Where you stand depends on where you sit

“Memory is like fiction; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t there anymore. You’re left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable.”

— Haruki Murakami, “The Last Lawn of the Afternoon,” The Elephant Vanishes

What you don’t see

You see that couple sitting on the next table — They look fine — They could just be saying, ‘Yeah, my brother’s buying a new shop,’ or she could be saying, ‘You know what? I can’t do this any more. I’m leaving in three days and I’m not coming back.’ And the other person might have been planning his whole life on that person staying, so he has a broken heart inside. But you can’t see it.

— Erlend Øye, quoted in Norwegian Blues, 2004.

Not today

I think as you get older, when things go wrong it hurts so much, and we question our ability to write any decent music so much, that it’s very easy just to put down your tools and say, ‘I’m not doing it today’. We could drift for months and months and months.

— Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, quoted in ‘It’s not wonderful at all – it’s horrible’, 2008.

A pain that’s heaven

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

“Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers,” I said, with a chuckle.
“I have no talent.”
“Then what do you want to do?”
He gave me his radiant, fascinating smile.
“Loaf,” he said.

And the world will kill you too

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

The Italians asked me if I thought President Wilson would declare war on Turkey. I said that was doubtful. Turkey, I said, was our national bird but the joke translated so badly and they were so puzzled and suspicious that I said yes, we would probably declare war on Turkey.

We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

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The things they carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

He said he’d done his best. He’d tried to be a decent medic. Win some and lose some, he said, but he’d tried hard. Briefly then, rambling a little, he talked about a few of the guys who were gone now, Curt Lemon and Kiowa and Ted Lavender, and how crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.

A lonely snail

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

I bought a pack of cigarettes, then phoned my apartment. Not that I expected anyone to answer, but I liked the idea of this being the last thing I did. I pictured the phone ringing on and on in an empty apartment. The image was so clear.

The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that energy was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings of the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact…I thought about snails and suzuki in butter sauce and shaving cream and Blowing in the Wind. The world is full of revelations.

History plays irrevocable jokes

The Joke by Milan Kundera

I was horrified at the the thought that things conceived in error are just as real as things conceived with good reason and of necessity…The errors were so common and universal that they didn’t represent exceptions or faults in the order of things; on the contrary, they constituted that order.

Feeling like I really understand

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

I think I’m going to go to RiverRun Books and look at the poetry shelves. When I see new books for sale there that I already own, it makes me happy. It makes me feel that there’s part of the world that I really understand.

In fact the letter may be better than any poem she wrote, though she wrote some good ones. But we wouldn’t be interested in reading the letter unless she’d written the poems. So once again its terribly confusing. You need the art in order to love the life.

Something wrong

From The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen:

Denise was a little worried by the degree of her revulsion. She didn’t understand what made her so very mean. She was unhappy to be so mean. There seemed to be something wrong with the way she thought about herself and other people [...] Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.

For a few minutes, the orange flotation device was the only object he had. It was his last object and so, instinctively, he loved it and pulled it close. Then they hauled him out of the water and dried him off and wrapped him up. They treated him like a child, and he reconsidered the wisdom of surviving.

From my peaceful corner, i conceal the world

From Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, a book with an “unlikeable” hero:

Who, then, if not an author, must speak the sacred truth? You fear the deeply penetrating gaze, you are afraid to penetrate anything deeply with your own gaze, you like to skim over everything with unthinking eyes. You will even have a hearty laugh over Chichikov…will turn to yourself with redoubled pride, a self-satisfied smile will appear on your face, and you will say: ‘One can’t help agreeing, the most strange and ridiculous people turn up in some provinces, and no small scoundrel at that!’ And who among you, not publicly, but in quiet, alone, in moments of solitary converse with himself, will point deeply into his own soul this painful question: ‘And isn’t there a bit of Chichikov in me, too?’

When i’m low i talk like a fool

From The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway:

The waiter seemed a little offended about the flowers of the Pyrenees, so I overtipped him. That made him happy. It felt comfortable to be in a country where it is so simple to make people happy. You can never tell whether a Spanish waiter will thank you. Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities. He would be glad to see me back. I would dine there again some time and he would be glad to see me, and would want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis.

Really wanting something

From The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand:

“Katie, why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world–to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things–they’re not even desires–they’re things people do to escape from desires–because it’s such a big responsibility, really to want something.”

Harder than doing what we want is knowing what we want, I think

Immortality

From Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski:

“This,” he says finally, pointing to the prisoner, “is the Shah’s murderer.”
The peasants gape at the assassin in horror and admiration. Because he’s killed someone great, he also seems somehow great. His crime has elevated him to a higher realm of existence. The peasants cannot decide between glowering indignantly and falling to their knees.

