Motherhood is Hell

“If everyone would read this book, the propagation of the human race would virtually cease…”

In last week’s Times Magazine (9/12/10) Lisa Belkin asks, “Is child-rearing the new self-actualization?” Her question stems from a recent article by the evolutionary psychologist David Kendrick that redefined Abraham Maslow’s original theory of self-actualization in terms of “attracting a mate and ultimately, parenting children.”

Rachel Cusk, the well known and much admired by this reader English writer, would surely object, and do so strongly, to this dubious claim. Cusk is the mother of two children and has recently written about her experience of motherhood in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother.

The book is a bold expression, a powerful one that angered many readers for its brutally honest account of motherhood. The nearly unanimous outcry after it was published confused Cusk for, as she commented, “I was only being honest.”

Cusk is not the first writer to write critically about the experience of motherhood. But she may be the first to describe its adversities with such vitality and intensity--a domestic struggle, confinement, sleeplessness, confusion, guilt mixed with love, servitude mixed with compassion, a prison, boot-camp, never ending torment.

‘Motherhood, for me, was a sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world. I was forever plotting my escape from it, when I found myself pregnant again when Albertine was six months old, I greeted my old cell with the cheerless acceptance of a convict intercepted at large.”

In A Life’s Work, Cusk has tried to convey what she thought and felt about the experience of having a child. Although she might now regret publishing the book, she must have hoped that other people would identify with her account and know that they were not the only ones to react the way she did.

For Cusk caring for her child was “isolating, frequently boring, relentless, demanding and exhausting. It erodes your self-esteem and your membership in the adult world.”

Throughout the book she draws upon works of literary fiction to corroborate her experiences. She cites Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth and asks what a woman is if she is not a mother or a wife either.

“The baby is the symbol not just of Lily’s exclusion from the human life-cycle, nor of the vulnerability, the helplessness that marks her life and her life’s end: it is also the vision of her squandered femininity…”

And in a separate chapter on Madame Bovary, she reflects on how confusing it is for a mother to make sense of being “supremely powerful and powerless at the same time.”

Her relationship with her husband comes under pressure. “…after a child is born the lives of its mother and father diverge, so that where before they were living in a state of some equality, now they exist in a sort of feudal relation with each other.” Clearly news about the how closely fathers are now involved in child rearing had yet to arrive in the British Isles.

And yet they were in this “crime” together. “When evening comes, I prepare the bottle. Her father is to give it to her, for we are advised that this treachery is best committed not by the traitor herself but by a hired assassin.”

I have always found much to admire in the works of Rachel Cusk. And while I will never be a mother, I heard clearly what she was saying in this book. At one point she speaks of “…the death of freedom, its untimely murder by the state of parenthood…” Note: parenthood, not motherhood.

And later “…the hardship of parenthood is so unrelievedly shock….At its worst moments parenthood does indeed resemble hell, in the sense that its torments are never ending.”

OK, you get the picture. While very few parents are likely to admit they experience anything close to this degree of hardship in raising their children, I think there is enough truth in Cusk’s account will be familiar to anyone who has ever been a parent.

"Hunger to capture another life, to understand another life."

In 1978 John Updike gave a lengthy interview in response to the questions of two professors of English while he was attending a writers conference in Croatia. He discussed his writing process (semi-fixed, every day but Sunday, a good deal of rewriting), favorite writers ((Thurber, Proust, Calvino, Nabokov) and the excessive focus of American fiction on infidelity and the breakdown of marriage (Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina are also novels of adultery and marital estrangement).

When asked about the many predictions that the era of the novel is over, Updike responded with the bold claim that the novel is the “ultimate vessel for truth telling and artistic expression.” Bold, yes, but also a view that was responsible for the turn I took from psychology to literature.

Psychologists seek to establish very general laws of human thought and action. However, I never understood how evidence derived by averaging the scores of a group of individuals could serve as the foundation for a science of individual behavior. Laws based on such aggregate data tell us very little about specific individuals and serve only to obscure crucial features of human variability and uniqueness. Literature points the spotlight on them.

Further, the many exceptions to those general laws severely limits their generality. Thus, it is impossible to say with much confidence that they hold for a particular individual at a particular time and place. I have come to believe that psychology will always have to be content with this sort of limitation. Laws based on aggregate data hold for some people, some of the time, but one never can be sure on any given occasion if they apply to a particular individual in the situation at hand.

This conclusion is not unlike one often voiced in judicial proceedings, where the legal standing of psychological research is also called into question. It took me a while to understand why courts were so hesitant to admit social science evidence, let alone take it seriously in adjudicating cases. Yet legal cases are decided on an individual basis and so, even when the weight of evidence clearly supports the relevant social science generalization, the courts still require "proof" that it applies in the case being decided.

When judges ask psychologists to link the general principle to the specific case, it is difficult, if not impossible for them to do so with certainty. But that is what the law requires. Psychologists can provide relevant case knowledge and guidance, but the information they present is rarely, if ever, decisive in judicial decision-making.

In his essay Medicine and Literature, Robert Coles puts the matter eloquently. "I am constantly impressed with mystery, and maybe even feel that there are certain things than cannot be understood or clarified through generalizations, that resolve themselves into matters of individuality, and again, are part of the mystery of the world that one celebrates as a writer, rather than tries to solve and undo as a social scientist…..As physicians we also know, or ought to know, that each person is different, each patient reacts in his or her special way to any illness, and indeed to life itself. A sense of complexity of human affairs, a respect for human particularity, ...these are the stuff of the humanities at their best …"

During all the time I was primarily engaged in psychology, I never stopped reading literature, mostly contemporary fiction. I did not have the time to read widely, but the literature I did read always told me things about myself and others that I never heard expressed in psychology. With rare exceptions, I rarely saw individuals in psychology as clearly or as deeply as I did in the novels and short stores I read.

Literary truths hold for particular individuals and situations. They make no claims beyond that. They do not require testing or verification or large sample statistical analysis. Their veracity cannot be doubted, they are without exception true for the individual or situation at that time and place, and as Coles suggests, they are bound to be different for each person and situation.

This is what I take Updike means when he speaks of the novel as the “ultimate vessel” for truth telling. Writers may not be overly concerned with expressing literary truths but it is a natural consequence of the work they do. Nor is the excellence of their work judged in terms of the literary truths on its pages.

Instead, what Updike does in his stories is “examine the details, the texture of time, the texture of a little experience in such a way as to make it yield all-new meaning, like turning a sock inside out or something.”

"A Variety of Impersonations"

For all the seeming self-exposure of the novels, he was a great defender of his solitude, not because he particularly liked it but because swarming emotional anarchy and self-exposure were possible for him only in isolation.

I think of Proust and the several years he rarely left his cork-lined apartment working on his masterpiece. I think of Salinger secluded at his home in the forested hillside of New Hampshire, Salinger who after the enormous success of Catcher in the Rye, rarely broke his silence. After To Kill A Mockingbird was published, Harper Lee did much the same, refusing interviews and public appearances. The creative life is usually solitary and it is in that solitude that a writer finds his story. Perhaps it also creates a strong desire to be heard. Every writer says much the same. Martha Gelhorn put it well, “I always live alone to work, cannot do it otherwise except as total immersion.”

In a way brothers probably know each other better than they ever know anyone else.

