Saturday 15 June 2013

Ian McEwan: an impossible world?


Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Vintage, 2006), p. 172.

A surgeon has a moment of epiphany when he drops into a jazz club where his son is playing:

“No longer tired, Henry comes away from the wall where he’s been leaning, and walks into the middle of the dark auditorium, towards the great engine of sound. He lets it engulf him. There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever — mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ’s kingdom on earth, the workers’ paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it’s tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.”[1]




Cf. contextualised in the Eucharistic in Timothy Radcliffe OP, Why God To Church? The Drama of the Eucharist (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 63.

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