The Boat | The Books | The Slow Movement
In early 2009, in a desperate effort to seduce bank loan departments with the enterprising potential of a bookshop – on a canal boat – I found myself diligently scouring libraries for nautical references to include in an otherwise rather thin and hastily-assembled business plan. The aim was to reassure them (and me..) that a 60′ rust bucket bobbing on the Great British waterways was a natural home for the literary canon.
Shakespeare offered a promising start. Surely there could be no greater endorsement of such a vehicle than the Queen of Egypt’s grand entrance in one in Act II Scene 2 of Antony and Cleopatra: “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne / Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold: / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them.”
Bingo. Or so I thought. Impressive though the bard’s description is, on closer textual inspection I feel oddly cheated by his inclusion of the word “poop”. While its maritime connection may have been obvious to all in the 16th/17th century, I’m not sure its lavatorial je ne sais quoi in present day will serve my purpose very well at all.
Thankfully Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the Willows provides a more unequivocal case for all things water-based: “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” Ratty declares happily to Mole. “In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it.”
Hurrah for water voles (although their days championing river revelry appear numbered: a quick Google search of Ratty’s fortunes unearths the rather crushing surmise that the species is “the MacDonald’s of the [riverside] food-chain” in a BBC archive chronicling their recent demise. Boo.)
Sobered by the thought (but more so by meagre first-year profit predictions), I turn to F Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby for an unashamedly pretentious epigraph to the bank banalities. As narrator Nick Carraway considers his late friend’s life – and dreams – he concludes simply: “And so we beat on, boats against the current.”
I like that. I hope The Book Barge offers something of the image’s tenacity.