One summer my brother and I met at a cafe in the beautiful town of Lucca in Tuscany. The warm afternoon was drawing to a close. The buildings surrounding the piazza glowed in that late afternoon Tuscan light. And he started to tell me about what he saw. He saw things I did not even notice until he pointed them out. It was like that with each building. The object; its meaning; historical importance and why it was placed there and not somewhere else. It was dazzling. He did know a great deal. But above all he wanted to tell me about it. I had never heard him so spontaneously outgoing to me or interested in what he was talking about. It turned out to be our last day together. We never had a better one.

…what matters isn’t what made you do it but what it is you do.

I listen to people tell me what they intend to do and what their attitudes and beliefs are or I read the same things in their writings and I say to myself this is really of no importance. What is important is how they translate their beliefs and attitudes into behavior, what they do when push comes to shove in real time. Many years of experience and a fair amount of research have taught me that the finest of intentions often fall by the wayside under conditions of even the most minimal pressure.

There is no you, Maria, any more than there’s a me. There is only this way that we have established over the months of performing together, and what it is congruent with isn’t “ourselves” but past performances—we’re has-beens at heart, routinely trotting out the old, old, act….It’s all impersonation—in the absence of a self, one impersonates selves, and after a while impersonates best the self that best gets one through.

Does it make any sense to speak of a self, an identity that is the same today as it was 30 or 40 years ago, a self that lies hidden behind most of the actions that constitute our daily life? Or are we, as the author of the passage above suggests, little else but performances of who we imagine our self to be or might wish to be?

On this account the notion of a self as a distinctive identity is a myth. Instead we are impersonators like actors on the stage with a range of parts we perform to meet the demands of the situation or the image that we think others have of us.

I have been searching unsuccessfully for my self for years. Instead, what I find are the various behaviors I enact over time, a set of behaviors that has remained consistent for most of my life now. If this is what is meant by “self,” then I admit the search has been successful after all.

The quoted passages above are from Philip Roth’s novel, The Counterlife. The novel depicts the various lives two brothers lived or might have lived--one is never quite sure. It is an imaginative, forceful, confrontational novel that is Roth at his best.

I might note that Roth, an intensely private man, also lives in virtual solitude at his home in Connecticut. He works from early morning until the end of the day, every day, in his studio back in the trees away from the house. He says he cannot do otherwise, that he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he couldn’t write every day.

My responses reflect the way I read a novel or most any book for that matter. I read a passage, come to a halt for one reason or another, place a mark in the margin, and then continue mulling it over for a while. From time to time I return to the passage and others from a really excellent book after I have entered all the marked passages in my Commonplace Book. And every so often these passages serve as the basis for something I write.

Notes on Reading

At Barnes and Noble last night I was given an extended demonstration of what it’s like to read The New Yorker on their e-reader, The Nook. The magazine arrives so late in the week at my home that I usually head out to buy a second copy on the newsstand the day after it hits the streets in New York. To avoid this unnecessary extravagance, I have wondered what it would be like to read the magazine moments after its publication on an e-reader at a fraction of the cost of the printed version(s).

And what I learned is that electronic version of The New Yorker is nothing like the edition that has been coming my way in the mail for ages. In the version of the magazine I read or tried to read on The Nook there are no ads, no little sidebars, no color photos, a fraction of the cartoons and unless you’re reading the both the print and the electronic version simultaneously, you have no idea what else is missing and that includes some of the articles, essays and reviews. Frankly, I thought the e-reader version of the magazine was a fraud.

While weekly edition The New Yorker is also available on the Web, much of the print version is also missing and a good many of the essays are blocked and can only be read by subscribers to the electronic edition of the magazine which is sent each week to subscribers via e-mail. I confess I’ve tried to read this digital version and I found it to be impossible.

I’ve also been worrying a great deal lately about what is happening to practice of reading on these devices. It is claimed that you can “read” countless books and periodicals with them, a large number for free. But what does that mean, what is meant by “reading” anyway? Is it simply from moving from one sentence to another, page after page with a flip of a thumb? Is that all that is meant by reading?

For me reading has always meant much more. It is reading carefully and slowly and sometimes deeply. It is marking passages, making notes, flipping back and forth between pages, and when you’re all done keeping a record of the best of what you’ve read in a notebook or as it’s usually referred to a commonplace book. Doing all of this with an e-reader is not anything I’ve ever observed anyone doing. Nor have I heard anyone tell me this is the way they read with the Nook, Kindle, or iPad. Of course this might be said of most readers of printed books too.

Recently a few blogs have made mention of the commonplace book tradition. Amanda at Desert Book Chick discusses the history of how she uses her commonplace book and over at Kittling: Books, Cathy does much the same in her post There's Nothing Common About Commonplace books. I was amused to read some of the comments to these postings.

I’ve been considering something of the sort for quite some time (didn’t know that there is actually a name for it) but I have this problem with the fact that I need to have it someplace close in order to use it, otherwise I don’t feel like getting up to retrieve anything while I’m immersed in a book. But I do actually need one because at the moment, my thoughts are scattered on post-its everywhere and that really won’t do.

Wow – i have never heard of these – what a simply WONDERFUL idea!!!

I have never heard about commonplace books either. I kept a diary when I was quite young, though, and looking back at that stage, I think it helped me finding a writing voice.

I wish I had kept something like that years ago - it would be wonderful to look at now to see how (or if) I've grown.

And then there is the matter of the future of the printed book, a future that many predict with be short. I realize printed books are expensive to produce and publishers lose a good deal of money on most of them. On possible solution to this problem was recently suggested by William Gibson.

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. Book making machines exist and they’re remarkably sophisticated. You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book -– and it would be a real book. You might even have the option of buying a deluxe edition. You could have it printed with an extra nice binding, low acid paper.

How cool is that? How would it work? You’d come into the bookstore, go to the shelf where the traditional book has always been located, read a short summary of it on a few pages within a slim pamphlet-like volume or do the same on the bookstore’s Web page, decide if you want to read the book, and if so, head over to the machine to print the complete volume on non-toxic, recycled paper with a soft cover. Or something like that.

The Art of Translation

“…the only rule in translation is that there are no rules.” Barbara Harshav

Readers of this blog may remember how much I admired Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier. Mercier, the pen name of Peter Beiri, is also the author of Lea a novel that I have been very eager to read. However, it has not yet been translated into English. To find out if the translation rights were still available, I wrote to Professor Barbara Harshav who did the English translation of Night Train to Lisbon. She replied that the rights had been purchased and another person is currently doing the English Language translation.

This was followed by a lively exchange on the art and process of translation. Reading a work of literature in translation, as I often do, is not something we ordinarily think about. And yet, once you realize there are many different styles and approaches to translating, you begin to wonder how true the translation is to the original.

In addition to German, Professor Harshav has translated a number of French, Yiddish and Hebrew publications. She is currently teaching a course on translation in the Comparative Literature Department at Yale and serves as President of the American Literary Translators Association. With her permission I have minimally edited and framed as an interview her responses to the questions I posed to her.

Q How does a reader know when a translation is good or bad? This is a reader, like myself, who does not know the translator, who cannot read the original and knows nothing about what distinguishes a good from a bad translation.
You raise the fundamental question about judging translation. In some ways, you are really buying a pig in a poke because there are no objective standards of quality. Signs of a bad translation would include strange locutions or phrases that are just slightly off. For example, would you write "completely new" or "brand new"? Minor details, but they can give the game away.

Another indication is that something just doesn't make sense, which means that the translator probably hasn't understood the original. More subtly, the rhythm of the English can be off, but it takes a fairly rare sensibility to language to discern that. However, that still leaves the issue of whether the translation is really conveying the original. And I doubt whether there's any way to know that.

