“My father liked his fruit very ripe, so whenever one of us came across an overripe pear we gave it to him,” Natalia Ginzburg writes in The Family Lexicon. “‘Ah, so you give me your rotten pears! What real jackasses you are!’ he’d say with a hearty laugh that reverberated through the apartment, then he’d eat the pear in two bites.”
You can feel it: the almost alcoholic impression a very ripe pear leaves somewhere between your throat and your lungs, a smell more than a taste. It’s the thing that makes a pear drop a pear drop. It’s the thing that makes it feel like you breathed the pear in, that a moment ago it was a piece of fruit in a dark and golden painting, then it was gone.
But there is evidence: the stem, the thing that reminds you that the fruit once weighed down a branch in a heavy orchard, something happening to move that weight from the soil to the trees, to move down again, the pear seeming to weigh itself down with that shape, a drop of water falling back to the ground.
The word pear comes from the Vulgar Latin word pira. In biology class we learned that the hard bits, especially in an unripe pear, are called sclereid bundles, or stone cells. We looked at them under the microscope, focusing the lens until the blurred dots turned to thin lines: dead cells with thick walls.
Sometimes (especially when I am hungover) I feel my mind is a microscope, zooming in and zooming out, from the simple explanation to the more complicated one. Let us have a debate, someone in there announces, and it begins. Perhaps the explanation is this – but it could equally be this – No no, my dear fellow, it is clearly this – No sir, your reasoning, like your Latin, is vulgar! It doesn’t go anywhere, I don’t settle on an answer, but it also doesn’t feel like wasted time. It feels like playing an old computer game. It sounds like chiptune.
“That the two seeds, or four seeds, are where the pear will go and where // it began,” Susan Stewart writes in a poem called Pear. She sees a woman flying and falling, over and over, and then realises the explanation – a trampoline she can’t see.
“If you find a sight like this a kind of gift or sign, you’ve missed the way / the mind seals over, the way the simplest thing pulls on its heavy hood // and turns away slowly from a thought.”
My own mind seals over when I try to draw something. Draw what you see, not what you know, my mother told me once. In art class, we were asked to draw a pear. But looking at a pear and trying to turn the shadow into shading caused a steamroller to drive over the inside of my head.
Pears weighed down branches tens of millions of years before humans saw pears, and named pears, and put pears in oil paintings. And “After we have finished here,” Billy Collins writes,
Time will go by the way it did
before history, pure and unnoticed,
a mystery that arose between the sun and moon
before there was a word
for dawn or noon or midnight,before there were names for the earth’s
uncountable things,
when fruit hung anonymously
from scattered groves of trees,
light on the smooth green side,
shadow on the other.
• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first book, a memoir called Freak of Nature, will be published in 2024 (she is destroying any trace of the previous title, Calcium Magnesium)
• Have an animal, insect or other subject you feel is worthy of appearing in this very serious column? Let me know: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
