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The Passion Do you ever think of your childhood? I think of it when I smell porridge. Sometimes after I've been by the docks I walk into town and use my nose tracking fresh bread and bacon. Always, passing a particular house, that sits like the others in a sort of row, and is the same as them, I smell the slow smell of oats. Sweet but with an edge of salt. Thick like a blanket. I don't know who lives in the house, who is responsible, but I imagine the yellow fire and the black pot. At home we used a copper pot that I polished, loving to polish anything that would keep a shine. My mother made porridge, leaving the oats overnight by the old fire. Then in the morning when her bellows work had sent the sparks shooting up the chimney, she burned the oats brown at the sides, so that the sides were like brown paper lining the pot and the inside slopped white over the edge. We trod on a flag floor but in the winter she put down hay and the hay and the oats made us smell like a manger. Most of my friends ate hot bread in the mornings. I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same thing as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher. But I'm not a child any more and often the Kingdom of Heaven eludes me too. Now, words and ideas will always slip themselves in between me and the feeling. Even our birthright feeling, which is to be happy. This morning I smell the oats and I see a little boy watching his reflection in a copper pot he's polished. His father comes in and laughs and offers him his shaving mirror instead. But in the shaving mirror the boy can only see one face. In the pot he can see all the distortions of his face. He sees many possible faces and so he sees what he might become. The Passion was given to me by my brother in law for Christmas. It's his girldfriend's favorite book. It's the kind of book I would have never picked up on my own. It's a series of interralated short stories and takes place during Napoleon's ruling. The author's style was fascinating and full of surrealism. By the end, I realized that I liked the book a lot and got attached to her characters as well as her prose.

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