As for whether you'd know if you were reading a less than perfect translation -- you wouldn't. In some ways, translation is one of the blindest items we buy (a pig in a poke -- translate that!). For example, if I get sick, I go to the doctor and if I don't get better, I try to find another doctor. The same with an auto mechanic. But we have no way of knowing if a translator has conveyed what's in the original.

Q Have you ever considered a translation a “better” book than the original?
I have had several authors tell me that. That raises a lot of issues about the nature of the process of translation as opposed to the process of writing itself. Aside from the major obvious difference, I suspect that translating a work is a more conscious process. I know that, when I've spoken with authors about their work, we have both been surprised that I often I know it better than they do, pick up connections they weren't aware of.

Translating, as I understand it, is a creative process. I have to live in a work, walk around in it, feel its dimensions, get into it. And to shift the metaphor, I have to feel that every single word is right. So, initially, I work on the leaves, then I get to the trees and from there to the forest.

So it's a tedious, self-conscious process that has to flow easily in the end. I argue that the translator has to be extremely humble and disappear into the text, so that the author says "that's what I wrote" and the reader doesn't know it's a translation.

Q What are the highlights for you of the process of translating a work of literature?
The greatest experiences I've had have been working very closely with authors. Knowing Peter Bieri was a great advantage, especially since, when I got into the novel, I recalled that he and I shared a love of detective fiction, which is an important part of the novel. Moreover, working together was absolute, sheer joy, based on mutual admiration and shared values.

So, to answer your question, yes, I think I got into what he meant. But that's been my experience with all my favorite works. I have to inhabit the work, walk around in it, see out of it. Indeed, as I work, I create images in my mind and translate from them. I hope you saw the scenes in Night Train. In the end, ironically, I know the work better than the author. Another experience with Peter was that, for a good part of it, I read the English aloud while he compared it with the German. Both of us were bowled over by that and found all sorts of connections neither of us knew were there.

Q I also wonder if it is important to have some personal experience with the place, theme, or the work’s central character(s) when translating a novel. Like you, Gregorious was a linguist, devoted to language and knowledgeable in several. Many of your translations are works in Hebrew. Was that helped by your very considerable experience living in Israel?
That is one of the fundamental problems of translation. Translation is not simply a matter of two dictionaries. Don't be surprised: I know many translators of repute, as it were, who claim that that's the essence of translation. The whole translating endeavor, as I see it, is understanding and conveying cultural differences; and that means not just knowing one, but two, cultures intimately to be able to find equivalents.

I think that one of the main attributes for a good translator (aside from humility) is the ability to play with language and not be afraid to push the boundaries of your own language. Walter Benjamin claims that one of the tasks of the translator is to stretch his own language.

And, finally, yes, I do consider translating an art. One of my basic principles is that sentences should dance on the page -- and that applies to literature, history, economics, philosophy and anything else I happen to be translating.

A Melancholy Egotism

Silence in October is the first novel Jens Christian Grondahl published in this country. It is a dreary tale of long, dense paragraphs. Nevertheless, its themes sometimes echo in my mind. I read it in two periods, separated by at least a month or two. It is the kind of book that easily lends itself to such a reading; in fact, it isn’t easy to take all that melancholy questioning without a break.

The questions Grondahl ponders are important, that is, they interest me and there are a great many of them, none of which are ever answered. The unexpected departure of the narrator’s (whose name we never learn) wife from their marriage of seventeen years is the central event around which everything else in the novel develops. And what develops is the narrator’s ruminations about the meaning of this event for his life, his marriage, his work (art historian), and the several other relationships that have come his way. That’s all but that’s a lot.

There is little story and not much action in the novel. Instead, reading Silence in October must be like what a psychotherapist of the non-directive persuasion must go through day after day listening to his patients unfold the perturbations of their emotional and mental life. The narrator does not know why his wife, Astrid, leaves or where she goes or if she will ever return. The only evidence he has are the charges she makes to their credit card which track her hotels and meals in Portugal where they had once gone together during better times.

We learn about their Marriage, although only from his perspective: “She was at once the woman I had wanted to leave and the woman I had gone to, and I was the man who had seen her alternatively as my salvation and my warden, as an unexpected, liberating lightness in my life and a burden, that chained me to the eternally grinding treadmill of days.”

We learn about the Silence that had come between them: “It became unnecessary to talk so much. After all, it was enough that we were there.” “Perhaps it didn’t matter, my being unable to think of anything to say to her. Words had never been what bound us together.” “…it occurred to me how much in life remains unspoken, in shadow.”

The narrator speaks often of the Repetition of their days together, how tedious they became, how exhausting and trivial they were. And while he spent all those years with Astrid, he realized that he never really Knew her: “I knew her as I had seen her in the thousands of days and nights we had spent together, but what of herself, as she was to herself.” “I thought about how close one can be and yet know nothing.”

And finally the narrator reflects on Solitude, the solitude when he and Astrid were together and the different kind of solitude after she leaves: “I was content in my solitude, completely absorbed in my book.” “…now I could finally be myself, far from other’s words and eyes, all their irrelevant stories and fruitless plans.”

Like the repetition in his life, these are the central themes the narrator mulls over and over throughout Silence in October. He circles around them, worries and raises questions about them from page one to page two hundred and ninety six tightly compacted, slowly paced pages. His musings are the stuff of a self-absorbed egotist who, in spite of all his introspective analysis, really doesn’t know himself, let alone anyone else.

Other than a few excursions to New York where he gathers information for his book on American painters, he never wanders far from these deliberations. He walks upon the beach with them, sits at his desk with them, confides them to no one, not even the woman he has an affair with in New York. You get the picture.

Where do the truths lie in this obsessive self-analysis? None is asserted in the novel. Perhaps, they reside only in the act of consideration itself. Yet it is only from a single perspective from which little in the way of self-knowledge can ever be expected.

E-Reading: More or Less?

I workout each day at the gym. More and more often now I see people who bring their Kindle with them and read with the thing while they are exercising. Some are simultaneously reading their e-book, listening to tunes on their iPod, and from time to time glancing up to watch the Food Channel on one of the overhead TVs. All of this makes life bearable, I suppose.

The other day, the person on the machine next to me was tinkering with their iPad. First it was YouTube, then the Times, then Pandora (ear phones in her ears) until I lost interest and picked up the pace a bit.

But not everyone has succumbed to the lure of these devices; there are still a few who I see reading a printed book as I snoop to find its title. Today I stopped to take a good look at one such reader only to discover it was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I should have known.

As for me, after listening to NPR for a while on my iPhone, I generally switch to the local rock station App and belt out a few tunes while I’m getting my heart beat up on the treadmill. Watching the TV depresses me unless they are showing a Red Sox game or Roger Federer playing tennis.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on how these new devices are changing reading habits. Confirming other reports I’ve heard, the article claims recent surveys indicate that people are reading more. At least that’s what the readers say they are doing

In one study 40% of digital readers reported they now read more than they did with printed books and in another study 55% of recent purchasers of Sony’s e-reader claimed they would be reading more books in the future.

The Journal article claims these findings contrast with the recent National Endowment of the Arts study reporting sharp declines in reading frequency especially among the young. However, this was a much larger, random sample investigation of individuals throughout the country. But like the more recent studies of e-book readers all of evidence in based on the self-reports of individual readers.

