When traveling, one expects to meet people ranging in ideology, profession, attitude, age, dress, ambition, language, culture, but my own experience demonstrates quite the opposite to be true. (I am talking here of fast travel, or, for some Europeans, "American" travel, where the aim is diversity and not immersion.) A natural habitat of the fast traveler is the hostel, and there, alas, he will meet but one person. Let me describe her (or him). On average, she is Australian and 22 years old; she's been traveling for months and is still months from the end; she has "done" more cities than she can list, and went to school for ______ but has unspecified plans for her return that may vaguely involve a farm or a start-up business. She is on a Eurail pass or equivalent and is leaving for Budapest in the morning. (They are always leaving for Budapest in the morning.)
In his new preface to The Great Railway Bazaar, written some thirty-five years after his initial train journey across Asia and Europe, Paul Theroux (my steadfast companion through the last leg of travel) refers to the early 1960s as "an age of mass tourism" in which "everyone set off to see the same things." Imagine what it must be like now, fifty years later. When the flight from Frankfurt to Barcelona costs less than bus fare to the airport, when young adults of all means and origins are traveling for six months or a year to "find themselves" in hostel bars and nightclubs with backpacker specials, one can easily touch down in Italy or Slovakia or England and find oneself always surrounded by exactly the same people.
This is not entirely a bad thing. There is something new to be found here, a kind of slipperiness of place that we don't normally encounter ensconced at home; a shifting, mutable landscape of vibrant cities and blurred hordes that register briefly in the eyes of the traveler, what the world must look like from the perspective of a frantic winged insect. I was constantly surprised to discover what the residents of the places I visited thought of travel when I asked them, when, in response to their envious murmurs at the sight of my photos or my listed itinerary, I suggested they do the same. To them (and it was always the same), travel is heavy; travel is a mountain unsticking. The town two hours down the street was as good as across an ocean; for me it was a passing glance from my window-seat on the way to far more distant reaches. The traveler perceives the world through a distorted lens, a kind of fish-eye that wraps and warps the edges of things into smears of colour and hazy definition. England is small - look how close the coasts are! Berlin to Warsaw is an hour. Milan to Paris isn't worth taking your laptop on board for. A three-month Eurail gets you up to 21 countries, which most purchasers do their best to cover. Most of the residents I encountered had never been to the places in their own countries I was planning to visit, and could tell me nothing about them.
This is, shall we say, only one way to travel. I am not talking about the ecstasy of disappearing into a place that is not your own, of forgetting, after months and perhaps years, all the things you always thought were constant and necessary in your previous life. What I'm describing is disappearing into constant motion, into a home whose only constant is the ever-receding horizon and the momentum of the hunt. You begin to see yourself as the one who is fixed, unmoving, a north star amid all these tragic figures with their houses and fireplaces and cars who rush toward you and then rush behind, a whole sky of glimmering points that revolve around your true and steady core. The world turns and you are the axis. And at any point you can reach across the revolving globe, your fingers probing inquisitively at this place or that, across small patches of ocean and rivers like hairs, to pluck at the fruit of some far-reaching place as if from a branch reaching over the fence from your neighbour's yard.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
How far there is to fall
We are rarely ready to face the full form of pain. Isn't this so? Here in the humming, squashy sitting-rooms of our lives, how often will we be roused to real terror, real anguish? These are things so far from our daily humdrum of activity that we cannot feel them, and only think how they might be. Those of us who live in safe neighborhoods, who have never seen a gun, who have never watched someone die, will try to span the gap of experience with feats of imagination, to insert ourselves into the news or movies or friends' accounts. We needn't worry. If it has not yet, the real moment will come to all of us, and more than once in our long lives; they will be the dull, flat rocks that gape baldly in the flow of a stream.
