Let me first say, thus far I have only read one essay, "Why Bother?", in this collection. I've yet to read the others, but this one was rich enough and, as will probably be evident from this post, forced and stimulated some introspection.
In 1996, when Franzen wrote the essay, he certainly had a lot of complaints about contemporary culture. He bemoaned the relative obscurity of the writer, the dangers of technology to the arts and the general decline of reading's importance in culture. He also does point out the risk that "in publishing circles, confessions of doubt are widely referred to as 'whining' -- the idea being that cultural complaint is pathetic and self-serving in writers who don't sell, ungracious in writers who do." Keep in mind this essay was written before
The Corrections came out and before Jonathan Franzen had essentially "made it". He'd already written two books at this point but had remained in relative obscurity. So it's clear why he might seem a little whiny.
I've written two critically acclaimed books, Franzen moans,
so why is it still the case that nobody knows who I am? It must be because culture is dying and technology has made people stupider.
And to warn you, this next bit could very well sound selfishly whiny, as well. Let me summarize some of it for you.
Good god, I say in the following paragraphs,
in New York, I can't be by myself. But when I am by myself, I am hardly happy with my solitude. And because of this, I can't read. My life is difficult, woe is me.
And because it is difficult, I'm leaving this city for greener pastures where life will be less difficult and I can read a book. So before I go any further I'd like to stress that the problems I bring up are, in fact, rather minor in the grand scheme of things - and I am well aware of this.
So. I'd argue that New York is a very difficult city to be alone - when you desire solitude. There are a number of paradoxical forces at play that make this true.
1] You are surrounded by millions of people. But you just want to be alone. Yet when you are finally alone, you cannot shake feelings of loneliness... because you are surrounded by millions of people.
2] There is so much to do in the city. Much of that involves what are inherently social activities - going to bars, restaurants, concerts, shows, the park on a sunny day, etc. But you cannot be happy being by yourself because that generally involves not taking advantage of huge amounts of what the city has to offer, and thus you know there are so many other things you could be doing
with people rather than by yourself.
At the heart of the philosophy behind this blog is the idea of a) encouraging reading and a free-flowing discussion of ideas and b) encouraging writing about that reading, which is introspective and reflective thinking about the reading one just did. But both of these require solitude.
After all, what is reading, but a purely solitary activity? It is just you and the book, and the two-way relationship that is building between you and it. Yes, the world of the book exists in printed words on pages, but ultimately it is up to you to construct it. By reading and using your imagination, you build it, piece by piece. You build glittering cities, mythical creatures, characters you fall in love with, philosophical ideas, whatever appears on the page... in your mind.
This is a reason why I almost always dislike films that are based on novels I enjoyed reading. By projecting images and sound, the films have already constructed much of that alternate reality for me and for the most part, what was in my head was so much richer and ambiguous and mysterious than what is on the screen, which I can no longer get out of my head. For example, Jack Nicholson is R.P. McMurphy, Elijah Wood is Frodo Baggins and Colin Firth is Fitzwilliam Darcy. And they portrayed the characters well, but now I can't dissociate them from what I had originally thought about each fictional character.
As for writing, well, what is writing, but a purely solitary activity? It is just you and the words you are spitting out, and the two-way relationship that is building between you and it.
So, with these activities that require solitude, where can you find it? I both read Franzen's essay and wrote this in a coffee shop. I chose a coffee shop because solitude does not necessarily mean pure objective solitude. I did not want to just be
alone. The aloneness in my room in my apartment, at the time, was too much. I had no contact with the outside world, so in order to feel comfortable with my aloneness, I moved to a place where it was socially acceptable to by one's self. Again, another paradox, albeit a more personal one, related to the first two I mentioned, of wanting to be alone.
I've now talked about the problem of not being able to find comfort in solitude in the city. But there is, at least, one other problem for me. In short, I'm spending less and less time reading. While the first problem is perhaps more due to surroundings than anything else, this other one feels more within my realm of control: when I do have solitude, I just can't concentrate on reading, so I stop trying. It seems to be more a matter of willpower.