Are these findings believable? Can we be confident in what people report when they are interviewed by another person or fill out a questionnaire? There is good reason to believe that those who respond to these surveys overestimate the frequency of positive or highly valued behaviors such as, yes, reading.

Since the subjects are fully aware that reading is important, they are hesitant to say they aren’t doing much of it anymore. They are also aware they are in a study and pretty much know its hypothesis, so they are reluctant to say anything that might contradict it.

In turn, the experimenter may subtly frame the questions in such a way as to confirm the hypothesis or if the survey is taken in the presence of the subject, lead them to respond in a certain way. These influences are known as experimenter errors and biases, factors that must always be ruled out of any study in which they are plausible alternative accounts of the findings.

So are readers reading more on their new devices? In my mind it is still an open question. I also don’t know if they are reading as carefully, or as deeply, if you will, as they might have been doing before they began reading e-books. On the other hand, I think it is clear that e-readers are purchasing more books and, of course, downloading a great many free ones. But my hunch is they are by no means reading each and every one of them, at least from start to finish.

Reading Downtime

“I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can’t do anything anyway.” Toni Morrison

Let’s talk about reading. You read a great deal—you must read fast. I read less--I read slowly. But we both keep reading, one thing after another, day after day, month after month, books, articles, essays, papers, the Web, etc.

Isn’t this a little bit crazy? I wonder if it can be compared to eating, constant eating, one meal after another, never a pause to digest or savor. When it comes to books, isn’t it also a bit unfaithful? We read a book we cherish, we admire the author and the way the books was written, we love the story.

And yet no sooner have we finished, then we move on to the next book, the next story and writer that we love. We have become bookizers, after womanizers. Wouldn’t it be better if we stopped reading for a while, took a walk, or went to the beach to mull it all over?

Yes we write about it, blog about it but all the while we are writing about it, we are already into the next book, one after another, like spending the night with one mistress and the next night with another.

Is this what reading is about?

I thought about all this recently after finishing a long and melancholy reading of Silence in October by Jens Christian Grondahl. No sooner had I finished than I started to read Per Petterson’s latest novel, I Curse the River of Time.

I had to stop. Both Scandinavian novels are dark and gray and the days are damp, so full of turmoil and unsettling memories. I needed some sun, perhaps an Italian novel, perhaps simply a vacation from reading for a while.

Have you ever had this experience? The metaphor of digesting a rich meal is not inappropriate. You have a fine meal one night and the next morning you don’t feel like eating a thing for a week.

The other day I finished Nicole Krauss’s second novel, The History of Love. Quite frankly, all I wanted to do was come up for air. I like the way she writes so much. Maybe I like it too much. Maybe I like Nicole Krauss too much. Her first novel is Man Walks into Room. I will probably read it for the second time too.

Can one read too much, too much without a pause for reflection and review? Isn’t it like doing anything too much? After a strenuous workout, physical or otherwise, isn’t is it a good idea to rest for a while? Perhaps the Greeks were right: Everything in moderation.

Physiology professor Loren Frank put it this way in the Times yesterday, “Almost certainly downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long term memories.” He said that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

And yet some of us read two or three books at a time. How can we possibly read a really fine work of literature deeply and immerse ourselves in it when we are also reading two or three others at the same time?

I am not suggesting we read less, only that we slow down a bit. It is like the slow food movement. Take a break, a seventh inning stretch, read your book more slowly. Ruminate about the book you just finished, what does it all mean, is it important or not, review your notes if you took them, talk to your roommate about it, your cat if necessary, give it a second thought

OK. That’s enough on reading. Next time, we’ll talk about trigonometry.

Dear Colleague

“To be a writer is to have hope, and to a writer, no matter how old, hope is belief in one more work yet to be written, another book that is somehow the capstone or distillation of all that has been written before.”

This is how Yi-Fu Tuan begins the Introduction to Dear Colleague: Common and Uncommon Observations. In a way, isn’t it the hope of every person, writer or not, a hope to set off on one more path, another life, another place, one last adventure?

In Tuan’s case, as it was mine recently, he had just finished his autobiography and was searching for another work that would bring together his lifetime of observations and experiences. This is what he has done in Dear Colleague, an unusual book, something between a personal journal, set of fragments, and letter writing collection.

The volume has a rather curious origin. Remarking that “real” conversations at a research university are rare, Tuan began writing his reflections as short letters sent biweekly to his friends and colleagues. The letters were brief, most them short one or two paragraphs in length. In a way, they were not unlike present-day blogs.

In Dear Colleague Tuan has assembled a fair number of them under twenty topical headings. The topics have been arranged to follow a path that “leads from nature and human nature, through society and culture, geography (Tuan’s professional discipline at the University of Wisconsin), history, morality, and religion, to stages of life and a sense of ending.”

In the section Home, Rootedness & Place Tuan wrote, “I am reluctant to admit that mere physical environment can affect my mood. Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was likewise reluctant. “Change of place” should make much difference, for the true source of happiness or misery lies in ourselves, he opined. But then he remembered who said, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” It was Satan—the fallen but still defiant archangel in Milton’s Paradise Lost.”

One more from the section on Nature, “A human being can go blind, lose a limb or two, or a third of the brain, and yet in time adjust so well that these losses are barely missed. The same would seem to apply to external nature. Suppose for reasons of pollution and urban glare we can no longer see the stars. W.H. Auden, for one, honestly admits that he would learn to look at an empty sky and appreciate its “total dark sublime,” though this might take him a while."

Reading an unrelated set of fragments on a set of diverse topics may not be to everyone’s liking. But Tuan invites the reader to browse as you would in a bookstore. There’s nothing about his observations that command they be read in order. They can be dipped in and out of, skipping from comment to comment, independent of topic or order. He suggests his book might be enjoyed at the airport as you wait to board your flight. Given the conditions of most air travel these days, most travelers should be able to finish the book in one sitting.

Tuan also maintains an easy-to-read blog with his current and past “letters, “as well as links to his various publications. He concludes his Introduction by asking what reward is there in reading a book like Dear Colleague?

“Well,” he says, “they will get to know one person and his world better. It doesn’t sound like much, yet I think the effort worthwhile—as worthwhile as getting to know stock options, baseball, or a cat.”

Literary Memories

We forget so much. I forget so much of the books I read. I read every word, I think about the story and the ideas and then if I ask myself about a book I read five, eight or ten years, I can scarcely recall a thing. Where have my memories gone? I am continually intrigued by the question. Do I retain anything from my reading?

I asked myself that question again after reading Nicole Krauss’s novel The History of Love. I first read the novel in 2005 and again this year. I duly made notes and cited passages in my commonplace book after both readings. But in contrast to the first, I wrote something about the novel this year. Does that make a difference? I must remember to ask myself about Krauss’s novel five years from now.

I saved 21 passages the first time I read the book, compared to 30 when I read it this year. What does that mean? Am I reading more carefully? Has this business of collecting passages gotten the better of me? Or am I becoming more and more like Leo Gursky? Probably all three.

Eight of the passages I saved this year were also saved when I read the book initially. They were:

Put a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza

…to live in an undescribed world was too lonely

…the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self-reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts.

We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.

I live alone now, which doesn’t bother me. Or maybe just a little.

You also asked what I do…Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

He was no longer in the business of making friendships.

…the whose sense of time and history in the book is very loose.

These overlapping selections please me a bit. They reflect a certain consistency in my behavior, my identity, if you will, something I am never sure is the same from one day to the next. It may also reflect the difficulty, indeed the near impossibility of changing behavior. William Salter expressed this well:

People were always saying something had completely changed them, some experience or book or man, but if you knew how they had been before, nothing much really had changed.

