The Convergence of the Twain

It is strange what research throws up when you let yourself follow a curving line, isn't it? (I know, it could be called a MAT, but I don't think it counts.)

I was looking for information about icebergs, when this caught my eye and so I veered off course towards it. Hardy wrote it in 1912, that ill-fated year for an apparently unsinkable ship and her passengers:

The Convergence of the Twain
by Thomas Hardy

I

In a solitude of the sea

Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her,

stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres

Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid,

and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls-grotesque,

slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless,

all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?'...

VI

... Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate

For her - so gaily great -

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history

X

Or sign that they were bent

by paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said 'Now!'

And each one hears,

And consummation comes,

and jars two hemispheres.

Prinknash (pr Prinnidge)

I am going here

where these Benedictine monks live

The reason I am going is that this was my great-grandmother's childhood home (she of the biography I was going to write, now of the novel that I am about to begin).

It's called Prinknash (pr Prinnidge) and I'm going to meet the Abbot who will show me round the house before it reverts to a closed monastic community and the Abbey they built in 1972 becomes an old people's home. (The monastic community is shrinking, hence the changes.) When I get there I shall also remeet a woman I met as a result of my Scottish research ... a woman who is the daughter of my great-grandmother's second husband's (do keep up) chauffeur. A woman who was so full of wonderful memories of my great-grandmother and the Scottish life they led.

You could, of course, say that this visit is a MAT. You could say that all research is MATing. But just as I went to Kilmalieu to get a sense of the place where my great-grandmother lived after the Titanic sank, so I want to go to Prinknash to get a sense of the place where she lived as a child, and from where she was married. That's how I justify it anyway ... .

Camas Chil Mhalieu, Loch Linnhe

I am going here: Which is in northwest Scotland. Image © Copyright Donald MacDonald and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Licence.

I'm going in search of the cottage that my great-grandmother used to go to get away from it all. I want to breathe the air, see what she saw and hear what she heard in the days and weeks, months and years when she never once spoke about her experience aboard RMS Titanic despite, or perhaps because of her courage on that dreadful night nearly 100 years ago.

I don't suppose the place will have changed that much, and when I am standing where she would have stood, looking at and listening to the things she would have seen and heard, I fancy I might sense how best to write about her.

And if any of you reading this have the Gaelic, perhaps you could translate Camas Chil Mhalieu into this language for me ... in a comment.