Writing as a Movement of Imagination, Reading as Companionship in Thought

Abstract

In the summer of 2005 Italian sculptor Giancarlo Neri installed his huge 30ft work, The Writer, on Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath. Neri’s tribute to the lonely heroism of writing took the form of a monumental vacant wooden table and chair. The giant sculpture, made from six tons of steel and 1,000 pounds of wood, was an uncanny presence set against the backdrop of the sunburnt grass and lush greenery of London’s historic park where Karl Marx liked to walk on Sunday. It was an apt location for the work given the many literary Gullivers who lived and wrote in this part of north London including Keats, Coleridge, Freud and CLR James. ‘As one moves around the elongated table legs and looks up from under the table’, wrote Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma, ‘the weight of the world as it is carried by the labour of writers, overwhelms, tires and leaves one wondering’ (Puwar and Sharma 2009: 45).