I read a lot, probably too much. Book after book each year, articles and essays, the newspaper, literary journals, and more. How can one remember all of that? Surely long term memory has its limits. Thinks get jumbled up, sent to ever more remote synapses.

When I come across a passage I copied the first time around, I might be able to recognize it as something familiar. But recognition is not recall or retrieval. Still something must be left from the books we read—somewhere—a certain residue, perhaps organized in some fashion unique to each reader or just as likely randomly scattered about the great storehouse. No doubt they are also mixed up and combined in ways completely unknown to each of us--inaccessible, unavailable, irretrievable memories.

In his American Scholar essay, Reading in the Digital Age, Sven Birkerts has also grappled with this question. He puts it this way, “You can shine the interrogation lamp in my face and ask me to describe Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus and I will fail miserably, even though I have listed it as one of the novels I most admire. But I know that traces of its intelligence are in me, that I can, depending on the prompt, call up scenes from that novel in bright, unexpected flashes: it has not vanished completely."

The History of Love

In an interview at The New Yorker, Nicole Krauss is asked, “What, in your opinion, makes a piece of fiction work?” She replies, “Its ability to remind us of ourselves, of who we are in our essence, and at the same instant to deliver a revelation.”

Precisely, I say to myself, at least for most of the books I enjoy most. There is a harmony, a union between me (reader) and text (writer). We are on the same wavelength, in the same mood. That doesn’t imply we prefer only one class of novels. If we are a brooder, we are also a joker, an escapist, a dreamer, etc. But it is that momentary alignment between where we are at the time we read the book, the story, and the way it is told.

That is the way I felt recently when I read for the second time, Nicole Krauss’s novel The History of Love. I’m not quite sure why I picked up the book again, although I know I am a great admirer of Krauss’s fiction. The story is a bit confusing, a novel within a novel, in which the aging, kvetching Leo Gursky, who came to New York after surviving the Holocaust, ruminates, largely in solitude, about Alma, the love of his life. Gursky had written a great novel in Poland, The History of Love that was given to a friend who later told him it was lost.

So within her novel, Krauss begins to unfold the chapters of this apparently lost novel. In fact, the novel was not lost, having been translated from its original Yiddish into Spanish by one Zvi Litvinoff who passed it off as his own work. Later, it was discovered by Alma’s father who sends it to Alma’s mother to be translated into English. Confused? At times I was. It is a complex tale.

Regardless, what is so good about this novel is the voice in which it is told. A voice of longing for lost people and lost times, Leo’s longing for Alma and for the son he never knew, as Alma was pregnant with their child when she escaped to America. Thinking Leo has been killed by the Nazis, she marries, gives birth to their child that Leo only learns about when he reads about his death in the newspaper.

Then there the voice Krauss gives to Leo, his sadness the way he qualifies much of what he says and feels. In reminiscing about Alma, he says, “…nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.” Elsewhere, “I live alone now, which doesn’t bother me. Or maybe just a little.” “Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone.”

Leo is often sad and funny at the same time. “Maybe this is how I’ll go, in a fit of laughter, what could be better, laughing and crying, laughing and singing, laughing so as to forget that I am alone, that it is the end of my life…” “You also asked what I do. I read…Also I watch movies…Oh, and I go to the mailbox.”

The deeply emotional nature of this novel is also reflected in the wry, ironic truths scattered throughout the novel.

• Put a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza.
• I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
• The truth? What is the truth? …The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.
• At most a person has two, three good ideas in a lifetime.
• …the insoluble contradiction of being animals cursed with self reflection, and moral beings cursed with animal instincts.

What is voice? I like Philip Roth’s answer best: “I don't mean style... I mean voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head." The History of Love has a great deal of that.

Some once told me that the most enjoyable parts of the essays in a book I had written was my voice. I thought that was great, although I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I’m not sure I do now, eight years after those essays were published. I’ve thought a little about it, but not too much, and looked for it in the novels I’ve read since then. From time to time I hear a voice in Coetzees’s novels, especially Youth. And I heard it in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, but not in his latest Solar.

On the dedication page of The History of Love, Krauss placed a photo of each of her four grandparents and wrote, “For my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing.”

Literary Chat

What is there to watch on television these days? No literary talk shows, that is for sure. So I turn to the evening news. There is a murder, followed by a calamity on the freeway, and then an ad for this and then another for that, and then several more before, it’s back to the news.

There is a war, there is a rebellion, and then there’s an ad (“Talk to your doctor.”) and then several more of them. Then there is more on the war, horrible scenes of death and destruction, and then there’s a flood and a fire and then the collapse of a bridge and the collapse of a marriage. And then more ads (“Ask your doctor.”)

But there is nothing about the poetry written that day or the symphony that excited the matinee crowd or the forthcoming literary festival in Memphis or the movie festival down the way and nothing about the new novel that is exciting the public and lo and behold, also the critics. Obviously they are not as newsworthy as a fire, flood, lost child, or serial murderer on the loose.

What is one to do? The other day I read a long article by Vanina Marsot about the literary talk shows on French TV. I was bowled over by their number and variety; I counted at least eight (8) that she described. In one way or another they are modeled after what Marsot calls “the golden age of Bernard Pivot and his legendary Apostrophes.”

There are the shorts (2)— two to five minute author interviews, or a passage from one of their books, or a short biographical sketch. Then there are the longs (6) that involve a range of formats—hour long literary discussions with a single or a group of writers or critics, some interspersed with biographical films, some with a studio audience. Others consist of more general conversations about literature or cultural issues. Debates are the format of one, another is designed for high school students who are invited to question an author.

Marsot wonders if people are watching these television shows and if so how many. No one seems to care, the ratings are irrelevant. Discussing literature is sufficient. “But maybe their very existence makes the most French of points: literature, and by extension and association, philosophy, journalism, and the arts, are important and are to maintained, period.” Please, put me on the next flight to Paris.

Still Marsot confesses she “often found her patience tried while watching the long programs, but I have to wonder how much of that is about my TV viewing has been trained by our infotainment culture, as opposed to the content of the shows themselves. Concentration is required…” We all know what has happened to that.

And then in a brilliant psychological insight she concludes, “In retrospect, I feel more fondly about my experience of watching them than I did while actually watching them, which may speak to the notion that having knowledge may be more agreeable that acquiring it.” However, I don’t think this reflects anything about the programs themselves.

Rather is it not often a feature of any human experience? Traveling can often be a tedious experience until you come back home and realize wandering around all those musty museums and steep hill towns of Italy was the best trip you ever had. Or that terrible statistics course you took from that boring old professor at 8 am every Monday, Wednesday and Friday with a lab at 8 on Saturday is, on reflection, the most useful academic experience you ever had.

Do literary talk shows have any future in this country? At least one is about to give it a try. Known as Amateur Thursdays, its producers say it will be a five minute segment with writers that will be posted each week on its website. “We want to make a show as mesmerizing and fun as reading is to us.” I truly wish them well. But I wouldn’t bet the family jewels on its success given the recent history of Titlepage, a similar Web-based book discussion group that was dropped after only a few episodes were shown.

"Letting Go"

I know the subject I’m going to write about is grim and one of the reasons it is so grim is that until recently it is almost never talked about. One of the exceptions is Atul Gawande’s forceful essay, "Letting Go," in the August 2nd New Yorker. And in the Sunday Times Magazine a few weeks ago, Katy Butler wrote a heartbreaking account of what dementia did to her father and how the medical profession did nothing but prolong the agony of his life.

