Julian Barnes was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer, weeks before the world was preparing to lock down in 2020. The cancer was a manageable version and last year, Barnes wrote his last book, aptly titled ‘Departure(s)’. The book’s structure was experimental. Why wouldn’t it be when one is writing and trying to look back at a rich eight decades of life.
How would I look back at my life after forty years? Would it be the travel? The countless hours spent reading? The women? The loved ones who are no longer around? The gratitude of having two daughters? Barnes grapples with these emotions and in this passage writes about travel:
Do I have a bucket list, now that I am more than three-quarters of a century old? Machu Picchu? Angkor Wat? The Antarctic? An African safari? No, I’m not a geographical completist. I’ve been to Ayers Rock (when it was called that) and the Atacama Desert, to the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon. I’ve set foot on every land mass except the freezing ones. So I’d prefer to loiter again in European towns and cities, watch the sea from the safety of a promenade and snow-topped mountains from a warm distance. And, just as I shall be rereading great novels for probably the last time, I’d like to make farewell trips to see great art: to Madrid for Las Meninas, Brussels for Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus, Rome for Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, Ghent for the Van Eyck altarpiece, Palermo for Antonello’s Annunciated Madonna, and so on. Maybe I’ll be standing in front of a picture I love, fall and hit my head, and be blitzed by IAMs of all the paintings I have loved in one tremendous chronological sequence.
And some classic British humour:
In the old days, popular anal self-implants were miniature busts of Napoleon, a habit which doubtless added patriotism to pleasure.
I should re-read his ‘Sense of an Ending‘.
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