Every man's an island as in

     lifeless space we roam.

Yes, every man's an island:

     island fortress, island home.

- Bee's sonnet

The Sirens of Titan is about isolation.  It is one of the loneliest stories I have ever read.

It's peculiar, because in some ways it is a love story, in some ways it is about family, in others it is a moving depiction of friendship, and in yet others it's about the human relationship with the divine.  But in a fundamental way, each character is totally locked away within himself, inaccessible and all alone.

Vonnegut diagnoses the problem in the very first chapter.  Man does not yet know how to find the meaning of life within himself, so he ventures desperately outward, searching for a signal somewhere out there in the universe.  But all he finds is "a nightmare of meaninglessness."  There is no true connection, and no true meaning, because he is looking in the wrong place.

What follows from this opening is Vonnegut's typical blend of quirky satire, bizarre and senseless plotting, and a thinly-disguised howling distress call for all of humanity.  It's not as perfectly-constructed as Cat's Cradle, or as paralyzingly profound as Slaughterhouse-Five, but it may be the most deceptively simple Vonnegut novel I've yet read.  The layers keep peeling back in my mind, and I can't seem to get a handle on it at all.

Every man's an island...

A megalomaniac who accidentally smears himself across space and time, able to interact with millions and alter the course of history, but never able to truly connect with another.

A woman so obsessed with the idea of her own purity that she refuses to consummate her marriage.

A mindwiped man who spends his life searching for the best friend he doesn't truly remember and does not realize that he murdered.

A broken man who lives all alone on the planet Mercury caring tenderly for the harmoniums, the planet's beautiful but mindless native beings.

A sentient alien robot who kills himself upon learning that the secret message he'd been tasked with carrying to a distant star system at great peril actually contains but a single word: Greetings.

A boy who ditches his parents forever to live among the massive, terrifying birds of Titan - his cries still drifting to his parents' ears, occasionally, on the wind.

A religion that scorns "God the Utterly Indifferent" in the abortive hope that humans will stop seeking favor with the divine and finally - finally - start caring for each other.

...island fortress, island home.

When I was ten years old, my family moved from Washington state to Ohio. More than any other single event, this move fundamentally changed my life, in some ways for the better, in some ways rather value-neutrally, but in most ways for the worse. Everything was different after the move, and ever since I have felt cast adrift, homeless.

My sister and I blamed it on the utter soul-crushingness of the Midwest ambience, of Ohio itself. We used to, as kids, call it O-hell-o. We'd repeat that line from Animaniacs over and over: "All is strange and vague. Are we dead? Or is this Ohio?"

I say often about certain books that I wish I could go back in time and give a copy to my younger self, and Winesburg, Ohio is one of those books. My eleven-year-old self needed this book; I needed to know that I wasn't the only one who'd ever felt so alone and desperate, that the characters in this book had felt that pain too, had understood it, had endured it. But maybe that would have depressed me all the more, because there are no happy endings in Winesburg. Nothing ever changes and for most there is no way out.

Maybe it's better 11-year-old me didn't read this, after all. I would have misunderstood it, anyway. I would have put far too much importance on the fact that it's set in Ohio; that would have reinforced to me that the place is the problem. It would have strengthened my belief that everything would be good again if I could just get out of the Midwest. Too many of the characters in this book operated under that fallacy, too. It's so comforting to believe there's an easy fix, especially if you know you'll never test it out and be proven wrong.

But I've been proven wrong enough times now to know that the particular setting isn't that important. Winesburg is everywhere. And the fact that it's an inbred small town isn't that important, either. Winesburg could as easily be a bustling city. As they say, cities are places where thousands of people go to be lonely together. My own personal Winesburg certainly followed me out of Ohio, back to the coast, back to the city.

Some of these stories were so familiar they were painful to read. Enoch Robinson was me. Elizabeth Willard was me. Alice Hindman was me. Elmer Cowley was me. And even the characters who were repulsive, hateful, utterly awful people, I found myself only feeling sad for - I couldn't bring myself to hate them, because they were just too real, their actions just too understandable.