Again, in the Times last Tuesday, Roni Caryn Rabin described the dilemma faced by family members and caretakers of an Alzheimer’s patient near the end of life when faced with the choice of whether to provide nourishment or withholding it. Her daughter said, “I had this realization—wow—that no matter what we did, Mom was never going to get better. We were just prolonging the inevitable, and potentially causing more suffering."

With the rising costs and growing arsenal of medical interventions and the rapidly increasing number of elderly individuals, end-of-life care has become a critical issue. Butler reports almost a third of Americans over 85 have dementia. And Gawande writes that “Twenty-five percent of all Medicare spending is for the five percent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in the last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit.” The days of a quick catastrophic illness leading to death at a comparatively early old-age are over. Today most individuals die only “after long medical struggle with an incurable condition”

How should medical professionals respond when they can’t save your life? Almost all doctors are reluctant to come right out and tell you this. And yet all the evidence presented in the foregoing accounts indicates that medical interventions for people in the last stage of their life cause more harm and suffering than doing nothing. Gawande reports: “…terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions.”

Gawande also treats at some length the effects of hospice care for critically ill patients and says there is no difference in survival time between hospice and non-hospice individuals with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Moreover, in a striking statement he says,“…hospice care seemed to extend survival for some patients; those with pancreatic cancer gained an average of three weeks, those with lung cancer gained six weeks, and those with congestive heart failure gained three months. The lesson was almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.”

What is the solution to this growing, nationwide dilemma? Gawande proposes a very simple one: It is essential for individuals to have a serious discussion with their physicians about how they want to spend their final days. An Advance Directive given to your doctor may not cover all the bases. Absent a comprehensive statement, the default choice for doctors is do all they can to save their patient’s life.

Thus, end-of life discussions with physicians and family members need to be detailed and explicit. What kind of care do you want under the following conditions?

• Your mental condition deteriorates to the point that you are unable to communicate verbally or in written form in a fully coherent fashion
• Your physical health becomes uncontrollably and severely painful and you loose control of your bodily processes
• You develop an incurable disease or illness, which is clearly terminal and for which there is no known cure.

To bolster the importance of this discussion Gawande cites some impressive studies: Two-thirds of the individuals in a Coping with Cancer project who did NOT have this kind of discussion with their doctors suffered far more than the one-third who did. He cites the city of La Crosse, Wisconsin that has unusually low end-of-life hospital costs and attributes this to the fact that 85% have had end-of-life discussions with their physicians.

He concludes there are no rules for conducting a discussion with people about their terminal illness wishes except trying to determine what is most important to them. These “Breakpoint Discussions” as puts it are “… the conversation that we all need to have when the chemotherapy stops working, when we start needing oxygen at home, when we face high risk surgery, when the liver failure keeps progression, when we become unable to dress ourselves.”

We'll Never See Those Days Again

A friend and I have been bemoaning the changing character of the once-great New Yorker. Those of us who were first drawn to the magazine when William Shawn was editor expect a different magazine than the current editor David Remnick puts together. In the old days, it was primarily an intellectual periodical that focused principally on literature. No more. Now it is politics, fashion, crime, the media, food, and celebrities.

All you have to do is pick up the latest issue to see what has happened to the magazine. This week, for example, there is profile of a rap star legend, a piece by David Sedaris whose humor escapes me, an essay on the Senate, which may be worth reading given the way it has paralyzed the nation, and one about video games that I will probably skip. Indeed, sometimes I find myself skimming the magazine and finishing it in five minutes. That was inconceivable in the old days when it was more like five hours before I had read everything.

Or compare the film reviews of David Denby and Anthony Lane with those of Pauline Kael. The thoughtful and sometimes clever Denby and the always-pretentious Lane are lucky if they get a half page to review a movie. Kael sometimes filled up a quarter or more of the issue when she wrote and if you were lucky enough to read her essays, you came away thinking you had really learned something. There you have it.

As Shirley Hazzard wrote a few years ago, “The atmosphere of The New Yorker, in those years, can never come again. It was a place of temperamental people, yet of eccentric goodwill, civility, amusement, liveliness. Yes, of generosity. Of literature and of fun. Any issue might contain a story by Nabokov or Pritchett or Frank O’Connor; a poem or a review by Auden; an essay by Edmund Wilson or Lewis Mumford. There was Cheever. There was on occasion, Salinger. There was Maxwell. There was the infant Updike. There was the gentle Joe Mitchell, and the ebullient Dwight Macdonald. William Shawn held it together, and Maxwell presided (although no one had a “title”) over the fiction. No one acted presidential.”

Of course, the magazine Shawn created would be bankrupt today after a single issue. I don’t think it ever made any money, but that never seemed quite so important. What was important was maintaining a tradition of literary excellence--period. While we’ll never see those days again, to a certain extent they are carried on at The New Yorker Book Bench, where a young and clever and sometimes very funny group of writers blog about the literary world. They blog each weekday, with an average of five interesting posts, including photos, videos, author interviews and an online book group that reads a different book each month. It is worth bookmarking.

In reading the magazine each week, I used to feel part of the community of other readers who value polished writing and serious commentary. The symbolic nature of this community made it no less real. In The World Through a Monocle, Mary Corey captured this bond quite well: "Some felt a profound kinship with the magazine because it spoke for them, giving a public voice to their own private intelligencies intelligences.”

One of the respondents to a recent survey of dedicated New Yorker readers conducted by Ben Yogoda recalled an experience she had while serving as a nurse during World War II in a remote section of northern Italy. She reported being asked by a wounded soldier, "If you could have anything right now, what would it be?" In an instant she replied:, "An issue of The New Yorker magazine.," Whereupon the two--wounded soldier, and American nurse, in that far off time and place--began reminiscing about their favorite New Yorker cartoons and writers. I am not sure any more if I would respond the same way.

My friend, a long-time devoted reader of The New Yorker reports: I let my subscription to The New Yorker lapse a couple of months ago: They sent me an issue warning me in a wrapping that this was it. And it was one of the worst issues I've seen. That was, indeed, the problem. Too often, I would pick up the magazine in the mailbox at the end of the drive, leaf through it on the walk back to the house, and by the time I got inside, I would simply pitch it into the trash.

First We Read, Then We Write

…life is wasted in the necessary preparation of finding what is the true way, and we die just as we enter it. Emerson

I’ve been mulling over Robert Richardson’s First We Read, Then We Write, his recent book on Emerson’s ideas on reading and writing about the books you’ve read. I read the book almost entirely because of its title, as reading and writing seem inextricably bound to me. When I read a book, I want to talk with someone about it, and if someone isn’t around I’ll try to write something, all the while mumbling to myself a word or two in order to make sense of it all.

However, the Richardson volume has only a few words about the relationship between reading and writing per se. One of them was Emerson’s belief that “…creative reading was at last inseparable for him from creative writing. But reading was just the means. The end—the purpose—was writing.”

I learned that Emerson apparently retained “nothing of all he read save that which seemed to him an echo or prophecy of his own state.” This has long been true for me although I’ve been hesitant to admit it, given the lofty standards of contemporary literary commentary. Now I know I’m in good company so it’s OK after all.

Emerson declared “The first rule of writing is not to omit the thing you meant to say.” And anticipating a remark Hemingway often made, Emerson reminds aspiring writers “All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word.”

