Sensim Sine Sensu: what I have been reading
Sensim Sine Sensu: what I have been reading
I was completely out of ideas for a post this month, so I turned to the books I had been reading for inspiration: The first was The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus, a birthday present from my sister. This author, as some of you may know, is a performance poet who is partly deaf, but whose life has been considerably enhanced by the wearing of hearing aids. This autobiography is an account of his struggle to come to terms with his deafness in a world which often fails to accommodate those with hearing difficulties and his eventual triumph against all the odds.
The second book that I finished, one that I had been meaning to read for some time, was Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell which I picked up in the second-hand section of my local library. It is the untold story of the death of Shakespeare’s son and the grief that followed which, it is surmised by the author, caused him to write Hamlet, his most famous play. In notes at the end and the beginning, Maggie O’Farrell explains how she has elaborated on the little-known facts about Shakespeare’s life to write the book, and what we are given is a magnificent and compelling story about what life must have been like, particularly for women, in Stratford-upon-Avon in the late Sixteenth Century.
The third book, which I must confess I haven’t yet finished, but with the AE deadline looming I thought I’d mention it anyway, is Our Evenings by Alan Hollingshurst, which I found in a second-hand bookshop in Stony Stratford where I often go to browse. It is set in 1962 and is the coming-of-age story of Dave Win, who is shown through his school and university life, coming to terms with his sexuality in an age where sex between males in England and Wales was about to become decriminalised. The point in the story which I have now reached, is where Dave has been turned down by Nick, whom he has met at a party with a group of university friends, but who has resisted his advances to continue a relationship with Jenny, one of the others in the friendship group. The writer’s depiction of the double rejection that Dave experiences is acute. I am just over halfway through, and Dave has withdrawn from his Oxford degree studies and is about to take up a job as an actor.
In reading these books I empathised with Raymon Antrobus, as I had begun to suffer a partial hearing loss in my late 30s. My teaching career was salvaged by the eventual use of hearing aids, something which, like him I was extremely reluctant to do. When I finally did have to give up teaching children because of my growing difficulty with hearing, I was lucky enough to find part-time work in adult education. This led me to new experiences in essay writing and delivering academic papers of which I had never dreamed.
Maggie O'Farrell’s book I found really engaging. In her end note she compliments her English teacher Mr Henderson, who in 1989 had told her about the existence of Hamnet, and I wondered how far my own career had affected pupils’ lives. I also followed my reading by watching the film of Hamnet which was directed by Chloe Zhao, and which spends more time with Shakespeare himself than the book does. One notable thing is that Shakespeare’s name is never mentioned in the book, although the author’s dedication at the beginning is For Will.
Alan Hollinghurst, who wrote the final book that I have been reading, won the Booker Prize for his earlier The Line of Beauty in 2004. At that time, I was teaching “Notable Novels” to adult students and this was one of the choices they had made. The book contained a lot of graphic sexual detail and one or two of my students found this difficult to deal with. I remember giving a lesson on “Gay Literature” which began with The Satyricon in the 1st Century AD and went up until The Stranger’s Child (2011) by Alan Hollinghurst, which revolves around first world war poet Cecil Valance and the consequences of his love affairs for posterity. Valance is based on the real life poet, Rupert Brooke. The lesson seemed to have the desired effect, and the students became more receptive to the novel. We later read The Ghost Road, the final novel from Pat Barker’s excellent First World War series, The Regeneration Trilogy, which also covered gay themes.
A Note on the Title: Sensim Sine Sensu is a Latin phrase encountered in Our Evenings. Its meaning, according to Google, is ‘slowly and imperceptibly’ and it can be attributed to Cicero, referencing ‘the creeping, unnoticed nature of ageing’. The phrase is the inscription on a sundial which a couple from the group in Hollinghurst’s novel had found in a junk shop on their honeymoon. It is discussed briefly by the group after which their talk moves on to another topic. It had, however, rung a bell for me: I remembered completing an Advanced Diploma in Science Education in 1982 and getting my Yr8 pupils to carry out a series of experiments on Time. This diagram of the sundial and its gnomon is from a book I used to plan those experiments.
References
The Quiet Ear (2025) by Raymond Antrobus
The Regeneration Trilogy (1991-95) by Pat Barker
The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014) Ed. E. L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen
Our Evenings (2024) by Alan Hollinghurst
Hamnet (2020) by Maggie O’Farrell (Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction in that year)
Time, A Unit for Teachers (1972) Schools Council Publications
Comments