Most people most of the time do not know or have forgotten what pain is, and this is not our fault. The scope of possible tragedy is as vast and inconceivable as the surface of the Earth. We know it is there, but for the sake of convenience focus on our small allotted plot, and only briefly are ever pulled up and given a suggestion of where the edges might be. In John Banville's The Untouchable, there is a scene in which the young, hedonistic English men sent to defend France during World War II barely register the danger as Germans descend upon them; the English army is retreating to the channel, but as they flee the narrator stops to remark that
This, to me, is also an illustration of the disconnect we experience when we read a news story about a girl being abused, or watch movies about real-life tragedies. (Even the word "tragedy" is somehow supposed to carry and impart the feeling of its definition; being only a word, it always falls short of the purpose for which people use it.) We do feel emotion when we hear of pain, even strong emotion, but this, I must say, is not even a portion of the whole thing, not even a lessened version of what those directly involved experience. It is something else entirely. It is the careful manipulation of image and sound, or of sentences that cascade and wrench and cause their own misery. When I read about the worst possible atrocities in the paper, I will recognize intellectually that they are horrible, but - if I am being honest - feel nothing emotionally but what I dredge up out of a sense of moral expectation. Unless I identify in some way with the story, in which case the pain I feel is for myself, I acquire no part of the pain of those who actually suffer. Pain is not a reaction to a thing, but a thing that happens itself.
What brings me to record these thoughts is a small, dense tragedy that occurred in my home yesterday night, a non-event that is hardly worth repeating but for the panic and dread it drew, however briefly, into our house; a microcosm of disaster. My brother was playing floor hockey in our backyard, his white sneakers trailing on the newly wet cement. It was dark, and my dad and I were in attendance (clutching sticks of our own) as he chased the dog-wet ball in circles, eyes set on the impish green blur. I remember only the afterimage: my brother's stick on the ground, and he on the ground too, behind it, his hands splayed as if in obeisance. He lifted himself from the ground, and there is a moment when all in attendance know, almost divinely, exactly what has happened, but cannot repeat it to one another until the final evidence is presented. My brother said, "I think I chipped a tooth." And then I saw it: a perfect quarter-circle in his right front tooth, as if only waiting for the puzzle piece that, with a flourish, would declare it whole.
Writing about it now, the whole event feels like nothing of consequence (at least for me, anyway; it is not my tooth that chipped), but I can assure you that it felt, at the time, like some permanent, irretrievable loss. My dad threw his hockey stick against the pavement, one of his few, always understated displays of anger. I felt clammy and flushed. My brother turned to one of us, then the other; I tried to reassure him but was myself doubtful, having forgotten in the moment if technology was sufficient to repair him. My dad constricted himself into a chair and opened a newspaper, his eyes tracking too rapidly.
It is a commonplace of moments like these that one wonders, with dread, whether anything will ever be the same again. It is, perhaps, an overstatement that compensates for our daily understatements, our inability to comprehend the dark shapes behind words like "murder" and "rape" unless they drop into our near proximity. And I thought, as I always do in these moments, of all of us on a thin ledge against the face of an impossibly high and steep mountain, tracing our way imperceptibly, in single file. Below us there are many more such ledges, all equally narrow, and once in a while someone might lose their footing and fall to the next one down, or two, or three. It is a precarious walk, but while we have our eyes rigid on our feet it is possible to forget the gaping chasm that lies only a footstep away. We climb slowly and gradually toward the top, but a gust of wind or the particular jut of a stone is enough to nudge us over, and who knows where the bottom lies. How high we all are, and how far there is to fall.
Most people most of the time do not know or have forgotten what pain is, and this is not our fault. The scope of possible tragedy is as vast and inconceivable as the surface of the Earth. We know it is there, but for the sake of convenience focus on our small allotted plot, and only briefly are ever pulled up and given a suggestion of where the edges might be. In John Banville's The Untouchable, there is a scene in which the young, hedonistic English men sent to defend France during World War II barely register the danger as Germans descend upon them; the English army is retreating to the channel, but as they flee the narrator stops to remark that
[t]he harbour had a wonderfully festive look, with crowds of men milling about the quayside and craft of all kinds bobbing and jostling on the sea. The water was a stylized shade of cobalt blue and the sky was stuck all over with scraps of cottony cloud.A moment later, as German bullets whiz past their heads, the narrator spots a soldier he went to school with and calls him over to introduce him to his friends. The disconnect between the present danger and the guileless insouciance of the soldiers renders the scene both hysterical and strangely terrifying; these men, you realize, so caught up with the little dramas and vanities of their lives, cannot see or accept what is around them.
