Details

   When asked to do a piece on Italy from the NY Review of Books' blog, Tim Parks (the author of over 20 books) wrote this on his page: I’ve always hated the word blog.  I dislike the idea of a writing which is perhaps more careless, off the cuff, here today and gone tomorrow...What I wanted to write about was writing itself, and reading, and books.  Not in a precious way. I thought I might use the space to say all the things I feel are never said about this profession, this habit, obsession, whatever.  The literary world is so full of piety, and snobbism, and in general a defensive need to describe everything we do as terribly important, central to the survival of Western culture, and so on.  The experience of reading books, of putting them down before we’ve finished them, of feeling that a book is very good, but nevertheless not really wanting to finish it, or again feeling it is very bad, but devouring it.  These were the things I wanted to concentrate on.  Why we can never agree about the books we like, why our opinions about books shift over the years.  So of course, I picked up his recent book Where I'm Writing From, a collection of his essays and musings (many based on his translated works) and noting that his acerbic observations continued with the book's opening: It's time to rethink everything.  Everything.  What it means to write and what it means to write for a public -- and which public?  What do I want from this writing?  Money?  A career?  Recognition?  A place in the community?  A change in the government?  World peace?  Is it an artifice, is it therapy?  Is it therapy because it is an artifice, or in spite of that?  Does it have to do with constructing an identity, a position in society?  Or simply with entertaining myself, with entertaining others?...And what does it mean to read?  Do I want to read the things other people are reading, so I can talk to them?  Which other people?  Why do I want to talk to them?  So that I can be of my time.  Or so that I can know other times, other places?  Do I read things to confirm my vision of the world, or to challenge it?  Or is reading to challenge my vision a reassuring confirmation that I am indeed the courageous guy I thought I was?  The more challenging the books I read, the more complacent I feel.  Yikes.

    Of all things, this was one of the books I had taken with me when I visited my friend, the 98-year old spitfire I talked about in the last post.  I also happened to drag along an article on the chocolate industry of all things, a piece on the frustrating efforts to stop or reduce the child labor on many of the cocoa farms (picture a 12-year old dragging 100-lb bags of cocoa pods and swinging machetes and you get the idea behind your Cadbury's or Hershey's bar), a piece titled "Bittersweet."  And there was one more book in the pile about the 50 greatest walks in the world which would include (of all things) Hadrian's Wall.  So I make it home from the visit and like throwing unpolished gravel into a tumbler, out comes the confluence of it all, a series of polished stones that somehow seem to fit together like finished parts of a puzzle.  During my visit, my friend (still hanging in there and still as witty and biting as ever when I called) would throw these words out to me regularly, words she would toss out like a fiery rope pulling Gandalf over the edge: details, too many details...you're crowding my mind...doesn't matter...who cares?...enough of that...let's not talk about me...you have no idea what I did for a living, do you? (sadly, I didn't)...what a naive question.   Our hours and hours together, interrupted only briefly by a peckish meal or a tap on the door, was reduced down to its essence; the idea of "making conversation" was quickly trimmed of fluff by such words, sending me home with more to think about rather than less.  And when I left some days later there were no goodbyes, just thank yous and her defining moniker...marvelous.

   She had pared our talks to the minimum, conversations often punctuated with long stretches of silence, her eyes closed yet moving as if inside were a giant shredder devouring and taking its time to spit out what little was actually said; a minute or so later her eyes would open and a shortened sentence or question would emerge, generally something along the lines of you talk too much.  It was, as my wife says in her British colloquialism, "home truths," bits and pieces and sayings that penetrate and are often things that we don't want to hear even as we acknowledge them.  My aunt was like this, much like my friend, never mean but often shocking (my aunt lived until age 94)...perhaps the fluff most of us pad our lives with become weights rather than feathers, our dinner party talks sending us home with smiles but wondering what was actually said, the hours of conversations emerging from our own shredders as little more than a few sentences, the details vanquished and the essence revealed, the jewel.

    As I peeked at the sudden flood of information coming out on Hadrian's Wall (from the book: ...you could have ridden from modern Iraq to Belgium on fine roads, speaking a single language, in a single state; or to discover that the Roman fort at Bewcastle was once the most populated sites in the isles and now houses just six people; or that the emperor Publius Aelius Hadrianus ordered a Roman fort with up to 60 soldiers placed every Roman mile along the wall, a wall that was nearly 14 feet tall and 10 feet wide), I wondered why now?  How is it that just because I was reading and writing about it I had suddenly seemed to notice that the "wall" was popping up everywhere?

Photo from Odyssey Archeoloy

   There seemed to be a reason for this eddy of information circling into a point as if, like my friend, I was supposed to close my eyes and process it all.  The wall, crumbling yet still a marvel; the words by author Park of a blog "here today and gone tomorrow;" the sharp and precise wording of my friend who soothed her sting with one word, "marvelous;" and now a quick reflection in The London Review of Books blog (of all things) by Amia Srinivasan on the passing of Derek Parfit, a "moral philosopher" who wrote: No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing.  In Srinivasan's memory she writes of Parfit: ...there was the fact that Parfit’s philosophy was a deeply personal affair.  There is something odd in saying this, since he is most famous for the view that personal identity– the conditions under which you continue to exist as you– does not, contrary to appearances, really matter.  We are psychological bundles of memories, inclinations, intentions.  In the future there will be bundles who will go by my name, who will share many of my memories, and act on some of my intentions.  They will think they are me.  At a certain point –my death– there will cease to be any such bundles, though there will be other bundles who remember me and perhaps even carry on some of my projects.  From this perspective, the boundaries between ourselves and others begin to dissolve.  So too, perhaps, does the horror of my death.  In Reasons and Persons, Parfit wrote that when he used to believe that personal identity mattered, he ‘seemed imprisoned’ in himself.  ‘My life seemed like a glass tunnel,’ he wrote "...through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness.  When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared.  I now live in the open air.  There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people.  But the difference is less.  Other people are closer.  I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.  

   As I left my friend that day, we both knew that it was a bittersweet parting, a word now drilled into me as surely as the young child sweating to make my chunk of candy, me thinking of fat and calories and him probably thinking of little life ahead.  In some ways those two were "diometrically opposed" (another expression from my friend) but in other ways quite similar.  At the end of it all, and perhaps the beginning of it all, there was the question of why was there anything?  During my visit Let's not talk about me came up only once, but once was all that I needed.  My friend had far more reflections and memories than I did, far more history and far more things about her life that even I --who talked too much-- would be able to eek out of her.  Now she had become my own moral philosopher, spewing words at a much slower pace but with purpose.  Caught in the swirl I found that I wasn't drowning...I was getting the message.