Time can manipulate and beautify even the harshest of memories. Love in particular is almost always better and more powerful in retrospect than when it actually happened. That one beautiful girl that broke your heart many years ago. Memories that are a part of you, and have helped shape you later in life. You have learned from them, drawn from the experiences and accepted how love, and indeed life, works. They have taught you to appreciate what you have, and know what you have lost.
These are some of the topics put forward in the short story “In the National Gallery” by Doris Lessing. We follow the narrator (whose gender is unknown to the reader, though I will assume it is Doris Lessing and therefore refer to the narrator as “she”) into an art gallery. The intention is to sit in the middle of the room and spend an hour just looking at a single painting. This painting turns out to be a painting of a chestnut horse painted by George Stubbs. It is a huge painting of a big red horse. “And there it was, the Stubbs chestnut horse, that magnificent beast, all power and potency, and from the central benches I could see it well.” L. 4. The narrator assumed she would be all alone in observing the painting, but soon a man sits down near her. He is about sixty years old and seems very absorbed in the painting. Moments later he is joined by a younger man, who is evidently his student, or younger family member. He starts telling him about the painting, which results in the younger man exclaiming that “You can’t make a silk purse out of me, I keep telling you” l. 23. This is evidence that the older man is trying to pass on some of his experiences, trying to teach the young man a thing or two. The young man, however, won’t have it, and claims that he cannot be changed. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. You can’t turn something bad into something good.
To find out