Whispers of Earth and Memory: Book Review of Ruskin Bond’s ‘Life’s Magic Moments’

Some books barge right in, all fireworks, demanding space in our attention-scarce heads. Others enter gently, like a breeze through a half-opened window on a warm, windless afternoon, and without much effort, bring something both new and old.

Everyone deserves a moment in the day to simply sit back and take a breather. Life’s Magic Moments by Ruskin Bond give readers that moment of Zen. It does not hurry. It does not ask. It simply is. One can imagine the man, sitting in his chair in Landour, staring at the hills, pen in hand, trying to let out a few gasps of air that form words as he gently, yet deliberately, grips the pen, his warmth bringing life to the hills, utterly lost to the realisation that he his writing. It is not a book to be enjoyed slowly, sip by sip, and in the end all that is left is a memory, a slight bitterness, and a sweetness that lingers.

While mentioning this, he shares the magical essence that he has in mind. “I must start with the tiny yellow flower that appeared, almost out of nowhere, in an abandoned flowerpot on my windowsill. I had given up trying to grow a petulant peony and had put the pot aside, still filled with earth.” Who will not smile at that! That flower, close to being a metaphor in embryo, shows us the way life functions—you let go, you stop caring, then something small and tenacious blooms in spite of you. As Wordsworth said a long time ago–as poets have said it for ages. And then he situates himself: “What a delight it is to sit here in my little sunroom, surrounded by geraniums, pen in hand, pad before me, inscribing these words on a fresh sheet of paper.” You imagine the scene immediately, the old writer, the sunlight sifting through leaves, the words flowing as not so much a duty as an act of camaraderie. Thoreau had his pond at Walden, Woolf her room of one’s own, and Bond his sunroom full of geraniums. Every room is greater than four walls; it is a mind that has expanded to fill space.

There is something haunting, too, in the way he speaks of Emily Brontë: “In the far distance is a church and the vicar’s house. The house is called ‘Wuthering Heights’, and it gave its name to the masterpiece written by a girl who was not to live for long—Emily Brontë, one of the three gifted daughters of the vicar. No, Emily Brontë never died. Her spirit still sings across the lonely moors.” This is not literary criticism—it is communion. He will argue that she has not died, because to him, she has not. That is the odd stick-to-it-iveness of art, isn’t it? Writers who left the world early walk among us still, and occasionally—by the grace of chance and a windswept hill—they stray into our sunrooms, too.

Books are scattered all over his house, he admits—“Books! They are all over the house—in bookshelves, in boxes, in drawers, under my desk, in the attic, beneath my bed. They have accumulated over the years, and still they come.…They cheer me up by presenting the more ridiculous aspects of our lives, something that the great philosophers and saints fail to accomplish!” Anyone who has grown up among books recognises this disorder and anyone who has chuckled aloud over a sentence, knows precisely what he is talking about. Philosophers can tell us how to live, and saints can point the way toward the divine, but sometimes it is the ridiculous that saves us from despair. Dickens was aware of this when he presented us with Mr. Micawber, Shakespeare knew it with his fools, and Bond knows it in the softly tittering corpse of a forgotten line rediscovered under a bed.

He remembers too the influence of Gide: “A young friend gave me a copy of André Gide’s Fruits of the Earth.…His novel, The Immoralist, influenced me into writing a novel, The Sensualist, which got me into trouble… a long time ago!” I like the bluntness of this—writers do not always leave inspiration like a torch handed down solemnly; occasionally they leave a spark that, where it falls, sets afire conflagrations. Gide to Bond, Bond to us—it is the rope of influence and of mischief, of writing that is queer because it is true of mind and body.

And then, as a result of reading, he turns to the warmth of walking: “I felt as though I were melting as I trudged along a mountain path on a hot and airless afternoon in May.” You are concerned about that sweat, that fatigue. What he steals is sobering: “I hope that spring is still there, quenching the thirst of wayfarers.…Humans have poisoned their own life-giving resources.…We have to pay for treated or ‘purified’ water sold in bottles…” There, the complaint moves, however slightly, out of discomfort into guilt. We drank out of rivers and think water is generous. Now we are drinking water in plastic bottles, and we believe what a label on a company package says. Bond, in his usual brevity, goes to the hills, and not to metaphorical hills, to our estrangement with nature.

