What. The bloody hell. Is this book? I thought that because it made a little cameo in A Single Man it would be good. That whole class lecture scene is incredibly intriguing. Amazing! But noooo. This book couldn't hold my attention for five minutes. I'd read twenty pages and be like... "What the hell is this?" Not because it was terribly difficult or anything--it just wasn't interesting or amazing. I mean, it pretty much was exactly about and representing what Isherwood had the students and George say (this may help). It was helpful to read A Single Man first, actually, despite the fact that it gave me far too high expectations... I mean, it was like a pseudo-sparknotes deal.
So. What the book is actually about--I trust you've peeked at the post linked above, so I need not explain what the title is referring to--though I think Huxley got his mythology confused. Endymion, if I remember my mythology, was a sheepherder who was given immortality--but he was eternally sleeping. This preserved his youth... On the other hand, there is another more unfortunate mortal who had won a goddess's affections. His loving goddess, unfortunately, forgot to ask Zeus to grant her beloved eternal youth along with his eternal life. So--the man lived forever, but withered and eventually turned into a cricket. There's a subplot--which becomes the main plot--involving a diary of a man who lived in the seventeen-hundreds. The 'mainest' character of the book is a millionaire named Stoyte. He is terrified of dying and has his personal physician working on the secret to immortality (apparently). So yes, the doctor has a man's journal--an earl's, actually--who basically feared the same thing. Noticing that the carps in the estate's pond are supposedly over one hundred years old, he decides to start eating the guts of the oldest carp to see what it will do for him. What it does for him, is make him very, very... hmm... Long lived and fertile. At the very end of the book, they find this man--he's holed up and locked away in a basement because he's devolved. (He also gave a bit of the mixture to a housekeeper who was ill, and she too is locked away with him.) So--like the cricket--he was given eternity but he withered on it--to something far more disgusting and pathetic than a cricket. He's filthy, only wearing a shirt--a group consisting of Stoyte, the doctor, and a young woman who I will get to later watch him, stunned, for a few minutes... In that time he and the woman chatter to each other like apes. The man has blemishes and sores on him from living in such poor conditions (which aren't entirely his fault, admittedly...) But what is repulsive is that he just pees. Right where he's sitting. Doesn't even get up, doesn't get up right away after he's sitting--and beyond being gross, it's disturbing. The woman is just kind of there (the ex-Earl slaps her once or twice), but the man still has habits that he did so often while coherent that he just kind of does them. He is wearing a ribbon and a medal, and he gets up and polishes them while humming a particular favourite tune of his--and every time he and his ex-housekeeper chatter at each other, their noises are described as on the verge of being understandable, echoes of coherence--and so on. So yes, he withered like the cricket, but in a far worse way.
And--I realize I've been spoiling the ends in the very beginning of these posts quite often as of late--but now I feel that I absolutely have to tell you Stoyte's reaction to this gruesome spectacle. Stoyte appears to be grossed out for a moment, but he can't seem to quite understand the situation: "Mr. Stoyte broke his silence. 'How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?' he said in a slow hesitating voice. 'I mean, it wouldn't happen at once... there'd be a long time while a person... well, you know; while he wouldn't change any. And once you get over the first shock--well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don't you think so...?' he insisted" (356). The doctor just laughs at how pathetic he is. Actually, the more I think about it, the more that this Doctor seems almost like a god figure of the novel... Beyond everyone's personal hangups and--he just seems a lot more intelligent and more powerful than everybody else. The doctor may even be seen as a devilish figure--he is holding out powerful temptations (he seduces the young woman who saw the devolved people, and makes her feel pleasure during sex, eek), and has the key to immortality in his palms--and he's messing with everybody with utter glee. He likes watching everybody floundering for nothing more than his own amusement.
So, the story starts out when a middleaged man named Jeremy goes to America to do some bookkeeping for Mr Stoyte. From here we meet the doctor, Obispo, Pete (O's assistant, who falls for Virginia), Virginia, Stoyte's mistress, Stoyte himself, and a few others.
My first note has to do with Jeremy--seven pages in he writes a letter to his mother, "Oscar Wilde's old friend, the witty and cultured Mrs. Pordage" (7). Of course I would mark that--as for the name, she is entirely fictional. I suppose that shouldn't be a surprise, but you never know.
I also want to mention that this is Jeremy's first time in the country--and he's in California first! He's hit with a barrage of neon marketing and superficiality, the likes of which he's never seen before. He's very overwhelmed, he starts trying out lingo and promising himself he'll try the things advertised, like certain types of burgers or milkshakes. It's overwhelming and strange, because he's never seen this sort of mass advertising and everything. It all seems as it is: absurd, alien, disgusting, rotten, pointless, a mockery--because it's being looked at by a foreigner (he is not necessarily seeing things as rotten or disgusting, but through his eyes, things look that way--like the neon-lit cemetery. He's in awe of it and I was disgusted)--it's essentially the same way Thompson and his Attorney see Las Vegas in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, except without the lizards and bats and overwhelming fear--but those few moments when Thompson is sober and disgusted, basically the same. And even when he's tripping, all the lights and signs and flashes and all overwhelm him and seem terrifying in their own right.
Stoyte has a terrible temper--his doctor has warned him that if he gets too riled, he's likely to give himself a second stroke. So: "'God is love,' he said again, and reflected that, if people would only stop being so exasperating, he would never have to lose his temper. 'God is love.' It was all their fault" (37). This cracked me up. I hope I don't need need to point out the humour... Do I?
The grossest thing I learned from the book was, unsurprisingly, explained by Obispo. He talks about theories of prolonging life, and untrue rumours--that sour milk will lengthen your life or what have you. One popular surgery in the days before the first World War it was apparently popular to have sections of your colon removed--that was thought to prolong health, I guess. Huxley is not making this up, I just looked it up. It killed 50% of people who tried it within two years, and even if it didn't, with a quarter of a colon you have to, um, "evacuate" as the doctor puts it, quite often. Yeah, so my point is, ew ew ew, gross gross gross, Jesus why, ew gross, vomitrocious.
As for George of A Single Man talking about what Huxley has cited as the "stupidest text in the Bible"--it is, to remind you, "They hated me without a cause". I guess this disturbs George's students, though Huxley in his own book basically says what George says, except in a more concise manner without examples and not as expansively (though I suppose concise would imply that?). And it's weird to think... A student raises the Holocaust in response to George's agreement with Huxley on this being the stupidest scripture. This book was written in 1939--when the very first Jews were being taken into ghettos and camps.
"For what hope, he asked himself, what faintest glimmer of hope is there for a man who really believes that 'they hated me without a cause' and that he had no part in his own disasters? Obviously, no hope whatever... In some measure they are directly or indirectly responsible. Directly, by the commission of stupid or malicious acts. Indirectly, by the omission to be as intelligent and compassionate as they might be" (107).
Later Huxley adds that the most sensible text of the Bible is "'God is not mocked; as a man sows, so shall he reap'" (256). I agree--and if the God bit makes you uncomfortable, add 'fate' or 'destiny'--or even cutting it out altogether works.
"'As a man sows, so shall he reap. God is not mocked. Not mocked,' he repeated. 'but people simply refuse to believe it. They go on thinking they can cock a snook at the nature of things and get away with it. I've sometimes thought of writing a little treatise, like a cook-book. "One Hundred Ways of Mocking God," I'd call it. And I'd take a hundred examples from history and contemporary life, illustrating what happens when people undertake to do things without paying regard to the nature of reality. And the book would be divided into sections, such as "Mocking God in Agriculture", "Mocking God in Politics", "Mocking God in Education", "Mocking God in Philosophy", "Mocking God in Economics". It would be an instructive little book. But a bit depressing,' Mr. Propter added" (282-283). "'Cock a snook'"?
"'Bad art can't do so much harm as ill-considered political action'" (172). Originally I marked this because again, Huxley mentioned Oscar Wilde, but then I realized that there was a good point--he's playing off of Wilde's "art for art's sake". Even if the art you make is mediocre, it's not as bad as a terrible political move--et cetera.
So far as i know, the earl whose diary is found and read is not based on any real earl. Again, I guess that probably goes without saying, but that's not the point--the point is that the earl 'wrote' a pretty bit of poetry and I was just checking if it was thieved... Anyways, the results, other than one passage, are pretty bad--"'If only the rest were silence!'" (213). Hehe.
The doctor, although he plays as a sort of God character, he is a smug fool too--he's just stupid in different ways--he's one of the sort who would have caused Brave New World. The doctor vaguely mentions several authors--the one he says specifically is Shelley--that he could have fixed, thanks to his modern medicines and therapies. Because many great pieces of art and literature are created out of suffering, I believe what he (Huxley, not the doctor) is essentially saying is that modern amenities can basically end art--beauty--and so on. Which again is exactly what is illustrated in Brave New World. There's a scene where Jonathan asks the man who suppresses all old literature and art if he has any use for old things, and the man says no, and then Jonathan asks even if they are beautiful, and the man says "'Particularly when they're beautiful'". (No source, but I promise that that is the exact line.)
My last note that directly corresponds to a page is the quote attached to the spiel about the silliest/most important quotes from the Bible. My last comment is again on the earl and his immortality secret: raw carp guts. It doesn't specify if it's just one dose or several that keeps up youth indefinitely (which bothers me greatly, the housekeeper lady is recorded to have taken it once when she was ill, but no other records of her taking it are there... Which doesn't really make sense...)
My second note is that a popular Roman condiment/dish was fermented fish paste--the exact recipe for making this... thing is unknown, though apparently historians have sought after the dish for quite some time. My point is that Romans, judging from statues, aged really, really well. And it's been proven that having a diet that's high in fish is about as healthy as you can get--well, it was at one point. Now that all fish are supposedly up to their gills in mercury... So, Huxley has something! We've found the key to immortality! HAHAHAHA--no, that's stupid. The reason why Huxley chose carp is because they live so incredibly long. But yeah, a diet with fish as a staple bis very healthy, but probably won't lengthen your life to two hundred years/turn you into an ape person. That is all, good night.
MLA Citation Information: Huxley, Aldous. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Ivan R Dee, Inc: Chicago, 1993.
