“How poignant the late afternoons of autumn! Ah! poignant to the verge of pain, for there are certain delicious sensations which are no less intense for being vague and there is no sharper point than that of Infinity.”
From Charles Baudelaire (c.1931) ‘Artist’s Confiteor’ in Paris Spleen
And that cerebral cinema? Now playing: a memory of seeing a wild boar hanging in our woodshed, having also seen at some stage around then, a rifle, and realising with a great sense of gravity, how those two moments connected. Innocence pulled suddenly backwards, like a receding wave, with all of the seething sound that accompanies it. And another filmic fragment, like an out-take from Steven Spielberg’s Duel… of driving home down the coast road in the pitch black that can only occur far, far from civilisation. And realising that something was following us in the dark. It was barely discernible. We’d slow down, it would slow down too. Eventually my father stopped the car, and It stopped too. Another car, without headlights, was following us closely, like a blind person holding the arm of a sighted person, through the treacherous winding road, where we seemed so very far away from every single thing ….
The coast road, Kaikoura, in the 1930s. (Christchurch City Library)
Theo Angelopoulos The Weeping Meadow Music: Eleni Karaindrou