This is one of those works that seems too big and too important to exist within the space of a 250-page paperback. Its essence can not be encapsulated in a book review. These stories can't be fully appreciated in a single reading, and there are some days and some moods where it's best to not even try to read them - you'll get nothing out of it but bored and depressed. And Winesburg, Ohio seems too real a place to just be literature. I've been there; I've lived there. Some days, I still live there.

20 August 2010

I don't read a lot of poetry. My mind is too analytical for its own good, and has trouble following the leaps and intimations of a good poem. But very occasionally, the right poem will hit me at the exact moment I need it in my life, and it is an almost holy experience. Completely unduplicable, except by chance.

I had one of those moments with the very first poem in this book, Richard Hugo's "Duwamish".

See, like Hugo did, I live less than a mile from the Duwamish. I read the poem on a grey Sunday afternoon in late November. The timing was preternaturally perfect. I read it over and over again, unable to move on. I was hooked.

I hadn't been familiar with Hugo before I read this book, and now I don't know how I missed him. He was a prominent poet originally from Seattle who wrote the kind of bleak and melancholy landscape-based poetry that deeply resonates with me. Traveling around Washington, Idaho, and Montana, he would stop in small towns, sometimes for less than a day, then write poems about them. Haunted, lonesome, painful, beautiful poems. From the first lines of "Duwamish", I felt a kinship with him. I too like to drive around by myself, getting lost in the scenery of the Pacific Northwest, feeling both at home and desperately lost, both embraced and all alone. I think about the people who live in these remote places, and I want to be one of them, I used to be one of them. If I had any gift for writing poetry, these are the kinds of poems I'd write.

This book is so much more than just a collection of poems, however. It's an account of how Frances McCue, an English professor at the University of Washington, and Mary Randlett, a renowned photographer, traveled throughout the Northwest in 2007 and 2008. Using Hugo's poems as guides, they went back to the same towns Hugo had visited and written about in the 60's and 70's. They found the landmarks he described, they went into the bars he frequented, they talked to his friends and acquaintances. They discovered what had changed since then, and what had remained the same. To McCue, a devoted Hugo acolyte, this was almost a religious pilgrimage, each tiny Montana town a rosary bead to pray and linger over.

The resulting book is divided into twelve chapters about twelve towns. Each chapter begins with a Hugo poem or two, and one of Randlett's photos, followed by an essay by McCue, illustrated with additional photos. All three components are equally fascinating. The poems consistently took my breath away, and the photographs act as both art and documentary, offering a clear window into these towns as they exist today - often poor, bleak, and disintegrating. But McCue's essays are truly remarkable. From the story of Hugo's life to the story of her own, from travelogue to poetic meditation, from town histories to local causes, from literary analysis of the poems themselves to private musings about what Hugo may have been feeling when he wrote them, her essays are varied and completely engrossing. They filled in the gaps in the poems that my analytical mind couldn't quite bridge, and they told me stories that I couldn't get enough of. By the end of the book, I couldn't help but love Hugo as much as McCue does. Her reverence for him is catching, and her writing is incredible.

If you like poetry, if you like the Pacific Northwest, if you like backroads road trips, if you're fascinated by places and the way they change with time, I can't recommend this book enough. I lingered over it, I didn't want it to end. I read it aloud to myself slowly, in whispers, and went back to certain paragraphs and stanzas again and again, captivated by the way they sounded, the way they said so much in so few words. I peered at the photographs for minutes at a time - the metal-poisoned rivers, the crumbling mills, the clouds rolling past heedless in the enormous sky. Beautiful, beautiful.

23 November 2010

I am not familiar with regret, perhaps because I am still rather young. Perhaps regret is something that creeps up on you as you age, as what had once been an infinite number of possible paths in front of you slowly solidify into one unchangeable road at your back. It's not that I haven't made bad decisions, but I still feel I have time to course correct. And I love the life I'm living now, despite all the bumpy roads and bad shortcuts I took to get here.

Still, my greatest fear is that I will regret, that I will become an old woman who feels as if she has wasted her life. Sometimes I fear that this is the fate of all of us, that in the end regret is integral to the human condition. I think of the end of The Last Unicorn, where the unicorn laments,

"I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret."