Showing posts with label A Single Man. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Single Man. Show all posts
Monday, August 15, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
So. I can't say that I'm in love with this book. Virginia Woolf certainly is eloquent, but I found it very difficult to get into the book. She writes well--incredibly well--but I just wasn't feeling it, even if I could relate to the characters and all of that. That's just the way it goes sometimes.
The book itself is about, unsurprisingly, Mrs Clarissa Dalloway. It starts out on the morning of a day she is holding a party. On that day her former suitor comes by from India, where he has met a woman he loves. Seeing Clarissa kind of throws him, and he goes back over the signs that their love couldn't last or hadn't existed at all, and all of that. (There's no dramatic reuniting scene or any of that, just for the record.) The story is also told through Septimus, a war hero who suffers from shell shock and who only appears in the main plot a few times, his wife, and Clarissa's daughter's history teacher. Because it only takes place on one day, it's compared to Ulysses often--a comparison I wouldn't make. There's a world of differences between them. It just doesn't seem right to compare the two...
The first note is mainly just a quote from Clarissa--she's reflecting on her relationship with Peter. "For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?--some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did" (9). The main reason why I've bothered to quote this section is because it's just a speculation on the mind and memory, an entirely accurate speculation, and that's the sort of thing that interests me. The secondary reason is that I find the "reward of having cared for people" bit quite interesting. The section could mean imagining that he has come back (thus her mind has brought him back) and he is no longer bitter about choosing Dalloway over himself. It could also mean that she is thinking about him without having any bitterness recalled in herself--thus, her affection for him overcame all of that.
"She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day" (11). Fun fact: this quote was the whole reason why I decided to read this book. It popped up on my Tumblr dash.
"The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?" (20). This sentence comes forth in introducing the reader to Septimus. He had a look in his eyes as though he were eternally apprehensive, so strong it made others feel the same, and thus...
"To love makes one solitary, she thought" (33). Septimus's wife fears her husband's supposed mental illness, and half drowns him under various doctors and psychologists, who never let him speak and just put forth their judgment. Rezia, the wife, isn't terribly smart and makes things more difficult for her husband and never listens to him, just swallows everything the doctors say without thinking. Eventually--spoiler alert--this causes him to kill himself, because he overhears a doctor recommending to Rezia that he should be placed in an institution. This makes me wonder about Woolf's feelings about Septimus and their similarities--Woolf eventually killed herself.
"It's been a hard life, thought Mrs Dempster. What hadn't she given to it? Roses; figure, her feet too... Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m'dear. For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses, and what was more, let me tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any woman's in Kentish Town! But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses. Pity she asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds" (40). This just reminded me of V for Vendetta... When Evey is reading Valerie's life story and she talks about how she grew roses with her lover in the window box, and then the war came, and after that there were no more roses at all--and she begins the conclusion to her letter with "It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and apologized to no one".
This is from when Peter first calls upon Clarissa after having been gone for so long: "Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his back to her... Mastery and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades lifting his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently. Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly on some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over" (71).
"But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?" (88). Peter, of course.
When Clarissa is first introduced to Richard Dalloway, she mishears his name and thinks that he is WickhamWickham is the name of the snake-in-the-grass in Pride and Prejudice... Not that Richard shows any outward signs of villainy, just that he stole Clarissa's heart, and that really matters most to Peter. At the end of the day, they don't, like I said, have a dramatic reconciliation--the book ends with Peter looking upon her. Nothing big and dramatic, and I kind of liked that. Maybe Wickham isn't the one Clarissa should have married, and that is why he received that nickname, but he does not seem particularly cold or conniving like Jane Austen's Wickham (though he is a politician). More likely than not, though, it just happens to be a name that I just happened to recognize that just happened to be the same. Though you never know, of course...
"The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought... was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained--at last!--the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,--the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light" (119). / "'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'"--Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (page one hundred sixty).
"But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged--in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own--is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feeds on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace... She stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires powers; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own" (151). Like I said, the lady can write. There's absolutely no question of that.
"The difference between one man and another does not amount to much" (157). This is one of those things that can either crack you up--Lady Bruton, a fan of Mr Dalloway, thinks this. She likes him because he was nice to her on one occasion, but she can't remember which exactly, because it was the kindness that counted. It could have been any man or woman or anyone. Anyways, it either cracks you up or depresses you--because it applies to you as well.
Oh, and Richard gets excited by the fact that Peter is in the area and impulsively buys a great bunch of roses to give to his wife to remind her that he loves her.
"How unbelievable death was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant..." (185). Mrs Dalloway, thinking about life day by day--until, of course, the inevitable.
I believe I have mentioned Miss Kilman already--Elizabeth's history teacher. Miss Kilman hates Mrs Dalloway. She thinks she doesn't work hard enough (she believes that instead of lounging around the house and throwing parties and such, she should be working in the factory) and really sees Dalloway as a worm. "Observing [Clarissa Dalloway's] small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion, Miss Kilman felt, Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your life away! And there rose in her an overmastering desire to overcome her; to unmask her... If only she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are right! But this was God's will, not Miss Kilman's. It was to be a religious victory. So she glared; so she glowered" (189). So Miss Kilman is a little, how you say, high-strung... Why I bothered to point it out is because Mrs Dalloway feels basically exactly the way about Miss Kilman--that she is foolish and is frittering herself (at least her mind) away--though she does not necessarily want to humiliate her or anything. "Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian--this woman! This woman had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences! Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the meaning of life!" (189-190). It's just sort of ironic that they'd both see each other in essentially the same exact light--you know? Neither of them believes at all that the other knows what's going on, or isn't a heathen. Kilman appears to be a straight backed, puritanical Christian (I'm thinking of the guy in The Scarlet Letter who had a house with shards of glass in the walls or whatever it was exactly), and Dalloway appears to be more relaxed and calm--like she thinks to herself later, she'd rather just let people be what they are. Of course that's not quite true, but still, I'd rather be in Mrs Dalloway's company than Kilman's. Miss Kilman is a tad too intense for me.
My next note is on the page Septimus kills himself. It's some more irony--like I mentioned earlier, Septimus overhears his doctor suggesting an institution, and it's for that reason and because he can't bear to be poked and prodded and made frustrated again that he kills himself. He says that he doesn't want to die, but it's his act of rebellion. The doctor, of course, cannot figure out why Septimus would want to kill himself.
Anyways--flip to many, many pages later--Elizabeth is, of course, at her mother's party. The book does not mention whether she has entered society yet, but Clarissa's cousin mentions it relation to Elizabeth, at the party. I've only marked this because she complains that nowadays girls wore "straight" and "perfectly tight" frocks (I'm going to say that probably means "form-fitting" and "skirts well above the ankles" (257). Ankles! Curved chest pieces! Open-top carriages! What disgraces could possibly be next!?
A woman named Sally was at the party as well (this woman Clarissa had romantic feelings for, very strong ones--to just think that they were under the same roof sent Mrs Dalloway--before she was a Mrs of course--all a-quiver). She thinks about how everyone loved her even though she was quite clumsy and could be absent-minded. She notes several mistakes of hers, smoking in her bedroom, stealing food from the larder for midnight snacks, and once she left a valuable book "in the punt" (276). I had to look this up... It's either a small boat, a Catalan newspaper, or the indented bottom of a wine bottle.
Anyways, the party. It goes well--for a tad bit Mrs Dalloway thinks it's going poorly, but it all turns out well. It ends at the party's close, with Peter: "'I shall say good night. What does the brain matter,' said Lady Rosseter, getting up, 'compared with the heart?' 'I will come,' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was" (296).
MLA citation information: Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, Brace and Company: New York, 1925.
It wasn't half-bad. I don't think Virginia Woolf is my new favourite, but I wouldn't turn her down, yeah? I quite liked Clarissa--I've been reading a great myriad of books and--you know what, I liked Septimus, and Peter too. There were a lot of characters I could relate to. That's actually odd, I've been reading a lot of books with characters I can relate to, which may or may not be a bad thing (the next book up is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Hmm... I don't have a lot of commentary of this. Not half-bad, not awe-inspiring, but likable, and if I saw it at a used book store I'd pick it up. That sounds cruel, but I'm cheap. Sorry I didn't describe the plot more, but it is really just a day in the life. There's not a whole lot to say... Well. Yeah.
I guess I don't have anything more to say. Sorry... Um... I guess I'll see you with Hunter S Thompson next!
EDIT: On page 192, Clarissa complains that when Peter visited her that afternoon, he only talked about himself and said that it was a "degrading passion"--this is of course a reference to the book of Leviticus, where it refers to sexual relations between two men (the implication is that all-women relations would be the same, but it is not specified) as such. He loves himself; he is a man loving a man.
The book itself is about, unsurprisingly, Mrs Clarissa Dalloway. It starts out on the morning of a day she is holding a party. On that day her former suitor comes by from India, where he has met a woman he loves. Seeing Clarissa kind of throws him, and he goes back over the signs that their love couldn't last or hadn't existed at all, and all of that. (There's no dramatic reuniting scene or any of that, just for the record.) The story is also told through Septimus, a war hero who suffers from shell shock and who only appears in the main plot a few times, his wife, and Clarissa's daughter's history teacher. Because it only takes place on one day, it's compared to Ulysses often--a comparison I wouldn't make. There's a world of differences between them. It just doesn't seem right to compare the two...
The first note is mainly just a quote from Clarissa--she's reflecting on her relationship with Peter. "For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?--some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did" (9). The main reason why I've bothered to quote this section is because it's just a speculation on the mind and memory, an entirely accurate speculation, and that's the sort of thing that interests me. The secondary reason is that I find the "reward of having cared for people" bit quite interesting. The section could mean imagining that he has come back (thus her mind has brought him back) and he is no longer bitter about choosing Dalloway over himself. It could also mean that she is thinking about him without having any bitterness recalled in herself--thus, her affection for him overcame all of that.
"She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day" (11). Fun fact: this quote was the whole reason why I decided to read this book. It popped up on my Tumblr dash.
"The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?" (20). This sentence comes forth in introducing the reader to Septimus. He had a look in his eyes as though he were eternally apprehensive, so strong it made others feel the same, and thus...
