A Southward Tide

“We live…lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time – not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.” (Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell)

Balthazar, the second in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, has always been one of my favorite first reads, shattering the constructions so carefully set out in Justine. Is this not the best type of literature – the kind that piles misinterpretation upon misinterpretation, that builds a false belief system so Romeo can drink his poison, where the fiction of the story itself and the fictions created within the story merge seamlessly. In a much quoted line from Justine, Durrell foreshadows the unraveling of the subsequent books, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

Ultimately, we condition ourselves by the preset limitations of our perceptions. How many little deaths do we create, how many times do we drink the poison believing our dreams to be dead when they are just sleeping? Or sometimes we dream the false dream, like the narrator of the The Alexandria Quartet, when beyond our small castle of thoughts a much larger fortress resides, an entire socio-political, even emotional, landscape. In ninth grade, I developed an intense crush on a classmate who was always staring at me. Only months later did I realize his girlfriend was seated behind me; hours of visual dialogue had occurred between them and in my head, just wasted time.