Known and Strange Things

You write not after you’ve thought things though; you write to think things through. Andre Aciman

It took me a while to finish Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things, reading the sixty or so essays from time to time, over the course of several weeks.

Cole divided his essays into three sections: Reading Things, Seeing Things and Being There. Many of the essays deal with Cole’s love of photography, the pictures he takes, what is important to him in doing so and the works of other photographers he admires.

The essay I remember best is one he wrote while being in a somewhat remote Swiss town, Leukerbad, one that James Baldwin wrote about when he was in the same village (“Stranger in the Village”). Cole, also African-American, retraces Baldwin’s steps and what being a black person in an otherwise all white community felt like.

You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the street or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys…The remote village gave him [James Baldwin] a sharper view of what things looked like back home.”

Another of Cole’s essays explores the peculiar way Andre Aciman sometimes writes, a way that appeals to me greatly. Quoting Aciman:

What was missed was not just Egypt. What was missed was dreaming Europe in Egypt—what we missed was Egypt where we’d dreamed of Europe.

Monet “realized that he liked painting this town [Bordighera] more than he loved the town itself, because what he loved was more in him than in the town itself.

In writing about why he voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Cole says he voted not because my doing so would change the outcome, but because it would change himself.

Now voting for Obama, in spite of my strong objections both to some of his ideas and to much of the system in which he functioned, was a declaration, mostly to myself, that we participate in things not because they are ideal but because they are not.

Cole wonders how the “reader in chief” could now be embroiled in wars in all but name in Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Syria. What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in a word and in deed, so radically different from the president he became?

And in one of the last essays Cole writes about the rarely acknowledged freedom the military gives to us. I am not naïve about the incessant and unseen (by most of us) military activity that undergirds our ability to read, go to concerts, earn a living, and criticize the government in relative safety.

Comments like this appear throughout Cole’s essays and make Known and Strange Things such a pleasure to read.

Every Day is for the Thief

“This should be a time of joy. You Know? Going home should be a thing of joy.”

The home you left long ago is never the home you come back to. It’s always a disappointment and your memories are always better anyway. Yes, a cliché, but that doesn't stop anyone from writing about the experience. It is the subject of Teju Cole’s recently published novel, Every Day is for the Thief.

Cole was born in this country, raised in Nigeria and author of the widely praised Open City. Every Day is For the Thief was written before Open City but only recently published in this country. It recounts the tale of an American psychiatrist-in-training who returns to Lagos for a short visit.

At once he is struck by the rampant corruption, thievery and bribery that even begins in New York as he applies to have his passport renewed at the Nigerian consulate. After arriving, it continues. Cole notes that the assumptions of life in America—obeying the law, moral constraints, due process—seem entirely absent from the city in which he was raised

On the streets in Lagos lawlessness is everywhere. “For many Nigerians, the giving and receiving of bribes, tips, extortion money, or alms—the categories are fluid are not thought of in moral terms.”

He never sees anyone reading, until one day, as he is traveling on a mini-bus he observes a woman holding a book. He strains his neck to find out what it is. “What I see makes my heart leap up into my mouth and thrash about like a catfish in a bucket." Michael Ondaatje”

The rarity of an adult reading a stimulating work of literary fiction on public transportation or most anywhere else astounds him. He wonders where could she have bought it or how could she afford it as it looked new. He is eager to talk to her and carries on a silent conversation. “What lady, do you make of Ondaatje’s labyrinthine sentences, his sensuous prose? How does his intense visuality strike you?” Where could she have bought it?"

And he hopes they will both get off at the same stop. Of course they don’t, as she gets off and disappears into the bookless crowd, long before Cole’s destination. It is the one of the few encounters in Lagos that brings him any pleasure, any intellectual pleasure. Cole confesses that Nigeria is “a hostile environment for the life of the mind.”

Before returning to Lagos, he had given some thought to staying permanently. But his week or so there convinced him, that was no longer possible. He isn’t the person he was when he left. Neither is Lagos, the city it was when he left. He knows that he loves the life he had created in the U.S. and had no desire to deal with what life is like in the country of his youth.

