From Word To Word

In the process of preparing for my Survey of Literature I course in the fall, I have been looking for adaptations of the major texts we will be studying, especially contemporary examples that would serve as points of comparison for my students.  Both Beowulf and William Shakespeare’s King Lear have a wealth of adaptations both old and new.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and John Milton’s Paradise Lost have many fewer adaptations, but enough to serve my purpose.  Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene, however, has been almost entirely ignored by adaptors, at least as far as I can tell.  The title shows up in various places, like Henry Purcell’s semi-opera, but not often attached to adaptations of Spencer’s text.  The narrative of St. George and the dragon has been retold in different ways, but this is only a very small part of the work.

I am at a loss, so consider this a general call to adapt The Faerie Queene.  An opera would be lovely, something really heroic in the style of the German romantics.  I would also like a theatrical version in an impressionist mode, a little abstract, a little surreal.  A film would even be acceptable, so long as it avoided casting anyone remotely recognizable as a Hollywood star.  I also want a graphic novel, but with full page illustrations, not the comic style boxes, something vaguely artistic.  In place of this I would also take a cycle of illustrations, preferably by someone interesting, like Dave McKean or Yoshitaka Amano.

So there it is.  Go do it.  You have until September.

In preparation for my course this fall, I have been rereading some of the major texts, one of which is Beowulf. The lines that always impress my imagination the most come late in the narrative, just before the now aged Beowulf goes to face the dragon who will be his destroyer. They are the words of the last of the people whose treasure has now become the dragon’s hoard, and I am drawn to them because they do well what much early-English and Norse poetry does well. They lament the passing of the noble and the heroic.

The translation from which I will be quoting can be found in Broadview Press’s anthology, which is the text that my students will be using. There is another translation that I much prefer, but I cannot seem to find it at the moment, and I do not have the time to make a serious search. The version I quote is more than adequate in any case.

“Death in war

and awful deadly harm have swept away

all of my people who have passed from life,

and left the joyful hall. Now have I none

to bear the sword or burnish the bright cup,

the precious vessel - all that host has fled.

Now must the hardened helm of hammered gold

be stripped of all its trim; the stewards sleep

who should have tended to this battle-mask.

So too this warrior’s coat, which waited once

the bite of iron over the crack of boards,

molders like its owner. The coat of mail

cannot travel widely with the war-chief,

beside the heroes. Harp-joy have I none,

no happy song; nor does the well-schooled hawk

soar high throughout the hall, nor the swift horse

stamp in the courtyards. Savage butchery

has sent forth many of the race of men.”

Whatever advances our civilization considers itself to have made over the one that produced these words, I suspect that there will be few such words of lament when ours passes away. There will be few odes to the businessman or the lawyer, few ballads of the politician or the advertising executive, few eulogies for the banker or the insurance salesman. Our only heroes are such that cannot bear this kind of immortalization without cyniscism: the sports hero, the pop diva, the movie star. These may have their tributes, but none that will bear reading a thousand years from now.

I think I have probably written on more than one occasion about how much I enjoy the kind of magic realist or fantastical stories authored by people like Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Franz Kafka and G. K. Chesterton and Jorge Louis Borges. Unfortunately, because my English Literature degrees introduced me to more literary theory than literature, and because my life now offers me little enough time for books, there is much that I have not yet had the opportunity to read, even of these favourite authors. One such book, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, has been sitting on my shelf for several years now, and probably would have remained there for some time yet if I had not been reminded of it by a recent correspondence with TC, who mentioned that she had read it to her son.

Yesterday evening, however, after an overfull day, my sister-in-law took my eldest son for a few hours, and my youngest son went to sleep for the night. My wife and I made some tea, sat on the front porch in the finally cooling air, and read. She finished Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, which fell somewhat short of her expectations. I picked up Rushdie’s story about Haroun and his Sea of Stories, which certainly did not fall short of mine.

