In an uncharacteristically hopeful moment Tennyson wrote, “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change”.
As for me, I’m not so sure. There is time enough for change when you’re at your peak, functioning at full throttle, on a roll, cresting the waves.
But sometimes keeping things ticking over nicely is what it’s all about. Easy does it is the order of the day. Stand your ground but hold your horses. Don’t do anything you can’t undo.
At such times what will pass for entertainment is a little uncertain. You don’t want to be stretched or startled. You’d like to be soothed, but you don’t want things that won’t improve you.
Ever since that time you were reading Heat magazine on a train and your old professor entered the carriage and caught you at it, you have avoided diversions where “Spot the sweat stains” and “How depression shrank me to a size 6” confessions are a regular feature.
You could re-read Hangover Square, or Herzog or Persuasion but it isn’t quite right to choose books where each sentence is an old friend.
You could watch All About Eve (again) or The Philadelphia Story for the 47th time, mouthing all the lines, but if you do that now what will you have to look forward to in your old age?
So, when invited to an Imax screening of Interstellar in London, instead of saying, “Sorry, no”, like the TV personality who refused to get in the car that was sent for him because it was maroon, off I went.
Outside I bumped into the sensitive boyfriend of a great friend, and he looked at me with his quizzical long-lashed eyes.
“Don’t think this film will be your cup of tea,” he said.
“I know, but it’s hardly the end of the world,” I said.
“But it is.”
“What is?”
“The film, it’s about the end of the world.”
“Oh.” His look said: “And you are the person who doesn’t like films where married couples argue or people are sarcastic to each other ... or someone gets a haircut they’re not happy with.”
“I know. And yet here I am.” I tried to say it with a bit of spirit, like a chorus girl jumping out of a birthday cake.
I took my seat and that seat, conveniently, was next to a priest. At the top of the Imax, things were sheer and dizzy-making, and I sat as though perched on a precarious cliff.
“These proportions are not very comforting,” the priest said.
“I know, and the world is about to end as well.”
He swore extravagantly, which seemed polite. As the film began, I remembered an afternoon not long ago when a friend of mine was babysitting TS Eliot’s scrapbooks. These books had a surprisingly playful atmosphere, in part because Eliot had recorded in them so many delightful things. There would be a table plan from a big dinner, done in the finest calligraphy, and alongside the poet had written, “Valerie had the spaghetti.” There was a programme from the premiere of Gigi. Next to a mention of the pair going to see Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Eliot had written something like, “I have never seen anything like it in my life. There is nothing I can compare it to.”
Experiencing space
This is how I felt watching Interstellar. Apart from Star Wars, decades ago, I’ve not experienced space. It’s alien to me. In the film, because the world was about to end, a new planet had to be found by a few heroes armed with cases of embryos. What drama!
The clock was ticking and off they went in the spaceship. An hour on another planet equalled seven years on Earth. Messages came in from their loved ones back home who were ageing at an alarming rate.
Space was peril upon peril, what here on Earth might be termed “just one thing after another”. There was so much you had to fight: gravity, destiny, nausea. At one point Anne Hathaway suddenly had a lovely new jumper in shades of mottled grey.
People took Dramamine against travel sickness, others declared they just wanted to go home, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Space was very 1970s and super-sincere, with no jokes at all. The terrain of a new planet looked like a beautiful frosted amaretti biscuit. I thought of Paradise Lost. I thought of Lego.
As I walked out into the drizzle afterwards, the world seemed different. I was stunned. I was impressed. I was refreshed. For three hours, I had not had a single feeling. What luxury.
—Financial Times
