'A Family of Serene Clouds in Miniature'

“Quiet tumult.” The words are Clive James’ in an interview. The man has been dying in public for a long time but he’s still worth listening to. He describes the composition of a new poem, “The River in the Sky”: “What I wanted was a tumult, and I hope that’s what I got: a quiet tumult, like the light on the harbor, or the snow leopard diving down the cliff.”

I can’t recall ever using tumult in writing or conversation, and one seldom encounters it. Tumultuous, yes, but usually as a cliché in journalism, a lazy way to describe an era (“those tumultuous Sixties”). It’s a good word to avoid. Tumult echoes in my inner ear with tummler and tumble, which help ameliorate any residual pretentiousness. It sounds like a broken-backed, stitched-together word, a fading trochee. It has its uses. One thinks of the Boar’s Head scene in Henry IV, Part II, in which Mistress Quickly observes: “Here’s a goodly tumult!”

Back to “quiet tumult”: James is playing with a near-oxymoron, but the unexpected pairing makes sense. We think of tumults as noisy affairs, like mob scenes or mosh pits. But disturb an ants’ nest with the tip of your cane and what do you have? Or watch the play of sunlight on the ground as filtered through the leaves of a breeze-tossed tree. A passage of prose or verse might also be a quiet tumult. Consider our foremost painter in prose, Vladimir Nabobov, in Speak, Memory:   

“I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the spare parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.”