The book is unlike much of Rushdie’s other fiction. It is more explicitly fantastical, closer in this respect to Grimus, his first novel, but it is much lighter in tone than Grimus. It has the feeling of an oriental fairy tale, something like Arabian Nights, but with a decidedly modern influence. It reminded me of some of Neil Gaiman’s writing, though pulling from very different mythological sources.

At first, perhaps because its tone is so different from Rushdie’s other work, I found the book merely flippant. The easy puns particularly annoyed me, and I prepared myself to be disappointed with the whole. As the story progressed, however, it began to grow into its tone, or perhaps I began to grow into it, and even the puns began to seem appropriate to the lightly ironic sensibility of the narrative. By the time I finished, I found that I was enjoying myself very much, even wishing that the book was a little longer. I would not compare it to some of Rushdie’s more serious work, but it has a novelty of imagination that makes it remarkable nonetheless, and it was certainly a very pleasant way to spend a summer evening on the porch.

I have had a strange pre-history with Moomins. Several years ago, Dave Humphrey and Cyril Geurette and I ran a series of lectures called The Underground Canon. We invited various speakers to introduce the texts that they had found influential but that were not widely read or recognized. One of the speakers proposed to speak on Tove Jansson’s The Moomins and the Great Flood, which he characterized as one of the great children’s stories. I was teaching a Children’s Literature course at the time, so I was looking forward to Moomins, but the weather intervened, and that particular lecture had to be cancelled. I promptly forgot about Moomins altogether.

In a recent email exchange, however, TC also recommended the Moomin stories, even correcting my longstanding unwarranted assumption about their author’s gender. While a single recommendation can, in certain circumstances, be safely declined, I have an unofficial policy of not declining a book that has been recommended to me twice, so I went to my local library, only to be disappointed, as I often am. Of the many Moomin books that Jansson wrote, the library carried only two, one of which was on loan. I signed out Finn Family Moomintroll, sternly rebuked the librarian, who promised to see what he could do, and read the whole way home.

I was delighted. The Moomin stories are alternately comic and grave, fanciful and serious, fantastic and commonplace. They are both accessible to a child and interesting to an adult, which is my first criterion for any children’s literature, and they manage to avoid being merely didactic, which is my second. They do not consistently have the mystical quality that characterizes my very favourite works for children, touching this mood only on occasion, but they are beautiful nevertheless, and I will add them to the ever growing list of books that I need to acquire. More significantly, I will add them to the much smaller list of books that I will share with my children.

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon in the garden with my eldest son. We were staking tomatos mostly. I was holding the twine for him; he was cutting. I was tying up the tomatos; he was clipping random plants. I was weeding; he was adding specimens to the snail house that he has constructed out of an old planter.

As we were working, a neighbour of ours, who used to play the piano at the church where I attended as I child, and who taught music lessons to my wife for several years, wandered by on his way to the library. He stopped to talk, and I noticed that he was holding several critical commentaries on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, including C. S. Lewis’ A Preface to Paradise Lost, which is often issued separately from the text that it is supposed to preface, and which is one of the very few works of criticism that I can say I actually enjoyed reading. We talked very briefly about the commentaries, most of which he disparaged, and about Milton’s poem itself, which he praised very highly.

When he had resumed his walk and I had resumed my gardening, I was left thinking about how strange a thing it was to find someone who was actually reading Paradise Lost, not to teach a class, not to complete an assignment, not to pass an exam, but just to read it. The same observation could be made of just about any canonical literary work more than a few decades old, of course. It would have been just as strange if my neighbour had been reading Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene or Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. What was disconcerting about this observation, however, was that it revealed how much I had myself begun to regard these texts as confined to the realm of the classroom. It was not only my cultural expectations that had been surprised by his reading practise but my personal expectations as well. I suddenly recalled how powerfully I had experienced Paradise Lost myself, and I was alarmed to see the extent to which I had allowed myself to confine it to an artificial role in an artificial curriculum. I had forgotten why I had read Paradise Lost in the first place, forgotten why I still believe that others should read it, but I have remembered now, so let the next few paragraphs stand as the beginning of a self-correction.