And yet he will not give up completely. He tells us: “To plant a tree is to believe in the future.…To plant anything that’s good…is to justify our existence on this earth.” Few couplets sound so much like him. Not only expedient, it is good, a soundless bet with despair. Even earthworms, he tells us, they must have their privacy: “They are not doing anything—even earthworms need a break…If humans need privacy, then so do earthworms.” It is a funny and a profound sentence at the same time. Honour, he would have us think, is not ours in solitude—it extends, timorously, perhaps, even to the smallest creatures which creep in our soil.

And then the rain. “The sound I like most is the patter of gentle rain on the old tin roof…After some time, the patter becomes a steady drumming.…And when the wind rises, the old roof rises a bit, too, creaking and groaning…” You can listen to it with your eyes closed, the sound, the sigh of the roof. Rain is the music of memory, the tune that helps childhood leave old age. Eliot heard it in Prufrock, Woolf in The Waves, but Bond hears it in Landour, on a tin roof, in the silence of the waiting hills.

Dreams are woven into his sentences: “I dream of old friends, and I dream of new friends. I dream of a world where flowers still bloom and birds still sing.…I dream of things that didn’t happen. Perhaps they will one day.” What you dream of here is not fantasy—it is continuation. Things that never were may still be! Márquez’s Macondo, Calvino’s invisible cities, are also dreams realised by writing.

And through it all, he laughs at himself: “I am torn between two choices. Do I follow my spiritual inclinations and continue with my meditation, ignoring the call to breakfast?” What a dilemma! The sublime and the smell of toast. This is Bond in the basement, serious enough to contemplate, hungry enough to laugh at his own seriousness.

Reflecting on that period now, he says: “In time, I did become a writer, and after a long literary journey, a fairly successful one.” No grandeur, no chest-thumping. Not more than a casual confession, a shrug with a smile.

But he is not blind to the corruption of the world: “Honesty is not highly prized in today’s world...Power comes first. The old men vying for power...are ready to go through all sorts of legal convolutions...” This is the voice of age: tired and sharp. He sees too much, and is still compelled to name it.

But he then smiles: “English literature is full of loveable buffoons, strangely absent from American literature; those early pioneers and gunslingers were usually dead before they could put on weight.” The humour is fond, sharp, a little wicked. He is also not wrong—there are plenty of bumbling kings in the English cupboard; it is a shame most of America’s kings are packing.

He returns to the act of writing: “Basically, we write for ourselves. An author is his own best audience...he must be content with the satisfaction that he derives from his creative effort.” This is the heart of it. To write is to have a conversation with oneself, and if the world happens to overhear it, so much the better.

And he recognises the different strains of writers: “There are all sorts of writers. Some are thinking writers, some are instinctive writers and some are lyrical writers...It’s only the formula writers who are immune to the anguish of failure.” That pain is the crest of your honesty, evidence that you have tried. The great ones— Brontë, Keats, Stevenson—wrote their way through sickness, poverty, death creeping closer. “The great works of literature were often created in adverse circumstances...” Bond reminds us that the persistence of literature maybe its most miraculous aspect.

Finally, however, he falls asleep: “But in my mind’s eye, I see the violet in the rock...the dragonfly’s translucent wings...I ramble into the unknown, where there is no beginning and no end.” This is Bond wandering beyond himself to the very extremities of eternity, beyond all those newsless and weedy domains of notification, to that eternal garden where all the violets, all the dragonflies, all the dreams continue to glitter.

And what of it all? No catharsis, perhaps, but a soul, a loose patching of silence. Life’s Magic Moments is not monumental—it has no reason to be. It is enough that it leads us to be conscious of attentiveness: the solitary flower in the deserted pot, the worms in the earth, the rattle of the old roof, the dream you never dreamed of. Bond’s gift is not thunder, it is echo. Even these little things that we brush past without taking any notice, he says, could be there to bind the world together. And then when you put it down you might start fussing over your own small stuff, the shade of a tree beside your window, the whistle of a kettle, how a memory will jump out at you when you are in the last place you expect to be. That must be the magic of it, a wake-up call by Bond to the world that is always nearby, just waiting to be noticed.

(Wani Nazir is the author of two collections of poetry: ‘…and the silence whispered’ and ‘The Chill in the Bones.’ He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, J&K and writes prose and poetry in English, Urdu and Kashmiri.)