So what is this "meaning of nowhere" in Morris' title? It refers to her very characteristic view that everything we do in life is written on water. All will be forgotten, and the things we do are no more than this -- roles we inhabit, attitudes we strike, in the short span between birth and death ("the ultimate bookends").
This is what leads her to describe even battles, usually seen by moralists and radicals as hideously cruel aberrations, as picturesque gestures. Some things, it's true, are too terrible to fit into this pattern, and then she turns her look away. The systematic murder of Jews in Trieste in 1943 is just too awful for her to contemplate at length, so in her walks round the city the simply avoids the site concerned.
Her "nowhere," then, is really the place we all inhabit, that piquant, lovable, constantly disappearing scene of life's passing show. She loves parades, just as she loves fleets dressed out in their flags (she has written an entire book about one charismatic English admiral), because they are displays of magnificence that briefly defy transience, that flourish in the face of inevitable dissolution. She can be guaranteed to have a soft spot for shows of panache of any and every sort.
In the final analysis, it's self-deception, Morris writes, that sees us through. But it's a self-deception she entirely approves of, and is a master at showing us how to carry off.
This is why it is so distressing to read her saying that this will be her last book. She has taught us to see the world her way, and now proposes to disappear from the literary scene like the very phantoms she has so often evoked. Most readers will be filled with a great sadness at the thought. Why, we cry, cannot we have more? Seventy-five is no great age these days. Verdi wrote Falstaff, perhaps his greatest opera, at 80, after all. Come back, Jan! You gave us such charm, taught us to see things so undogmatically, with such infinite tolerance. Don't go! Don't leave us alone in the cold.
Wales, she writes, is her home, and the place she increasingly misses when traveling. So perhaps, instead of books, there will be something else -- an epic poem in Welsh, or a filmed round-Wales trip by balloon. Both would be very characteristic, and either, needless to say, nectar to her innumerable fans, most of whom will buy this book without a second thought.
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