"To love makes one solitary, she thought" (33). Septimus's wife fears her husband's supposed mental illness, and half drowns him under various doctors and psychologists, who never let him speak and just put forth their judgment. Rezia, the wife, isn't terribly smart and makes things more difficult for her husband and never listens to him, just swallows everything the doctors say without thinking. Eventually--spoiler alert--this causes him to kill himself, because he overhears a doctor recommending to Rezia that he should be placed in an institution. This makes me wonder about Woolf's feelings about Septimus and their similarities--Woolf eventually killed herself.
"It's been a hard life, thought Mrs Dempster. What hadn't she given to it? Roses; figure, her feet too... Roses, she thought sardonically. All trash, m'dear. For really, what with eating, drinking, and mating, the bad days and good, life had been no mere matter of roses, and what was more, let me tell you, Carrie Dempster had no wish to change her lot with any woman's in Kentish Town! But, she implored, pity. Pity, for the loss of roses. Pity she asked of Maisie Johnson, standing by the hyacinth beds" (40). This just reminded me of V for Vendetta... When Evey is reading Valerie's life story and she talks about how she grew roses with her lover in the window box, and then the war came, and after that there were no more roses at all--and she begins the conclusion to her letter with "It seems strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and apologized to no one".
This is from when Peter first calls upon Clarissa after having been gone for so long: "Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with his back to her... Mastery and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades lifting his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently. Take me with you, Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly on some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and she had lived a lifetime and had run away, had lived with Peter, and it was now over" (71).
"But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?" (88). Peter, of course.
When Clarissa is first introduced to Richard Dalloway, she mishears his name and thinks that he is WickhamWickham is the name of the snake-in-the-grass in Pride and Prejudice... Not that Richard shows any outward signs of villainy, just that he stole Clarissa's heart, and that really matters most to Peter. At the end of the day, they don't, like I said, have a dramatic reconciliation--the book ends with Peter looking upon her. Nothing big and dramatic, and I kind of liked that. Maybe Wickham isn't the one Clarissa should have married, and that is why he received that nickname, but he does not seem particularly cold or conniving like Jane Austen's Wickham (though he is a politician). More likely than not, though, it just happens to be a name that I just happened to recognize that just happened to be the same. Though you never know, of course...
"The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought... was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained--at last!--the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,--the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light" (119). / "'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'"--Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (page one hundred sixty).
"But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged--in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own--is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feeds on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace... She stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires powers; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own" (151). Like I said, the lady can write. There's absolutely no question of that.
"The difference between one man and another does not amount to much" (157). This is one of those things that can either crack you up--Lady Bruton, a fan of Mr Dalloway, thinks this. She likes him because he was nice to her on one occasion, but she can't remember which exactly, because it was the kindness that counted. It could have been any man or woman or anyone. Anyways, it either cracks you up or depresses you--because it applies to you as well.
Oh, and Richard gets excited by the fact that Peter is in the area and impulsively buys a great bunch of roses to give to his wife to remind her that he loves her.
"How unbelievable death was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant..." (185). Mrs Dalloway, thinking about life day by day--until, of course, the inevitable.
I believe I have mentioned Miss Kilman already--Elizabeth's history teacher. Miss Kilman hates Mrs Dalloway. She thinks she doesn't work hard enough (she believes that instead of lounging around the house and throwing parties and such, she should be working in the factory) and really sees Dalloway as a worm. "Observing [Clarissa Dalloway's] small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion, Miss Kilman felt, Fool! Simpleton! You who have known neither sorrow nor pleasure; who have trifled your life away! And there rose in her an overmastering desire to overcome her; to unmask her... If only she could make her weep; could ruin her; humiliate her; bring her to her knees crying, You are right! But this was God's will, not Miss Kilman's. It was to be a religious victory. So she glared; so she glowered" (189). So Miss Kilman is a little, how you say, high-strung... Why I bothered to point it out is because Mrs Dalloway feels basically exactly the way about Miss Kilman--that she is foolish and is frittering herself (at least her mind) away--though she does not necessarily want to humiliate her or anything. "Clarissa was really shocked. This a Christian--this woman! This woman had taken her daughter from her! She in touch with invisible presences! Heavy, ugly, commonplace, without kindness or grace, she know the meaning of life!" (189-190). It's just sort of ironic that they'd both see each other in essentially the same exact light--you know? Neither of them believes at all that the other knows what's going on, or isn't a heathen. Kilman appears to be a straight backed, puritanical Christian (I'm thinking of the guy in The Scarlet Letter who had a house with shards of glass in the walls or whatever it was exactly), and Dalloway appears to be more relaxed and calm--like she thinks to herself later, she'd rather just let people be what they are. Of course that's not quite true, but still, I'd rather be in Mrs Dalloway's company than Kilman's. Miss Kilman is a tad too intense for me.
My next note is on the page Septimus kills himself. It's some more irony--like I mentioned earlier, Septimus overhears his doctor suggesting an institution, and it's for that reason and because he can't bear to be poked and prodded and made frustrated again that he kills himself. He says that he doesn't want to die, but it's his act of rebellion. The doctor, of course, cannot figure out why Septimus would want to kill himself.
Anyways--flip to many, many pages later--Elizabeth is, of course, at her mother's party. The book does not mention whether she has entered society yet, but Clarissa's cousin mentions it relation to Elizabeth, at the party. I've only marked this because she complains that nowadays girls wore "straight" and "perfectly tight" frocks (I'm going to say that probably means "form-fitting" and "skirts well above the ankles" (257). Ankles! Curved chest pieces! Open-top carriages! What disgraces could possibly be next!?
A woman named Sally was at the party as well (this woman Clarissa had romantic feelings for, very strong ones--to just think that they were under the same roof sent Mrs Dalloway--before she was a Mrs of course--all a-quiver). She thinks about how everyone loved her even though she was quite clumsy and could be absent-minded. She notes several mistakes of hers, smoking in her bedroom, stealing food from the larder for midnight snacks, and once she left a valuable book "in the punt" (276). I had to look this up... It's either a small boat, a Catalan newspaper, or the indented bottom of a wine bottle.
Anyways, the party. It goes well--for a tad bit Mrs Dalloway thinks it's going poorly, but it all turns out well. It ends at the party's close, with Peter: "'I shall say good night. What does the brain matter,' said Lady Rosseter, getting up, 'compared with the heart?' 'I will come,' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was" (296).
MLA citation information: Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, Brace and Company: New York, 1925.
It wasn't half-bad. I don't think Virginia Woolf is my new favourite, but I wouldn't turn her down, yeah? I quite liked Clarissa--I've been reading a great myriad of books and--you know what, I liked Septimus, and Peter too. There were a lot of characters I could relate to. That's actually odd, I've been reading a lot of books with characters I can relate to, which may or may not be a bad thing (the next book up is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Hmm... I don't have a lot of commentary of this. Not half-bad, not awe-inspiring, but likable, and if I saw it at a used book store I'd pick it up. That sounds cruel, but I'm cheap. Sorry I didn't describe the plot more, but it is really just a day in the life. There's not a whole lot to say... Well. Yeah.
I guess I don't have anything more to say. Sorry... Um... I guess I'll see you with Hunter S Thompson next!
EDIT: On page 192, Clarissa complains that when Peter visited her that afternoon, he only talked about himself and said that it was a "degrading passion"--this is of course a reference to the book of Leviticus, where it refers to sexual relations between two men (the implication is that all-women relations would be the same, but it is not specified) as such. He loves himself; he is a man loving a man.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
So I decided to reread this book! The last time I read it I was an angsty teenager. This time, when I started I was feeling low and I was all, "Yeah, Holden, I can so relate!" but then by the halfway point I was like, "SUCK IT UP HOLDEN, OR YOU'RE GONNA GET A PURSE-SMACK. AND DON'T BE THINKING THAT THE BEATLES PURSE IS GOING TO HURT LESS BECAUSE IT IS SMALLER. IT IS MORE COMPACT AND IT WILL HURT TWICE AS MUCH." Sooo yeah. Long story short, it's been removed from the 'classics'/'books everyone should read' shelf and will be moved down to the regular shelf. It's still a little cruel that it has to be next to a Goosebumps book, but oh well. These things happen.
So tell me you know what this is about. An angsty teenager fails out of school and goes back home and stuff. It's another twenty-four-hour deal. Fun times.
If you like South Park you've probably seen the Catcher in the Rye episode. I think it's absolutely hilarious, even if that makes me sound like a bad person. See, the Catcher in the Rye was once--and actually in some places it still is--considered a really controversial book because of the swearing and references to sex. Listen. Margaret Atwood is dirtier than Catcher in the Rye. So Mr Garrison explains that this is the book that made Mark David Chapman kill John Lennon. Butters finishes the book and he starts going crazy, like "Must... kill... John... Lennon", and he takes a knife out of the drawer. He goes to his dad and asks him where John Lennon lives, and his dad says that John Lennon is dead, of course. So he's like aww, man! and goes back to his room. ...Okay, it's funnier on the show. (And all the episodes are online, so...)
And we were discussing this one day in Intro to Lit and Mrs CF was talking about how scared she was to read it because, in her words, "Every weirdo is found with a copy of Catcher in the Rye!" She's worried that if she reads it she'll go insane or something. I can relate, I'm scared to read Nietzsche for the same reason.
Sooooo let's go.
First, people tend to put this book's opening as one of the best book openings ever. Here's the opening: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth" (1). Excuse me? That's not best. It's new and different, but come on here. Pride and Prejudice. The Hobbit. A Tale of Two Cities. Just to name a few. I highly doubt Caulfield had a crappy David Copperfield-esque childhood. Also, Caulfield, don't compare yourself to David Copperfield, or your book to his. Call me touchy, but that book is fantastic. Let's be real with ourselves, Holden.
One of the first things--people--Holden talks about is his older brother DB. He says his brother is an author and that one of his best stories is "The Secret Goldfish"--a kid buys a goldfish but won't let people look at it because he paid for it all by himself. I wonder of JD Salinger actually wrote this story--though perhaps under a different title. (There is actually apparently a book called The Secret Goldfish, but it was written in 2004.) And I'm thinking that perhaps this story might supposed to be symbolic or something, but to be honest... I'm not sure how. I have trouble taking this book seriously.
I also wonder if DB is supposed to based off of an author JD Salinger knew, or just authors in general--DB moves up to Hollywood to presumably write scripts, and Holden says that he's become a prostitute.
