The moon, Easter, and making connections between the acts

In-between thoughts

One of the loveliest literary festivals I know happens every year in a friend’s hallway at her home in the depths of the Devon countryside. Compared to the razmataz of most other festivals, something feels a bit idyllic about this now long-established happening. Each spring Caroline and her great friend and festival partner Georgie invite writers to come and talk to anyone who lives nearby, loves reading and can fit into the panelled hall or cram, cushion in hand, onto the wide staircase. Perhaps 50 or 60 enthusiastic, book-buying, question-asking people in total (it’s always a sell-out) come to listen to a dozen sessions over the three days and there are delicious sandwiches at lunchtime and really good cakes for tea. This year the sun shone all weekend on audiences who gathered in the garden as they waited for a session to begin. I made a new friend during one of these intervals, the intimacy of the setting encouraging barriers to dissolve at speed at we talked about our experience of motherhood and daughterhood as if we had known one another all our lives

If you are one of the lucky speakers, one of the best things is being asked to stay in the house for the whole weekend. When the audience had gone home we all sat round the kitchen table eating fish pie and drinking elderflower and claret and cups of tea and talking. And this is where, on the nights that intervened between the official business of the day, between the acts, I had some of the best chats ever, the common denominator of professional creative focus unifying and also liberating us all.

These in-between moments have been on my mind, the unanticipated moments, the pauses that materialise when you don’t expect them but which, if you are IN that moment, can hold deep significance. Last week I was away again in Oxford at the Lit Fest to meet a friend who I do not get enough time to be with, life and counties holding us apart. But a decision to arrive in the city early and to have supper the night before our joint event meant that a precious chat, confidences exchanged, memories shared, acquired a special value.

I am trying to invest my pre-dawn wakefulness with something of the same. Weirdly the usually insignificant week-old clock change has triggered an early alertness that has acquired a habit of getting tangled up with anxiety, war-fear, truth-telling and not-telling, self-questioning and the temptation to go downstairs and make a first cup of tea and eat toast even when I know that is not a good idea. I want to learn how to break through the eeriness of those strange dark hours that defy sleep with an authority that becomes ever-more resistant the harder I try.

Yesterday on Easter Day I heard the new Archbishop of Canterbury talking about the pre-dawn moment when Mary Magdalene is weeping in the garden near the tomb looking for the body of the dead Jesus. And then when Mary hears her name spoken by the gardener sge realises he is not the gardener at all. I am not religious although I love the Bible stories, but I wanted to hear the first sermon by the first female archbishop, especially as I knew she would be calling for an end to war. And Sarah Mullally talked about this pre-dawn moment, the time that elapses between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, before the sun rises as a ‘dazzling darkness’ and how ‘darkness is a place of creativity and germination.’ Is it during the pause that the best thoughts come? Solutions, acceptances, ideas for a new book even?

All this thinking has coincided with the moonshot. I have been gripped. I remember watching the moon landings when I was at school, with two hundred girls jammed around the one TV set, trying to get our minds into the very idea of an American flag being planted on the actual surface of the sphere that ebbed and expanded and floated in space above us. Last week on the night the rocket went on its way the night sky was pinpoint clear and the full moon was shining right through my bedroom window. I stared and stared at it wondering ridiculously if I looked hard enough whether there might be a way I could make out any sort of disturbance within the familiarity of the image in front of me: madness I know. And yet here once again were three men (and now) one woman, held in an in-between, travelling….. rocketing… from one fixed point to another, the very idea of a human being so far away in infinite space being both thrilling and absolutely terrifying. Would they even have time to think at all, what with all the technical demands on them? Would they feel frightened in this limbo or would it be the very experience of in-betweenness that would prove to become the most awe-filled moments of their lives?

Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts, published in 1941 six months after her death is about a country pageant staged in the summer by an English village during the Second World War. But the real stuff takes place in the interval. That is when the connections, the creativity, the enigmatic emotional heft and intricacy of the characters and their lives and ideas reveal themselves.

I love this thought. I am going to hold onto it as I resist both a cup of tea and the temptation for glooming, and instead welcome that feeling of slipping between unconsciousness and awakening as the moon shines on me through the darkness.