Before the strangeness of things ... the taste of dreams

'Emerald Blue' is one of my favourite Gerald Murnane stories, and the whole collection of which it is the title story, is my favourite Murnane book. In 'Emerald Blue' the narrator describes receiving a collection of foreigh postage stamps at the age of seven. "One stamp was from Helvetia. ... He, the owner of the stamp, wanted to know where Helvetia was, but no one he asked had heard of any country of that name. ... More than forty years afterwards, he still remembered that he had seen in his mind from time to time for several years images of a place he supposed to be Helvetia. ... As soon as he was able to use an atlas, he searched for Helvetia. When he could find no part of the world with the same name as the country in his mind, he felt for a few moments as awed and delighted as he would ever afterwards feel before the strangeness of things."

This seems to me a masterfully precise description of the inner life and the workings of the imagination. Of course, Helvetia is itself a wonderfully literal metaphor for imaginary landscapes. Murnane is one of those writers whose paragraphs lead you off into your own speculative world; I often find myself often reading a paragraph or two then drifting off into my own thoughts. The great figure in this vein of writing is of course Marcel Proust. Early in Du côté de chez Swann he writes how on waking from a dream of a woman he has known he would set about finding her, "comme ceux qui partent en voyage pour voir de leurs yeux une cité désirée et s'imaginent qu'on peut goûter dans une réalité le charme du songe" ... which Lydia Davis translates as "like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charms of a dream" (this somewhat sacrifices the strong overtones of goûter which has "to taste" and there's that subtlety of "une réalité")

Back to Murnane: "Later, he had come to understand that the landscape of Helvetia was not the only such landscape he had seen. Whenever he was invited to a house that he had not previously visited, he would see in his mind at once the house as it looked from the front gate, the interior of the main room, the view of the back garden from the kitchen window. Then he would visit the house, and the other house would have followed Helvetia into oblivion."