Okay yeah, one of the most annoying things about Holden is when he says a fact--or what he believes to be a fact, and the next sentence is "it really does", or he'll state a belief or opinion, and say, "I really believe that." And I just want to be like, "WELL OBVIOUSLY HOLDEN, THAT'S WHY YOU SAID IT!" I get that he's supposed to be an unsure teenager and wants to be sure we don't think he's a phony too and all of that but honestly, stop. I could smack you upside the head. Upside the gray part. BAM.
"What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse" (4). He means that people are saying by, making some kind of fanfare or something to show in some way they are aware that you're going. This I agree with.
Also, that sad good-bye and bad good-bye made me think of Shel Silverstein. Sorry, it's too late to unthink it now.
"'He just kept talking about Life being a game and all. You know.' 'Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.' 'Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.' Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right--I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game" (8). / "His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53). This is from Isherwood's A Single Man, when George is watching the two tennis-playing teenagers. Anyways, I see where Holden is coming from. I know exactly what Holden is saying. It's not so much that I disagree with him, it's just that after a while he gets annoying. I get antsy, you know? Like, GET TO THE BLOODY POINT ALREADY! He just drags and drags after a while.
"People never notice anything" (9).
When he's leaving Mr Spencer: "After I shut the door and started back to the living room, he yelled something at me, but I couldn't exactly hear him. I'm pretty sure he yelled 'Good luck!' at me. I hope not. I hope to hell not. I'd never yell 'Good luck!' at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it" (16).
So Holden bought an orange hunting hat with the flaps and all in NYC. This kid Ackley starts ragging on him for it--saying it's a deer shooting hat. Holden responds with: "'Like hell it is... This is a people shooting hat... I shoot people in this hat'" (22). Call me crazy, but I actually saw it as a really cute scene. The way I imagined him saying it... Kind of like a little kid. It sounds little kiddish, the way he words it... Anyways, this might be why the book ends up in the possession of serial killers or inspiring them or what have you. Problem: phonies. Solution: shoot them. It's the only reference to shooting I see... And instead of just quietly getting agitated by 'phonies' and trying to ignore them and avoid them, this passage could be the "Wait! I have a better solution!" passage. I don't know. I'm not a serial killer. I'd make a pretty poor one at any rate. (PS. Aspiring serial killers out there: Holden is not being serious! He is kidding.)
"He was always asking you to do him a big favor. You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favor. Just because they're crazy about themself, they think that you're crazy about them, too, and that you're just dying to do them a favor" (28). Holden is talking about his roommate, who asks Holden to write him up a composition--even though Holden has failed out (though Holden is very talented in English and actually did pass that). Holden does end up writing him a very nice piece about his dead brother's baseball mitt, but the roommate thinks it's stupid--so Holden just tears it up and throws it away out of agitation.
"Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad" (52).
So Holden leaves school, but instead of going home he wanders around NYC. Eventually he goes to a club and starts talking to a lady... "The band was starting a fast one. She started jitterbugging with me--but just very nice and easy, not corny. She was really good. All you had to do was touch her. And when she turned around, her pretty little butt twitched so nice and all. She knocked me out. I mean it. I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them" (73).
He also get agitated over the people clapping over the piano player--the player was trying to be really show-offy, and in doing so, he really screws the number up, The people were stupid and not realizing he was a screw up, and were clapping and all--Holden says if he was an actor or a piano player he wouldn't want these people to think he was good. "I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet" (84).
And Holden sees a college fellow telling a girl about a fellow who committed suicide on pills while giving his girlfriend a feel. He's shocked at that behaviour, and I don't blame him--there's a bit in Factotum where Henry sees a sailor doing pretty much the same thing to his girl. I want to say that the sailor's victim was eaten by alligators or something weird like that, but yeah. Tried and true way to pick up ladies?
"People are always ruining things for you" (87).
"It's no fun to be yellow" (89).
"One of my troubles is, I never care too much when I lose something--it used to drive my mother crazy when I was a kid. Some guys spend days looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much" (89).
"You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains" (92). Hehe.
Also, Holden describes a book he read about a fellow named Monsieur Blanchard. Just for future reference: the book in question is (according to KGB and Amazon.com) is Warped in the Making: Crimes of Love and Hate. Hm. Seems interesting.
Holden also complains about how Catholics apparently are always trying to figure out if you're a Catholic too. He's talking about how he met a fellow at one of the schools he flunked out of who he was having a great conversation with about tennis and stuff, and the kid clumsily brings up the subject of Catholicism--he asks Holden if he knows where the local Catholic church is. Granted, the kid could have just been asking an actual question--you know, "Do you know where it is?" and so on. Holden is a little bit of the unreliable narrator, so everything is bound to be slanted by what he thinks, and he could have just laid his own take on the situation--the definition of the situation and all of that. Still, whether Holden was right or not, he says you could tell--it seemed like you could tell--that the boy would have enjoyed the conversation even more if they were both Catholic. "That kind of stuff drives me crazy. I'm not saying it ruined our conversation or anything--it didn't--but it sure as hell didn't do it any good" (113).
Holden starts driving me nuts about when he starts complaining about actors. I understand his complaints about actors who are too good--whose acting attempts to be real end up being too real and end up looking ultra-rehearsed anyways. But then he talks about how he's always worried because he's scared even good actors will do something phony in the next instant. That bothers me. Everybody has a bit of arrogance, I admit that. But jeez, chill out! He's like the super-hipster. HE IS THE ORIGINAL HIPSTER.
And Holden goes to the museum and starts talking about how he's always loved it: "The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole... and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat on this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way--I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it" (122). I totally know how he feels. There's something incredibly reassuring about going to museum you know like the back of your hand and having it be the same, even if you haven't been there for a few years. For example, I could probably go through the Peabody museum blindfolded and still be able to tell you exactly where everything is (except for that new caveman bit and the room that has monthly exhibits, of course)... But like the dinosaurs, the ancient animals, the contemporary animals, the birds... I guess the crystals and geodes too, but I never much pay attention those things... Oh, and the kid's room! But I'm too old for the kid's room. But I could describe that room in perfect detail if need be. I need to have kids so I have an excuse to go into the kid's room... Or borrow kids. I like that better. So... Yeah. (Of course, it goes both ways. When they change something it can be shocking and even devastating, though fortunately they've mainly changed the geological exhibits, and like I said, I'm not exactly invested in those.)
...He goes on and says... "I kept walking and walking, and I kept thinking about old Phoebe going to that museum on Saturdays the way I used to. I thought how she'd see the same stuff I used to see, and how she'd be different every time she saw it. It didn't exactly depress me to think of it, but it didn't make me feel gay as hell, either. Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that's impossible, but it's too bad anyway" (122). (Phoebe is his little sister, by the way).
"If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody" (125). Men, this goes for you too. (PS. Holden goes on a date!)
On his date, he starts attempting to explain what about society and people he's so fed up with. The girl of course doesn't get it, but it made me start thinking. I mean, they're the normal our society and culture is stupid blah blah blah that anyone can spit out, but then Holden starts talking about going off to live in the woods. Now, let me back up a little. A few months ago, the book Into the Wild happened to come up in conversation during Intro to Lit. Every kid--except me--hated it. I admit that Christopher didn't act smartly--in fact he acted the opposite of smartly--but I still liked and admired him. My teacher adequately ripped him apart, especially on the fact that it never explains why he was so agitated and had to leave. In the movie they have to make up things. She actually had a really good phrase to describe his unexplained feelings, and I can't remember what it was... It was like "cul de sac ennui", or something. I sort of thought about it, but I put it out of mind for whatever reason, probably too busy to think about it really. But, when I read this part... my first thought was automatically, oh my God, he's Holden Caulfield. Which ended up sort of ruining him in my eyes--he's not some Christ figure, he's not some big hero or idol, he was just a confused, disenchanted kid who didn't know what to do--so he did what he did. So... Yeah. I'm not saying that this book inspired Christopher--it isn't even mentioned--but I guess that maybe it proves that Salinger got the teenage brain down pat.
Anyways, the date flops because the girl is basically a phony in Holden's eyes. Truth is, she's the one doing the thinking--well, I see both sides. Yeah, it's good to do spontaneous things. It's fun. It's life-changing. But at the same time, Holden is like, let's just get up and go! Move somewhere far away, I have $180, and all of that... Which is a stupid decision. Anyways, Holden gets agitated for her thinking things through, and tells her she's a pain in the ass, and yeah. There goes the date. So Holden leaves, drinks some more, and decides to sneak into his house and visit Phoebe.
"I'm not too sure old Phoebe knew what the hell I was talking about. I mean she's only a little child and all. But she was listening, at least. If somebody at least listens, it's not too bad" (172).
Anyways, the title comes from the fact that Holden misheard that old bit, "If a Body Meet A Body"... He thought it was "If a Body Catch a Body". He tells Phoebe that that's what he wants to do--he imagines that there's a big playing field of rye on a cliff somewhere. There's thousands and thousands of kids, and if one starts veering off-track, he can catch the kid and keep them from falling off the end. I don't... I don't get it. Last time I read it I was all, "Holden's such a great guy, protecting those kids!" But now, I'm missing something maybe. I'm just like, that's great Holden... But it's stupid as hell. Maybe there's some fantastic display of humanity or symbolism or something I can't quite get. Maybe it's supposed to be symbolic of him keeping kids from veering off in life like he seems to have or something. Maybe he feels like he's fallen down a precipice. And at the same time... It's like, what makes it so great? I mean, when someone is in trouble, most people's first inclination is to help the person out. I would stop kids from falling off a cliff too. Why are we throwing Holden a big party? Everybody gets excited over this part and I just respond with what I've just written--you know? Maybe I'm just particularly obtuse today.
So Holden tells Phoebe he's going to leave, and Phoebe offers him her Christmas money. He feels guilty about it the next day and goes to her school to leave a note for Phoebe. While he's there, walking in the hallways: "I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another 'Fuck you' on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn't come off. It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the 'Fuck you' signs in the world. It's impossible" (202).
"Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody" (214).
So... There's the book. Like I mentioned, it's being moved to the regular shelf, but it still is worth a read so your hipster friends don't beat you up. Well, maybe not the hipsters in your life, but I'd read it at least to say you've done it. Really, you look like a dunce if you've made it out of high school without reading this. It's not half-bad, but Salinger has done better. So... Yep!
