Back in the days when I was the wife of a New Zealand Airforce officer, living on Base Woodbourne, up in Marlborough (‘up’ because I came from ‘down’ in Dunedin) I bought a book that has traveled everywhere with me ever since.
I devoured Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun, as we moved off Base and out of that airforce life. We were heading to Fiordland, in the south west of New Zealand, chasing that husband’s career - back in the 90’s. (Yes, I’ve lived here before) And I read that book, holding it close, through the crazy days of packing moving and unpacking.
It’s a beautiful poetic prose book, one that I dip in and out of when I’m seeking beauty and some kind of peace ... a book that takes me wandering even while grounded.
Some years later, I was flying between Istanbul and New Zealand, on my summer holiday break from teaching, and Under the Tuscan Sun was there as a movie choice on my Singapore Airlines flight.
I had at least 19 hours of flight time ahead of me, and so I selected it as a movie to watch, as I flew to the other side of the world ...
The movie is not not like the book. Do not expect it. It’s a nice enough movie but it contains none of the depth and richness I find, again and again, when I go back to my tattered copy of the book.
An extract from the book: I remember dreaming over Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’, which I don’t have with me, only a few sentences copied into a notebook. He wrote about the house as a “tool for analysis” of the human soul.
By remembering the houses we’ve lived in, we learn to abide within ourselves. I felt close to his sense of the house. He wrote about the strange whir of the sun as it comes into a room in which one is alone. Mainly, I remember recognising his idea that the house protects the dreamer; the houses that are important to us are the ones that allow us to dream in peace.
And this: ‘Choice is restorative when it reaches towards an instinctive recognition of the earliest self. As Dante recognised at the beginning of ‘The Inferno’: What must we do in order to grow?