This, to me, is also an illustration of the disconnect we experience when we read a news story about a girl being abused, or watch movies about real-life tragedies. (Even the word "tragedy" is somehow supposed to carry and impart the feeling of its definition; being only a word, it always falls short of the purpose for which people use it.) We do feel emotion when we hear of pain, even strong emotion, but this, I must say, is not even a portion of the whole thing, not even a lessened version of what those directly involved experience. It is something else entirely. It is the careful manipulation of image and sound, or of sentences that cascade and wrench and cause their own misery. When I read about the worst possible atrocities in the paper, I will recognize intellectually that they are horrible, but - if I am being honest - feel nothing emotionally but what I dredge up out of a sense of moral expectation. Unless I identify in some way with the story, in which case the pain I feel is for myself, I acquire no part of the pain of those who actually suffer. Pain is not a reaction to a thing, but a thing that happens itself.
What brings me to record these thoughts is a small, dense tragedy that occurred in my home yesterday night, a non-event that is hardly worth repeating but for the panic and dread it drew, however briefly, into our house; a microcosm of disaster. My brother was playing floor hockey in our backyard, his white sneakers trailing on the newly wet cement. It was dark, and my dad and I were in attendance (clutching sticks of our own) as he chased the dog-wet ball in circles, eyes set on the impish green blur. I remember only the afterimage: my brother's stick on the ground, and he on the ground too, behind it, his hands splayed as if in obeisance. He lifted himself from the ground, and there is a moment when all in attendance know, almost divinely, exactly what has happened, but cannot repeat it to one another until the final evidence is presented. My brother said, "I think I chipped a tooth." And then I saw it: a perfect quarter-circle in his right front tooth, as if only waiting for the puzzle piece that, with a flourish, would declare it whole.
Writing about it now, the whole event feels like nothing of consequence (at least for me, anyway; it is not my tooth that chipped), but I can assure you that it felt, at the time, like some permanent, irretrievable loss. My dad threw his hockey stick against the pavement, one of his few, always understated displays of anger. I felt clammy and flushed. My brother turned to one of us, then the other; I tried to reassure him but was myself doubtful, having forgotten in the moment if technology was sufficient to repair him. My dad constricted himself into a chair and opened a newspaper, his eyes tracking too rapidly.
It is a commonplace of moments like these that one wonders, with dread, whether anything will ever be the same again. It is, perhaps, an overstatement that compensates for our daily understatements, our inability to comprehend the dark shapes behind words like "murder" and "rape" unless they drop into our near proximity. And I thought, as I always do in these moments, of all of us on a thin ledge against the face of an impossibly high and steep mountain, tracing our way imperceptibly, in single file. Below us there are many more such ledges, all equally narrow, and once in a while someone might lose their footing and fall to the next one down, or two, or three. It is a precarious walk, but while we have our eyes rigid on our feet it is possible to forget the gaping chasm that lies only a footstep away. We climb slowly and gradually toward the top, but a gust of wind or the particular jut of a stone is enough to nudge us over, and who knows where the bottom lies. How high we all are, and how far there is to fall.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Hey man, slow down
I've been gone for a few weeks and there are 212 unread items on my Google Reader. I click "Show All Items" and start to flip through, but the erratic ricochet of subject matter from post to post makes me confused and a little anxious. So I decide to tackle my various blogs one by one, kill them off systematically.