There's a quote by Thoreau which I remember liking back in high school: "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." With this in mind, I set about tackling the greats and the classics. Sure, every now and then I'd mix things up with some pulpy trash because I was tired of
thinking. But for a long stretch in my reading career, if the novel wasn't supposedly a classic, great work, I wouldn't read it. I was in a race against time.
Franzen complains about his own lack of ability to read, and as he does so he mentions performing some basic calculations to see how many books he will read in his lifetime. So, I did some of these rather morbid calculations myself. Since this blog began, I have, not including this current one, posted five times. That's five books, plus three books that I have read but not posted about. So let's do a little rough extrapolation. I'm going at about 8 books every half year, or 16 books a year. Assuming I've got a healthy 60 years to go before I go to the great beyond, I'll read close to 1,000 more books in my life. Do I want to waste my time reading crap? All the more reason to pick the novels carefully.
But a more fundamental worry is that time spent reading, which is so important to me, a devoted lifelong reader, will decrease. In short, I'm scared I'll read less and less as it shifts down in my list of priorities. What if my current paltry rate of 16 books a year shrinks to 10 books a year, and then will bottom out at 5 by the time I have a family and children, a career and other obligations? That 1,000 has quickly dropped to a number a lot smaller than 1,000.
And I can see this happening because, if there's anything I miss dearly from my pre-real world college days, it's my attention span. In the workplace, I can hardly concentrate on anything uninterrupted for more than a few minutes before I get an instant message, a coworker says something or stops by, I receive an email, my work telephone rings or my cell phone buzzes. And with the death of my attention span goes my ability to focus for prolonged periods of time. I previously had visions of finishing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Now, I just want to be able to get through
a novel.
I've detailed some of this in an earlier post, where I talked about the problem (whined?) of a crippling reader's block and my struggle to find an effective antidote.Drenching all of these thoughts is a certain amount of nostalgia for some sort of mythical golden age of the arts, where people still cared about classical music and opera and listened to the radio and full albums... and novels changed lives. I recently got asked, what is the book that has changed your life the most? And I struggled mightily to answer the question. How about Atonement, The Naked and the Dead, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Water For Elephants or The Varieties of Human Experience (the books I have posted about here)? No, none of them, not in the slightest. So, what the hell have I been reading for the past half year? If I care so much about reading, what am I getting out of these books?
And this is when Franzen's essay reenters the picture. He cites an interview with a sociologist who has studied the effects of reading on people, and the first paragraph of the following quote is from her:
""There's the social isolate - the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don't like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can't share with the people around you - because it's imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren't present, they become your community."
Pride compels me, here, to draw a distinction between young fiction readers and young nerds. The classic nerd, who finds a home in facts or technology or numbers, is marked not by a displaced sociability but by an antisociability. Reading does resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it's a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost resourceful need to be alone and do some reading--to reconnect that community."
Well, that's me, both when I was young as well as now.
It's unfair to ask what novel has most changed my life. But reading has indeed changed my life immensely. For the mass majority of books, it's not the works themselves, individually, that have been of prime importance. The best books I have ever read have perhaps changed my life indeed, but each did so only incrementally. So, instead, what I prize so dearly about reading books is just that - the mere process of reading. It's a way for me to be both by myself and not by myself, to be completely alone but also in a world of my imagination surrounded by countless others.
And that's what I'm craving most of the time, anyways - to have my cake and eat it to. So if you ask why I'm moving to the West Coast, I think productive "alone time" will come more easily. And because there is indeed less unavoidable densely packed civilization screaming for my attention, I'll be able to be more comfortably at peace with my solitude.
Maybe that will be a more lasting cure to my reader's block.
Willing to lend: Yes.
Purchase Price: $1
Purchase Location: Sidewalk sale on Underhill Street.
Edition: Picador
