Searching for the Real

Not only do I keep the seemingly anachronistic phone books that appear annually on my doorstep, I use them from time to time, and this weekend I found myself searching for the directory’s latest incarnation in order to look up an address. I needed to find a service center for the wireless device I reluctantly purchased a few months ago so that I wouldn’t spend most of my time without access to the internet. My trip to the store was of the universally aggravating sort that need not be explained, and I left the store with another broadband card coming in the mail, and this wry thought on repeat in my head: A book never let me down like this.

I don’t like the idea of relying on ‘stuff’ to entertain me. Although I am a devotee of Facebook and Twitter (and, of course, blogging) I am equally wary of the barrage of contact and stimulation they can provide. I don’t want gadgets, I don’t want a million TV channels, and I want it to be easy to unplug and to look for something real. I look at new technology and see new passwords to memorize, new directions to uncode, new chargers to clutter the basket under the couch. I also see things that pass away – why get attached to something that will be out in a few years? I’m not opposed to technology in general: for example, I am quite glad that it exists when I am at the doctor, and despite doing most of my writing by hand, I still use the Internet to share my ideas with a world that may or may not care. I’m just opposed to the more-is-better attitude that is quickly becoming sacrosanct. My phone does nothing but call and text, my TV does nothing but show network channels. I know I can live without them, and from time to time I do.

Now we can “read books” on an electronic device – convenient for travelling, I suppose, but at what cost? There are two books with which I have spent more time than with any other: the Bible and The Brothers Karamazov. Both of those are as precious to me as objects as they are as repositories of the written word. The sections that fall open tell the story of what has intrigued and moved me, and the many years of underlining and scribbling in the margins track how I have changed in relation to these unchangeable texts. Almost every dinner with my parents and brother ends with some good-natured factual dispute or confusion that requires the use of a reference book. Someone fetches the dictionary, atlas, encyclopedia, or Bible and we resolve whatever has come up. The act of dashing up the stairs or digging through a stack of books to retrieve the information gives it more value, and as the book goes back on the shelf we know that it will be there the next time we need it.

We can read these books on a screen. We can take online tours of great museums, and listen to “choirs” of singers who have recording themselves individually in their bedrooms. We can look at the Grand Canyon on Google Earth. None of this can come close to the real thing.

We label these experiences “virtual” – virtual tours, virtual performances, etc. When I started thinking about that word I couldn’t pin down the definition, but imagined it was in the ballpark of “not real, imaginary, a substitute for that which is real”. The true definition (which, incidentally, I looked up in an old-fashioned hardcover dictionary) horrified me: being in essence or effect, though not formally recognized or admitted. In other words, pretty much the real thing, even if no one will say that out loud.

Let’s not delude ourselves that any of this is real. Turning that last corner at the Accademia and seeing Michelangelo’s David is real. Feeling the breeze on your face is real. Hearing a live chorus (or better yet, experiencing the camaraderie and intimacy of singing in one, of having your artistry affected by the person standing next to you) is real. Looking in someone’s eyes, holding someone’s hand – those things are realer than any Facebook status or Direct Message. Our ‘virtual’ activities are fine substitutes when circumstances prevent our experiencing reality, but too often we use them to escape the power of the real.

In the end, I’m willing to sacrifice convenience for simplicity, staying unplugged for stretches of time, using old paper maps and phone books on my search for the real – in books, art, nature and people.

Lost in a Book

Four years ago my then-boss let me go through a few books she was planning to give away. I assume I acquired some ministry references that day, but the book I remember taking was White Teeth, the name of which I must have recognized from some bestseller list or other. It made its way from my old place to my current apartment, where it has set on the sagging section of my shelves that ‘s reserved for novels.

Emboldened by finishing the Hopkins tome during break, I pulled White Teeth off the shelf in early January and dutifully started reading. My New Year’s resolution to write in the evenings has required a bit of space and peace before bed, so I would allot a portion of that space to a chapter a night (when not shamefully substituting a magazine as my nighttime reading). I was involved in the plot and was often eager to keep reading, even though the characters were a little irksome in their self-absorbed disorder. Just as Puccini was able to make me cry over a bunch of whiny brats in La Bohème, Zadie Smith made me care about the fools who make up the world of White Teeth.