The first is The Sartorialist, which, because it is mostly a picture blog, accounts for nearly a third of my unread entries. I skim a few, then click "Mark All As Read." Aaron has a handful of typically intelligent but unfortunately dense entries on a variety of topics; I open up my TPL account and place a hold on The Elements of Typographic Style, and promise myself I'll come back and chew through his post on modernity. The Elegant Variation is my backdoor pass into the literary world, and here I open up new tabs on Margaret Atwood on Twitter, Paul Krugman on health care, James Wood in the New Yorker, and - this especially fills me with delight - Daniel Mendelsohn on Avatar. There is also an entry that catches my eye: an author on her experience of incorporating poetry into her daily routine. She, Siobahn Phillips,
But look at all the riches here still to be mined: there's new posts from the ever-impish Nico Muhly, whom I once found deliriously unconstrained but whose words now seem to bracket his meaning like the bars of a cage; a few doses of academia from Dial M; grievances with Google in Evan Osmos's Letter From China (are blog titles italicized or put between quotation marks?). Mark Sarvas points me to a blog I haven't heard of, that belonging to poet and translator George Szirtes, and commands me to "[r]ead it. And when you're done, go back and read his archives. All of them. Really." Well, all right.
Then I get to one of my favourite blogs, Jonah Lehrer's The Frontal Cortex, and I slow myself down as I always do so as to give him my full attention. Each post is a complete, discrete idea, and generally follows a single structure: introduction of a particular study related to neuroscience, discussion of practical ramifications, conclusion. What I like is the way he clearly delineates the philosophical and real-life applications of these ventures in hard science. These last entries are no exception: there is a fascinating study on commuting, which I was just thinking about yesterday while stuck in traffic for an hour and a half after meeting a friend for lunch (I believe my conclusion was "Never again"), and then another fascinating study on how adults can trigger in themselves a childlike imagination. I thought: yes, this is useful, the next time I sit down to brainstorm a paper or a film subject or ... but I read on, read to the end, and I began to forget what I had read only a paragraph before, forgot the title of the post, and began to sense that my retention of this marvelous idea was going to be temporary, like a ball skidding across ice.
I felt that this was a good place to stop and reflect. Why, exactly, do I read these things? Why is it difficult to turn away a promising link or the hope of a new, excellent blog? They are of course tools, and very useful ones at that - but tools need to be used to become worthwhile. We might better think of these tools as fuel - coal, for instance - that needs burning in order to grant the light and heat we crave. Coal as coal does nothing. To bring the metaphor full circle: if you have one piece of coal, you treasure it and use it through and through, until it has provided to you all that it can. But the internet is like a massive storehouse with shelves and shelves of coal, and we're given a bottomless shopping cart and it's like one of those games where whatever you put in your cart before time runs out is yours to keep. And how beautiful all the coal is.
The result is that nothing is burned through, but everything is singed - here a bit of Thoreau, here a few passages of Wittgenstein, here a handful of verses from Shelley. I doubt it would be an exaggeration to say that I've already accumulated enough coal for ten lifetimes. One could (and one has, in the past) easily devote an entire life to the study of a few thinkers, and few artists. You could easily spend a year just studying Emerson. He is one of the most important thinkers in my life, and yet I've only read a few of his essays, and no more.
There comes a time in all this accumulation, a time I've no doubt already long passed, when more and more becomes less and less. If we are born as blank books and spend our lives filling the pages, then I might say (perhaps unfairly) that I've become all index and no content. But what am I supposed to do? There's so goddamn much of it all.
I'd like to stay, but I've just downloaded the complete filmography of Terence Malick and am halfway through John Banville's The Untouchable, not to mention the 53 items still waiting in my Google Reader queue. Good night.
