Life, the universe and everything

"If I could define enlightenment briefly I would say it is 'the quiet acceptance of what is." Wayne Dyer

I don't think this post will have much to say about food. In fact I'm not sure what it is going to be about really, but I do know that it is inspired by this book which I finished the day before yesterday - as you can see it is called Enlightenment and is by Sarah Perry. It was apparently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but got no further. Sarah Perry is an English - nay an Essex - writer, who I now discover was brought up as a Strict Baptist, but is now, what I guess you would perhaps call agnostic. Religion does indeed feature in her books, but don't let that put you off, as I guess it's more a kind of spirituality than religion, with a sense of wonder, mystery and questioning.

Sarah Perry's biggest success so far was The Essex Serpent, which became a best seller and was made into an AppleTV+ series with Clare Danes and Tom Hiddlestone. I bought the original book for two - well three reasons I suppose.

The cover was mindblowingly gorgeous - for me anyway. But it wasn't just me because I believe the cover design won some big design award. I just found it on my bookshelves, because I remember that not only did it look good, but it had a textural feel as well - almost embroidered. And yes my copy is textured, but not in the way I remembered. Maybe I lost the original and just bought a substitute. The second reason was the title. I grew up in what was then Essex. My home base in Hornchurch was absorbed into Greater London, in later years, but my high school was definitely in Essex and we spent many happy weekends wandering the highways and byways of this beautiful, but mostly ignored, even despised, corner of England. The icing on the cake, as it were, of its tale of a local legend unravelled, as were the lives of its protagonists, was the clincher. Anywy I loved it and have now read her two subsequent books - the first Nehemoth, being a bit of a disappointment, but this current one, which took her six years to write, almost the perfect novel. For me anyway.

One of the magical things about this book and it is indeed magical was the coincidence of Brian Cox's latest turn around the Solar System on the television. The day after I began the book, whose first part was illustrated with this diagram of Keppler's first Law - the Law of Ellipses - we watched Brian Cox as he demonstrated, in typical fashion, with rocks in some wondrously scenic spot - this very diagram and its very mysterious second focus point. F2, which even he implied, I think - I am no physicist - but with his trademark grin - that the second focus point is a bit of mystery that can only be explained by complicated maths.

I suppose the point of the coincidence is that both the book and the TV program are both talking about mysteries, terrors, magic, wonder and that they both use the universe which to tiny human brains like mine is basically inexplicable - to sort of explain our own interiour lives.

And another coincidence. I treated myself to Nigel Slater's latest - yes - resolution not to speak of Nigel this week broken - A Thousand Feasts - which is not a cookbook but a collection of small pieces he has written in notebooks as he has lived his life. A coincidence, only that it talks about everyday mysteries and wonders. Moments of beauty and joy. Small ones.

Enlightenment is also beautifully written. I read fast, and inevitably skim and forget. This book - Enlightenment - I read with care, savouring every word. The characters seem real, the scenery - especially to an Essex girl, is a character in itself, from the tatty everyday ordinariness in an English town - the supermarket trolleys in the river, the dingy pub, the train that rattles past - to the marshy ground, and the light of the sun on the chapel windows.

The characters are involving, as is their complicated story and surrounding it all is the mystery of the universe, and the comet that is coming - like the Oort cloud which Brian Cox spoke about in his second program - a phenomenon I did not know about. Far, far, far away - halfway to the nearest star -there is a cloud of small bodies of rock that form a kind of shroud around the solar system. Mind-blowing.

I suppose the wonder of the book is how it balances the mundane, the loves, losses and trials of human lives, against the wonder and beauty of the entire universe. How even ordinary lives - the people in this book are ordinary - can be important. At the end of one of the central character's, pieces of writing for the local newspaper he says:

"'You are the music', said T.S. Eliot

While the music lasts."

Which is, at the same time reassuring and somewhat grim. And somehow, adding in those words 'said T.S. Eliot' adds an extra level of meaning.

Don't ask me how or why though, because one thing these books and the TV program tells me is that I am hopeless at communicating all of those big thoughts, that we probably all have, but don't really understand. Until, at least for a brief moment at least, you read a book like this.

And, of course, we are all different. I thought of proposing it for my book group book next year, but felt that my fellow book groupers - most of them anyway - would find it all too airy-fairy - with characters of no interest at all. But I just couldn't let it go by without at least a mention.

YEARS PAST

December 6

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Malaysian food

2021 - Nothing

2020 - Memory + imagination = dinner

2019 - Vegetables without water

2018 - Sharing a picture

2017 - We eat the birds

2016 - The much maligned dandelion