To Print in Big Letters and Hang on my Wall

"[O]n the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep."

Herman Melville

Everything to Everyone

In trying times, I have discovered that no one friend can be everything for me. My friends are compartmentalized, each one serving his or her purpose, just as I am for them: I know that I cannot be everything to everyone either. The ones that mean the most to me are scattered around the country, unable to be on-call 24/7, and this I understand. They shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t make me yearn for them any less. This weekend I spent time with several friends that have played a big part in my life, and while the combination of them settled my tired soul for the weekend, I am now cast off into my life alone again. I can’t blame anyone for this but me: I must take responsibilities for the decisions I have made. But in these trying times, it’s easy to break down and wish for a relaxing evening and warm hug from someone who knows me almost better than I know myself - and become caught up in dreams that this will once again be my reality on a daily basis. Ideally, that someone will be me.

To Rebuild

A structure that can no longer serve its purpose can sometimes be remodeled. If the foundations are strong, you can get away with surface improvements – painting, carpeting, and plumbing, for example. Sometimes, more work is needed – perhaps the roof must be patched, the drywall fixed, the flooring replaced. But sometimes, even after making all of these changes, the very core of the structure is the cause of its downfall, and you must tear the whole thing down and begin again, brick by brick.

Over the last few years I have been attempting to make surface changes to my structure: first cosmetic improvements, then some practical ones. But when these didn’t work, I found I had to try harder: patches, major structural repairs. I let these stand for a while, and ignored the roof leaking and the foundation sagging. I let them stand for so long that one morning I woke up and my entire structure had collapsed around me, when I should have made the decision to have it torn down some time ago.

So now I sit, surrounded by the rubble that was once, long ago, a secure structure. I must stand up and rebuild slowly. I must not be tempted to cut corners and use materials that may appear shiny, convenient, or cheap. I must not be swayed by the way others have built their own structures, because while they may be safe in them, I may not. And I must not decline the help of more experienced builders who have made their own structures strong enough to resist the threats of time and the elements, because they will have much to teach me about how to make my own free-standing environment.

I do not remember how I built my structure the first time, just as I do not remember learning to write my name. But as I stand before my cleared lot, a nice deep hole dug for the basement and another in the back for a swimming pool (I will not leave anything out this time), I see the possibilities laid out before me in all directions. My rooms do not have to be arranged the same way they were before, and I can choose the walls to be any color I want. No one else can tell me how to build my own shower, or kitchen, or laundry room. The choices are mine alone, and while these choices sometimes overwhelm me, deep down they are exciting.

Once it’s done (or appears to be done, for a structure is never truly done), I might invite someone else in to share it with me. But I hope this won’t happen for a while - not until the last colorful tile is cemented to the kitchen backsplash and the sawdust vacuumed away. Until then I will try and embrace and enjoy the long process of reconstruction, and like stubborn residents of a tropical island in the path of hurricane after hurricane, resolve to always rebuild again.

Escaping the Cycle

As I work to come into my own for the future, I have been forced to build from the past. But thus far I’ve only looked at the recent past – my recent mistakes, shortcomings, and insecurities. I need to go farther back than that – to why I might be the way I am. Because then I will have a better idea of how to move forward and build my life around strength, confidence, happiness, and integrity.

I am, in no way, disappointed with how I was raised. My parents were wonderful: they gave me everything I could ever need and want, opened my heart and mind to new experiences, and made sure I knew how to take the high road and choose integrity over what was easy or convenient. There are so many things about my mother and my father that I want to emulate, like my mother’s bottomless cup of kindness and empathy and my father’s ability to take on adversity like a knight defeating a dragon. But there are other things I saw in my parents, especially my mom, that I vowed I would never become.

I watched my mom take bad news with tears, watched her take great joy with tears, and watched her cry in desperation, sometimes being set off for days at a time. When I was younger I vowed not to let myself cry at such seemingly insignificant worries, problems that clearly had some sort of a solution, or sappy movies. I kept this vow for a long time, but as I’ve gotten older the tears come in frustration, fear, worry, anxiety, great joy and yes, sappy movies. I let worries carry me away when I am alone and unoccupied. And even, sometimes, when I am occupied. Sometimes worries follow me to times that should be happy and healing, and they shadow the good time I should be having and the relationships I should be building with the people I am with. And sometimes those people see my melancholy as a detriment to our relationship, which makes me fall deeper into worry. It is a vicious cycle, and even though I have watched my mother go through it again and again, I have fallen into the trap myself.

I’ve gotten a lot better with therapy. But now that my life seems to be changing possibly more quickly than I can plan for, worries and anxieties are overshadowing more and more experiences that should raise me up. Knowing that I am floundering is the first step. The next step is to see possibly solutions and work toward them. I wish I could live in a vacuum and shy off everyone else’s opinions of me (or what I worry is everyone else’s opinion of me), but the time I spent being raised by my mother sets me back from the start. Realistically, I will always have worries, I will sometimes be sad, sometimes melancholy, and sometimes cry at sappy movies. It is the recognition of these times and the ability to pull myself out of them that I have been and will continue to work on. And most importantly, I need support and patience of those around me – and faith that I can and will turn around. Because I have come pretty far already, and can see no reason I should ever back down now.

