Book//mark - Peel Me a Lotus | Charmian Clift, 1959

Charmian Clift, Peel Me a Lotus, 1959 / Charmian Clift, 1923-1969

“In appearance, the town today must be almost exactly what it was in the days of its merchant princes…It rises in tiers around the small, brilliant, horseshoe-shaped harbour – old stone mansions harmoniously apricot-coloured against the gold and bronze cliffs, or washed pure white and shuttered in palest grey: houses austere but exquisitely proportioned, whose great walls and heavy arched doors enclose tiled courtyards and terraced gardens. The irregular tiers are broken everywhere by steep, crooked flights of stone steps, and above the tilted rooftops of uniform red tiles rise the octagonal domes of the churches and the pierced and fretted verticles of marble spires that might have been designed by Wren.’

“The house where we are staying has a little terrace tucked under the tall bronze mountain that curls over the town like a static wave. I sit up here wrapped up in a blanket, listening to the dialogue of donkeys, seeing shadowed wall, roof-top, tile, alley aswarm with huge slinking shapes of cats, like an emanation of the secret soul of the place.
Athena’s little owl drops two liquid notes from the mountain, and again two notes, very pure and chill. Some restless stirring in a high sheepfold is signalled by a little drift of bells. All pale and quiet the lovely houses sleep, tier upon tier folding down from the black bulk of the mountains to the black silk spread of water. Across the water the dark hills of Troezen are pricked all over with the fires of the charcoal burners like a scattering of rubies.”

“We are poor, but then we have been poor for the last two years – poorer, indeed, than we are now, with a house of our own, and enough money to live for another six months or so even if we should earn nothing more. Those two years of poverty have been the most eventful, the most enjoyable, the most exciting of our lives; we have felt richly defiant and adventurous eating lentils and wearing darned sweaters and thumbing our noses at the Jeremiahs who had said we couldn’t do it. So why should one now have a hard knot in one’s heart – not so much of fear, but of outrage, of the wildest indignation? What is this protesting cry of anger and disbelief that wells up in one’s throat? Why, it is very simple. It is only that one has come face to face with the plain bleak realisation that perhaps we are to go on being poor!

“I think no beauty has ever been as true for me as this beauty of rocks and sea and the beauty of the mountains that rush up between the blue and the blue, skirted only with the austere white terraces of houses simplified to the purest geometry of planes and angles. It seems to me that we have become simplified too, living here, as though the sun has seared off the woolly fuzz of our separate confusions(…) Shedding so much we are stripped to our bare selves, freer, and impoverished of nothing but a few ridiculous self importances.”

“I thought today how beautiful my children have become in this deeply natural world, thin, brown, hard creatures, still unconscious of their own grace or even of the extravagance of beauty in which they move and have their being: for them it is no more to be observed than the number of times their sharp little breasts rise and fall breathing it in.”

“I thought of the safe anonymity of the office desk, the furnished flat, the monthly salary cheque, the insurance policy, the hot, stale smell of the herd and the will-less, witless way one had shambled along in the middle of it. It had seemed a glad thing to declare against all that; to declare for individuality, for risks instead of safety, for living instead of existing, for faith in one’s ability to build a good rich life from the raw materials of the man, the woman, the children, and the talents we could muster up between us. ‘We will go and live in the sun,’ we had said, and George had got up from his desk and walked out whistling…
But would we be left alone to do it? Was there really any room in the world for people who did not fit neatly into the filing system? Perhaps one would be forced to take sides, declaring For or Against… or perhaps one was going to be filed away without any choice at all.”

“It is a diverse and tantalizing collection of human beings sprawled about these rocks and ledges on a hot cliff far from their native lands, insurgents who have rebelled the station in which it pleased God to place them. What devious roads brought them to this small island, what decisions and indecisions , what driftings, what moments of desperation and hope? And what are they looking for? What do they expect to find here, an Australian journalist, an Irish schoolmaster, an American misfit, an exotic outrider from the St-Germain-des Pres?”

“Warm, mad, and wonderful the nights, wearing the soft bloom of purple grapes. The water lapping dark, and a huge mad moon extinguishing behind the shark mountain edges like every dream one ever had. “

“Ask nothing of it and the soul retires, the flame of life flickers, burns lower, expires for want of air. Here, in the midst of all our difficulties, life burns high. Though it seems sometimes that we make no progress towards the ideal, yet the ideal exists, and our energies are directed towards it…Living simply, living in the sun, we are at least in touch again with reality; we have bridged that chasm that separates modern life from life’s beginnings and come back to the magic and wonder of such sensible mysteries as fire, water, earth and air. And, more than this, we have no masters but ourselves.”

“To accomplish anything it is obvious that a talent is not enough. You need a motive, an aim, an incentive, an overwhelming interest be it ambition or fear or curiosity or only the necessity to fill your belly. You need a star to steer by, a cause a creed, an idea, a passionate attachment. Something must beckon you or nothing is done – something about which you ask no questions.”

Charmian Clift, Peel Me a Lotus, 1959