Joe Roberts
Description
Looking in the long glass, Lear can t believe he has become so old there hardly seems to have been the time to grow so old. Sixty-one. He finds his ow
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n appearance absurd: the discrepancy between his physique (lumbering) and his manner (timid). Lear has learned to bear his lack of beauty; he no longer seeks physical love. Through his sensibility and charm, he is sought after as a friend. Still he would rather have the deeper involvements of loving another and being loved. His sister had loved him, of that he is certain, but not his parents. When he takes his bath, he is disheartened by the clumsiness of his body. A wounded octopus. He sometimes draws himself in letters to friends, emphasising the globularity of his torso and the inadequacy of his legs. In these drawings his spectacles are always springing from his nose and sometimes he draws them with pupils like a second pair of eyes. In one drawing he sits, with his arms flung out behind him, on the shoulders of a runaway elephant... Lear is ashamed of his epileptic condition, the demon that has pursued him all his life, and he keeps it secret with the help of his Albanian servant, Giorgio. The pair journey through Bengal to Calcutta where the landscape painter and Nonsense poet has been invited to pass the Christmas holiday with the Viceroy, Lord Northbrook. The tropical landscape seems both alien and hauntingly familiar. The people Lear meets are almost as otherworldly as he is: a feverish hotelier, a scholarly Raja, a giant minstrel. When they reach Calcutta and find themselves among the upper social strata of the Raj, even among old friends, Lear cannot relax for a moment the demon could ruin everything. Bengal, The Cold Weather, 1873 is funny, sad and disturbing in equal measure, its atmosphere comic and Gothic
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