One of yesterday’s many errands was having a car safety inspection, so I tossed the novel in my bag to read while I waited. All of my errands all took much less time than I expected, and I found myself pulling out of the inspection station, barely a mile from home, with almost three hours until I had to be anywhere else. I had plans to go to the practice room, but instead I entertained a rebellious idea – what if I just went home?

I kicked off my galoshes and walked into my apartment thinking: Now I can work on my papers or finish my readings for class. I can look over music and empty the dishwasher and the washing machine. I could go for a run. Instead I put a bunch of baby carrots on a plate, sat on the futon (which I arduously cleaned this weekend – do you have any idea how hard it is to put a futon cover on by yourself?) and read my book.

An hour, an hour and a half, the sun went down, rain picked up and let up, neighbors pounded in and out, but I was entranced by my book. I had made it into the final third of the book, when any novel with any sort of epic aspirations starts to swirl toward some grand climax like a little whirl of water picking up speed before it’s sucked down the drain. I was desperate to finish the book before my meeting at BC at 7:00. It was like reading used to be, when I couldn’t put a book down. I stood in the kitchen and stirred my dinner on the stove with my book in hand, turning on the lamp near the table so I could read it as I ate.

I used to read everywhere: on Caribbean beaches (House of the Dead) and city beaches (Common Ground), in the back seat of a rental car as my family drove across South Dakota (Jurassic Park, or something like it), on a tiny towel in a park in Parma while some creep rode his horse in circles around me (Crime and Punishment), on the blue couch in my room at the Paraclete with my head resting against the plaster walls (we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families), on a bus (What’s the Matter with Kansas? ), on a train (The Poisonwood Bible, sobbing copiously), on a plane (One Hundred Years of Solitude).

Mostly I remember reading in my bed at my parents house when I was younger, waking early (proof that a morning person is always a morning person) and spending entire Saturday mornings, sometimes into afternoons, shifting from leaning back on the headboard to leaning forward over criss-crossed legs to lying on my right and then on my left side. I would grow uncomfortable in each posture but not want to put the book down and come back from whatever world I had gone to. Babysitters’ Club gave way to A Wrinkle in Time and then to The Brothers Karamazov, but the feeling of experiencing a whole world, a universe away and yet held within my hands, stayed the same.

I don’t have many memories of reading in my current home. The last few years have been busy and thrilling, but reading – of all the great pleasures in life, the first I savored – has fallen by the wayside. I make myself feel guilty for having time to read. Shouldn’t I be productive, studious, or at least domestic instead? The cliché of the busy professional with a nightstand full of unread books: should that be my fear or my ideal?

I was sucked back into the world of reading yesterday, absorbed by a good story. When I got home from class (for which, I later discovered, in an instance of the rueful humor that follows me around, I was supposed to read a book), I settled into the same corner of the futon as before (maybe now my ‘usual spot’?) and went away again to the novel’s world. The thickness of pages under my right thumb decreased, the plot’s tension increased, and you could tell “it” was coming, whatever “it” would be. ”It” came and went, the author mercifully tied up a few loose ends, and I read the last page three times to wean myself from the people I got to know these last few weeks, and to come back to my own story again.

Set down this: Making peace with the Magi

If you’re looking for a way to get me riled up, hide one of my favorite books. Two nights ago I couldn’t find my edition of T. S. Eliot. It was Epiphany and I wanted to read “Journey of the Magi”. I had done a ferocious cleaning before I left for the holidays and was terrified I had thrown the book away. I was preparing to dump everything in my apartment onto the floor when I found Selected Poems on a shelf.

Like a good girl I read Journey of the Magi, which to be honest has never been among my favorites. The opening sections on their journey and arrival in Judea are richly descriptive, beginning with the hook that has always reeled me in: A cold coming we had of it. The end of the poem is where the language takes my breath away – the repetition of words and phrases, the stark expression of the Magi’s harsh and bitter agony. As enamored as I am of the language in that section, I always end my reading dissatisfied, wondering “what the hell do they have to be so distressed about?”

In the same pile as my poetry and journals I keep a small photo album that was a Christmas gift years ago. My brother made me the album in grade-school art class, writing my name on the front in puffy paint. Before I returned to Boston that year I filled the album with photos of my family over the years. My toddler self looks up at my father in one of the photos as he makes a face back at me. There are group photos of cousins, my mom yelling at my uncles, my dad hiding behind a cereal box while my brother displays the half chewed contents of his breakfast in an open mouth.