From time to time I have compared the passages I’ve collected from a book with those of other readers and I’m always struck by how little overlap there is. Had I read Emerson more carefully, I would not be so surprised. “You have seen a sklilful man reading Plutarch. Well, that author is a thousand things to a thousand persons. Take that book into your own two hands and read your eyes out. You will never find there what the other finds.”

It was music to my ears to read Richardson’s discussion of Emerson’s advice on keeping a commonplace book. “What Emerson kept, and what he recommended enthusiastically to others, were what used to be called commonplace books, bland bound volumes in which one writes down vivid images, great descriptions, striking turns of phrase, ideas, high points from one’s life and reading—things one wants to remember and hold on to.”

It also reminded me of one my central concerns about the proliferation of e-book readers. While I am aware it is technically possible to highlight and save passages, as well as write with these devices, it is in fact a rather cumbersome task.

And when I see individuals reading with them, as I do more and more often these days, I have never observed a single one doing any of these things. I admit the same is true for the individuals I see reading printed books. I am fairly certain Emerson would feel quite disappointed each time he observed someone reading without a pen in hand.

Emerson referred to his commonplace books as his journals and considered them to be his savings bank. Some people save money, others save words and for Emerson, as for many commonplacers, these words draw every bit as much interest as their dollars do.

It was also music to my ears to read Patrick Kurp’s blog on commonplace books the other day. He begins with a passage by Brian Vickers that could very well have been written by Emerson, himself, “All educationalists taught that reading was to be carried out pen in hand, ready to note in the margin metaphors, similes, exempla, sententiae, apophthegms, proverbs, or any other transportable units of literary composition. These were then to be copied out into one or more notebooks, divided either alphabetically or by topics, and to be reused in one’s own writing.”

Kurp also writes a bit the relationship of blogs to commonplace books and how they are in certain respects written in the manner of a cento or collage. The interested reader might want to read more at Anecdotal Evidence.

"The Purest Form of Eros"

A few years ago a group of social psychologists posed the following question in an article on conversational styles. “What is the source of the ineffable “chemistry” that some couples enjoy? The question is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating because of its richness and complexity; frustrating because it has defied simple answers. Indeed, precisely why members of some couples get along better than do others has, for the most part, remained cloaked in mystery.”

This is a question that has longed been an interest of mine. In their latest book, Click: The Magic of Instant Connections, Ori and Rom Brafman try to unravel the mystery of this phenomenon. They begin with what is clearly well known to anyone who has experienced this “almost euphoric state.”

Clicking can be defined as an immediate, deep, and meaningful connection with another person or with the world around us…we immediately sense that we can just be ourselves around that person. Things feel right: we hit if off.

Only a very few times in my life have I felt this way. Once it occurs, I think you are changed forever. The experience sets a standard against which you tend to measure all your future relationships. There is a responsiveness to each other that is rarely found with other individuals. You can say something to one person and nothing happens. When you say the very same thing to a person you click with, there is an immediate understanding, an even faster reply, which in turn, gets another and the cycle continues until you both need to stop to take a breath.

“You’re so clever, sometimes, with words, and I’m every so clever when I’m talking to you….You’re appreciative of my cleverness, you laughed at my jokes, you make related jokes back, implying that you’ve heard and actually LISTENED to what I said.”

After discussing a range of conditions in which clicking occurs, Brafman and Brafman describe “five click accelerators—ingredients or factors involved in a click—that show up time and time across different contexts."

The first is the power of vulnerability, the willingness “to disclose to others the kind of person you are, to drop your protective armor....” An example is the way shared adversity can become a key factor in bringing people together.

Proximity is the second accelerator that can make a big difference. This is not the least bit surprising. The likelihood of clicking with someone in Montevideo if you live in Omaha is pretty close to zero.

Similarity is said to be an accelerator. That is also fairly obvious, although far from a necessary condition, as two people with widely different interests often get along just fine.

In 1979 Woody Allen met Mia Farrow and they stayed together for many years. Yet Woody once said. "I could go on about our differences forever: She doesn't like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don't like it. She doesn't like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early -- 5:30, 6 -- and I love to eat out, late… She can't sleep with an air-conditioner on; I can only sleep with an air-conditioner on. She loves pets and animals; I hate pets and animals. … She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up to Mount Kilimanjaro; I never want to go near those places… She has raised nine children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day."

The Brafmans identify the environment as the fourth click accelerator. Here they speak of shared communities working together for a common goal or to overcome adversity. They mention soldiers who become lifelong friends after fighting together, individuals who lived together on a kibbutz or individuals who worked together in the same office for years.

Finally they say certain personalities simply seem to click more readily. They come almost preset with an open and levity spirit. This, in turn, can often lead the other person to respond in the same way.

Have the Brafman brothers contributed to our understanding of the mystery of connecting with another person? To be sure they have described various components of the relationship and they have done so by discussing a good deal of current empirical research. I view their analysis as identifying some of the key predictors of clicking.

But even when all these factors are present, there is no guarantee the other person will be on the same wavelength. We can disclose all we want but that may only lead someone else to clam up. Similarly, neither similarity nor proximity seems to me necessary for these kinds of relationships to develop. Nor does a sparkling personality absent a shared temperament.

The mystery remains. Of all of the factors the Brafmans identify the one that seems to have the most practical value is disclosing personal details of your life, what they call “the power of vulnerability.” But this is a very tricky matter, as well as a bit manipulative. More likely, that “ineffable chemistry” simply happens or it doesn’t, the gears will mesh unpredictably, uncontrollably perhaps once or twice in a lifetime—if you are lucky. Let it be. No matter your age, your current relationships, your joys or heartbreaks, you’ll recognize it instantly.

21st Century Commonplace Books

Has the commonplace book tradition come to an end? I know there are still a few people who keep a private collection of memorable passages from the books they read. At the same time, in recent years a considerable number of “commonplace books” have migrated from their handwritten or printed version to the Web. Perhaps they are the wave of the future, the dominant form that 21st Century commonplace books will take.

While these electronic analogues of their forerunners have probably not led to a revival of the commonplace tradition, they have surely broadened the audience for what was always a largely private activity. Several of these sites include a section in which the author gives a brief statement of its background. For example the author of The Sheila Variations writes:

Years ago - in high school - I started keeping a 'commonplace book' - although I had no idea at the time that there was a NAME for it. I just wanted to keep all the quotes I really liked in one place. I called it my quote book. Then much later, I realized that there's a long, long tradition of people keeping these "commonplace books" - especially "those guys" that I love so much in the 18th century. I've shared a ton of those quotes with you all here.

The Commonplace Book Website is authored by a librarian, J. Jacobs is distinctive in that it has an author and word index, as well as a search tool for specific topics and “random quotes.” To locate the passages that Jacobs has entered into his Commonplace Book, it is first necessary to type the name of a topic, word, or author in the box on the search page. An author search for Shakespeare resulted in three selections, one for Borges yielded eleven, and a topic search for “Literature” yielded over a dozen passages, some of considerable length. For example, the search for Hemingway produced the following passages that seemed especially timely a few years ago:

No one man nor group of men incapable of fighting or exempt from fighting should in any way be given the power, no matter how gradually it is given them, to put this country or any country into war.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

A few electronic commonplace books are designed as collective sites, a Wiki in Internet parlance, where anyone can contribute to the list of passages. The Literary Works Commonplace Book is an unedited collection of quotations drawn from a list of book titles arranged alphabetically. For example, a click on the link for The American Scene by Henry James displays 17 passages including their page and chapter number, while the link for Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities cites 19 passages with their chapter number.

