Byron Easy Read Online Free Page A

I don’t have a preference; and the faint smell of lavender pot-pourri in the immaculate, startling can). Although psychoanalysis, it has to be said, so often misses the point—the subtext to many of its questions about parents seems to go something like: What were you doing hanging around with a father like that in the first place? As if anyone ever had a choice.
    But my father was, is, an intelligent man. After his emigration to Sydney, Australia, with a new wife, I began to miss the stimulation of his bookshelves (not him, you note, but his bookshelves—why, why, why? What am I that I can be so frigidly monstrous when it comes to the central relationship of my life?). My formative memory is of an entire ranged wall in our living room bearing texts on at least twenty runnered shelves. An odyssey, a magical orange-grove for a child; a gift. As I grew older I could see that some of the erudite works looked suspiciously unread, their spines pristine and uncreased; also that his taste, in his fifties, had come to rest on dry historical accounts, political philosophy, along with biographies of prominent chemists and right-wing politicians. The roman candles of literature (the Lawrence, the Joyce, the Kerouac, the Yeats) had been consigned to the dustbin marked ‘deluded youth’. (Though you had to search for this dustbin. The exciting books were often hidden behind the volumes of European history, in piles or stacks—concealed like pornography.) But he did have books. Books that are probably the cause of all my present heartache and pain; though one doesn’t choose the inviolable facts of one’s upbringing, good or bad.
    Yes, an intelligent man, and sure proof that you can read all the great works of literature and still be as confused about your moral and spiritual life as the dustman who devours the Sun every day as if it were The Book of Common Prayer . And maybe this is at the core, the rotten root, of why we haven’t communicated since I ceased to be a teenager. You see, at that age, Desmond Easy personified the perils, the folly, of the man who has made firm metaphysical conclusions one way or the other (there being no persuasive evidence in either direction, as any fule kno). A lot depends on what you believe, of course; where you stand vis-à-vis the afterlife. In his case, two thousand years of philosophical debate could be distilled into a simple sentence: there was no God. A committed atheist probably from before birth, I would feel corroded, soul-contaminated, every time I endured another spleen-filled rant about how our only destination was the avid soil and its gleeful worms; or about getting and spending and the greasy world of commerce; or the importance of chemistry as an A-level subject. That’s not where my head was at, not in the least. I was all for keeping my options open. When the bullet enters my brain (as it most certainly will), I’d like to believe in the slimmest possibility that the Big Man Upstairs will be there, shaking his fist, cursing that I’d arrived too early. And when I engaged my father in argument, I would witness his divorce-injured spirit cowering as I expounded (ludicrously, at that age!) the doctrines of Platonic transmigration, of Lawrence’s soaring and solipsistic life-belief and the lyric (largely stolen from the French Symbolists, I was later disappointed to discover) to The Doors’ ‘Break on Through to the Other Side’. So we agreed to leave it. We agreed to differ. For ten years thus far. The bond cracked twixt son and father.
    My mother, however, was a different kettle of ballgames—a free spirit, but most tangibly different in her physical characteristics. While my altitudinally challenged father was always fighting a tendency to flab in the upper arms and was bald as an acorn by the time he reached thirty-five, Sinead Mary Maguire (to use her stunningly beautiful and evocative maiden name) was an elegant raven-haired head above the crowd. Literally. By