Michael Harding: Conversations with friends in search of lost time

I invited a distinguished professor of literature to dinner last week and he couldn’t stop talking about Proust. I felt he was trying to smother me with his erudition.

“There is a calmness that abides inside every line Proust wrote,” he declared.

He was chewing on a raw slice of roast beef.

“What say you?” he inquired, eyeing me over the rim of his glasses.

Polish is a tricky language but Hiberno-Cavan-English is worse

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Michael Harding: I'm as confused about masculinity as my cat

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When I was young, flesh pots were few and far between in Cavan

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‘The flute in my hand, I got on the treadmill like a true Orange Man’

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“You’re dead right,” I agreed.

“Every sentence must have a soul,” he intoned.  “So that the words feel like they are making visible something that is essentially invisible. Naming what is un-namable. Am I correct?”

“One hundred percent,” I agreed.

I don’t get many professors at my dinner table. And I was running in and out of the bathroom all evening, my bladder in overdrive with fear that he might point his sharp tongue towards my own writing. But fortunately he didn’t appear to be aware that I wrote anything, which was comforting.

The next morning one phrase stuck in my head.

“To make visible what is invisible. I didn’t understand what he meant.”

I washed my teeth and sat on the toilet for a long time but was none the wiser when I was finished.

I remember when I lived in Mullingar, in a semi-detached, I could hear a child in the house next door. His feet on the stairs, his cries when he fell off the back of the sofa, and the ball thudding on the other side of my dining room wall.

Himself and his mother were in there most of the time, as I typed away. Occasionally I’d stop just to listen. I couldn’t decipher any words but there’s no ambiguity in a child’s emotions.

Sometimes there was silence. A door squeaking. The child sleeping. The mother on tiptoes about the rooms. And in the silence I could hear a hidden love, and feel a calm abiding behind the wall.

I was still thinking about the professor later, as I walked about the town, crisp and dry beneath my feet.

If only I were calm, I thought. If only I were at ease, inside the narratives that I weave around my sense of self. But I’m not. In fact, if I were a semi-detached house, the mother and child inside me wouldn’t be enveloped in blissful silence, on the contrary, they’d be constantly screaming at each other.

And as I wandered around the town I was a bit worried that such morbid introspection might be a sign of impending depression, but in fact it was only a cold coming on.

The professor had been spluttering over his parsnips the previous evening and he may have been full of germs.

By lunchtime my throat was sore and I was cursing the erudition that caused him to blow so much hot air in my face the previous night.

I fled to the bed, with vitamins B12, D, C, ibuprofen, and Sally Rooney's novel, Conversations with Friends.

And it took three days before the repulsive ulcers under my tongue had completely gone, my sinus canals had returned to normal, the remains of the roast beef had been consigned to the cats’ dish and I was almost at the end of Sally’s book.

Reading it was an act of self-forgetting. And the further I read the more real the characters became and the sentences grew plump with calm invisible things that lay softly within and needed no saying.

A few days later I went for a check-up and I opened my kindle again in the doctor’s surgery, because when I got to the waiting room it was full and I was so caught up in how the book ended that I didn’t even notice my name being called.

“You’re next,” the doctor repeated several times, before an old lady elbowed me in the ribs and said,

“He’s talking to you.”

I closed the kindle on my phone.

“You look like your mind is elsewhere.” The doctor said.

“I’m reading this wonderful book, and there is a calmness inside every sentence.” I declared, hoping I sounded like a professor.

The doctor just said, “okay.”

“It’s as if it makes the invisible visible,” I said.

“Okay.” he said.

“It’s like a semi-detached house,” I said, “full of people I can hear through the wall.”

The doctor was shining a light into my eye.

“What is?” he asked.

“The book.” I said.

“Are you feeling depressed?” he wondered.

“No,” I replied.

“Good,” he said.

And he assured me that the virus was gone, and urged me to get the winter flu vaccine as soon as possible.