MLA citation: Salinger, JD. The Catcher in the Rye. Bantam Books: New York, 1981.
(This is actually sort of disappointing. I thought this edition was much older... Though it does look like it's from the seventies, so I guess the date makes sense...)
Actually, have I explained what phonies are? Okay, we're not done yet then. Phonies are those people that you feel better than, whether you actually are or not. They're the sort--well... Hm. They seem like they don't get 'it' or 'you'. People that maybe blindly follow society and the 'big man's' ideas without question. So, a hipster would probably say I'm a phony. Like I said, Holden Caulfield is the original hipster. I don't have a better way of putting it.
Also, on an unrelated note--I love animated shorts from film festivals and all of that. On a whim, I searched for one that scarred me for life as a child. I was both pleased and horrified, of course. Enjoy! It was nominated for something in the Sundance film festival x years ago too, I guess.
Last post's cryptic song lyrics: Blame it on the Tetons by Modest Mouse
This post's cryptic song lyrics: I save my grace with half-assed guilt and lay down the quilt upon the lawn, spread my arms and soak up congratulations
So tell me you know what this is about. An angsty teenager fails out of school and goes back home and stuff. It's another twenty-four-hour deal. Fun times.
If you like South Park you've probably seen the Catcher in the Rye episode. I think it's absolutely hilarious, even if that makes me sound like a bad person. See, the Catcher in the Rye was once--and actually in some places it still is--considered a really controversial book because of the swearing and references to sex. Listen. Margaret Atwood is dirtier than Catcher in the Rye. So Mr Garrison explains that this is the book that made Mark David Chapman kill John Lennon. Butters finishes the book and he starts going crazy, like "Must... kill... John... Lennon", and he takes a knife out of the drawer. He goes to his dad and asks him where John Lennon lives, and his dad says that John Lennon is dead, of course. So he's like aww, man! and goes back to his room. ...Okay, it's funnier on the show. (And all the episodes are online, so...)
And we were discussing this one day in Intro to Lit and Mrs CF was talking about how scared she was to read it because, in her words, "Every weirdo is found with a copy of Catcher in the Rye!" She's worried that if she reads it she'll go insane or something. I can relate, I'm scared to read Nietzsche for the same reason.
Sooooo let's go.
First, people tend to put this book's opening as one of the best book openings ever. Here's the opening: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth" (1). Excuse me? That's not best. It's new and different, but come on here. Pride and Prejudice. The Hobbit. A Tale of Two Cities. Just to name a few. I highly doubt Caulfield had a crappy David Copperfield-esque childhood. Also, Caulfield, don't compare yourself to David Copperfield, or your book to his. Call me touchy, but that book is fantastic. Let's be real with ourselves, Holden.
One of the first things--people--Holden talks about is his older brother DB. He says his brother is an author and that one of his best stories is "The Secret Goldfish"--a kid buys a goldfish but won't let people look at it because he paid for it all by himself. I wonder of JD Salinger actually wrote this story--though perhaps under a different title. (There is actually apparently a book called The Secret Goldfish, but it was written in 2004.) And I'm thinking that perhaps this story might supposed to be symbolic or something, but to be honest... I'm not sure how. I have trouble taking this book seriously.
I also wonder if DB is supposed to based off of an author JD Salinger knew, or just authors in general--DB moves up to Hollywood to presumably write scripts, and Holden says that he's become a prostitute.
Okay yeah, one of the most annoying things about Holden is when he says a fact--or what he believes to be a fact, and the next sentence is "it really does", or he'll state a belief or opinion, and say, "I really believe that." And I just want to be like, "WELL OBVIOUSLY HOLDEN, THAT'S WHY YOU SAID IT!" I get that he's supposed to be an unsure teenager and wants to be sure we don't think he's a phony too and all of that but honestly, stop. I could smack you upside the head. Upside the gray part. BAM.
"What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of a good-by. I mean I've left schools and places I didn't even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don't care if it's a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I'm leaving it. If you don't, you feel even worse" (4). He means that people are saying by, making some kind of fanfare or something to show in some way they are aware that you're going. This I agree with.
Also, that sad good-bye and bad good-bye made me think of Shel Silverstein. Sorry, it's too late to unthink it now.
"'He just kept talking about Life being a game and all. You know.' 'Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.' 'Yes, sir. I know it is. I know it.' Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right--I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game" (8). / "His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53). This is from Isherwood's A Single Man, when George is watching the two tennis-playing teenagers. Anyways, I see where Holden is coming from. I know exactly what Holden is saying. It's not so much that I disagree with him, it's just that after a while he gets annoying. I get antsy, you know? Like, GET TO THE BLOODY POINT ALREADY! He just drags and drags after a while.
"People never notice anything" (9).
When he's leaving Mr Spencer: "After I shut the door and started back to the living room, he yelled something at me, but I couldn't exactly hear him. I'm pretty sure he yelled 'Good luck!' at me. I hope not. I hope to hell not. I'd never yell 'Good luck!' at anybody. It sounds terrible, when you think about it" (16).
So Holden bought an orange hunting hat with the flaps and all in NYC. This kid Ackley starts ragging on him for it--saying it's a deer shooting hat. Holden responds with: "'Like hell it is... This is a people shooting hat... I shoot people in this hat'" (22). Call me crazy, but I actually saw it as a really cute scene. The way I imagined him saying it... Kind of like a little kid. It sounds little kiddish, the way he words it... Anyways, this might be why the book ends up in the possession of serial killers or inspiring them or what have you. Problem: phonies. Solution: shoot them. It's the only reference to shooting I see... And instead of just quietly getting agitated by 'phonies' and trying to ignore them and avoid them, this passage could be the "Wait! I have a better solution!" passage. I don't know. I'm not a serial killer. I'd make a pretty poor one at any rate. (PS. Aspiring serial killers out there: Holden is not being serious! He is kidding.)
"He was always asking you to do him a big favor. You take a very handsome guy, or a guy that thinks he's a real hot-shot, and they're always asking you to do them a big favor. Just because they're crazy about themself, they think that you're crazy about them, too, and that you're just dying to do them a favor" (28). Holden is talking about his roommate, who asks Holden to write him up a composition--even though Holden has failed out (though Holden is very talented in English and actually did pass that). Holden does end up writing him a very nice piece about his dead brother's baseball mitt, but the roommate thinks it's stupid--so Holden just tears it up and throws it away out of agitation.
"Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad" (52).
So Holden leaves school, but instead of going home he wanders around NYC. Eventually he goes to a club and starts talking to a lady... "The band was starting a fast one. She started jitterbugging with me--but just very nice and easy, not corny. She was really good. All you had to do was touch her. And when she turned around, her pretty little butt twitched so nice and all. She knocked me out. I mean it. I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them" (73).
He also get agitated over the people clapping over the piano player--the player was trying to be really show-offy, and in doing so, he really screws the number up, The people were stupid and not realizing he was a screw up, and were clapping and all--Holden says if he was an actor or a piano player he wouldn't want these people to think he was good. "I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet" (84).
And Holden sees a college fellow telling a girl about a fellow who committed suicide on pills while giving his girlfriend a feel. He's shocked at that behaviour, and I don't blame him--there's a bit in Factotum where Henry sees a sailor doing pretty much the same thing to his girl. I want to say that the sailor's victim was eaten by alligators or something weird like that, but yeah. Tried and true way to pick up ladies?
"People are always ruining things for you" (87).
"It's no fun to be yellow" (89).
"One of my troubles is, I never care too much when I lose something--it used to drive my mother crazy when I was a kid. Some guys spend days looking for something they lost. I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much" (89).
"You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains" (92). Hehe.
Also, Holden describes a book he read about a fellow named Monsieur Blanchard. Just for future reference: the book in question is (according to KGB and Amazon.com) is Warped in the Making: Crimes of Love and Hate. Hm. Seems interesting.
Holden also complains about how Catholics apparently are always trying to figure out if you're a Catholic too. He's talking about how he met a fellow at one of the schools he flunked out of who he was having a great conversation with about tennis and stuff, and the kid clumsily brings up the subject of Catholicism--he asks Holden if he knows where the local Catholic church is. Granted, the kid could have just been asking an actual question--you know, "Do you know where it is?" and so on. Holden is a little bit of the unreliable narrator, so everything is bound to be slanted by what he thinks, and he could have just laid his own take on the situation--the definition of the situation and all of that. Still, whether Holden was right or not, he says you could tell--it seemed like you could tell--that the boy would have enjoyed the conversation even more if they were both Catholic. "That kind of stuff drives me crazy. I'm not saying it ruined our conversation or anything--it didn't--but it sure as hell didn't do it any good" (113).
Holden starts driving me nuts about when he starts complaining about actors. I understand his complaints about actors who are too good--whose acting attempts to be real end up being too real and end up looking ultra-rehearsed anyways. But then he talks about how he's always worried because he's scared even good actors will do something phony in the next instant. That bothers me. Everybody has a bit of arrogance, I admit that. But jeez, chill out! He's like the super-hipster. HE IS THE ORIGINAL HIPSTER.
And Holden goes to the museum and starts talking about how he's always loved it: "The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole... and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all. You'd have an overcoat on this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you'd have a new partner. Or you'd have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you'd heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way--I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it" (122). I totally know how he feels. There's something incredibly reassuring about going to museum you know like the back of your hand and having it be the same, even if you haven't been there for a few years. For example, I could probably go through the Peabody museum blindfolded and still be able to tell you exactly where everything is (except for that new caveman bit and the room that has monthly exhibits, of course)... But like the dinosaurs, the ancient animals, the contemporary animals, the birds... I guess the crystals and geodes too, but I never much pay attention those things... Oh, and the kid's room! But I'm too old for the kid's room. But I could describe that room in perfect detail if need be. I need to have kids so I have an excuse to go into the kid's room... Or borrow kids. I like that better. So... Yeah. (Of course, it goes both ways. When they change something it can be shocking and even devastating, though fortunately they've mainly changed the geological exhibits, and like I said, I'm not exactly invested in those.)