In a way, I saw my future in The Remains of the Day. And I mourned for that person I may become. That person that, to one extent or another, we may all become.


We open in the countryside of England in the 1950's, as our narrator, Stevens, describes what led him to take a motoring trip to the West Country. Stevens is an old man who has devoted his life to being a consummate butler at Darlington Hall. Only now, the world seems to have no further need of consummate butlers. Stevens's former employer, Lord Darlington, has died, and the estate has been sold to a young American, Faraday. For a lark, Faraday enjoys running the place like a proper English manor, continuing to employ Stevens, a housekeeper, and a couple of maids. But Stevens finds that what he once managed with a staff of 30 is impossible with four, and he is falling short of his own lofty standards. So when he receives a letter from Miss Kenton, a former housekeeper, he immediately begins to wonder if she'd be interested in coming back and working at Darlington again. He resolves to go visit her at her home in the West Country to discuss the possibility.

Stevens is a rambling, obsessive old codger, telling story after story about what it means to be a truly "great butler". This has been the primary preoccupation of his life, precluding romantic attachments, personal aspirations, or any sort of social life. However, he's modest about his own achievements in that regard, telling us that the nearest he ever came to achieving the status of a "great butler" was when he let his father die alone, upstairs, while he unflappably served tea to some important guests.

In this anecdote and others, it quickly becomes clear how resolutely Stevens has been deluding himself all his life. He is not the "great butler" he aspires toward, nor is he the unfeeling monster his actions make him out to be, but rather he is a desperately lonely old man trying to convince himself that his life and his vocation have had any meaning at all. He's terrified to admit to himself that they have not, and that any chance he had of forging a purposeful life has long ago slipped away.


This book is masterfully written. Ishiguro's skill in consistently having Stevens say one thing, mean another, but clearly be deeply repressing a third is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Throughout, Stevens's tone is chatty, if a bit punctilious. But there are so many thoughts he refuses to express, and even below that, so much raw, screaming emotion that he will not even let himself feel, and yet it's all there in the narrative, clear as crystal. I am in awe.

A truly great butler, Stevens remarks, never appears outside of his professional dress and demeanor - except when completely alone, and even then it's a dubious idea. Someone could barge in and see you in your jammies, after all, and then where would your self-respect be? ("This guy takes English uptightness to an insane new level," I noted after reading that section.) So the reader gets the impression that Stevens has never let himself even think an unprofessional thought, much less feel an unbutlerlike emotion. He seems genuinely unaware of the veritable heap of Freudian defense mechanisms he's piled up against the specter of his true feelings: Denial, repression, delusions of grandeur, reaction formation, sublimation...

And so he focuses on the details. If only, he tells himself, he had mastered the art of bantering. Interacting with others on a human level is a skill he never thought would be important, but he intuits now that this "bantering" is what allows people to enjoy each others' company, and would have served him well in his career. It's not just that he finds small talk difficult, though, it's that he literally has no idea how to behave genuinely. He can't "be himself" with others because he may not have developed a self at all. Just a shell of a "great butler" who lives to serve, in perfect self-denial.


And so here he is, motoring out to the West Country to talk to Miss Kenton (whom he was NEVER in love with), to try to convince her to come back to Darlington Hall (which is STILL a grand and respectable house) and work for Mr Faraday (who did NOT sweep in and nab the place for a song after Lord Darlington was exposed as a Nazi sympathizer and died in shame).

And after all is said and done, here he sits at dusk, left with the remains of the day and nothing left to say or do, nothing that can be changed or redone.

--

At first I thought this book was going to be sad because here is this man who has devoted his life to being the consummate butler, and now the world has moved on and he has become something of a joke and a relic.

But instead, it's about this man who has devoted his life to being the consummate butler at the expense of any happiness or love he might have had, and who is now having to confront all the regrets of his life when it is far too late to change anything. Which is so infinitely more tragic.

And also, the world has moved on. And he has become something of a joke and a relic.

That, too.

August 16, 2013