“The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all.”

I read Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal a few days ago. I hated it. I think it’s fair to say that. I hated it, but I read it anyway. I found a copy of it on the shelf near the bathroom, the one tucked in the alcove at the top of the stairs, while I was excavating the thick stacks of books, searching for more Paul Auster (on the same shelf I uncovered two copies of Man in the Dark and a hardback copy of Travels in the Scriptorium, so not a fruitless endeavor). Anyway, The Dying Animal. An uncorrected bound proof. It was strange to find it in this state – it was published in 2001, why did we have this uncorrected proof, with its flimsy yellow construction-paper cover? I had never read any Philip Roth before. I know I keep saying that – I had never read any Paul Auster before, I had never read any this before, any that before – and if it highlights the enormous gaps in my literary education, let it also indicate a curiosity, a willingness to admit these gaps and then fill them. But I had never read any Philip Roth before and I thought, from the back cover description, that maybe I would like this one.

I hated it – well, if not immediately, then almost immediately. The pleasure of the opening pages – promising! – was diminished by what came after, diminished by my irrational reaction to the white-haired professor’s young lover and her “cream-colored silk blouse”. Why should a cream-colored blouse matter so much to me? The repetition, I guess. Pages and pages of her big breasts and her bowlike lips and her startling self-awareness. None of it ultimately incidental, but all of it seemingly gratuitous. Why do I hate her cream-colored silk blouse? But no matter why: I do, and even so I read the book, the whole book, though I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t simply skimmed the last few pages, coming to the last lines breathlessly and excitedly. At some point during my reading I remembered that Roth had once been shortlisted for some sort of bad sex award.

But it’s this book, not its author, that I object to. And this line – extracted, as it happens, from its sexually explicit setting: “The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all.” This I like.

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It’s 2012 now. I didn’t do my usual end-of-year post to mark the transition. I started doing this a few years ago. I didn’t intend to make a habit of it, but I make habits very easily, by accidentally doing the same thing over and over again, and so it became a habit. I thought about it this year, after we’d had our nice Christmas with family and I had eaten a lot of turkey and nibbled at the Christmas pudding and taken naps and baths and read so many books in a short space of time that I was getting them mixed up in my head and was feeling ready to get back to making things again. But everything seemed too small to bother writing about, and simultaneously too large to even comprehend, too large certainly to fit in a few paragraphs – “time passed, or maybe it didn’t,” as Geoff Dyer writes. Last year, while time was passing, or maybe not passing, I worked. I went to Scotland and wore espadrilles in the rain and they didn’t dry out for weeks. We re-visited Wales, we re-visited New York. I left my job – “without one to go to!” as they say, biting their fingernails, but of course that was the point, to leave without having a clear sense of what came next. And I’m going have a book published this year, as a result of what happened last year when I had no clear sense of what comes next, and even so I still have no clear sense of what comes next, though that feels right somehow, that feels okay.

Anyway, instead of a chronological list of things we did last year, or things that happened to us, here’s a random assortment of things I (think I) learned last year.

- On my way to the pool I take a detour down a residential street. I peer through windows as I pass; I see a man bent over a guitar, a woman bent over a baby. Later, on the walk home, I notice how I have two shadows, how it looks like the fainter shadow is chasing the stronger shadow along a low wall on Aston street.

- I go to a gig. I’m too short to see the band so instead I watch their shadows moving on the ceiling. I’m with a friend who’s very tall. He can (presumably) see the band, but later on we go to get fresh bottles of beer, and then linger outside in the hallway, where it is impossible to see but much easier to listen.

- One afternoon, as I am recovering from a winter cold, I listen to the rain. I write this:

The front room was glowing yellow, because of the strange, smoggy light that the sun was managing to give off from behind its protective layer of golden clouds. It was raining, quite hard, but in the way it rains when you know it will only rain for a minute, or a few minutes, maybe ten – a summer shower, it had the sound of a summer shower, and people walking past were bent against the falling rain with the same surprised faces you see in summertime – women in skirts who left the house on the tricky promise of a blue sky. On the horizon, above the low roof of the shed across the street, the sky was bright. We went to the window to observe; the rain was actually hail, stones bouncing forcefully off the bins and the garden path. Sometimes when it really hails here the stones fall through the chimneys and bounce out into the house, melting, covered in soot. But soon the hail turned again to rain. The light went darker; the clouds were ablaze now with sunset-yellow, pinkish, purplish, almost bruised in their centers, but light on the edges, like a depiction of heavenly clouds in a Renaissance painting.