I looked over those photos on Epiphany because they had surfaced in the scramble to find the poems. I wished I had those whiny wise men in front of me so I could shake them, point to a 20+ year-old photo of myself and my grandmother and say “Look, this is the Incarnation! Look how good it is!” Still pretty irked at the wise men, I took a day to think about it. Since I first read Journey of the Magi I have been haunted by that last stanza. I am moved by the beauty of the text but could never get behind the dark conclusion to the adventure of the Magi. What about their journey could make them feel so...Prufrockian?

And then, appropriately, an epiphany.

We returned to our places, those kingdoms, but no longer at ease here. The Magi followed their guts, their instincts, that star, having an adventure, exploring a mystery. And then they went home, having played their part in salvation history.

"Every great getaway has a moment when you want to pack it up and stay. That's how I ended up with a timeshare in Port Arthur, Texas." (Jack Donaghy) Our lives take certain tracks from which significant deviations are not always possible. These tracks are valorous, beneficial. We live in webs of relationships, alliances and dependencies, and when we glimpse another good life that is not ours, we can’t rip ourselves from the fabric into which we are knit. The lives we return to are tainted once we’ve tasted something else. Like the Magi we may be a little less at ease, and perhaps a little less attached to the lives to which we are bound.

What I do is me, for that I came.

Even for someone as prone to tears as I am, I know I have finished a good biography if I cry at the end when the subject dies. The last book that moved me like that was Christophe Wolfe’s biography of J. S. Bach, and it goes without saying that I knew what was coming in the end. “Winston & Franklin” on the other hand, made me eager for the demise of both protagonists. Last night I got misty reading the end of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani. I’ve always admired Hopkins’ poetry (and Mariani’s, for that matter) but had only a passing familiarity with the circumstances of his life - I knew he was a convert, a Jesuit, lived throughout Great Britain, died young, achieved no literary fame in his lifetime.

On the other side of having read this biography, that’s still the story. I now have a greater understanding of his trademark sprung rhythm, a term for which I’d only had cocktail-party level comprehension. New Hopkinsian terms like inscape and instress have worked their way into my vocabulary and will likely disappear once I’m off what promises to be a “Hopkins kick” and have moved on to another temporary obsession.

Every biographer is going to focus on one element or another of a subject’s life, and throughout much of this book we read about Hopkins desire for sacrifice - he sacrifices reputation and relationship to ‘swim the Tiber’, he sacrifices his writing and creativity seeking obedience to his order, and he sacrifices much of his health in that same spirit of obedience. From what I know of Mariani’s other writing, the biographer has undertaken spiritual journeys of his own, including the Spiritual Exercises. The knowledge, both intellectual and spiritual, of Hopkins’ Catholic (and Jesuit) world makes all the difference in his writing about the poet. I imagine it is hard to write about a man who punished himself too much - who probably took himself too seriously - while loving and respecting the man and his actions. Mariani never laughs at or dismisses Hopkins’ deep desire for sacrifice or communion with God.

What I do is me, for that I came. I know I’m not the only person for whom that is one of Hopkins’ most memorable lines. My little liturgist rises up at this affirmation that what we do matters - not what we think, or believe, or intend, or someday might do.

I realized about 2/3 of the way through the book that I was basically reading from poem to poem. Though I gave attention to and was interested in the circumstances of his life, all the while I was measuring out Hopkins’ life in sonnets. I turned each page hoping to see more of his familiar poetry, accompanied by the circumstances of its writing and by Mariani’s unparalleled insights on its inspiration. But would the poet have read his own life the same way? Would he have agreed with posterity on the reason for which he came?

What I do is me, for that I came. We can think we know what it is we do, for what it is we come, but perhaps like our friend Gerard that which survives of us won’t resemble our dreams and intentions. Knowing the future’s uncertainty what else can we do other than catch fire, draw flame, keep grace, offer ourselves over to God and to each other? Perhaps Hopkins would have been even more prolific, more genius (is that a possibility?) had he not indulged his religious scruples. But the brilliance that we have from him was born in that intersection of devastating sacrifice and creative indulgence. His reality - his ‘me’ - was the filthy manger in which his spark took flesh.

For that I came. The eager and inspired want to know what “that” is. It is music, it is sport, it is health, it is justice - we have ideas of our purpose and our end. Or maybe we don’t. Maybe we just slog through, with no sense of what makes us most ‘me’, what will survive, and what may reach beyond us across years to help others suss out dappled things, bright wings, God’s grandeur, our end.