The Shah did not understand that even though you can destroy a man, destroying him does not make him cease to exist. On the contrary, he begins to exist all the more. These are paradoxes no tyrant can deal with. The scythe swings, and at once the grass starts to grow back. Cut again and the grass grows faster than ever. A very comforting law of nature.

Conducting business properly

A fascinating contemplation (and supporting anecdote) of the corporate male bathroom experience, from The Mezzanine by Nicolson Baker:

The absence of stealth or shame that men, colleagues of mine, displayed about their misfortunes in the toilet stall had been an unexpected surprise of business life. I admired their forthrightness in a way; and perhaps in fifteen years I too would be spending twenty-minute stretches in similar corporate stalls, making sounds that I had once believed were made only by people in the extremity of the flu or by bums beyond caring in urban library bathrooms. But for now, I used the stalls as little as possible, never really at ease reading the sports section left there by an earlier occupant, not happy about the prewarmed seat. One time, while I was locked behind a stall, I did unintentionally interrupt a conversation between a member of senior management and an important visitor with a loud curt fart like the rap of the bongo drum. The two paused momentarily; and then recovered without dropping a stitch–”Oh she is a very, very capable young woman, I’m quite clear on that.” “She is a sponge, a sponge, she soaks up information everywhere she goes.” “She really is. And she’s tough, that’s the thing. She’s got armor.” “She’s a major asset to us.” Etc. Unfortunately, the grotesque intrusion of my fart struck me as funny, and I sat on the toilet containing my laughter with the back of my palate–this pressure of containment forced a further, smaller fart. Silently I pounded my knee, squinting and maroon-colored from suppressed hysteria.

Chance and choice

From Ghostwritten by David Mitchell:

When I was younger I thought that kids were an inevitable part of getting old. I thought you’d wake up one morning and there they’d be, nappies bulging. But no, you actually have to make up your mind to do them, like making up your mind to buy a house, cut a CD, or stage a coup d’état.

Advanced capitalism

From Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami:

I enjoy shopping at [the fancy-schmancy Kinokuniya supermarket]. You may not believe this, but the lettuce you buy there lasts longer than lettuce anywhere else. Don’t ask me why. Maybe they round up the lettuce after they close for the day and give them special training. It wouldn’t surprise me. This is advanced capitalism, after all.

Nearly everyone I know who has read Murakami dislikes his books because they don’t like the narrators, who are—i guess—”unlikeable.” Murakami’s narrators represent the postmodern everyman: Detached, deadpan, resigned.. annoying, because his apathetic attitude means that you don’t love him or hate him enough to find him interesting. Remind you of anyone?

Dance Dance Dance is only the third Murakami novel I’ve read (the others being A Wild Sheep Chase and Norwegian Wood). Verdict: this is not escapist literature. The narrators are unlikeable probably because they remind us of ourselves, and that’s the point, isn’t it? Surrealism isn’t the same as magical realism, and Murakami is actually a master of the latter. When you adjust expectations, the narrators’ introspection becomes eerily relatable. The perfect windows into their worlds, which can be just as bizarre as our own realities. Very Nick Carraway-esque; I’m sane and everyone around me is crazy. Or is it that I’m crazy and everyone else is sane?

Accepting dull existence

From A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers:

I pull up to a light, next to a bunch of young black kids. Maybe they’ll shoot me. I’m in the zone of all probability. I cannot be surprised. Earthquakes, locusts, poison rain would not impress me. Visits from God, unicorns, bat-people with torches and scepters–it’s all plausible. If these kids happen to be bad kids, and have guns, and want to shoot people like me, it will be me, the glass will break and the bullet will come through and I will not be surprised. With the bullet in my head, I will drive my car into a tree, and as I am waiting to be pulled from the wreck, nearly dead, I will not panic or yell. I will think only: Weird, this is exactly what I expected.

On connoisseurship in general

From Joel Stein’s Awesome Column on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries in the November 16, 2009 issue of TIME Magazine:

Legitimizing pot hasn’t created more users; it has just produced more annoying ones, who now apply Whole Foods-ian levels of snobbiness to the differences between Hawaiian Sativa and Humboldt Indica.

Kundera and the new media landscape

From The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera:

[B]eauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise–the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music–we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

It’s like he saw it coming, way back in 1979, PRE-BLOGOSPHERE. Gives more weight to that “unbearable lightness of being” he wrote about five years later doesn’t it?