Only a Blockhead: Self-Awareness

03/05/2013

"I am moved by praise of the world."

Now that I’m in my 60s and realize my time is finite, I’ve started to seek out a genre of book I haven’t read until now: the death memoir. After reading Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality, I’m beginning Tom Lubbock’s Until Further Notice, I’m Alive. I read the following passage just now while lying in the sunshine after lunch, and it’s going in my commonplace book.

I thought fear at the idea of my non-existence would seize me. I find it’s sadness at the idea of loss, parting, those I love, the world, that pierces me. I am moved by praise of the world…. I have no desire for the lifeboat of immortality. The goodness of the world is all I know or can imagine or wish for.

I hope that’s what I’ll feel if I have the chance to anticipate my own death. But isn’t writing a death memoir (or this blog post) a kind of immortality lifeboat?

Lubbock goes on to talk of a “heightened awareness of being a body.” If we had more of that, rather than experiencing ourselves as a consciousness floating on the earth (“my time is finite”), we’d take better care of our world, ourselves.

--Julian

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Books David Finished in 2013

Christopher McDougall: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
This is, as the author has noted, several books in one. It is an argument for the controversial theory that human beings evolved to run long distances, an introduction to the Tarahumara, the famous "running Indians" who live in the remote Copper Canyon in Mexico (their name for themselve is Rarámuri, or those who run fast), the growing sport of ultra-running, and an amazing endurance race held in the Copper Canyon between American ultra-runners and these fast-running Native Americans. A fascinating read, this book left me wanting to know more about each of the areas it touches upon.
Barry Eisler: Redemption Games (previously published as Killing Rain and One Last Kill) (John Rain series) (Volume 4)
Okay, I said I was addicted, and I grow more so as the protagonist of these novels, the assassin John Rain, grows more complex. He's actually begun to feel guilty for, you know, assassinating people.
Barry Eisler: Winner Take All
Well, I said I was hooked on Eisler's John Rain series. This one was good too, with Macau and Rio de Janiero added along with increasing complexity in the assassin's character. A quality thriller.
Barry Eisler: A Lonely Resurrection (previously published as Hard Rain and Blood from Blood) (John Rain series) (Volume 2)
This is the second I've read in Barry Eisler's series about assassin John Rain, and I'm afraid I'm hooked. They're well written, his evocation of Tokyo rings true, and his protagonist is interesting. It seems odd to suggest that the actions of a character who is a cold-blooded assassin could be morally ambiguous, and in most novels like this he would not be; he would be either a good guy--his assassinations were somehow justified--or a bad guy--defined as such because of his assassinations. Rain moves back and forth between those camps: sometimes he's only in in for the money, but thinks he's at least not in the pay of absolute evil. Other times the people he kills are absolutely evil, so the killings could possibly be defined as heroic. Other times somebody irritates him, and ends up with a broken neck. In keeping his protagonist wondering about whether he's doing the right thing, whether he could choose to do otherwise, and whether he could atone for what he's done, he keeps us, his readers, guessing about how we should feel. This places the book a rung up from the run-of-the-mill.
Theodora Keogh: The Double Door
Though not quite as coldly elegant as The Tattooed Heart, Theodora Keogh's The Double Door is another excellent short novel that belongs on your "we forget how weird the '40s and '50s in the USA were" shelf. The double door of the title is between two buildings in New York City. The first is occupied by a family made up of a neurotic and unlovable mother, a girl with a heart of ice who is her 12-year-old daughter, and the girl's father, a South American gigolo who passes himself off as European nobility. The other is where the nobleman indulges in debauchery with a select circle of friends augmented by young men picked up off the street. That one of this gang is a monk on leave from the monastery only adds to the gothic tone of the book. It's not surprising that one of the few positive reviews Patricia Highsmith ever wrote was of one of Keogh's novels. Fans of Highsmith's cold eye will certainly enjoy her work.
Roz Kaveney: Rituals - Rhapsody of Blood, Volume One
This is a well-written fantasy—largely urban—about two heroines who, mostly independent of each other, set about removing evil-doers from the world. Both of the heroines are, perhaps, a bit too heroic—they hardly seem challenged by encounters even with monumental evil—but Kaveney's intelligence saves the book. She manages to weave together lots of the world's mythologies (she writes hilariously about Judeo-Christian mythology in particular) and augment them with her knowledge of music, opera, history and literature to produce a fantasy more than usually engaging.
Dr. Kenjiro Setoue: Doctor Stories from the Island Journals of the Legendary Dr. Koto
Dr. Setoue, a successful surgeon, took a temporary job at a clinic on a remote Japanese island in the South China Sea. He intended to stay six months, but has ended up spending his life in that remote place and caring for the people there. Setoue's Island Journals are unexciting, and that is as it should be. He does what needs to be done, and writes about it simply, but in a way that helps us to understand why he remains with the aging islanders, and why they have come to trust and depend on him. He is, it is clear, a good man.
Theodora Keogh: The Tattooed Heart
Readers of Dawn Powell must be grateful to Gore Vidal for bringing that, for a time, forgotten writer to our attention. Unfortunately, although she surfaces now and then on the Internet, Theodora Keogh has yet to find such a high-profile champion. That's a shame, because The Tattooed Heart alone demonstrates that she is worthy of our attention. It is the story of a chaste, though always simmering, first love between a twelve-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl, a summer romance destroyed by adults and adulthood. Most of the story takes place on a New England estate with lots of woods for the young people to roam in, and the atmosphere is almost gothic: accompanying the young lovers one sinks into Keogh's world as into a dream. Published in 1954, the novel remains compelling. Surely it, and the rest of Keogh's work, are worthy of reissue? NYRB, are you listening?
Tristan Garcia: Hate: A Romance: A Novel
Tristan Garcia's Hate: A Romance is about the cultural, political, and intellectual life of France—which is to say Paris—in the last two or three decades. Since that life can be seen as a series of conversations (also arguments, shouting matches, and hissy fits) this is appropriate: we never quite know what Garcia thinks about AIDS, Israel and Palestine, head scarves on Moslem women, Internet culture, or any of the rest of the issues that he, or rather his characters, are on about. We do see them loving each other, and thanks in large part to a sort of man without qualities from the provinces, hating each other, and doing their best to destroy each other, before the novel's end. The book is compelling, though thanks to the odiousness of this interloper, at times it is hard to read. Hate is the 27-year-old author's first novel (he's also published a book of philosophy), a fact that makes it all the more impressive.
Nicholson Baker: The Anthologist: A Novel
Nicholson Baker is in top-form in this novel. He combines two of his modes: avuncular observer of the minute and often missed and ranter at a society that seems to want to discard everything old. In this case Baker, or rather his protagonist, Paul Chowder (Baker noted in a recent Paris Review interview that his writing is eighty percent autobiographical) rants at what he feels was a wrong turn taken by poetry in the Pound era: the rejection of rhyme. One may not agree with Baker/Chowder's conservative take on what poetry should be, but one will learn a lot about poetry, and, as with all Baker's books, about life from this book.