To read Paradise Lost is to experience words as force and as power. I am awed by its pompous, thunderous, resonant, grandiloquent voice with the same kind of awe that I have for Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung opera cycle, or James Joyce’s Ulysses, or William Blake’s illustrated mythopoetic creations. It is not necessary to like these works only to experience them. They hold something audacious and fearful. They do not hesitate to speak on behalf of gods and devils, to claim the place of the prophet and the seer. They place themselves apart, in the space between heaven and hell, earth and sky, good and evil. They speak a language that others fear to speak, a language of angels and demons and spirits and heros and immortals.

To write and speak and create and compose like this is presumptive in the last degree. It is to assume the role that all creators secretly desire and yet fear to hold. It is to be as like to God as God will allow. It is to invite adulation and ridicule. It is to be called a prophet and a heretic. It is to be consigned to the space between spaces that is opened up by their creations, to inhabit this space that is nowhere, to be considered a little lower than angels and a little higher than fiends.

When I read Paradise Lost, whatever its literary successes and failures, it is because it allows me to stand in this place too, even if only for a moment. It is because it can make me recall this place, years later, in the heat of the sun, standing among the tomato stakes of my garden. It is because Milton’s garden of poetry and myth makes my own garden somehow wilder and stranger, somehow truer and richer. It makes this garden of mine, for an instant, strain beyond itself toward the space that separates it from the divine.

I enjoyed Dave Humphrey’s most recent post on reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to his daughters. Perhaps it is only one of our strange synchronicities, but I identify very strongly with him when he puts himself in the place of Mole, gliding ever further down a stream that he has never seen before, putting himself completely in the hands of his new friend Rat. I have imagined myself in Mole’s place also, as I have imagined myself in the place of Rat and Badger, though never in the place of Toad, whose encounters with the human world always seem to disrupt the unity of the novel for me. There is a quality to these characters that causes me to identify with them and with their world.

I especially appreciated the notice that Dave takes of the hospitality shown by Badger to Rat and Mole when they become lost and beset by weasels in the woods. I have already made mention, in a previous post on open homes, of an earlier episode in which Rat provides hospitality to Mole, but Dave’s reflection reminds me of the other places where Grahame’s story is deeply about hospitality and friendship, the home and the hearth, the table and the meal. There is something beautiful about this world that Grahame creates, something that reaches its fullness in the scene where the nature god appears during the search for the lost otter pup. I love this story, and I envy Dave the few years headstart he has in sharing it with his children.

The stars aligned for me yesterday in a way they seldom do. My wife took my eldest son away for the morning, and my youngest son decided to have a nap, so I had what turned out to be something more than two hours all to myself. I was initially too overwhelmed with my good fortune to know how to use it, but I eventually decided to watch one of the many documentaries that I have collected but have never had a chance to watch, Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which follows the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Apocalypse Now is, of course, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a book that holds some intense memories for me. I read Conrad’s novel several years ago in strangely appropriate circumstances. I was working in a fiberglass manufacturing plant, in what is called the winding tunnel, a long hallway situated beneath a gigantic vat of liquid, boiling glass. The heat and the noise were so intense that someone had scribbled above the entryway, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” the words that are written above the door to hell in Dante’s Inferno. It was right there on the factory floor, amidst these hellish conditions and these equally hellish allusions, that I read Conrad’s account of a man’s journey into the unknown darkness of the African interior and of his own soul.

My impressions of the novel are obviously heavily marked by the circumstances in which I read it. It was as if I was experiencing the heat and the humidity of the jungle with Marlow, the novel’s protagonist. I actually felt myself to be in the atmosphere of Conrad’s story, and it is this atmosphere that I now recall far more than the details of the narrative. The descent into the darkness of the human condition, into my human condition, was almost a palpable thing, like the moisture on my skin and the heat on my face. The heart of darkness was something that I felt through the body rather than read through the intellect.

