Yesterday I was watching Mad Men, and because there are damn buses driving past my window all night, and because Mad Men is an Important Drama with Frequent Nearly Inaudible Speeches, I could not figure out what was going on on the show, and my mind wandered. And what it wandered to was that I don't know what Charles Kinbote looks like. I thought about it some more: I don't know what Tyrone Slothrop looks like, I don't know what Don Gately looks like, I don't know what Kilgore Trout looks like. And these are people whom I've spent a not insignificant amount of time thinking about, imagining in actual situations and doing actual things. I have thought long and hard about Kinbote puttering up to Shade's house and being told that he's not there by Mrs. Shade; I just kind of imagine the abstract idea of hopefulness, in one old body, puttering up to an abstract idea of disdain. I am having trouble even talking about what it is I can't do, because if you asked me, well, you understand, do you not, that a man is driving over to another man's house and encountering his wife, I would of course say yes. But I keep imagining different Kinbotes -- different old people reconstructing into the deposed old king -- and none of them stick. This is even true of people whom I met first in books whom I later saw in movies; Gilbert Osmond will never ever have quite the same features as John Malkovich, especially not in the way that Osborne Cox will always have exactly the same features as a particular John Malkovich.
When, straining to hear what icy thing Betty Draper was mumbling, I first thought about the fact that I didn't know what Gately or Slothrop looked like -- and moreover, that I had never really thought about the fact that I didn't know what they looked like -- I felt sort of scandalized. It was like realizing that I had never even thought about what Club Member Brian Matthew Blood's middle name is. But now, after thinking about it, I feel less scandalized, and more --not happy, really, but maybe appreciative: I like that I don't know what these people exactly look like, and probably because I can know them better. This is a constant theme among lonely readers, but one of the delights of books, and in particular a delight of books that isn't offered by films or television, is a deep feeling that You Know These People: and who would be easier to feel like you know than a hazy, blurred at the edges version of Charles Kinbote?
Showing posts with label Loneliness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Loneliness. Show all posts
Monday, December 14, 2009
Monday, August 31, 2009
The Big Move
I live in Manhattan now. The biggest, most immediate improvements:
1) the subway -- I don't have to drive anywhere, so instead I take the subway around and listen to Coffee Break French, a program where two Scots teach you how to conduct rudimentary conversations in French
2) the Local Interest Section at the Barnes and Noble around here has stuff like Bright Lights, Big City and The Collected Stories of Damon Runyan, instead of this stuff.
3) there are parks to read in -- I realize that this is true of most places I used to live, but these parks have other reading people in them. A crucial improvement.
In fact, there are people reading all over the place, and, most importantly, anonymous people. It is one thing -- it is quite a nice thing, actually -- to sit around in rooms with other people who are reading and whom you know. I do it all the time. But it is actually even a nicer thing to sit around in Starbuckses or in parks with people who are reading and reading wholly apart from you. They're reading a book they call loneliness, but it's better than reading alone, William Joel would say. Everyone sits and reads their books, and no one talks about it, but in the massed quiet of readers, is comfort. I've read considerably more since I have moved out here, even before classes have started: I read a bunch more of Updike's short stories, I read Benjamin and Moretti on cities, I read a lot of Mason and Dixon (my and my brother's book to read over vacation) that I didn't finish over vacation. When I used to sit in my hot hot house and look at my books, as I did for most of this last summer, sweating and miserable, they seemed more than anything like a bunch of things I had to work through, methodically; like they were a pile of pages I had to solitarily mark as read, like so many TPS reports. I don't know that it speaks especially well of me that it took such a drastic relocation to reappreciate my library, but I am glad that it happened.
1) the subway -- I don't have to drive anywhere, so instead I take the subway around and listen to Coffee Break French, a program where two Scots teach you how to conduct rudimentary conversations in French
2) the Local Interest Section at the Barnes and Noble around here has stuff like Bright Lights, Big City and The Collected Stories of Damon Runyan, instead of this stuff.
3) there are parks to read in -- I realize that this is true of most places I used to live, but these parks have other reading people in them. A crucial improvement.
In fact, there are people reading all over the place, and, most importantly, anonymous people. It is one thing -- it is quite a nice thing, actually -- to sit around in rooms with other people who are reading and whom you know. I do it all the time. But it is actually even a nicer thing to sit around in Starbuckses or in parks with people who are reading and reading wholly apart from you. They're reading a book they call loneliness, but it's better than reading alone, William Joel would say. Everyone sits and reads their books, and no one talks about it, but in the massed quiet of readers, is comfort. I've read considerably more since I have moved out here, even before classes have started: I read a bunch more of Updike's short stories, I read Benjamin and Moretti on cities, I read a lot of Mason and Dixon (my and my brother's book to read over vacation) that I didn't finish over vacation. When I used to sit in my hot hot house and look at my books, as I did for most of this last summer, sweating and miserable, they seemed more than anything like a bunch of things I had to work through, methodically; like they were a pile of pages I had to solitarily mark as read, like so many TPS reports. I don't know that it speaks especially well of me that it took such a drastic relocation to reappreciate my library, but I am glad that it happened.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Celebrating Old Birthdays
The first day of this month, when I started this essay, is the birthday of my dachshund Schnitzel, Chris, our friend who cuts my mother’s hair, and of Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. In honor of that, and because I have almost nothing not totally general to say about Schnitzel (against him) or Chris (for him), let’s talk about “The Avoidance of Love”, a very long essay by Cavell, of which I am a very big fan.