...He goes on and says... "I kept walking and walking, and I kept thinking about old Phoebe going to that museum on Saturdays the way I used to. I thought how she'd see the same stuff I used to see, and how she'd be different every time she saw it. It didn't exactly depress me to think of it, but it didn't make me feel gay as hell, either. Certain things they should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. I know that's impossible, but it's too bad anyway" (122). (Phoebe is his little sister, by the way).
"If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Nobody" (125). Men, this goes for you too. (PS. Holden goes on a date!)
On his date, he starts attempting to explain what about society and people he's so fed up with. The girl of course doesn't get it, but it made me start thinking. I mean, they're the normal our society and culture is stupid blah blah blah that anyone can spit out, but then Holden starts talking about going off to live in the woods. Now, let me back up a little. A few months ago, the book Into the Wild happened to come up in conversation during Intro to Lit. Every kid--except me--hated it. I admit that Christopher didn't act smartly--in fact he acted the opposite of smartly--but I still liked and admired him. My teacher adequately ripped him apart, especially on the fact that it never explains why he was so agitated and had to leave. In the movie they have to make up things. She actually had a really good phrase to describe his unexplained feelings, and I can't remember what it was... It was like "cul de sac ennui", or something. I sort of thought about it, but I put it out of mind for whatever reason, probably too busy to think about it really. But, when I read this part... my first thought was automatically, oh my God, he's Holden Caulfield. Which ended up sort of ruining him in my eyes--he's not some Christ figure, he's not some big hero or idol, he was just a confused, disenchanted kid who didn't know what to do--so he did what he did. So... Yeah. I'm not saying that this book inspired Christopher--it isn't even mentioned--but I guess that maybe it proves that Salinger got the teenage brain down pat.
Anyways, the date flops because the girl is basically a phony in Holden's eyes. Truth is, she's the one doing the thinking--well, I see both sides. Yeah, it's good to do spontaneous things. It's fun. It's life-changing. But at the same time, Holden is like, let's just get up and go! Move somewhere far away, I have $180, and all of that... Which is a stupid decision. Anyways, Holden gets agitated for her thinking things through, and tells her she's a pain in the ass, and yeah. There goes the date. So Holden leaves, drinks some more, and decides to sneak into his house and visit Phoebe.
"I'm not too sure old Phoebe knew what the hell I was talking about. I mean she's only a little child and all. But she was listening, at least. If somebody at least listens, it's not too bad" (172).
Anyways, the title comes from the fact that Holden misheard that old bit, "If a Body Meet A Body"... He thought it was "If a Body Catch a Body". He tells Phoebe that that's what he wants to do--he imagines that there's a big playing field of rye on a cliff somewhere. There's thousands and thousands of kids, and if one starts veering off-track, he can catch the kid and keep them from falling off the end. I don't... I don't get it. Last time I read it I was all, "Holden's such a great guy, protecting those kids!" But now, I'm missing something maybe. I'm just like, that's great Holden... But it's stupid as hell. Maybe there's some fantastic display of humanity or symbolism or something I can't quite get. Maybe it's supposed to be symbolic of him keeping kids from veering off in life like he seems to have or something. Maybe he feels like he's fallen down a precipice. And at the same time... It's like, what makes it so great? I mean, when someone is in trouble, most people's first inclination is to help the person out. I would stop kids from falling off a cliff too. Why are we throwing Holden a big party? Everybody gets excited over this part and I just respond with what I've just written--you know? Maybe I'm just particularly obtuse today.
So Holden tells Phoebe he's going to leave, and Phoebe offers him her Christmas money. He feels guilty about it the next day and goes to her school to leave a note for Phoebe. While he's there, walking in the hallways: "I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another 'Fuck you' on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn't come off. It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the 'Fuck you' signs in the world. It's impossible" (202).
"Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody" (214).
So... There's the book. Like I mentioned, it's being moved to the regular shelf, but it still is worth a read so your hipster friends don't beat you up. Well, maybe not the hipsters in your life, but I'd read it at least to say you've done it. Really, you look like a dunce if you've made it out of high school without reading this. It's not half-bad, but Salinger has done better. So... Yep!
MLA citation: Salinger, JD. The Catcher in the Rye. Bantam Books: New York, 1981.
(This is actually sort of disappointing. I thought this edition was much older... Though it does look like it's from the seventies, so I guess the date makes sense...)
Actually, have I explained what phonies are? Okay, we're not done yet then. Phonies are those people that you feel better than, whether you actually are or not. They're the sort--well... Hm. They seem like they don't get 'it' or 'you'. People that maybe blindly follow society and the 'big man's' ideas without question. So, a hipster would probably say I'm a phony. Like I said, Holden Caulfield is the original hipster. I don't have a better way of putting it.
Also, on an unrelated note--I love animated shorts from film festivals and all of that. On a whim, I searched for one that scarred me for life as a child. I was both pleased and horrified, of course. Enjoy! It was nominated for something in the Sundance film festival x years ago too, I guess.
Last post's cryptic song lyrics: Blame it on the Tetons by Modest Mouse
This post's cryptic song lyrics: I save my grace with half-assed guilt and lay down the quilt upon the lawn, spread my arms and soak up congratulations
Friday, May 20, 2011
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
First of all, the first time I read this book was two or three years ago. I wasn't that impressed. I'd like to go back to sixteen (or fifteen?)-year-old me and ask what the hell was wrong with me. Then again, the first two times I read Everything is Illuminated, I was unimpressed. Can you believe it? But then the third time I read it hit me, all of a sudden and just like that. Same for this book.
Like Everything is Illuminated, this story is told through three different people--Oskar Schell, Thomas Schell SR, and Oskar's grandmother. First of all, there is Oskar, whose father died on 9/11 two years before, when Oskar was (I believe) six (or seven?). He has found a key in a blue vase hidden away in his father's closet, untouched--Mrs Schell has not touched or moved any of the things in his closet, it seems. Anyways, he finds the key in an envelope and it has Black written upon it. He then decides to find every person with that name in the city in the hopes that one of them knows what it unlocks and knew his father. Secondly there is Oskar's grandmother. She tells the story of her early life to her immigration to America. Her immigration is described, she find the man who was to marry her sister (her sister was killed in the bombing of Dresden) and marries him. She describes their courtship and marriage, and the eventual failure (or perhaps not) of their marriage. Thomas Schell SR is Oskar's grandfather, who left before Oskar's father was even born. His story is told through letters addressed to Thomas that were never actually sent. Eventually he comes back, and appears in the story and meets Oskar, though Oskar doesn't realize until later that Thomas Schell SR is his grandfather. So... let's start!
So the book is peppered with photographs. The very first thing in it is a picture of a doorknob and the surrounding door. It's got an old-fashioned keyhole--I don't know if this was the intent of Foer, but it reminds me of that quote, "People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped". It seems appropriate for the book.
"What about a teakettle?" (1). That's how book starts. It's so perfect and simple, but it's asking everything.
I love that instead of using the cliche of his boots feeling like lead or his feet feeling like lead when he's upset or sad he says that he has heavy boots or that he's getting heavy boots.
So on the way to the service for Oskar's father (it's a flashback) Oskar talks to the limousine driver--they go in a limousine on the way there--and he comes up with an idea: "'Now that I'm thinking about it... they could make an incredibly long limousine that had its backseat at your mom's VJ and its front seat at your mausoleum, and it would be as long as your life.' Gerald said, 'Yeah, but if everyone lived like that, no one would ever meet anyone, right?' I said, 'So?'" (5).
"A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but writing was the only thing that made my boots lighter. One weird thing is that instead of using normal stamps, I used stamps from my collection, including valuable ones, which sometimes made me wonder if what I was really doing was trying to get rid of things" (11). (The worst day is of course 9/11. The book is also peppered with letters from famous folk like Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall and, most of all, Ringo Starr. I marked the page of Ringo's letter too. I don't know if Foer just made the letter up himself, but I'd like to think that it's a bona fide letter for Ringo Starr. That would be so cool!)
"'Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'We exist because we exist.' 'What the?' 'We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened'" (13). This is Oskar talking to his father, pre-death, obviously. This book obviously slants the father (I have to say it like that, I know that's harsh, but it would be foolish to deny a slant when the book has parts written from the son's point of view about his father), but I see Thomas Schell (JR, Oskar's father) as an Atticus Finch-type. I mean, not as good, that's Atticus Finch we're talking about, but still, the closest possible.
Thomas Schell SR's first letter talks about why he does not speak. The ability just kind of disappeared over time thanks to grief--the first word he lost was the name Anna, the girl he was to marry and Oskar's
"I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless" (33). Thomas SR still.
"'We're useful now, but soon we'll be interesting'" (39). Oskar goes to a locksmith to show him the key. Because electronics are coming more and more into play, soon traditional keys are going to be more of an eccentricity than anything else--the locksmith says this bit. I love that line. I went so far as to underline it in the book. There's something so lovely about it, and it's got something higher than what it signifies, but I just can't seem to wrap my head around it.
"'Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true'" (43). For some reason I feel like the old woman of Trachimbrod (whose name I can never seem to remember) says something like this, but I seem to be incorrect...
On page fifty-six there's a diagram of an 'intrepid flyer' paper airplane. I guess it doesn't mean much in relation to this book--I mean it does, that's why it's in here, but my note on it refers more to Chuck Palahniuk's book Survivor. The edition I have is all white, but for a drawing of a plane from above and there are roses or flowers and curlicues about it (or something alone those lines, I don't have it exactly on hand) and the title/author, et cetera. But the edition I see all the time now is all red with big sort of blocky black letters with a curious line design. It's the folding instructions for a paper airplane! Ah-ha! ...Yeeeeep...
"'It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don't you think?' I told her, 'It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone'" (69). Thomas Schell SR finds his ex-wife after he reads that his son died in the paper, and has been living with her ever since, even though neither Oskar nor his mother see him until the book's close-to conclusion. Oskar's grandmother just refers to him as "the renter" as well--anyways, Oskar's mother imagines that it's just an imaginary friend--because the Grandma is lonely.
"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love" (76).
Oskar's grandmother is writing about her younger life: "[My schoolmate Mary] loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?" (78).
