A Smile in the Mind's Eye by Lawrence Durrell Page A

been ailing him here in Orta, the gestation of his critical books in which he declared war on Christianity in the name of Heraclitus and the ancient Greeks. His target was no less than the Christian god, God the Father.
    Night fell, the mists closed in and filtered eerily among the mossy vegetation, trailing long tentacles; the lake began to creep about, as it were, for such was the illusion given by moving mists and waters forever rubbing out and correcting images of sky and mountain. The sky full of stars burned furiously in the water, broken up by belfries and cupolas and the slow planetary trails carved by the boats (now lit like fireflies) as they crawled about the lake. Never have I experienced such a sense of peace, suspended upon a narrow balcony between sky, mountain and water – feeling as if I myself had become a trail of vapour slowly drifting about at the behest of a current of wind, of water. The sky turned slowly through its arc as if projected by a stage diorama. Time filled the heart like an hourglass. I had an early dinner and turned in, though for a long moment before sleeping I watched the shifting spectacle offered by the polished water outside the balcony window. I wondered whether Vega would find what she was seeking – the chapel where the timid but brilliant (though neurotic: all those migraines!) professor plucked up his courage to propose not marriage but … concubinage to the slim and graceful Slav whose brilliance he so admired. And then, the tragic enigma posed by his collapse into mania; surely Lou in her old age must have seen the rationale of the whole thing through the lens of Freudian theory – it still holds firm. The old sage Freud considered her one of his most brilliant pupils. He addresses her, in a letter, as ‘My indomitable friend’. He was no Zarathustra either, though he preserved his inquisitorial sanity to the end. As for Nietzsche, it was war to the knife against three fathers – or rather against God the Father (the Christian God), God the Son (his own father and all he stood for in the realm of ideas) – he never forgot hearing his mother hiss at him: ‘You are a reproach to your father’s grave’; the words had bitten deep into his sensibility – and then God the Holy Ghost, was Wagner of course, whom he also had to deny and destroy. Was it not the shock of this tremendous struggle that overturned his reason? Sometimes when he was mad he spoke of Cosima Wagner. ‘My lady Cosima sent me here …’ Of course in the turbulence of his broken mind the wife of the Holy Ghost must have been a highly desirable muse in the Oedipus context! And finally, of course, Mother won out, his own earthly mother; triumphantly she gathered all this human wreckage into her arms, while the sister quietly betrayed him by falsifying the text of his work with anti-Jewish interpolations … What a fate, what a man, what a place! I fell asleep thinking of the little chapels on the wooden hill above me. Next day was clear, but by evening a thick mist came down, and this time in a definitive manner – you could not see your hand before your face. My heart sank. Stresa was only a quarter of an hour’s drive – I knew the way by heart. But never have I seen such dense fog. The hotel proprietor told me curtly that it would not lift until morning; I stood no chance of climbing out of the hollow where Orta lies so I had better give up the notion of driving to the station and stay put. It enraged me. I closed my eyes at the dinner table and mentally rememorized every inch of the road round the lake – I had done it several times now. It was extremely foolhardy, I knew, but I thought I would try and get up on to the main road, travelling blind. I got pitying looks from everyone. They said that after a hundred yards I should be forced to leave the car and walk back to the hotel. Nevertheless I set off. It was terrifying, I could not even