Proof that God Loves Us and Wants Us to Be Happy

Here are some things that have made me think, "I should get drunk immediately" in the last couple of months:

1) the Buffalo Bills win

2) the Buffalo Bills lose

3) the people on The Office seem too sad

4) the people on the Office seem too happy

5) Lord of the Rings seems too long

6) anything at all about the movie The Last Waltz

7) my parents

8) everyone at my workplace

So there is a sampling, undoubtedly not totally representative -- I have thought "I should get drunk immediately" way more than eight times in the last few months -- but a sampling that correctly and conspicuously fails to mention books. Which is a shocker, because most lists I make that have to do with anything at all end up being pretty book-intensive. However, most books that have to do with drinking end up either being cautionary -- don't get as drunk as these protagonists! -- and there has never been, say, the book equivalent of the Last Waltz.

Rick Moody wrote an essay on celestial music that is included in the Best American Essays 2008, which I have been reading at coffeeshops the last few days, and one of the things he mentions therein is that in heaven, they need no intoxicants. "In heaven," he says, "you have not fallen short, you are not in a condition of wanting, you are theoretically happy, and so you are not looking for the music or drugs or spirits to intoxicate you in any way." I think that, in books, we need no intoxicants either. To me, alcohol represents the victory of not-knowing over knowing: he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Reading is the opposite, then, of intoxication: he who makes a reader of himself delays the pain of being a beast. To me, working through a piece of literature is the opposite -- but, I have to add, the equal -- of working through a bottle of gin: one puts me up higher, in a position to judge without caring, and the other puts me where I don't want to do anything but listen to Hall and Oates, in a position of caring without judging. Those two activities, I should note (judging w/o caring and vice versa) are not necessarily opposed, though: both reading (All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well) and drinking (Michelob Ultra) have reminded me to remind my father that I love him. However, I only mentioned that after reading the book; after drinking all that Mich Ultra, all I did was start jabbering at him about progressive income tax and socialized health insurance. That is what I get for having, as the one book I like to read when drunk, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal in my liquor cabinet. So I guess in the last analysis, as usual, books beats booze by a narrow margin.

Hamlet's Buddy

So I have scaled another assault -- from the beginning -- on Elizabeth Royte's Garbage Land, and I like a lot, still. I read it on the stationary bike at the gym. But it still seems to me to suffer (if categorically, not specifically) from the almost piecemeal way in which the non-fiction characters are developed. It is better this time, at any rate, because I read the book in great swaths while on the bike, instead of in little nibbles while I wait at a toll or walk through the mall or watch tennis, in all of which situations I read the book the last go-round.

Anyway, I am reintroducing all of this because I was thinking about the idea of nonfiction characters, and what it is like to deal with people in writing who are not entirely open to us not because it is not especially material (the way that we are not vexed over what, say, what Captain Peleg was up to the whole time the Pequod was asea), but because they are real people, and because their chroniclers are prevented by the truth, not by convenience, from telling us everything they think. Natalie Zemon Davis's The Return of Martin Guerre, about a case of mistaken identity from the sixteenth century, is a fascinating piece of this kind of inscrutablilism: there is a real Martin, an impostor Martin, a Mrs. Guerre who seems to be okay with either of them, and eventually Montaigne throws his two cents in. But it is really hard to ever figure out just why anyone is does what they do the way they do it and not some other way; from five centuries out, these people -- who did not write much that we have down -- are some of history's mysteries. The people who run the waste services in Garbage Land are a little more annoying -- they are obfuscating, rather than inscrutable -- but they are similarly and wholly nonfiction, and of course: the Return of Martin Guerre and Garbage Land are both nonfiction books. But!

But, are there ever any people like that in fiction books? It seems like it may be unlikely: the characters in fiction are more likely to be inscrutable for a reason than for the general inscrutability of the world. I don't know much about Pierce Inverarity's real affiliation with the Tristero people, but that's because Pynchon wouldn't tell me, rather than that he couldn't. But one person stands out, from fictiondom, as the kind of hard to read, obfuscating, and piecemeal character we expect from real life and reasonable reports from real life: Horatio, Hamlet's buddy.

It is disappointing to remember, as we must, that we are much more like Horatio than we are ever like his friend. We are in fact more like Horatio than we are like most of the outsize characters in Hamlet (thank goodness, for most of them). There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. That has a lot to do with our philosophy --and Horatio's -- concerning itself mostly with a recalcitrant earth. Hamlet is a magnificent fiction, and can have to do with those other things. But is that simply because Horatio is a simpleton, or are his problems of confronting recalcitrance more like ours for another reason?

I think that Horatio has problems which remind us of our problems because, unlike any of the other characters in Hamlet -- unlike any of the characters I can think of anyplace, off the top of my head -- he is doing an enormous amount of work in our world: he is, at several critical junctures, ensuring that you and I do not lack information about Shakespeare's drama called Hamlet. Why does he hang out with those night watchmen of whom he is so skeptical? Does he really have nothing better to do than wander around graveyards with Hamlet saying things like "E'en so, my lord"? And, most bizarrely, why is he the one who tells the queen about how crazy Ophelia has become? That last one seems, to me, to be inexplicable -- except by thinking that Shakespeare has needed us to see what she has been up to, and thus to provide us with an inexplicable -- but dramatically unnoticeable -- link to the rest of the story. Horatio is an in, for us, to everything else that goes on in Hamlet, much as the bland san men in Royte's book (remember that one from the beginning of this post?) are an in into her meditations on garbage. But, unfortunately, they are part of the same boring real world as we are.

I don't know whether or not this has much bearing on the more ethereal examples of people becoming fictional (a topic close to my own personal heart), but I am willing to think on it.