At the top of the stairs was a small painting by Brueghel that Leclercq had pointed out earlier. It was one of those winter scenes of gray ice, white snow, and blackened trees all overrun with a stampede of human life, so exquisitely small and yet not one life overlooked, each measured and considered: tiny scenes of merriment and despair, equally ominous and comic when seen as such a distance through the master's telescopic eyes. I stepped closer to study it. In one corner a man was pissing on the wall of a house, while in the window above a coarse, dough-faced woman prepared to empty a pot of water on his head. Some ways off, a man with a hat had fallen through the ice while around him the oblivious skaters continued to enjoy themselves—only one small boy had noticed the accident, and was trying to offer the drowning man the end of his stick. There the scene was frozen: the young boy leaning, the stick offered but not yet taken, the whole scene suddenly tilted toward that dark hole that waited to swallow it.—Nicole Krauss, Great House (2010)
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
"tiny scenes of merriment and despair"
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Calling to mind the opening lines of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938):
ReplyDelete"About suffering they were never wrong, /
The Old Masters: how well they understood /
Its human position; how it takes place /
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just /
walking dully along;"
(And later referring specifically to Brueghel, which I'd forgotten!)
Those lines being:
ReplyDelete"In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away /
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may /
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, /
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone /
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green /
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen /
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts" (lines 16-23)