Books Julian Read Recently

Ian McEwan: Sweet Tooth
[Skull, no, Skillduggery] McEwan’s latest and surprisingly gentle novel paints a vivid picture of 70s Britain. There are also interesting insights into both the mysterious world of the MI5, and the life of a novelist. The whole thing is a little off kilter, (rather as late Woody Allen movies tend to be). Is it because McEwan is less than competent at channeling a female protagonist/narrator? Suffice it to say, all is explained. Extremely clever it is. Fairly entertaining, too, but--to this reader--less than completely satisfying. (***)
Edmund de Waal: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
A English potter, descended from a rich, Jewish family that was dispersed and dispossessed of everything in Hitler’s Europe leading up to World War II, traces the history of the one remaining family heirloom: a collection of antique netsuke. De Waal brings the family members and their lives, and the places—Odessa, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo--and times they lived in, to vivid life. Along with this pleasure is a harrowing account of anti-Semitism. Thank you, C and L, for recommending this. I enjoyed it deeply and learned a lot from it. (*****)
Tom Lubbock: Until Further Notice, I Am Alive
Our own death is absolutely inconceivable: it’s a koan as inexplicable as one hand clapping. This is made abundantly clear in Tom Lubbock’s death memoir, written while a brain tumor gradually takes his language and his life. We all face death; it cannot be faced; this book dives into that paradox. Lubbock mentally thrashes this way and that, trying to grasp death and to come to terms with it. It’s an endless, impossible process. Round about the 80-page mark, it brought me (not him) to the exhausted realization that the present moment is the only refuge. That death doesn't exist apart from life. This book was a valuable meditation. (****)

