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I have never been able to explain what my father's hands looked like when he was working. I can tell you they were large, that they moved with a particular economy I have spent years trying to describe and have never quite managed. Language fails here, as it always does when what you are trying to hold is not a fact but a quality.
He built things. He built them well. What he built still stands.
I am writing this in the house he made. The walls are the same walls. But he is not here to see them, and I am not sure this is comfort or its opposite.
My mother kept a garden that was, by any reasonable standard, too large for one person. She was not a young woman. Her knees were bad. The soil was poor. But every March she would begin again, as if the previous year's roses had not died, as if the frost had not taken the lavender, as if starting over were not the very definition of futility.
I asked her once why she did not simply let it go. She looked at me the way she sometimes did when I had said something that revealed how little I understood. "It is not about the garden," she said.
I have spent years trying to work out what she meant. I think she meant that the act of tending something, even something that will not last, is itself the point. But I am not certain, and she is no longer here to ask.
What is the paradox when a writer states that "language fails"?
Markscheme
