“‘You are free to give to the story what application you will,’ Foe replied. ‘To me the moral of the story is that there comes a time when we must give reckoning of ourselves to the world, and then forever after be content to hold our peace.’
‘To me the moral is that he has the last word who disposes over the greatest force,’ [I said].”
—J.M. Coetzee, Foe
I looked over my bookshelves recently and removed some duds—a bad translation of The Master and Margarita, The Lightning Keeper, and My Old Man. The last is a particularly odd purchase: I read a review of it somewhere that convinced me to buy it. The review didn’t explicitly say it was chick lit, although I guess I should’ve inferred it. As so often happens, I made a note to myself to buy it and then blithely did so much later, after I’d forgotten the original context.
The book’s cover startled me: a pastel, old-fashioned print of an ancient man and a young girl. Twenty pages in, I was still wondering what the hell the cover person was thinking when he (she? Who knows.) picked that. Still, a bad cover shouldn’t sabotage a good book. The paperback, happily, has new artwork.
The problem is that My Old Man didn’t give me enough to take my attention from the cover. The beginning wasn’t too bad, and I actually made it to the end, which made me wish I hadn’t; the last quarter of the book is filled Big Pronouncements about Life. The dialog had me cringing, as did the contrived situations. The narrative had the subtlety of a piano falling off a building.
Despite all this, the book has been with me for almost two years, like the phone number of a friend I’m not likely to call again. At some point it’s time to get rid of the stuff that I could never again conceivably want to read or recommend to anyone—the stuff I could cart around until the end and still never use. For me, that threshold is a fairly high: I like most of what I read, and many of the ones I don’t necessarily like that much still have some redeeming quality. That copy of Beowulf and one of Elmore Leonard’s weaker efforts get to stay, but at some point a book is just no longer worth keeping.
I feel slightly bad about selling the books I don’t like, as though in doing so betrays the author. It’s the same reason I hesitate to slam books, even though at times I do—not all books are worth reading, and it’s necessary to distinguish the worthwhile ones. Granted, criteria for what is worthwhile varies, and I try to keep my scope broad—but broad doesn’t mean indiscriminate. Keeping My Old Man would be indiscriminate and gratuitous, as well as a waste of space. The pang caused by ditching the books fades quickly because of the knowledge that I’m not quite as encumbered, both literally and figuratively.
“But [Chloe] should not have spoken. The next day, she discovered her words had spread all over camp, her foolishly honest declaration played back to her in a mockery of her vulnerability. She had experienced a betrayal at the hands of language, seen intimate words converted to a common currency, and therefore had come to trust the body instead, the movement rather than the phrase.”
—Alain de Botton, On Love
“Some complain that e-mail is impersonal—that your contact with me, during the e-mail phase of our relationship, was mediated by wires and screens and cables. Some would say that’s not as good as conversing face-to-face. And yet our seeing of things is always mediated by corneas, retinas, optic nerves, and some neural machinery that takes the information from the optic nerve and propagates it into our minds. So, is looking at words on a screen so very much inferior?… Whereas, when you see someone with your eyes, you forget about the distortions and imagine you are experiencing them purely and immediately.”
—Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Anything can change your life, if you’re willing to let it change. Does Proust make the process easier?
“But an advantage of more prolonged encounters with Proust or Homer is that worlds that had seemed threateningly alien reveal themselves to be essentially much like our own, expanding the range of places in which we feel at home.”
The danger is in reducing the real life places in which we feel home—as we start to feel at home only in stories and not in reality, rendering us deracinated from the real world, like Internet hermits.
That is not, of course, a reason to avoid Proust or Homer. We know that the former, like many writers, led a somewhat unusual life. I recently read Frederick Brown’s new biography of Flaubert, which describes Flaubert’s numerous neuroses and generally manic demeanor. This passage in de Botton reminds of Flaubert:
“It is not the contended or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.”
De Botton goes on to qualify that statement—being miserable is necessary but not sufficient for one to create profound testimonials, so one should be wary of being miserable solely for that purpose—but it is an insight nonetheless: for aren’t the contented too busy being content to analyze their own souls or become sufficiently introspective about the world? If all is well, why worry?
Still, there is at least some upside to being “violently miserable,” although the violently miserable probably aren’t likely to notice because they are too busy being themselves. They just have to recognize and change—which is what Proust can help us do, if we let him.
(Not that my use of the group pronoun “we” indicates that I think I’m necessarily among the violent and miserable…)
The Story's Story 