The first time I read “The Avoidance of Love”, I had just walked home, around five in the morning, from a night I had spent writing English papers at the very end of my senior year at Williams. I decided I would sleep for a few hours, couldn’t, and decided I would start in on this essay instead. I read the whole thing, and finished it at eight in the morning. The second time I read it, in a different collection of Cavell’s essays, I made special time so that I could read it all at once, without at the same time watching tennis or cooking dinner or driving to a coffeeshop, or any of the other things I sometimes do when I read. Both times, it paid off.
I have been asked, after effusing about this essay, what it is about, and what Cavell’s argument is. It is about King Lear, and it is about spectatorship, and it is about how to deal with other people as separate moral agents. Dealing with them doesn’t look real good. Quoting from it helps a little (maybe), to try to address what it is that I find so lovely about this essay, or at least to explain what points he is making:
"Certainly blame [for cruelty to Gloucester, for Cordelia's death] is inappropriate, for certainly I do not claim to know what else Lear might do. And yet I cannot deny that my pain at Lear's actions is not overcome by my knowledge of his own suffering."
"Now I can give an answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events?...[I]f I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another's to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition."
(That last I view as kind of the punchline.) This, of course, tell only a little tiny bit of the story, especially from my point of view, because I read the essay both times that I did, in the holistic manner described above. I think that the poignancy of this essay lies in the way in which knowledge of the phenomenon it describes -- the fundamental separateness between each of us and each of everyone else -- hovers as a constant threat. And I think that the power of this essay lies in the way in which its form -- that of an essay itself -- marries into that content of separateness, and forms a kind of unspoken answer to it.
Let me try to explain this by talking about the special power of an essay compared to a novel. The novel -- like, say, Nicholas Nickleby, which I am reading now -- seems to be an act of world-building, which is to say world-replacing, which is to say a staving off of the reader's loneliness. The facsimile world (this is especially true for Dickens, I think) creates a space in which the reader can move around and, at some important level, forget that she reads alone. She reads with Nicholas, or Smike, or the Brothers Cheeryble. She can even, for cathartic anger purposes, read with Wackford Squeers. But the people she reads in the novel are themselves not alone; they have always their narrator, at least, for company. She is always reading a simulacrum of a community, which she can observe or imagine herself a part of as she pleases.
Not so the essayist, though, who carries on but by himself. The essay cannot provide a peopled, ruminative world in which its reader might (however critically) indulge. Rather, what I think the essayist offers (think of Montaigne ruminating by himself) is a fantasia of what a person can do in spite of loneliness, what a person can do sitting just by herself, writing, independent of any other consciousness. I think that I love "The Avoidance of Love" so much because of the way in which it represents a discussion of that loneliness -- that inability to successfully acknowledge another human being that is the problem of King Lear as well as the problem of tragedy -- while being, itself, the product and the glory of just that loneliness, the loneliness of the reader.
The first time I read “The Avoidance of Love”, I had just walked home, around five in the morning, from a night I had spent writing English papers at the very end of my senior year at Williams. I decided I would sleep for a few hours, couldn’t, and decided I would start in on this essay instead. I read the whole thing, and finished it at eight in the morning. The second time I read it, in a different collection of Cavell’s essays, I made special time so that I could read it all at once, without at the same time watching tennis or cooking dinner or driving to a coffeeshop, or any of the other things I sometimes do when I read. Both times, it paid off.
I have been asked, after effusing about this essay, what it is about, and what Cavell’s argument is. It is about King Lear, and it is about spectatorship, and it is about how to deal with other people as separate moral agents. Dealing with them doesn’t look real good. Quoting from it helps a little (maybe), to try to address what it is that I find so lovely about this essay, or at least to explain what points he is making:
"Certainly blame [for cruelty to Gloucester, for Cordelia's death] is inappropriate, for certainly I do not claim to know what else Lear might do. And yet I cannot deny that my pain at Lear's actions is not overcome by my knowledge of his own suffering."
"Now I can give an answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events?...[I]f I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another's to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition."
(That last I view as kind of the punchline.) This, of course, tell only a little tiny bit of the story, especially from my point of view, because I read the essay both times that I did, in the holistic manner described above. I think that the poignancy of this essay lies in the way in which knowledge of the phenomenon it describes -- the fundamental separateness between each of us and each of everyone else -- hovers as a constant threat. And I think that the power of this essay lies in the way in which its form -- that of an essay itself -- marries into that content of separateness, and forms a kind of unspoken answer to it.
Let me try to explain this by talking about the special power of an essay compared to a novel. The novel -- like, say, Nicholas Nickleby, which I am reading now -- seems to be an act of world-building, which is to say world-replacing, which is to say a staving off of the reader's loneliness. The facsimile world (this is especially true for Dickens, I think) creates a space in which the reader can move around and, at some important level, forget that she reads alone. She reads with Nicholas, or Smike, or the Brothers Cheeryble. She can even, for cathartic anger purposes, read with Wackford Squeers. But the people she reads in the novel are themselves not alone; they have always their narrator, at least, for company. She is always reading a simulacrum of a community, which she can observe or imagine herself a part of as she pleases.
Not so the essayist, though, who carries on but by himself. The essay cannot provide a peopled, ruminative world in which its reader might (however critically) indulge. Rather, what I think the essayist offers (think of Montaigne ruminating by himself) is a fantasia of what a person can do in spite of loneliness, what a person can do sitting just by herself, writing, independent of any other consciousness. I think that I love "The Avoidance of Love" so much because of the way in which it represents a discussion of that loneliness -- that inability to successfully acknowledge another human being that is the problem of King Lear as well as the problem of tragedy -- while being, itself, the product and the glory of just that loneliness, the loneliness of the reader.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)