Another is The Commonplace Book for Advisors is a collection of quotations that educators might find instructive in guiding their students. It has been created by the voluntary submissions of unknown advisors from unknown places. Most importantly, it is organized around a set of fourteen topics including careers, decision making, overcoming adversity, success, and friendship.

Most of the remaining commonplace books on the Web consist of a cumulative set of unrelated quotations and sometimes drawings and photographs from literary or artistic sources on various topics that simply follow one another in chronological order.

Does the public visibility of these commonplace books increase their readership? In response to my question about the number of hits or visits their Websites get during an average week, one author said about 50-75 hits a week, another said 150 each week, while the author of the most widely visited said his gets about 762 during an average week. On a yearly basis, this ranges from about 2,600 to 39,624, an enormous degree of variability that surely depends on the subject matter of the Website, as well as its placement in Internet search engines.

Regardless, it is clear that readership on the Web is far greater than would be expected for a printed volume of the same material. Of course, these figures don’t tell us how much is read, or what a viewer derives from the experience, nor how many readers were stimulated to start their own commonplace books after viewing these electronic collections, all of which would be very interesting to know.

On Moving

We are moving once again. This will be the 23rd time we have moved to a new residence since graduate school days and I am hoping most fervently that it will be the last. Dream on, Richard.

We move, I move, because it is one of the pleasantries of academic life—a sabbatical here, a visiting professorship there. And then again we move, I move, because of the restlessness that I cannot escape, wandering from town to town, from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of I know not what.

This has to be the craziest move of them all. How else to look upon it? From our current rental overlooking beautiful downtown Portland, we are moving to the very same unit one floor below—same view, same floor plan, same everything, only now contrary to my irrefutable arguments, we will own the place rather than rent it. So much for my powers of persuasion

I search for writers who have written about moving. What did Emerson have to say? What about Montaigne—he had something to say about everything? But no, neither has written even a snippet about the matter as far as I can tell.

But Lawrence did: We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

A friend who has recently moved writes: I am not ashamed to admit that when I go back to Atherton, I am homesick. I first saw Atherton when I was 10 years old when my parents went to visit the Walkers who had owned the lumber company in Westwood…and still think of it as my "Eden."

I surely don’t feel this way about our current move. Portland has never been my Eden and I have never felt the least bit like Lawrence, never felt I belonged in Portland. Other places have felt more like home, but they are far away and English is not spoken there, both of which have always been problems for my best beloved.

Andre Aciman writes more perceptively than anyone I know about the larger meanings of these journeys, journeys across the seas or just down the block. In A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past he admits, I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.

I may write about little parks in New York that remind me of Rome and about tiny squares in Paris that remind me of New York, and about so many spots in the world that will ultimately take me back to Alexandria. But this crisscrossed trajectory is simply my way of showing how scattered and divided I am about everything else in life.

And a little later in the same article he continues, Ambivalence and dispersion run so deep that I don't know whether I like the place I've chosen to call my home, any more than I know whether I like the writer or even the person I am when no one's looking. And yet the very act of writing has become my way of finding a space and of building a home for myself, my way of taking a shapeless, marshy world and firming it up with paper, the way the Venetians firm up eroded land by driving wooden piles into it.

So like Aciman, I write a bit about this move, playing “musical-condos” if you will, because it is one of the ways I have to make note of writers who express the follies of my life.

Is Google a Commonplace Book?

Look closely at the photo. It’s a page (9th) of a Google search for “Search Engine.” Note at the top it shows 81-90 of 87,600,000 listings that were obtained by Google in lightning speed--0.07 seconds.

Is that page or any of those that precede or follow it a commonplace book? Steven Johnson in his lecture The Glass Box and The Commonplace Book says it is:

What I want to suggest to you is that, in some improbable way, this page is as much of an heir to the structure of a commonplace book as the most avant-garde textual collage.

To understand Johnson’s claim consider the various meanings of commonplace book. There seem to me to be three. The first refers to a set of quotations from a text that follow one another sequentially without any structure or organization. An example is the blog simply known as Commonplace Book that posts from time to time a referenced quotation without a comment or note.

The second meaning is the one I follow in my commonplace book where I list the passages I have made note of in each of the books or articles I read. After I have finished reading the work, I type in a Word document a heading with the name of the author followed by the title of the text. I follow this with each of the passages I’ve marked. My commonplace book consists now of well over 600 typed written, single spaced pages of such passages.

Thus, it isn’t organized in any systematic fashion, say by subject matter, theme, or category. That has to be done subsequently during a time-consuming analysis. While I’ve done that for the first 300 pages, the second remains a task for the future. I am hoping to find a method that will be simpler and more efficient than the one I employed initially.

I might have used the approach John Locke used as long ago as 1652 in A New Method of Making Commonplace Books that represents the third and most complete meaning of the term. Locke developed an elaborate system for indexing and categorizing the contents of his commonplace book by creating at the outset an index keyed to each letter of the alphabet that was, in turn, divided into five separate sections corresponding to one of the five vowels. He explained his procedure this way:

When I meet with any thing that I think fit to put into my Common-Place-Book, I first find a proper head. Suppose for example, that the Head be EPISTOLA, I look into the Index for the first Letter and the following Vowel which in this instance are E.I. If in the space marked E. there is any number, That directs me to the Page designed for words that begin with an E and whose first Vowel, after the initial Letter, is I. I must then write under the word EPISTOLA in that Page what I have to remark.

Locke did not begin with a pre-determined set of topics or “heads” as he referred to them; instead, they were created during the course of his readings. They included a broad array of themes followed by the passage he selected to fit the theme, and a comment of his own. This sounds like a commonplace book at his best. He not only copied passages but he classified, indexed, and annotated them at the same time. I know of no one who keeps a commonplace book in this manner today. It really isn’t that intricate, although it clearly takes a good deal more time than the two other methods. It also encourages the commonplacer to identify the reason the passage was selected in the first place.

Does a Google search employ this method? In citing Locke’s example, Johnson claims that is precisely what its algorithm does and it does so almost instantly. However, every commonplace book I know about has been created by a real person. Although the Google algorithm performs some of the same functions, insofar as I can tell, it is not such a creature.

On review, I should have included the “real person” component to the commonplace book concept. So while a Google search does provide a set of references (without form or structure), still it is not generated from the reading experience of an individual reader. And while it does provide a list of citations with a brief description (snippet) for the specific search phrase, it doesn’t index them or organize the sub-set in any particular way. Rather they are enumerated one after the other without regard to informative value, author or quality. If I really stick with a Google search for page after page, I am often startled to find the very document I want or the one that is most useful a good many pages beyond the initial one.

Johnson’s really fine lecture has stimulated me to think further about the commonplace book concept, as well a new way of viewing the results of a Google search. It seems to me such a results page or cluster of pages might be viewed as a second or third order variation of a commonplace book, something in between the first and second forms I have described.

It is more a remixing, recombination of ideas and references from a vast range of sources, as in a collage or cento, that are almost miraculously put together in not much more than a nanosecond. But a cento is not a commonplace book in the strict sense of the term, although it may be derived from one.

Johnson ends this portion of his lecture optimistically: “But all of this magic was predicated on one thing: that the words could be copied, re-arranged, put to surprising new uses in surprising new contexts. By stitching together passages written by multiple authors, without their explicit permission or consultation, some new awareness could take shape.”