Dying As Kaleidoscope

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I’m reading Paul Harding’s novel, Tinkers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year. It’s about an old man lying in bed, trying to take stock of his life during the week leading up to his death. But he finds that his memories defy narrative arrangement, coming to him instead like mosaic tiles loose in a frame, “with just enough space so that they can all keep moving around…” It is some of the most beautiful prose I have read in a long time, slow and meditative and, unsurprisingly, largely plotless. Similar in these ways to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which won the Pulitzer in 2004. But I’m actually finding it much more compelling. There is a two-page section that starts on page 64, comprising only five sentences, the central one 39 lines long, wherein the old man, George, wonders at the “shifting mass” of his experience and at how it will only stop when he dies, its solid state something only for others to see. And then how even then it will not reveal itself to be as set and discernable as one would like.

“… I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all of the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else’s frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their own time, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world because they were made from this world, even though the fleeting tenants of those bits of colored glass have vacated them before they have had even the remotest understanding of what it is to inhabit them, and if they—if we are fortunate (yes, I am lucky, lucky), if we are fortunate, have fleeting instants when were are satisfied that the mystery is our to ponder, if never to solve…”