It is perhaps for this reason that I did not read Heart of Darkness as portraying the Congolese natives in racist ways, though many have made this argument, and though it is one that I think is valid to some degree. It is certainly true that Conrad’s depiction of the Congolese people and of the jungle itself is one that emphasizes the primal, the fearful, the dark, the savage, and the evil. Marlow’s journey is a descent into the mysterious and originary desires of human nature, and what he finds is violent and savage and fearful. Conrad makes the jungle and its peoples the physical correlates of this spiritual place, and so they too are portrayed with its darkness.

In many ways, the same kinds of criticisms could conceivably be made of both Francis Ford’s Apocalypse Now and Eleanor’s Hearts of Darkness as well. Francis Ford’s film ostensibly portrays Vietnamese natives, but it is perfectly content to substitute Filipino natives in their place and to film them in the ruins of buildings that are neither Vietnamese nor Filipino nor anything else outside of some Hollywood set designer’s imagination. Clearly, his concern is not with representing these people with any accuracy. They are merely figures, as they were for Conrad, for something dark and savage and unknown, merely part of the scenery in the heart of darkness.

Eleanor’s documentary is different in that it is at times quite concerned with the native Filipino tribe that is providing the extras for the film, but her interest often seems to be in the native merely as an aspect of her husband’s own journey into the heart of darkness that is the shooting of the film, a journey which she never fails to compare to those of Willard and Marlow. Again, there is a sense that the people and the scenery are equivalent, that they are of interest only because they represent the darkness and the strangeness of the filmmaking journey on which Francis Ford has embarked.

In all three of these texts, the novel, the film, and the documentary, it is easy to argue that the native cultures are stereotyped and racialized, whether they be from the Congo or Vietnam or the Philippines. All three of these texts seem merely to employ native cultures as convenient figures for what is dark, primal, and savage. They are part of the strange and originary darkness where the too civilized English sailor, American soldier, and Hollywood director can go to discover their own darknesses and to find an epiphany of primal and forgotten violence.

Even so, I think it would be a mistake to understand these portrayals as entirely racist. In each case, though less obviously with Eleanor’s documentary, I would argue that the native peoples are not intended to represent real people at all. They appear only as metaphors and stereotypes because that is all they are intended to be. Their function is not to correspond with real people in a real world, but to correspond with what Western culture has traditionally imagined the primal and the savage to be. This imagination certainly contains many racisms, and it could be easily argued that all three texts serve to reinforce these racisms, but I do not think that they themselves function in racist ways.

I have little in the way of obvious proof for this assertion, but let me return, by why of providing anecdotal evidence for what I mean, to the place where I first read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In that tunnel of heat and sweat, feeling the text like a physical presence, it was always clear to me that the natives were not natives at all but fantastical beings, like elves or Lilliputians. I never paused to consider how Conrad was portraying the Congolese people because I did not for a moment see his natives as corresponding to real people anywhere. They were creations of fantasy, not stereotypes of reality.

I recognize the danger with this kind of argument, and I am not even entirely comfortable with what I am saying, yet I think it may also true of Francis Ford’s film and even of Eleanor’s documentary. The natives of Apocalypse Now are Filipinos who are playing Vietnamese who are standing in for Congolese, and they exist in a scenery and an architecture that has no real correlate. They are entirely unreal fantasies.

The natives of Eleanor’s Hearts of Darkness are similarly unreal. Despite voicing a claim to a kind of ethnography, the documentary shows a people who have no connection to reality. They perform their traditional ceremonies in a building constructed by a production crew on the set of a Hollywood film. They are buried to the neck to play severed heads, with umbrellas perched above them to protect them from the sun between takes. They are unreal fantasies. They do not correspond to real natives. They exist only as part of the heart of darkness that Eleanor represents Francis Ford as enduring to produce his film.

Does this fantastical element justify Conrad and the Coppolas? I am not sure that it does. I am only certain that there is a difference here, perhaps a significant one, between a racist depiction and a fantastical depiction that happens to participate in racist cultural assumptions. I do not intend this distinction to be a justification of anything, but I will suggest that it contributes to the fact that I have a good deal of affection for all three of these texts, despite the problems they pose for me.