So, one of the Mrs Blacks that Oskar meets has a picture of an elephant. She tells Oskar about a study that was done on the elephants' memories--they'd record a call and play it back to see if the elephants could remember the calls, and remember they did. "'What's really fascinating is that she'd play the call of a dead elephant to its family members.' 'And?' 'They remembered... They approached the speaker.' 'I wonder what they were feeling... When they heard the calls of their dead, was it with love that they approached the jeep? Or fear? Or anger?' 'I don't remember'" (96). I wonder. I wonder what that would be like. I feel like it would be cruel. I feel like they'd hope against hope. Maybe that's too romantic--Oskar says that they were probably just confused. Though that's logical, I'd like to think that they remembered and felt hope and love and all of that--confusion too, but beyond just animal confusion.
"'Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are'" (99).
"Sometimes I wondered if she cried when no one was looking" (100).
Oskar's grandmother was pretending to be a monster once when he was littler, and he fell and cut his lip on a table and needed a stitch or two--"'You see, I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster'" (101).
"Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in the apartment as 'Nothing Places,' in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist" (110). Later, Thomas SR remembers being on a Something "island" (because eventually the apartment became just a place of Nothings) and thinking "'How did I get here... and how can I get back?'" (111). But I like this idea. I think everybody needs these places. I think everybody has these places, even if they're not aware of it. I tend to think of my basement as my Nothing place (Dante is privy to it, of course), and the floor of my bedroom too. There are certain spaces you expect to be nothing places, even if you haven't given them quite that name, I'm sure. Just think about it.
"Literature was the only religion her father practiced" (114). Thomas SR is describing Oskar's grandmother and Anna's father. Thomas also mentions that when a book fell on the ground the father would kiss it--one of the men shot by Nazis in Everything is Illuminated had this same trait. I believe this is the man who refused to spit on the Torah even when there was a gun at his daughters' heads--but I don't remember exactly.
"I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person that stays?" (114). Still Thomas SR.
"'So little happens,' she said, 'and I'm so good at remembering'" (130). Oskar's grandmother said this.
"I'm sorry for my inability to let the unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things" (132). All of Thomas SR's letters are addressed to his son--this must refer to Anna. She is dead and gone, and thus 'unimportant', at least in comparison to his wife and his son--and because he leaves them he cannot hold onto them. I guess that hardly needs an explanation, but please humour me.
"I thought about the unfinished scarf, and the rock she carried across Broadway, and how she had lived so much life but still needed imaginary friends, and the one thousand thumb wars" (144). Oskar has not met the renter--his grandfather--at this point, obviously.
"I kept wondering if what I was feeling was at all like falling" (147).
I love Mr Black. Now, Oskar meets a lot of Mr Blacks, but Oskar meets a Mr Black who lives in the apartment exactly above him. He's certainly my favourite character in the book. He's so alive. He's just bursting. I wish I knew someone like him--or could be someone like him. I think some of the reason why I marked one page of his bit is because he talks about Winston Churchill--and Americans love Winston Churchill. We really do, Americans are like Winston Churchill's little fangirls. Also, Mr Black says that he was born on January first, nineteen-hundred--So, he's "'lived every day of the twentieth century!'" (152). Wow! So that would mean--I didn't realize it until just now--that he's one hundred and three, if I've done my math correctly. But really, wow. That's amazing. I wonder what it would be like.
"'So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!'" (153).
"'[My wife] died twenty-four years ago! Long time ago! Yesterday, in my life! ... 'You don't feel bad that I asked about her? You can tell me if you do.' 'No!' he said. 'Thinking about her is the next best thing!'" (154).
"It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me" (154).
"'It's not a horrible world,' he told me... 'But it's filled with a lot of horrible people!'" (156).
"'I've lived long enough to know I'm not one-hundred-percent anything!'" (156).
"'Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!'" (159).
So Mr Black--the one talking in all exclamations--is the veteran of both World Wars, I believe, and a few others, mayhaps--he's not quite specific with it and of course he's seen every other war of the twentieth century... He also has a bed made from a tree he cut down and carved himself. "'Which was your last war?' He said, 'Cutting down that tree was my last war!' I asked him who won, which I thought was a nice question, because it would let him say that he won, and feel proud. 'The ax won! It's always that way!'" (161).
"It made me wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about 'Eleanor Rigby'. It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?" (163). I tried to pay attention to the use of the words incredibly and extremely and close. Mr Black was incredibly close--one floor above--but incredibly lonely. But you don't have to be alone and isolated to be lonely, and vice versa. You can feel alone in a room of people... And so on.
And in the next heartbeat, Oskar immediately thinks of an invention. His idea is that you would absorb a chemical through your skin that would change colour depending on your mood--red would be anger, sad would be blue, pink would be pleased, and so on. The water of a special shower would automatically reset you to your base mood, if you know what I mean. It's so you would know how to treat people--you wouldn't get mad at a blue person, you wouldn't want to ruin the mood of a pink person (although it would make you incredibly guilty if you had no choice), and so on. My favourite application for this invention: "Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I'm happy! That whole time, I was actually happy! What a relief!" (163).
"'That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!'" (164).
Mr Black also reveals that he hasn't turned his hearing aids on for a long time--I just assume that it's been since his wife's death. (He's been reading Oskar's lips.) So Oskar turns them up, and it says that at that moment, a flock of birds flies by outside the window "extremely fast and incredibly close" (165). Like I said earlier, I've been paying attention to when Jonathan uses the words in the title, and in this, all but one word is the title. Was the title referring to this? I have to admit that I never thought particularly about what the title could refer to or what it truly means before just now. Could it be this? It would be loud, very loud to Mr Black. And clearly it was also incredibly close. Hm.
Oskar is upset by his mom. His mom has been seeing a person named Ron--she met him at a support group for people who had lost parts of their families. Oskar doesn't know this, and of course he doesn't understand, and he tells her that if he could have chosen who was killed in the towers, he'd have picked her. He of course instantly regrets it, and then changes his mood in his feelings book to incredibly alone. Again, the word usage.
"We spent our lives making livings" (175). Oskar's grandma, this time.
"He could have rebuilt the apartment by taping together the pictures" (175).
"I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces" (176).
"It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life" (179).
"When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Is that growing world? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness" (180).
"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life. I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me. I would jump with Mary on the bed, even if I made a fool of myself. I would send out ugly photographs, thousands of them" (185). That was all Oskar's grandmother again, no surprise.
"I turned on the radio and found a station playing 'Hey Jude.' It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how" (207). Oskar again.
"You can't love anything more than something you miss" (208).
I already talked about the scene where Oskar's grandfather talks about killing the animals at the zoo. I can't be more specific. I just can't. If you're so serious, it's on page 213 in the hardcover, right next to a picture of a doorknob.
"One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second" (215). And more than that. It's like Everything is Illuminated again--such a beautiful, vibrant history, erased in a little more than one second but just the same, completely erased.
"It was her touch that saved my life" (214).
"'Life is scarier than death'" (215).
After Oskar's grandfather talks about the bombing, Oskar's grandmother talks about 9/11. She stays with Oskar before his mother gets home, but when she goes back home--"When I no longer had to be strong in front of you, I became very weak. I brought myself to the ground, which was where I belonged. I hit the floor with my fists. I wanted to break my hands, but when it hurt too much, I stopped. I was too selfish to break my hands for my only child... I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone" (231).
"'It was terrible. All the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having'" (278).
"I wish we could have wasted time" (281).
By the way, Mr Black had a lot of cards--index cards with names and one word describing the person. Ghandi is war, Marilyn Monroe is sex, et cetera. When Oskar goes back he says he left something in the apartment and looks to see if his father's card was added. Instead he finds his own name. His word is son.
And the very first--or one of the very first Mrs Blacks Oskar visits he asks to kiss. She says no, of course, but when he visits her again she offers to (what!??). He says that they were incredibly close--the word again--and he refuses. He asks to hug her instead, and he starts crying and says that he wishes he could use up all his tears because he wants to be empty--like his Grandmother said (if you'll look a few quotes up).
Also, major spoiler in a second. His mom knew the whole time. Mrs Black--the one Oskar wanted to kiss--called her and told her everything. Meg was really annoyed with that the first time she read it (she just reread it, but I don't know her opinion on it now). I don't know how I feel about it. It's funny, I kind of feel the same sort of indifference I've got with my own life. You know? It happened and there's nothing we can do with it. It is what it is. It's funny, I don't think I've ever really reacted that way to a book. Well, it kind of kills me because he starts wondering if Mr Black ever really liked him or cared about him or just hung out with him as a favour to Mrs Schell. That sucks, the poor kid.
He also describes himself as being incredibly close to Mrs Black's ex--they got divorced in the time between since they first met. I won't spoil everything (like why Mr Black is important), but I think it's an interesting parallel done for a reason. (STRUCTURALISM? Maybe? New criticism...? Damn, I definitely failed that final...) ...Crud, a little bit of spoiler coming up. Or a lot. Still, you've been warned.
Well, this different Mr Black met Oskar's father once. "'For what it's worth, your father was a good man. I only spoke with him for a few minutes, but that was long enough to see that he was good. You were lucky to have a father like that. I'd trade this key for that father.' 'You shouldn't have to choose.' 'No, you shouldn't'" (300).
Did I mention about how I wondered if that letter from Ringo was real? I wonder the same thing about the letter from Stephen Hawking on page 304-305.
Grandmother's bit again: "I tried to notice everything. I've forgotten everything important in my life... Some nights I lay awake for hours trying to remember my mother's face" (308). This scares me so much. This is so scary.
--But on a parallel note... Thomas SR says his problem was never letting go. Hers is letting go. Parallels again.
After the bombing destroyed their home: "I wanted to stay with him. But I knew he would want me to leave him. I told him, Daddy, I have to leave you. Then he said something. It was the last thing he ever said to me. I can't remember it" (307-308). Again... It scares me. It kills me. It's like in A Single Man, when George leaves Doris at the hospital and thinks that he ought to remember the moment because it could be the last time he sees her alive, but he doesn't become emotional, and in a moment he can't even fix upon the moment. (Also, in a moment of annoyance, Wikipedia erroneously lists George in the book as George Falconer. He's only Falconer in the film! Also, as of this very moment, it has been fixed in the characters section. YEAH UPPITY ISHERWOOD FAN!)
"In my dream, painters separated green into yellow and blue... Children pulled color from coloring books with crayons, and mothers who had lost children mended their black clothing with scissors..." (309).
"The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did" (309).
