Review: Richard Wollheim - 'Germs'

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I had no idea who Richard Wollheim was before reading this book. I've since learned a few things about him, notably by reading this book.

Lifting my eyes, I see that the garden, and everything in it, moves. The flowers move, and the lavender moves, and the tree above me is moving. I am standing in the sun, my body is tipped forward, and I am walking. Walking I shall trip, and, if I trip, trip without a helping hand, I shall fall. I look above me, and I feel behind me, searching for the hand that is always there. There is no hand, and therefore, if I trip, or when I trip, and now at long last, the waiting is over, and I have tripped, and I am, am I not? I am falling, falling – and was it then, in that very moment when magically I was suspended in the early light, when the soft smells and sounds seeping out of the flowers and the insects and the birds appeared to be doing for me for a moment what the hand that was not there could not do, or was it, not then, but in the next moment, by which time the magic had failed, and the path was racing towards me, that I did what I was to do on many later occasions, on the occasion of many many later falls, and I stretched out my hands rigid in front of me so that my fingers formed a fan, not so much to break my fall, or to make things better for me when I hit the ground, but rather to pretend, to pretend also to myself, that things were not so bad as they seemed, or disaster so imminent, and that this was not a fall but a facile descent through the air, which would leave me in the same physical state, clean, ungrazed, uninjured, that I was in before I tripped, and that the urine would not, out of sheer nervousness, pour out of me?

It's quite a dreamy state, reading this book; It's one of those books that feels mostly like listening to really good ambient music and also like seeing worlds through the eyes of someone who has lived for quite some time and thought about things.

Having said that, this book isn't airy and lofty in an ignorant and solipsistic sense. I don't think it's grandiose either, which I think is a state that some authors suffer from as they try to weave together a story from as long back as they can remember to the present day.

Wollheim wrote this book at the end of his life, at the start of the twenty-first century. It both allows for long, dreamy passages and brief ones.

At a period when, having finished one undergraduate degree, and unable to decide what to do next, I was briefly working at an editorial job in London, I suffered greatly from the fact that I was separated from a girl who was still in Oxford, and whom I loved, and who, I eventually allowed myself to believe, loved me.

What struck me hardest when reading the book were passages where Wollheim questions things that a lot of men take for granted.

Amongst Allen’s miscellaneous tasks, set him presumably by my parents, was that of trying to teach me a number of manly skills, such as carpentry, and boxing, but all ultimately to no avail. I always made an enthusiastic start, and the idea of learning a new subject, and particularly a subject that came with new words, a new vocabulary, excited me. But, in a short while, the excitement deserted me. Fear, fear that my body would fail me, compounded by the further fear that I would not be able to live with this fear, so that my mind would give out even before my body, soon drove out every other concern. Allen told me that, when I was a grown man, I would regret not being able to defend myself. But the appeal fell on deaf ears. I did not particularly want to grow up, and, even less, to grow up to be a man.

The second way in which women showed their superiority was in the more interesting and enjoyable lives that they lived. Men had to make money, which women, on the whole, did not, and this had the striking consequence that, whereas men were never permitted to talk about how they passed their days, it was something that women discussed continuously. Women could, I knew, be painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, actresses. There was no limit to the paradise that opened up at their feet and stretched forwards indefinitely, whereas for men such possibilities existed only rarely, and then mostly in the past, in history.

This is a gem of a book. I'll remember it fondly and will read it again.