I love G. K. Chesterton, though he is not much in literary favour any more. I love how his novels feel as though they were written for a lark in fifteen minutes on the back of a restaurant napkin. I love their utter disdain for things like narrative pace and plot unity. Most of all, I love the sincerity of their absurdity.

I have just finished reading Chesterton’s The Flying Inn, a fantastical hypothesis set in a future where a kind of adulterated Islam has conquered most of the world and made alcohol illegal throughout England. The book can only be read as racist today, though this would not have occurred either to Chesterton or many of his contemporaries, but it would be unfair to the story’s other qualities if I was too dwell on this fact too much. Islam was for Chesterton merely a convenient binary for English Christian culture, which he also represents unfavourably, a binary of the sort that he loved to push to illogical and satirical extremes. In this sense, Islam is more a literary figure for Chesterton than it is a religious and political fact.

I do not have the space to discuss the text in detail, because I would like to attend to one detail in particular and to the tangent where it has led me, so I will say only that, like every Chesterton novel, there is much to love and much to hate in it. It bears certain similarities, in the central protagonist especially but also elsewhere, to his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but there is a greater seriousness to its fantasy, though not perhaps the kind of theological implications of The Man Who Was Thursday. I do recommend it, of course, along with everything else Chesterton has written and a good biography of his life.

I recommend Chesterton so heartily, not only because I enjoy him so much, which I do, but because his surreal approach to narrative has had such a tremendous, and also largely unrecognized, influence on certain strains of subsequent literature. The most obvious of these strains is that of popular fantasy, where he has been a favourite of writers from C. S. Lewis to Neil Gaiman, even making several appearances as a character in Gaimon’s Sandman series. Less obvious and less recognized is the influence that he has had on the development of magic realism in the novel, mostly because this influence is indirect through the work of Jorge Louis Borges, whose short stories and fables (see Ficciones) were a central inspiration in the kind of writing that is practised by authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. Borges mentions Chesterton’s influence explicitly several times in Other Inquisitions, a collection of essays and other oddities, and I think there may be an essay or two to be written on the subject.

In any case, it was an entirely different tangent that I found myself following after reading The Flying Inn. Late in the story, Humphrey and Dalroy, the protagonists, are partaking of a giant cheese that they have taken from one of the last pubs in England, dragged all over the countryside, and shared with those they happened to meet. Wimpole, the latest friend to partake of the cheese, declares that it tastes holy, which Dalroy explains by noting that it has been on pilgrimage. He then goes on to conjecture on what sort of cow would produce a cheese that tastes so holy, saying, “I think this cheese must have come from that Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath, who had horns bigger than elephant tusks, and who was so ferocious that one of the greatest of the old heroes of chivalry was required to do battle with it.”

Now, this quotation may seem a little obscure to warrant sustained attention, except that one of my favourite books is The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, and I have often wondered about the origin of the Dun Cow, though not seriously enough to go looking for an answer. This reference to a Dun Cow, however, in a book that Wangerin might well be supposed to have read, intrigued me very much, so I decided that it was probably time that I did go looking to find what answers there might be. In the event, it is unlikely that the story Chesterton references was the inspiration for Wangerin’s title, for several reasons.

The Dun Cow of Dunsmore Heath is entirely unlike the Dun Cow of Wangerin’s story. The mythic beast was huge with massive horns, one of which, more likely an elephant tusk, still sits in Warwick Castle, the supposed home of the ancient hero of chivalry that Chesterton mentions, Sir Guy of Warwick. Besides being very large, the cow’s milk was also said to be inexhaustible, but when one woman was not satisfied with a single pail of milk, the cow became angered and began rampaging over the countryside until it was slain by Sir Guy. A contemporary translation of the most famous verse description of the myth, reads as follows: “On Dunmore heath I also slew / A monstrous wild and cruel beast, / Called the Dun Cow of Dunmore Heath, / Which many people had oppressed.” This beast is not very likely the source of the Dun Cow of Wangerin’s narrative, who is a gentle and holy figure.