Then I take a long nap.

- I fall asleep sitting up at my desk, engulfed in sheepskin, reading something. When I wake up it’s black outside, but, surprisingly, I have no crick in my neck.

- Because my usual pool is shut over the Christmas period I have to go further afield. I cycle to Summertown one evening; on the ride home I have the city more or less to myself. I pass the blackened lawns, the buildings shrouded in scaffolding and mesh. I make myself remember this – the blackened lawns, the buildings shrouded in scaffolding and mesh – all the way home, even when I stop at Tesco, just before it shuts, to pick up lettuce leaves and avocado.

- Later that week I try a pool off the Cowley Road, across from the police station. I cycle there late in the evening again, the road wide and empty. I insert a pound coin into a locker, stash my shoes, my coat. There is almost no one else around – a woman, a man, and me. The water is cloudy and green; I imagine that it feels a little thicker than I’m used to, smells vaguely medical – iodine, disinfectant, the smell of waiting and worrying. There is a library nearby and so the sign outside says “Swimming Pool Library”. I wonder if anyone else finds it funny, if maybe it’s a private joke in Oxford, the Hollinghurst reference in Temple Cowley. I wonder if I’m being undeservedly pretentious: I’ve never actually read the book. Does just knowing about its existence – even knowing, loosely, what it’s about – qualify me to share the joke, or do I need some deeper understanding?

When I roll my head to breathe, I can half hear the Christmas songs, playing through speakers in the big room.

- I’m obsessively but irrationally repulsed by the Christmas shoppers, their laden-down shuffle, their vulgar worship of Things. I don’t want Things, I tell myself, I’m already mired in Things. I spend what maybe adds up to an hour every day looking for Things, Things which are always obscured by other Things. But then again I want a new dress, new shoes, this, that. I only don’t want these things when I don’t think of them: and when I don’t think of them I feel free and am not sure what to put in this new space.

- I can’t remember, or maybe I never knew, which state Yellowstone National Park is in. I look it up. Then I look up the distance between where I grew up and there: about 1200 miles. Then I look up the distance between where I am now and there: “We could not calculate directions”.

- I wonder about the veracity of this, from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad: “I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.” And regardless of its truth, the important question is this: do I want it to be true?

- “I don’t know why I do what I do. If I did know, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to do it.” – Paul Auster.

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I. Christmas cards

This year, some are hand-delivered. At the farmers’ market, I run into some friends; they pull a card out of a coat pocket, but it gets lost amongst the leeks and the potatoes and I never end up taking it home, let alone opening it. Oh well, they say, when I tell them the fate of their offering. It was just a Christmas card; it said Christmas card things – and besides, I think, we’ve seen each other six times since; all the card contained, I suppose, was the representation of a relationship, while here we are, living that relationship. Later, drinking wine at a friend’s house late at night, she produces a card, and I’m vaguely ashamed to have nothing to offer in return, but then, I’ve never been good at this; even the cards I send to my family, back in California, arrive embarrassingly late if at all, little attempts to disguise the distance between us that only serve to magnify it.

Others arrive through the post, personal but to the point. Let’s see more of each other in the new year, one of them says, which I like; it’s an active card, an invitation of sorts. But people of my generation, maybe people in general, don’t send those long letters that my parents used to receive at Christmas – round-robins, sometimes, but not always, full of life updates: how little Susie is doing in middle school and how Howard is considering Harvard but he’s not sure he’s got the SAT scores for it and how even though Tom lost his job earlier this year because of downsizing or company restructuring or whatever the fashionable reason to lose your job is, they’ve picked themselves up, are doing well, even managed a family trip to the Grand Canyon this summer!