The first is The Sartorialist, which, because it is mostly a picture blog, accounts for nearly a third of my unread entries. I skim a few, then click "Mark All As Read." Aaron has a handful of typically intelligent but unfortunately dense entries on a variety of topics; I open up my TPL account and place a hold on The Elements of Typographic Style, and promise myself I'll come back and chew through his post on modernity. The Elegant Variation is my backdoor pass into the literary world, and here I open up new tabs on Margaret Atwood on Twitter, Paul Krugman on health care, James Wood in the New Yorker, and - this especially fills me with delight - Daniel Mendelsohn on Avatar. There is also an entry that catches my eye: an author on her experience of incorporating poetry into her daily routine. She, Siobahn Phillips,
would use some of the many sites that present daily or nearly-daily verse: “Today’s Poem” at the Academy of American Poets, the “Featured Poem” at Poetry magazine, the morning selection at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, the “new poems” column at thepage.name—plus a site that offers a Shakespeare sonnet each day.Tabs appear for Poets.org, Poetry Magazine and Poetry Daily, along with bookmarks in my browser toolbar. A brief glance at these websites reminds me of Michael Silverblatt, a radio critic I discovered from TEV on a similar linkhunt some months ago; I spent a few enraptured hours listening to his radio interviews with Chang-Rae Lee and Sharon Olds, the latter of whose poetry struck a particular chord with me and led me to seek out more of her work (I can now recite her poem "One Week Later" from memory). I haven't been back to Michael Silverblatt since.
But look at all the riches here still to be mined: there's new posts from the ever-impish Nico Muhly, whom I once found deliriously unconstrained but whose words now seem to bracket his meaning like the bars of a cage; a few doses of academia from Dial M; grievances with Google in Evan Osmos's Letter From China (are blog titles italicized or put between quotation marks?). Mark Sarvas points me to a blog I haven't heard of, that belonging to poet and translator George Szirtes, and commands me to "[r]ead it. And when you're done, go back and read his archives. All of them. Really." Well, all right.
Then I get to one of my favourite blogs, Jonah Lehrer's The Frontal Cortex, and I slow myself down as I always do so as to give him my full attention. Each post is a complete, discrete idea, and generally follows a single structure: introduction of a particular study related to neuroscience, discussion of practical ramifications, conclusion. What I like is the way he clearly delineates the philosophical and real-life applications of these ventures in hard science. These last entries are no exception: there is a fascinating study on commuting, which I was just thinking about yesterday while stuck in traffic for an hour and a half after meeting a friend for lunch (I believe my conclusion was "Never again"), and then another fascinating study on how adults can trigger in themselves a childlike imagination. I thought: yes, this is useful, the next time I sit down to brainstorm a paper or a film subject or ... but I read on, read to the end, and I began to forget what I had read only a paragraph before, forgot the title of the post, and began to sense that my retention of this marvelous idea was going to be temporary, like a ball skidding across ice.
I felt that this was a good place to stop and reflect. Why, exactly, do I read these things? Why is it difficult to turn away a promising link or the hope of a new, excellent blog? They are of course tools, and very useful ones at that - but tools need to be used to become worthwhile. We might better think of these tools as fuel - coal, for instance - that needs burning in order to grant the light and heat we crave. Coal as coal does nothing. To bring the metaphor full circle: if you have one piece of coal, you treasure it and use it through and through, until it has provided to you all that it can. But the internet is like a massive storehouse with shelves and shelves of coal, and we're given a bottomless shopping cart and it's like one of those games where whatever you put in your cart before time runs out is yours to keep. And how beautiful all the coal is.
The result is that nothing is burned through, but everything is singed - here a bit of Thoreau, here a few passages of Wittgenstein, here a handful of verses from Shelley. I doubt it would be an exaggeration to say that I've already accumulated enough coal for ten lifetimes. One could (and one has, in the past) easily devote an entire life to the study of a few thinkers, and few artists. You could easily spend a year just studying Emerson. He is one of the most important thinkers in my life, and yet I've only read a few of his essays, and no more.
There comes a time in all this accumulation, a time I've no doubt already long passed, when more and more becomes less and less. If we are born as blank books and spend our lives filling the pages, then I might say (perhaps unfairly) that I've become all index and no content. But what am I supposed to do? There's so goddamn much of it all.
I'd like to stay, but I've just downloaded the complete filmography of Terence Malick and am halfway through John Banville's The Untouchable, not to mention the 53 items still waiting in my Google Reader queue. Good night.
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