Sudha Devi Nayak
Julian Barnes’s “Levels of Life” is a meditation on love, loss and grief that touches us with an immediacy that is overwhelming. Martin Fletcher of The Independent has said “Anyone who has loved and suffered loss or just suffered should read this book, and reread it and reread it” and The Times has said, “To read it is a privilege. To have written it is astonishing”. Indeed it requires tremendous courage and tremendous grief, even self-effacement to bare your soul before the world. Yet it is grief contained, written in a style that is measured with elegant restraint, honesty and truthfulness. Grief is the great denominator, freeing people from hierarchy; there are no heroes in grief. There is the singularity in grief with Barnes saying, “One grief throws no light upon another” but also the commonality as none of us can escape its true pangs.
Barnes opens the novel with “You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed”. Yes life is the coming together of disparate things, more so love. The first part of his book combines photography and aeronautics. It is a ballooning adventure of Nadar the photographer with 8 companions and his wife Ernestine. Up in the air, he sees the silent immensities of welcoming beneficent space where no evil force can reach him and negative emotions fading away, leaving forgiveness. The balloon crash-landed near Hanover with its balloonists suffering injuries. Nadar continues life with his wife whom he loves dearly and whom he nurses till her death. If there was a pattern to his life she provided it. He dies soon after and his aerostatic photographs are near forgotten. But they represent a moment the world grew up.
In the second part also Fred Burnaby an English traveller and adventurer and Sarah Bernhardt the legendary actress travel in their respective balloons and land in France and what follows is their imagined affair. Barnes says here that we are but groundlings who aspire to the exaltation of art, religion, love. But when we soar there are necessarily no soft landings, we can also crash. “So why do we constantly aspire to love? Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic and truth, as in photography and magic as in ballooning.” Burnaby’s and Benhardt’s love was doomed from the beginning, with his reticence and her waywardness. He longed for a stable relationship but she lived in the moment, constantly in search of new emotions and sensations and her heart desired more excitement than one person can give whereas Burnaby felt we are all incomplete and seek completion through another person. It was not to be.
The third part is the emotional epicentre of the book, an insight into love and sorrow. Barnes loses his wife of thirty years when nothing prepares him and he had little to help him to cope. Friends and acquaintances who dwelt on his loss sounded empty and meaningless. He does not agonise over their reactions and they didn’t matter when the worst has happened. Every love story is a grief story when one or the other is left behind. What has been taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. Life has lost its celebratory qualities, reduced to a mere passive continuance. Sometimes he feels life itself is deprived of her beauty, body and radiant curiosity. Happiness is always shared happiness as there can never be solitary happiness which is a contradiction in terms. He misses her in every action and inaction. He contemplated suicide but suicide meant killing her off altogether, an erasure of all her memories. He calls on others’ memories of her; he is in communion with her, even articulating her responses. ”the fact someone is dead may mean they are not alive but doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”
He is candid in his grief but protective of her privacy, giving away little. She remains the elusive figure of his grief. The pain of loss is so intense, so heartbreaking because in living we deeply connect with another human being and grief is the reflection of the connection that has been lost. He mentions the German word “Sehnsucht” which means “inconsolable longing “in the human heart for the loved one. The loss happens in a moment but its aftermath lasts a life time. No one could express it better than Pablo Neruda Love is so short, forgetting is so long. In Barnes’ words,”Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies.”