Roads to Joy

Snapshots from the past are often very evocative, and our January visit to Taormina, thirteen years ago now, hoves back into the present as my mobile phone reminds me. Those days seem like a lifetime ago, but then life has a way of crescendoing into its climactic periods before or after it’s been more of a leisurely sort of stroll. I wouldn’t say our time in the bakery and café were a walk in the park, especially because before then we were in good shape physically, good health, and wondering what on earth we’d do next with our lives.

I think the trip to Taormina was pretty much the start of our retirement, after we sold out of the bakery/café and downsized to breadmaking courses from home. The village hall seemed to be running by itself, by then, or at least I had everything well in hand, and the Allen Valleys Folk Festival was on the near horizon. Our grandsons, too, were waiting to be born over the next several years. Looking back, which turns out to be quite a joy, I can see how this particular holiday marked a kind of turning point in our lives. We stayed in an ageing hotel on the road above the seaside, where we looked out from our balcony over Isola Bella. And that holiday began our quest to discover the whys and wherefores of Florence Trevelyan‘s remarkable life. To be fair, it also set me on a writing odyssey that I have not relinquished.

Just now, I’m trying to look closely at motivations. Why did this happen? What was it that elicited that reaction? These are the sorts of questions that novelists must ask of their characters, so that they can create a story of their lives. It might be a back story that’s scarcely revealed, apart from a gesture, a word, but it needs to be known and understood. I’m doing the groundwork on our own lives, which are the things we know the most about, of course. Perhaps I’ll be able to work with characters if I understand first where I’ve come from myself.

At any rate, joys tumble over themselves as memories open back up. The Greek theatre in Taormina was also the setting for the crepuscular (twilight) story Alcina by Guido Gozzano, who was apparently inspired by Florence. I can’t think that I was inspired by anything more than Florence’s wilful life, her attempt to grasp her opportunities and run with them. Those inspirational motivations live with me still.

And theatre, itself, stretches back to the great Greek dramatists, and forward to the present day and doubtless onward. Our children experience theatre in entirely different ways, but the word resonates for them both. If all the world’s a stage, and we are merely players, then our life is theatre. There’s a certain joy in realising the story behind ourselves, or the story we inhabit, that is ongoing, but as a story must, that has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Looked at it that way, we are the joy of the story, the delight of the play.