This kind of correspondence served conflicting purposes – to highlight both the banality of everyone else’s lives (they’re human too, just trotting along at the same speed as the rest of us) and the magnificence of everyone else’s lives (they’re doing all kinds of amazing things that I’m not doing!). Who didn’t feel a pang of jealousy, knowing that acquaintances were traveling further, making bigger decisions? Who didn’t, also, know that these kinds of details, the cheery attitude, the photo of the smiling family lined up on the edge of the Grand Canyon (the edge of the abyss!), were just fragments? Those notes contained nothing more or less than a series of clues, designed to add up, when pieced together by detective-friends, to a life grander than the life actually lived.

II. Curation

Now we don’t need to send end-of-year updates. We’re busy constructing and tending to our grander selves all year round. We broadcast the bits of the truth we want other people to see every day, primarily online, combing our public image, curating our personal histories.

I’m thinking about this when I come across this post by Cheri Lucas on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Facebook Timeline. I’m struck by the connection Lucas draws between Lacuna, Inc. and “my curation of my own history” and am prompted to write my own rambling mini-essay in the comments:

“Maybe what’s interesting here is the collision between two kinds of curation – the curation of personal memory and the curation of one’s public self, or one’s public image, anyway. The former has always occurred – not as drastically, as literally, as it does for Joel and Clementine, but in little ways (misremembering the last months of a relationship, forgetting certain things, placing private but heavy emphasis on others, say). I know when I tell people I meet now about relationships I’ve had in the past, I’m not telling a whole story, or even a true (in the sense of factually correct) story – but I am, usually, at least telling a story which is emotionally true for me, based on my (curated) memory. But now, as you point out, “I am able to highlight what is important in my life—or what I want others to view as important—and fill in missing details”. We can not only present (and broadcast) a certain version of ourselves; we can also edit it, for an audience, we can do on paper (or Facebook, anyway) what we’ve always been able to do in our minds forever. I don’t know if this is a ‘bad’ thing, if any of it can be quantified, but I think it’s certainly raising questions about memory and identity that are fairly unique to our era.”

III. Casual Correspondence

I wrote a month or two ago about how the question of whether or not correspondence – in its grand sense, its life in letters sense – is dead, or dying, because of technology, doesn’t interest me. But the art of staying in touch – well, now, that’s different, that’s a rare art indeed these days, and “rarity…is the precursor to extinction,” as Darwin writes.

For me, casual correspondence is too difficult these days. Why write to someone (or even – the horror! – ring her), for no specific purpose other than to make contact, when you can track her movements (however heavily edited) online? And if she doesn’t broadcast any aspect of his her online, you hesitate: perhaps it’s deliberate, perhaps she’s hiding, perhaps your friendly advances are unwelcome. My inclination anyway, in an environment where we’re saturated with the details of other people’s lives, is to assume that the dissapearer has disappeared for a reason, has gone underground in order not to be found.

So we forget how to make contact, how to say hello, how are you, what have you been up to? There are plenty of people I want to say that to, but not only do I feel disinclined, I feel I lack the vocabulary – and also the medium – with which to do it. I don’t know how to say let’s stay in touch, but more than that, I don’t know how to stay in touch.

I do know this: staying in touch – or, rather, the art of staying in touch – is interactive. It is is not adding someone as a friend on Facebook so that you can passively observe; it’s not consuming the fragments, the breadcrumbs. It’s talking about the fragments and the breadcrumbs, filling the spaces in with conversation.

You could look at something like Facebook and think, how efficient! It’s saving so much time; people don’t have to write a million letters and emails anymore; all the necessary information is in one place; it’s never been easier to stay in touch! This is true, on the surface; but what it ignores is the possibility for different selves, different levels of revelation. I worry (probably needlessly, nearly all of my worry is needless) that if everyone sees precisely the same thing, we’ll forget how to tell different people different things – not in order to mislead, but in order to tailor relevant information, to revisit shared history, to retain a sense of dignity. And we’ll let this art, this tiny art, shrivel and become extinct.

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“The careening interior monologues of Mrs. Dalloway serve as a prescient forecast of today’s hyperlinked, click-through culture”

- Buzz Poole at The Millions

I mean, I haven’t always loved Virginia Woolf, but I like looking at her from this angle.

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