Now that I had begun my search, however, I was not satisfied to discover what Wangerin’s Dun Cow was not. A cursory search was all that was required to inform me that Book of the Dun Cow is actually the translated title of a 12th century Irish manuscript, the oldest to contain narrative materials. Its name comes from the myth that it was made from the hide of a cow by St. Ciarán of Clonmacnois, one of the twelve apostles of Ireland. This source is much more consistent with the character of Wangerin’s Dun Cow and also with the archaisms that Wangerin uses throughout the text, though it still does not make any clearer who the Dun Cow might be supposed to allegorize. Perhaps she might be meant to represent St. Ciarán or one of the saints more generally, though this does really account for the role that she plays in the narrative.

The result of Chesterton’s reference, then, and the subsequent directions that it has sent me, is not exactly increased clarity, but it is at least increased knowledge and also increased avenues for exploration and speculation. I now have a link to the complete translated text of the Irish Book of the Dun Cow manuscript, which I intend to read next in this little textual chain.  Hopefully it will lead to others.

I was recently able to find a copy of Charles Williams’ The Place of the Lion from an online bookseller who operates out of Guelph, and it has reminded me of how much I love Williams’ novels. Though very few remember him any longer and those who do only as a name peripherally associated with J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis, Williams was highly regarded in his own time by such writers as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden for his poetry, criticism, history, theology, and drama, as well as for his novels.

I first encountered Williams’ name among the members of the Inklings, a literary society that grew up around Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford, but it was through mere chance that I first read any of his work. I was looking in a used bookstore for something by T. S. Eliot, I forget exactly what, when I found among Eliot’s works a copy of Williams’ All Hallow’s Eve, for which Eliot wrote an introduction. I knew the name, and the book was priced at all of two dollars, so I took it to the counter, where the proprietor told me that he had just taken in another of Williams’ novels, Many Dimensions. I bought both.

I can hardly describe the experience of reading those two books together, because they are so unique in mood and sensibility. Though Lewis’ That Hideous Strength has many similarities, clearly informed by Williams’ fiction, there is nothing quite like a Charles Williams novel. I always describe his books by saying that they are to mystical theology what good science fiction is to science. Just as true science fiction is the fictional exploration of a scientific hypothesis, so Williams’ novels are the fictional exploration of a mystical or theological idea. The stories are set in Williams’ present time, but each relates a scenario in which this present time is disrupted by supernatural events. The result is always eerie and sometimes even horrific, as the central characters, usually conflicted in regard to their religious faith but nevertheless moving toward Christian principles, struggle against strange and terrifying powers.

The novels are not great literature, though they approach it more closely than most thrillers do, and Williams is not a great novelist, though he is perhaps a great storyteller. His characters are full and complex, but they do not strike a contemporary ear as being realistic. His philosophising is sometimes profound, but it often breaks the flow of the narrative. Where he really excels is in creating a sense of mood. The books are all profoundly disturbing, as if their fiction somehow falls too close to a truth, as if it might yet become a truth. They are hauntingly possible, not physically perhaps, but spiritually. Though they may not rank very highly in the history of literature, I would choose them over any number of those that are usually placed above them.

As I mentioned in my post on Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano, one of the things that I like most about this book is a single sentence, which I think may be the most exceptional sentence ever written in the English language. I did not have the space to quote it in that post, but I feel so strongly about it that I will quote it here, where it can stand apart in its own right:

“It is a light blue moonless summer evening, but late, perhaps ten o’clock, with Venus burning hard in daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony, when from beyond along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engineered freight train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers for a moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg’s angels, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over distant mountains whose purple has faded lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold lightening, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the mountains: and then all at once a fishing boat with tall gear comes running round the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly behind it a long silver scalloped rim of wake, not visibly moving inshore, but now stealing ponderously beachward toward us, this scrolled silver rim of wash striking the shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of the beach, while the floats, for these are timber driving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver, then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightening within the white clouds in deep water, as the fishing boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling light in its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the headland, silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightening in the blue evening, unearthly.”

This needs to be read several times, aloud, slowly, accounting for the punctuation, like poetry.