Films Julian Watched Recently

Amour
[Life’s last act] "Amour" is about a loving couple in old age. It’s beautifully made and acted, but watching it made me miserable and frustrated, in the same way as watching a film about slavery, or the persecution of, let’s say, gay people. I think choosing the manner of one’s own death is the next taboo to be overcome, and this film is a useful contribution to the debate. After seeing director Michael Haneke’s "Cache", I knew better than to expect a tale well told, and here we have odd digressions, and the fate of a main character unexplained. (***)
Lincoln
[What a tale!] Lincoln and the abolition of slavery didn’t figure in my (British) history classes, so the first six words of this sentence were the extent of my knowledge. A (Canadian) friend found the account a little dry, and an (American) friend fell asleep over the DVD. But I was riveted, having no idea how the apparently impossible became possible through the intelligence and stubbornness of a president, or how the story played out against the background of a civil war still in progress, political venality, and the prevailing idea that full humanity extended only as far as white males. The script sensibly avoids offending modern sensibilities by not employing the racial epithets of the time in the name of authenticity. An amazing and inspiring story told with understated bravura. (****)
Cloud Atlas
[A banquet of stories] On returning home, I was asked if Cloud Atlas was a drama? A love story? Yes, I said, and comedy, action, and science fiction. What it doesn’t have--pace a raft of dodgy metaphysical messages--is a point. But so what: This is a three-hour storytelling feast of pure bravura. If you have a comfortable theater seat and an empty bladder, sit back and be enthralled. (****)
Les Miserables
[A hard slog] The musical Les Miserables was born of the artifice and distance of the stage, but the film drops us right into extreme squalor and aching poverty, and being so close to that much suffering and dirt was a bit overwhelming for a fastidious and sensitive soul like me. Things move slowly when sung, so there was lots of time to think that the same inequality-induced suffering continues today in the Paris banlieues (and for the homeless in Tokyo parks), and that the bloody fight for freedom and justice is an endless one, with Syria the latest example. This long musical is creaky and only sporadically tuneful, but the film is magnificently staged, acted and sung. And I might have actually enjoyed it if it had been trimmed by an hour. (**)
Silver Linings Playbook
[Great fun] This is a rom-com but one that journeys very far from the genre before getting reeled in. Snappily made, superbly acted and with music that Danny Boyle would be proud of, it's bracing, hilarious and always surprising. (****)

Things NC Consumed Recently

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
More than forty years on since my last reading, this classic novel is remarkable not so much for its romantic longings as for its emphasis on American violence, its depiction of a country in which California hardly matters and its meeting of the Mid West and East Coast. Plus its succinct nine chapters, its elegant prose and its almost noirish tone: Tom breaking Myrtle's nose would seem to foreshadow Lee Marvin throwing hot coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat - and the use of flashbacks helps too. I'd like to thank the publicity for the recent film version and my current cold for sending me back to the novel (and my young self).
Isabelle Eberhardt
In 1904, Isabelle Eberhardt drowned in the desert, leaving behind, among other things, various writings in French (a novel, travel notes, a journal, short stories), Islam, Lake Geneva, a husband, debauchery in kif, sex and alcohol, and a small collection of male clothing, which she wore habitually, along with her man's name. The lazy say she was an early hippie, because of her nomadic, hedonistic life, and being the first one to die at 27. Lindqvist has her in a line from Villon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Celine and Genet. Her story can only get stranger and more fascinating. "In The Shadow of Islam", "The Passionate Nomad", "The Oblivion Seekers" and Annette Kobak's biography are one way in. You'll find there an apt fatal romanticism for vast desert spaces and a depiction of Islam to ponder. Among other things.
Listen to Britain - Humphrey Jennings
Terence Davies is surely right to say Listen to Britain is in part an attempt to define the nation on the eve of its being invaded. But that invasion never came. A little prematurely, Humphrey Jennings's film records what left later, with something messier, less defined usurping through the back door. Terence Davies is surely right to say Listen to Britain is one of the greatest things these islands have produced.
Patience (After Sebald)
Grant Gee's documentary uses a palette of pale black and white, maps and talking heads to comment on W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, an account of his walk through Suffolk. Unlike the book, where a variety of genres (and photographs) coheres to make a recognisable whole, the film suffers slightly from a lack of direction. It is too specific to serve as an introduction and lacks an overriding arc that might describe a thesis. However, with its archival footage, interviews with the author and shots of the route taken, it is essential viewing for those already in thrall to all things Sebaldian - even if the ending, alas, veers close to Conan Doyle and fairies-in-the-garden territory.