{"id":1598,"date":"2011-06-16T21:47:37","date_gmt":"2011-06-16T20:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1598"},"modified":"2014-03-31T11:55:40","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T10:55:40","slug":"deep-memories-the-death-of-patrick-leigh-fermor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=1598","title":{"rendered":"Deep memories:  the death of Patrick Leigh Fermor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/time_of_gifts.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft  wp-image-2377\" alt=\"time_of_gifts\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/time_of_gifts-196x300.jpg\" width=\"157\" height=\"240\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/time_of_gifts-196x300.jpg 196w, https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/time_of_gifts.jpg 293w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 157px) 100vw, 157px\" \/><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>There have been some thoughtful appreciations after the death of Patrick Leigh Fermor<\/strong> &#8211; none more so than <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thetimes.co.uk\/tto\/opinion\/columnists\/benmacintyre\/article3060910.ece\" target=\"_blank\">Ben Macintyre&#8217;s excellent piece in the Times<\/a>, which rather than following the obvious line of \u2018the end of an era and can anyone still write travel books anymore\u2019 instead proclaimed the continued need for them.<\/p>\n<p>The thing that has always most intrigued me is the length of time between Leigh Fermor\u2019s journeys and his books.\u00a0 <em>A Time Of Gifts<\/em> came out 40 years after his Balkan travels of the 1930s;\u00a0 <em>Between the Woods and the Water<\/em> 50 years later;\u00a0 he was still working on the final volume of the trilogy at his death, which would have appeared almost 70 years after the events described.<\/p>\n<p>.<\/p>\n<p>Such fine distillation of experience over very many years can do interesting things to a book.\u00a0 I&#8217;m used to it from the chroniclers of South American adventures where you often also get such time delay:\u00a0 Garcilaso de la Vega, the best known chronicler of the Incas, had been in Europe for forty years before he wrote his account of the civilisation he had left behind;\u00a0 Pedro Pizarro wrote his memoirs of being a page boy at the Conquest of Peru when he was an old man;\u00a0 similarly the great chronicler of the Mexican campaign, Bernal Diaz, only recorded his eyewitness account of that parallel conquest some fifty years after the event.<\/p>\n<p>Is there something that makes ambitious journeys difficult to assimilate in the present tense &#8211; \u00a0that their sensory overload can only best be interpreted years later, when the glitter and noise has fallen away to reveal structure underneath? Many of Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s novels depend on just such an almost optical effect, \u00a0in which events of the distant past are foreshortened and looked at with startling clarity.\u00a0 W.H. Hudson\u2019s classic memoir of Argentina, <em>Far Away and Long Ago<\/em>, relies as much on the passage of time between the writing and the remembered events for its nostalgic power.\u00a0 Or is there a simpler explanation \u2013 that young men inclined to go out into the jungle and cross deserts \u00a0&#8211; or the Balkans \u2013 are equally disinclined to sit down at a desk and write about it immediately afterwards?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>. There have been some thoughtful appreciations after the death of Patrick Leigh Fermor &#8211; none more so than Ben Macintyre&#8217;s excellent piece in the Times, which rather than following the obvious line of \u2018the end of an era and can anyone still write travel books anymore\u2019 instead proclaimed the continued need for them. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1598"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2378,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions\/2378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}