The aesthetics of me

When I got to the concert house, she was already there. And only her, strolling around the Gendarmenmarkt with no one else in sight, twirling her umbrella as she made circuits of the sandy square in the soft summer light. She was my girlfriend, elegant and young. Berlin, 2004. I was late for the concert.

I wouldn’t be able to say if we all have a personal aesthetic within. But I would wager in most of us there is an aesthetic palate, a sense of colours, climates, sounds and images that we find ourselves instinctively drawn to. Ways of looking and even ways of acting which feel like home. The difference between the languages we speak as foreign ones and the ones which, even if not our native tongue, feel closer to us even if we speak them imperfectly. Our vibe. I remember just before the 2019 election a friend, heavily into Jeremy Corbyn, doing a Twitter feed outlining their ideal societal conditions, and it was all subsidised lunch kitchens and hearty buns and free buses, all very Orwell and Silitoe, and thinking, ‘It does not feel inside this person as it does inside me.’ That their paradise would be different to mine.

I think this is an underrated factor in why people create – that they are drawn to a particular aesthetic so intensely that they want to marinate in it, even need to summon it given its absence in their reality. Writers are often criticised for writing the same book, but given that it’s hard to write at all, writers can’t afford to ignore those certain scenes, those certain configurations, which seem to possess an animating power and demand to be written again and again. I think it can simply be that the aesthetic charge of a particular scene is irresistible to that author. I’m reading Philip Roth at the moment, ‘I Married a Communist’, and tho his world of ‘50s union labour and eloquent characters is not my own, I can feel that for him it is highly charged. He is able to communicate to the reader why he can’t get 1950s Newark out of his head, and his enthusiasm is contagious.

By now, I feel pretty aware of my own creative aesthetic. It’s continental European cities, a lot of train trips or travel in general, people who feel like they’ve missed out on things. Millennials finding themselves abroad and older and reflecting on their lives, an emphasis on verbal wit and a deep interest in male friendship. Lots of rain. Girls walking alone around central European squares. Not expressly poetic; people have told me on several occasions that my writing comes over a bit like detective fiction, with the mystery being the universe. Kafkaesque, but gentler, and nostalgic and more in dialogue with pessimism than pessimistic. More influenced by the continental tradition than the English one, perhaps, but also totally English in humour and sensibility.