Notes in the Margin (Part II)

Figes

I bought the book for a dollar and a quarter at Community Thrift on Valencia, in San Francisco. I can’t recall when. I’ve bought so many books for a dollar and a quarter at Community Thrift. It might be—no offense to my friends at Dog Eared—the best used-book store in San Francisco, if you judge only by prices and the randomness of the selection. In any case, I’ve held on to it for many years without reading it. You know the kind of books I mean? The books you are waiting for the right moment to open—though what you mean by “the right moment,” you’ve got no clue?

It’s called Light: With Monet at Giverny, and it’s by Eva Figes, a German-born British novelist who died in 2012. This past weekend, for inexplicable reasons, after making a conscious effort not to read the book for so long, I found myself holding it. I sat down on the floor. I read a little. The book is about an elderly Monet in his garden at Giverny. It opens with Monet awake before dawn:

The sky was still dark when he opened his eyes and saw it through the uncurtained window. He was upright within seconds, out of bed and had opened the window to study the signs.

On this day the light seems to him promising and so he hustles to bathe and have breakfast so he can get outside and catch it. This isn’t so easy. Getting Monet out the door entails the hustle of numerous servants as well—the woman who serves him breakfast, the man who rows the painter out to his little island studio. It’s clear that Monet wasn’t easy to work for, and was often, at best, indifferent to his family. But what’s entrancing about the book’s opening is that you start to feel giddy along with Monet. What he’s after this morning is not the sunrise, but the moments just before. In fact, when the light does arrive (“Everything would change now”), it wrecks the scene completely. The book is pervaded by this desire to harness the fragile fraction of time before the sunlight begins to touch the trees. Maybe this is what I craved without knowing it? Too often I wake up late and even then I’m almost too tired to face the morning light. Look, I’ve never believed in books as forces of healing. As much as I live for them, breathe for them, they are only, at the end of the day, bound paper and glue. I don’t want to get at all cosmic here. And yet. Maybe it’s possible that certain books stick around and wait for a...