A Portrait in Autumn

Including a heart note and some Stoicism

Audio Version

Here is a photograph of my life taken one late afternoon this week, a few days before the end of September.

A Portrait in Autumn

It’s a photograph of some of this year’s apples from a neighbour’s tree, resting on the shed table next to the Spring bulbs I’ll soon be planting out. Orderly I’m calling it, the portrait, since that’s the way I laid it out and also how I’ve framed the picture. Harvest from this year next to those hopeful bulbs for the next one. With other garden stuff visible underneath, and advice available there in the top corner of the photograph, from the books of the two gardeners who’ve been so much help to me this year, Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd. Orderly then, and I’m part of the portrait as well though you can’t see me. Standing in the shed doorway to take the photograph on my phone.

Other things you can’t see, though they’re there, are what I’m worrying about on the day I took the photograph, what I’d been reading to distract me from the worries and how come I managed to end such a day contentedly constructing something beautiful to help tell its story. Because I’m well aware the photograph is lovely, I angled it so it would be. Another one I took before this was from a bit closer in and wouldn’t have suggested so much story. So I deleted it, stood a bit further back and took the one you see. A picture to define this week and perhaps much of the Autumn. The week itself being visible in a version of the same photograph containing its background information.

The background information

Information that shows me the photograph was taken at quarter past five on the Friday of the week when I’ve had the Cardiology appointment I’d been so waiting for. An inconclusive “more investigating needed” kind of appointment I was at first disappointed about, as it hadn’t led to the heart surgery I’d built myself up into expecting, especially after the extra exhaustion, dizziness and other symptoms that have been arriving since that second collapse I wrote about. So I’d come to the allotment there on Friday afternoon not to harvest, plant or do any kind of gardening at all, but for the comfort of being here. Somewhere beautiful and familiar where I’d be able to distract myself with reading and maybe even think.

Distract myself with the beauty of this, for example:

“Nowhere was there a lawn more smooth-shaven, walks better swept, or a porch more prettily festooned with creepers, than at Foxholm Parsonage, standing snuggly sheltered by beeches and chestnuts half-way down the pretty green hill which was surmounted by the church, and overlooking a village that straggled at its ease among pastures and meadows, surrounded by wild hedgerows and broad shadowing trees, as yet unthreatened by improved methods of farming.”

George Eliot, from “Scenes of Clerical Life”

The1973 edition I’ve been reading

Isn’t that perfectly lovely? Even with its implication that worrying changes are about to arrive. So yes, I’ve been reading George Eliot again. Back in the nineteenth century there at the beginning of her fictional writings, to give me some heartsease.

Nearly all my reading is George Eliot just at the moment, while I find my way through this heart-time. I seem to need her thoughtful discursiveness, the way she always includes us readers in her own thinking and gets you, or me anyway, thinking along with her like we’re having an across the centuries conversation.

And I’m not sure how great writing does this, but during the course of the afternoon I’ve found that thinking through the lives and problems of a group of early nineteenth century clerical characters has brought me back to a place of deep confidence in the people looking after me. And the peaceful acceptance that their “more investigating” is exactly the right thing to do. Because you can’t just go rummaging around in somebody’s heart can you? They know what they’re up to, because they’ve done the sort of thing I need plenty of times before.

Meanwhile then, and while I wait, I’ve decided I can be content with simply being here. In the garden, on the allotment, preparing it for a Winter where it won’t all be bare spaces where the plants used to be. But somewhere special I can still come. With the evergreens I’ve already planted and some more soon arriving, there’ll be semi-hardy me there, planning and looking forward to another Spring while I read my George Eliot books

Happy with all that on Friday afternoon I stood up, constructed and took the photograph of “A Portrait in Autumn.” Feeling as confident and content as those bulbs and apples.

So next? Just to end this section on some facts, I’ll be having what’s called a Transoesophageal Echocardiogram¹, an internal scan that will go down my throat to as close to the back of my heart and its defective aortic valve as can be got without going inside it. Then I’ll have another discussion with my cardiology doctor about the surgery he says I’m eventually and maybe soon be going to need.

Before all that I’ll carry on gardening and reading.²

I’ve been reading

Well George Eliot obviously,³ with more to come. And well aware that other authors are available I’ve started books by two of them over these last couple of weeks that have lost me and where I’ve had to stop. Neither being their author’s faults I suspect, but more about me and what’s distracting me. So I won’t mention the books, it’s not their authors’ faults.

One I did manage to read and enjoy was a short book by Svend Brinkmann called Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze. A book about how Ancient Greek and Roman Stoicism might be more helpful to some of us as a philosophy to live by than all the wishful, magical and positive-thinking self-help literature the book mercilessly, and I think wisely, lampoons. Recommended then, especially if you’ve got anything going on in your life where science, logic, reasoning, history and a touch of self-resolve might just be of more use to you than being surrounded by positive affirmations all over the walls of your house.

And I’ve been listening

Usually I’d intend to use this occasional end piece, like the reading one, for some recent recommendations. This time though it’s a lament and two thank yous to two of my favourite BBC Radio 3 presenters, Kate Molleson and Elizabeth Alker, who’ve both left their early morning programmes within a couple of weeks of each other. Thank you both, should you ever read or hear this, for all the years of education as well as early day and so mostly quiet entertainments you’ve broadcast. All my just-got-up hours for the past seven or eight years have begun with classical music, so early mornings aren’t going be the same from now on without you two. But my life is nevertheless and immeasurably richer because of the work you’ve both done. So thank you Kate, thank you Elizabeth.

And that’s it from me for now. Until next time,
Ronnie

Audio Version

1. NHS information about this here, including a British Heart Foundation film of one being done,

2. While writing this my appointment has come through, for Friday this coming week, just as October begins. I think I’ll still be reading Adam Bede by then.

3. Or Marian Evans, the name she preferred to be called by rather than Mary Ann. According to David Lodge’s introduction to Scenes of Clerical Life.