Altitudes and Heartaches

Julian Barnes' Levels of Life soars to colossal heights and plumbs depths like all good works of art. The book is a slim volume of 117 pages. All the three essays, The Sin of Height, On the Level and The Loss of Depth are interspersed with philosophical reflections and metaphors. Lucidity and brevity are the mainstay of Levels of Life.

The first two essays offers a peek into the lives of balloonists; Colonel Fredrick Gustavus Burnaby, Nadar aka Gaspard- Felix Tournachon and the French stage and film actress Sarah Bernhardt, nicknamed The Divine Sarah.

The third essay deals with the loss of the author's wife and literary agent Pat Kavanagh. The book is in fact dedicated 'for Pat.'

Sarah Bernhardt: She is temperamentally drawn to ballooning because her dreamy nature would constantly transport her to the higher regions. She feels the balloon to be the 'emblem of uttermost freedom.'

Fred Burnaby believed that shape was the key: an aerostat in the form of a tube or cigar and propelled by machinery, was the way forward- as it eventually proved.

(Ballooning represented freedom-yet a freedom subservient to the powers of wind and weather).

Nadar: Journalist, caricaturist, photographer, balloonist, entrepreneur and inventor...a tireless self-publicist. His infidelities coexisted with uxoriousness. He wrote that the three supreme emblems of modernity were 'photogarphy, electricity and aeronautics.' 

(Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the Truth.' Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers:'How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness  drop away...and forgiveness descends)