Lindgren
  • Book Review of Helen Garner’s “One Day I”ll Remember This” by Charlotte in Book Bird. “…There are some books you slip through like water. They have a weightlessness to them, an otherworldly lack of friction…This was my experience of reading Helen Garner’s diaries. I was surprised by how immersive it was, that experience, how easy to lose my sense of time…Garner is a very sensual, instinctive writer. She feels her way through moments, days, and years, and documents those feelings as they roll and toss…”

Walking. With Helen and Back.

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So, here we are. 1,229 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

98% overcast, a sliver of sunlight slashes the horizon.

Audible is plugged in to Helen Garner’s “One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987-1995”. And the author narrates:

“A whole life can be spent quietly and patiently drawing nearer to something important. It can’t be hurried…”

Standing here at midlife (yes, I’m still calling it that), I ponder. 

And I walk. 

Helen continues.

“The story about looking. I want it to have a curve in it. To come right back and tie itself to the very beginning.”

No Helen. There’s no looking back. Not last week. Not to the middle. And certainly not to the beginning.

“As if I could change myself in any way, at this age. All I can do is try to know myself and apply discipline.”

Helen’s been reading to me all week on my morning walks, and I’m smitten. Rewind, 30 seconds. Play. Rewind, Play, Rewind, Play, Rewind. I’ve got vertigo.

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