Change

Life is change. There is no escaping it. You can either fight it and tire yourself out, no better than you were before, or you can look it in the eye and nod and say, "Okay." Sometimes change is for the better, sometimes it is for the worse, but to know for sure either way is rare. It is a lucky man indeed that knows exactly how change will affect him and those around him.

Yes, it is true that sometimes you have to make your own changes occur. And there will be ripples, sometimes waves, when you do. Uncertainty is inevitable, whether it be over your decision to have Corn Flakes vs. Frosted Flakes or over a change that is much more life-altering than that. Remorse is possible. Mistakes are probable.

Recovering from change takes time. In that time more changes occur and your feelings shift and alter. You reach a peak, and then you even out. The change becomes the commonplace, ready to be blasted with a change again. This is life.

I hope I never regret any of the changes I make to my life. I hope that throughout it all, I can still look back and see that I became happier, or wiser, after it all. But it is the nature of change to blind you to all but hindsight, no matter how much you plan for it. And I cannot say how any of it will turn out.

Thus is life, thus is change. There is no escaping it.

American Literary Snobbery: Business as Usual

In attempting to broaden my knowledge of the literary/publishing world, I began what will be a weekly endeavor of curling up with the New York Times every Sunday. And, beginner's luck, I found something very interesting that brought up some memories of discussions I had in my Senior Seminar class in undergrad. In this article about the Nobel Prize in Literature, Charles McGrath explores the seemingly biased opinion of the judges against Americans - and why they might just have a point. Makes me want to read more translations.

Lost in Translation? A Swede’s Snub of U.S. Lit

By CHARLES McGRATH

If you’re John Updike, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo or Joyce Carol Oates, you don’t have to worry about whether the phone bill has been paid. You won’t be getting the call from Stockholm next week.

On Tuesday, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, gave an interview to The Associated Press and, while not dropping hints about this year’s winner, seemed to rule out, pretty much, the chances of any American writer. “Europe is still the center of the literary world,” he said, not the United States, and he suggested that American writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” He added: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

The next day, in an interview with the British paper The Guardian, Mr. Engdahl appeared to backtrack a bit. He insisted that the academy strictly followed Alfred Nobel’s rule that in awarding the prize no consideration should be given to an author’s nationality, and added: “It is of no importance, when we judge American candidates, how any of us views American literature as a whole in comparison with other literatures.”

All the same, any American foolhardy enough to bet on this year’s prize — the announcement comes on Thursday — would be well advised to put his money on a writer whom nobody in this country has ever heard of and who is out of print here or, ideally, has never been published at all. For example, Ladbrokes, the British betting shop, has as the frontrunner, at 3 to 1 odds, the Italian essayist and novelist Claudio Magris, followed, at 4-1, by the Syrian poet Adonis. Were either to win, he would follow in the great tradition of the Italian satirist Dario Fo, who won in 1997; the Chinese novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian (2000); and the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (2004); all of whom caused Americans to scratch their heads and say “Huh?”

Another good betting strategy is to look for a writer with a record of America-bashing. His criticisms of American capitalism and the fact that he was once banned from entering this country didn’t hurt Signor Fo, a playwright and performer whom even some Italians considered a little lightweight; and Harold Pinter, the Briton who won in 2005, surely appealed as much because of his outspoken opposition to America’s involvement in Iraq as for his plays, the best of which were written 40 years ago or more.

If you add all-purpose political correctness or opposition to an unpopular regime, your odds get even better. You would have lost your bet in 2001, when the prickly V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad but transplanted to England, neither a lefty nor anyone’s idea of politically correct, won the Nobel. But you would have collected in 2003 and 2006 with the novelist and critic J. M. Coetzee, born in South Africa but now an Australian citizen, and the Turkish novelist and memoirist Orhan Pamuk. That Mr. Coetzee and Mr. Pamuk happen to be terrific writers is just gravy, though if you want to try that card again — someone politically sound who can also write — then a good long-shot pick for this year might be the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare.

In other words, the Nobel selection process is hardly the lofty and purely literary exercise — the “big dialogue” — that Mr. Engdahl suggests, and it never has been. Whatever else the prize may be, it is not a guarantee of literary excellence. Critics are always pointing out that the list of writers who never won, which includes Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov and Auden, is far more impressive than the roster of those who did. The duds include Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), author of “Quo Vadis,” and Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), whose supposed masterpiece, “And Quiet Flows the Don,” was probably plagiarized (at least according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won five years later).

