I-level

It won't be long now brothers, before the decadent west is finished.

~~~

I find it so hard writing nowadays (Thank God! I hear you say). 'The snow is general' and all that kind of thing. Not that knowing why would make any difference; it rarely ever does. How can we find someone without knowing what they look like?

'We are only real in our moments of recognition'

---Carol Shields (with thanks to anton for pointing me here)

Don't know why I'm surprised, but Carol Shields is surprisingly good. Only 140 pages in but there's a great 'writerly' quality to it, the same unassuming intelligence that you thought you picked up in the first pages of JCO's memoir. The most interesting passages are on the house, how rooms, images, through their use and their structure, can offer a form of continuity against the ordinary loneliness of being human. And this idea of a shell, an encircling, a turning, as a way of survival seems to run through it. It would be interesting to re-read Roth's American Pastoral at the same time, given the similarity. You know, that's a terrible thing to do. But think back to Cheever's Bullet Park also and how comical parts of that were (comical not in a good sense, mind you; comical as in: unreal).

What or who do we recognize, acknowledge? This seems to be the heart of it. We go on blindly, as it accumulates particle by particle. The illusion that you'd find some meaning just by pottering about, never taking the plunge, hopelessly pinning your hopes to this fake, old-world detachment, and those bloodless abstractions. That you'd get by another day by half-inhabiting the routines whilst your mind drifted...that there'd be a second and a third chance. Make your lists, get serious. Does it matter? You inherited the temperament of a clown! (Not even a high-minded clown like Herzog!)

You woke up in the middle of the night remembering this perfect line. It all made sense. And now only a few words. guess you'll have to make do. "Keep", for example. "At the right distance". Yes, that was it. You were always getting too close or too far away from things, what really mattered. All that was brought on by Milosz's speech, no doubt. Or was it Shields: how one needs to inhabit a life and remember things, to see things in the right way?

To my left, at eye-level: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Life is Elsewhere; The Gardens of Light; The Sheltering Sky; Patterns of Medieval Society. Well, okay, you didn't expect a perfect match, did you?

Today you saw some penguins on their little island, oblivious of all the noise around them, the sun heavy on their backs, the bars of light and shade across their eyes; people pause and sit down to gaze at them, or marvel at their undivided world, whilst no-one notices the drowning all around...