Open City

Julius is his name. He is from Nigeria and has lived in the United States since 1992. His father, a German, died when Julius was young and he is estranged from his Nigerian mother. He has done well in this country, graduating from medical school and is about to complete his psychiatric residency. He is also widely cultured, devoted to classical music, photography, and literature. And he is the central character in Teju Cole's remarkable debut novel Open City.

Julius is also a wanderer, an observer who takes off on long walks in New York City to ease the stresses of his working day and recent, painful breakup with his girl friend. “And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.” He often wanders deep into the canyons through Columbus Circle, all the way down to Wall Street and Battery Park continuing up the West Side Highway.

He is an acute observer of everything he sees and everyone with whom he speaks and he records his observations with a clarity that soon become the reflections of a therapist, a philosopher interspersed with memories of his boyhood in Nigeria. He notes it “is unimaginable how many small stories people all over this city carried around with them.” The same can be said of Julius.

He encounters an enormous range of people—immigrants, a Liberian who he visits in a detention center where he has been for two years, a graduate student he befriends at Internet café during a visit to Brussels, the doctor he meets on the flight there, and he makes several visits to a dying former professor whose conversations echo the literary class he once took from him. And in these meetings he mulls over art, literature, music and photography, the partisanship and violence of contemporary life, and a countless number of books.

Cole's novel reads like a meditation, a diary without a plot, an autobiography without a beginning or end. “The days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city intensified. Most days I stayed indoors, reading, but I read without pleasure. On the occasions when I went out, I wandered aimlessly in the parks and in the museum district. The stones paving the streets were sodden, liquid underfoot, and the sky, dirty for days, was redolent with moisture.”

Always the observer, the listener, Julius is generally aloof, not one to get involved in the melodrama of the city. Even when he is mugged one night he describes the experience as an impartial observer rather than the victim of a brutal attack.

“I fell to the ground. I don’t recall if I cried out, or if opening my mouth I was unable to make a sound. They began to kick me all over—shins, back, arms—a quick preplanned choreography..The initial awareness of pain was gone, but now came the anticipation of how much it would hurt later, how bad tomorrow would be for both my body and my mind. My mind had gone blank except for this lone thought…We find it convenient to describe time as a material, we “waste” time, we “take” our time. As I lay there time because material in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent tufts, and at the same time spreading, like something spilled like a stain.”

Throughout Julius poses questions that he cannot answer and he reflects on ordinary matters. On happiness: “I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherry wood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard.”

And the seasons: “In recent years I have noticed how much the light affects my abilities to be sociable. In winter I retreat. In the long and sunny days following in March, April, and May, I am much more likely to see out the company of others, more likely to feel myself alert to sights and sounds, to colors, patterns, moving bodies, smells other than the ones in my office or at the apartment. The cold months make me feel dull, and spring feels like a gentle sharpening of the senses.”

Toward the end of his journeys about the streets of Manhattan Julius goes to a symphony at Carnegie Hall. Watching Simon Rattle conduct Mahler’s 9th, he recalls other conductors who have led an orchestra in Mahler’s vast score and he falls into a mood connected to each name, “one of balance, extreme, sentimental, pained, consoling.”

“I found myself thinking of Mahler’s last years as I sat on the uptown-bound N train last night. All the darkness that surrounded him, the various reminders of frailty and morality, were lit brightly from some unknown source, but even that light was shadowed. I thought of how clouds sometimes race across the sunlit canyons formed by the steep sides of skyscrapers, so that the start divisions of dark and light are shot through with the passing light and dark. Mahler’s final works…were all first performed posthumously; all are vast, strongly illuminated, and lively works, surrounded by the tragedy that was unfolding in his life.”

These are but a few of his ruminations in this beautiful, intellectually rich and provocative novel. They led me to think about many old and new issues and in the strange way that sometimes happens in reading certain works of fiction, I often found myself in an extended conversation with Cole. Perhaps you will too if you read Open City and fall under its spell as I did.