There are 18 Nobel judges, of whom Mr. Engdahl is one. They’re all Swedes, they serve for life, and in the early years of the prize they tended to vote for — surprise! — other Scandinavians, writers like Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Selma Lagerlof and Henrik Pontoppidan, who were not exactly household names even back then. There used to be a weakness for middlebrow writers like Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck, who championed the downtrodden. But ever since the last American to win, Toni Morrison, took the prize in 1993, there has been a drift not just to the left but away from the conventions of narrative realism. This may be what Mr. Engdahl, himself a post-structuralist literary critic, was referring to when he complained about “trends in mass culture” dragging down American literature: we tend to write, for the most part, about the world we live in, without resort to the devices of myth or fable or allegory, all of which are popular in Stockholm these days.

This is not to say that the Swedish Academy is a united front or that when it sits down for the “big dialogue” there is no conflict of interest. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda didn’t win the Nobel until his Swedish translator, Artur Lundkvist, was elected to the academy and lobbied for him. (Mr. Lundkvist also blackballed Graham Greene, whose politics were almost as left as Mr. Neruda’s. Go figure.) Mr. Gao’s Swedish translator, Goran Malmqvist, a China scholar at the University of Stockholm and, conveniently, an academy member, similarly pressed his case. On the other hand, a member named Knut Ahnlund quit in 2004 over the award to Ms. Jelinek, a feminist, whose work he called a “mass of text shoveled together without artistic structure.” There was also an internal squabble over whether the body as a whole should denounce the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989.

The Swedes read, you have to give them that — they buy more books per capita than the citizens of just about any other country — and they probably care more than anyone else does about their prize. In the United States, a Nobel usually doesn’t produce even the modest uptick in sales that a Pulitzer or a National Book Award does. That fact may underlie Mr. Engdahl’s comments, and especially his observation that we don’t translate enough foreign literature. It’s true. We don’t. Publishers are always claiming that translations just don’t sell here, and they no longer even try anymore. Meanwhile we flood the rest of the world with our schlock, and the rest of the world doesn’t complain much. If you browse in an airport bookshop anywhere in Europe or Asia, you quickly discover that translated Danielle Steele sells almost as well there as back home.

It’s possible, in other words, that Mr. Engdahl has it in for American writers, the Updikes and Roths, not because of their own failings, real or imagined, but because of the rest of us, the American readers, who in truth don’t even read our own Nobel candidates in the numbers we used to, and whose poor mass-culture taste is infecting the rest of the world, even Sweden. Mr. Engdahl has to keep up standards, and probably from his point of view, the more we complain about the Nobel Prize, the more we prove his point.

Published in the New York Times. October 5, 2008

Getting Around

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a serious choice I would have to make if I ever moved to a metropolitan area: car or no car? In the Midwest, it’s not a question many people ever ask themselves. Not having a car in Saginaw, for example, is extremely debilitating – it can even cost you a job. Out here, however, where car insurance is skyrocketing and parking places are few and far between, having a car can break the bank. It all depends on where you live.

Living where I am now, in Newton, a city mostly made up of large homes, schools, and upscale dining and shopping, would probably require a car – the public transportation around here doesn’t span as widely as it does in cities like Cambridge, Allston, or Boston proper. However, if I lived in Cambridge or closer to downtown Boston, having a car would be a nuisance.

I like my car. It suits me well, and once I learned how to get around, it gave me a sense of freedom. Learning your way around somewhere new is one of the steps you must undertake to becoming comfortable and settled, and though it is a necessary one it is also sometimes the most frustrating. But now that I am not constantly turning around, I enjoy driving here. It’s an adventure to be sure: no one uses a turn signal, bikes pass from every direction and don’t follow traffic laws, and pedestrians (myself included) cross the street with little regard for crosswalks or stoplights. But even the traffic, like everything else in life, gets easier to manage with time and experience.

This newfound confidence in driving around here makes me wonder if I could get rid of my little Bug. Would I feel as unfettered exploring the area if I had to rely on bus and train schedules only? Sure I would probably live in an area with more options for transportation, but having my car everywhere I go in the Midwest is comforting. Sure, I’m not going to drive up to Maine this weekend, but if the inspiration struck me I could. But having the ability to pop off to Maine for the weekend (keeping in mind that I could always rent a car for a day or two if I needed one) is overshadowed by how much cheaper and environmentally friendly public transport seems to be: $59.00 a month for unlimited local bus and train service versus up to $750-$1000 a month for a car payment, gas, and insurance? Cute bug aside, the numbers speak for themselves.

I’m traveling home in a few weeks for the weekend, and during the two weekdays I’m there I won’t have a car. It will be strange to be both car-less and unable to catch public transportation, and the time will probably make me realize how nice that option is. People who have only ever lived where public transportation is dirty, dangerous, and totally unreliable don’t see how much a wide-reaching system could benefit the community and the environment, and that’s sad. Because they don’t have a choice, they don’t see that there could be a choice, and therefore our dependence on the automobile and oil continues. I’m glad that I have had the opportunity to experience using public transportation out here so that I am reminded that even though I love my car, I could live without it.