"Lovers pulled up each other's underwear, buttoned each other's shirts, and dressed and dressed and dressed" (311). I don't know what it is about this part, but it grabs me, it does, so much more than anything else...
"The night before I lost everything was like any other night" (313). Again, George and Doris.
"I thought we would be awake all night. Awake for the rest of our lives. The spaces between our words grew" (313). She's talking about that last night--she shared a room with her sister.
Oskar now--I won't explain the big scene with the Renter, I suddenly feel guilty about spoiling things, but...
"I kept thinking about how they were all the names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing that dead people keep" (319).
"The renter reminded me that just because you bury something, you don't really bury it" (322).
And Oskar has a photo of a man jumping from the towers as they burned: "Was it Dad? Maybe. Whoever it was, it was somebody" (325).
And the end--I love the ending. I have to have it be here:
"If I'd had more pictures, he would've flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would've poured inside the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would've left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plan would've flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston. He would've taken the elevator to the street and pressed the button for the top floor. He would've walked backward to the subway, and the subway would've gone backward through the tunnel, back to our stop. Dad would've gone backward through the turnstile, then swiped his Metrocard backward, then walked home backward as he read The New York Times from right to left. He would've spit coffee back into his mug, unbrushed his teeth, and put hair on his face with a razor. He would've gotten back into bed, the alarm would've rung backward, he would've dreamt backward. Then he would've gotten up again at the end of the night before the worst day. He would've walked backward to my room, whistling "I Am the Walrus" backward. He would've gotten into bed with me. We would've looked at the stars on my ceiling, which would've pulled their lights from our eyes. I'd have said 'Nothing' backward. He'd have said 'Yeah, buddy?' backward. I'd have said 'Dad' backward, which would have sounded the same as 'Dad' forward. He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in the can at the end to the beginning, from 'I love you' to 'Once upon a time...' We would have been safe" (325-326).
Perfect ending. I also just realized: a few pages before, Oskar's grandmother talks about how she rarely ever told her sister that she loved her, because they were sisters and they knew. She ends it with how she never said that she loved her sister that night before the bombing--it didn't seem necessary because they both knew. She says that the point is is that it's always necessary. I didn't just realize what I just said. I realized what Oskar was going to say. He was going to say I love you, but he got shy and backed off.
So... Yeah. There's the book. This took me a ridiculously long time to write, but. It's such a good book. Really, you should read ittttt.
MLA Citation Information: Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Houghton Mifflin Company: New York, 2005.
Last Post's Cryptic Song Lyrics: Cinnamon Lips by OK Go
This Post's Cryptic Song Lyrics: Language is the liquid that we're all dissolved in, great for solving problems after it creates a problem
(This one is ridiculously easy, by the way. Ridiculously.)
(And spellchecker hates me as always.)
Like Everything is Illuminated, this story is told through three different people--Oskar Schell, Thomas Schell SR, and Oskar's grandmother. First of all, there is Oskar, whose father died on 9/11 two years before, when Oskar was (I believe) six (or seven?). He has found a key in a blue vase hidden away in his father's closet, untouched--Mrs Schell has not touched or moved any of the things in his closet, it seems. Anyways, he finds the key in an envelope and it has Black written upon it. He then decides to find every person with that name in the city in the hopes that one of them knows what it unlocks and knew his father. Secondly there is Oskar's grandmother. She tells the story of her early life to her immigration to America. Her immigration is described, she find the man who was to marry her sister (her sister was killed in the bombing of Dresden) and marries him. She describes their courtship and marriage, and the eventual failure (or perhaps not) of their marriage. Thomas Schell SR is Oskar's grandfather, who left before Oskar's father was even born. His story is told through letters addressed to Thomas that were never actually sent. Eventually he comes back, and appears in the story and meets Oskar, though Oskar doesn't realize until later that Thomas Schell SR is his grandfather. So... let's start!
So the book is peppered with photographs. The very first thing in it is a picture of a doorknob and the surrounding door. It's got an old-fashioned keyhole--I don't know if this was the intent of Foer, but it reminds me of that quote, "People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped". It seems appropriate for the book.
"What about a teakettle?" (1). That's how book starts. It's so perfect and simple, but it's asking everything.
I love that instead of using the cliche of his boots feeling like lead or his feet feeling like lead when he's upset or sad he says that he has heavy boots or that he's getting heavy boots.
So on the way to the service for Oskar's father (it's a flashback) Oskar talks to the limousine driver--they go in a limousine on the way there--and he comes up with an idea: "'Now that I'm thinking about it... they could make an incredibly long limousine that had its backseat at your mom's VJ and its front seat at your mausoleum, and it would be as long as your life.' Gerald said, 'Yeah, but if everyone lived like that, no one would ever meet anyone, right?' I said, 'So?'" (5).
"A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but writing was the only thing that made my boots lighter. One weird thing is that instead of using normal stamps, I used stamps from my collection, including valuable ones, which sometimes made me wonder if what I was really doing was trying to get rid of things" (11). (The worst day is of course 9/11. The book is also peppered with letters from famous folk like Stephen Hawking and Jane Goodall and, most of all, Ringo Starr. I marked the page of Ringo's letter too. I don't know if Foer just made the letter up himself, but I'd like to think that it's a bona fide letter for Ringo Starr. That would be so cool!)
"'Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'We exist because we exist.' 'What the?' 'We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened'" (13). This is Oskar talking to his father, pre-death, obviously. This book obviously slants the father (I have to say it like that, I know that's harsh, but it would be foolish to deny a slant when the book has parts written from the son's point of view about his father), but I see Thomas Schell (JR, Oskar's father) as an Atticus Finch-type. I mean, not as good, that's Atticus Finch we're talking about, but still, the closest possible.
Thomas Schell SR's first letter talks about why he does not speak. The ability just kind of disappeared over time thanks to grief--the first word he lost was the name Anna, the girl he was to marry and Oskar's
"I'd experienced joy, but not nearly enough, could there be enough? The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering, what a mess I am, I thought, what a fool, how foolish and narrow, how worthless, how pinched and pathetic, how helpless" (33). Thomas SR still.
"'We're useful now, but soon we'll be interesting'" (39). Oskar goes to a locksmith to show him the key. Because electronics are coming more and more into play, soon traditional keys are going to be more of an eccentricity than anything else--the locksmith says this bit. I love that line. I went so far as to underline it in the book. There's something so lovely about it, and it's got something higher than what it signifies, but I just can't seem to wrap my head around it.
"'Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true'" (43). For some reason I feel like the old woman of Trachimbrod (whose name I can never seem to remember) says something like this, but I seem to be incorrect...
On page fifty-six there's a diagram of an 'intrepid flyer' paper airplane. I guess it doesn't mean much in relation to this book--I mean it does, that's why it's in here, but my note on it refers more to Chuck Palahniuk's book Survivor. The edition I have is all white, but for a drawing of a plane from above and there are roses or flowers and curlicues about it (or something alone those lines, I don't have it exactly on hand) and the title/author, et cetera. But the edition I see all the time now is all red with big sort of blocky black letters with a curious line design. It's the folding instructions for a paper airplane! Ah-ha! ...Yeeeeep...
"'It probably gets pretty lonely to be Grandma, don't you think?' I told her, 'It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone'" (69). Thomas Schell SR finds his ex-wife after he reads that his son died in the paper, and has been living with her ever since, even though neither Oskar nor his mother see him until the book's close-to conclusion. Oskar's grandmother just refers to him as "the renter" as well--anyways, Oskar's mother imagines that it's just an imaginary friend--because the Grandma is lonely.
"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love" (76).
Oskar's grandmother is writing about her younger life: "[My schoolmate Mary] loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?" (78).
So, one of the Mrs Blacks that Oskar meets has a picture of an elephant. She tells Oskar about a study that was done on the elephants' memories--they'd record a call and play it back to see if the elephants could remember the calls, and remember they did. "'What's really fascinating is that she'd play the call of a dead elephant to its family members.' 'And?' 'They remembered... They approached the speaker.' 'I wonder what they were feeling... When they heard the calls of their dead, was it with love that they approached the jeep? Or fear? Or anger?' 'I don't remember'" (96). I wonder. I wonder what that would be like. I feel like it would be cruel. I feel like they'd hope against hope. Maybe that's too romantic--Oskar says that they were probably just confused. Though that's logical, I'd like to think that they remembered and felt hope and love and all of that--confusion too, but beyond just animal confusion.
"'Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are'" (99).
"Sometimes I wondered if she cried when no one was looking" (100).
Oskar's grandmother was pretending to be a monster once when he was littler, and he fell and cut his lip on a table and needed a stitch or two--"'You see, I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster'" (101).
"Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in the apartment as 'Nothing Places,' in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist" (110). Later, Thomas SR remembers being on a Something "island" (because eventually the apartment became just a place of Nothings) and thinking "'How did I get here... and how can I get back?'" (111). But I like this idea. I think everybody needs these places. I think everybody has these places, even if they're not aware of it. I tend to think of my basement as my Nothing place (Dante is privy to it, of course), and the floor of my bedroom too. There are certain spaces you expect to be nothing places, even if you haven't given them quite that name, I'm sure. Just think about it.
"Literature was the only religion her father practiced" (114). Thomas SR is describing Oskar's grandmother and Anna's father. Thomas also mentions that when a book fell on the ground the father would kiss it--one of the men shot by Nazis in Everything is Illuminated had this same trait. I believe this is the man who refused to spit on the Torah even when there was a gun at his daughters' heads--but I don't remember exactly.
"I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person that stays?" (114). Still Thomas SR.
"'So little happens,' she said, 'and I'm so good at remembering'" (130). Oskar's grandmother said this.
"I'm sorry for my inability to let the unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things" (132). All of Thomas SR's letters are addressed to his son--this must refer to Anna. She is dead and gone, and thus 'unimportant', at least in comparison to his wife and his son--and because he leaves them he cannot hold onto them. I guess that hardly needs an explanation, but please humour me.
"I thought about the unfinished scarf, and the rock she carried across Broadway, and how she had lived so much life but still needed imaginary friends, and the one thousand thumb wars" (144). Oskar has not met the renter--his grandfather--at this point, obviously.
"I kept wondering if what I was feeling was at all like falling" (147).
I love Mr Black. Now, Oskar meets a lot of Mr Blacks, but Oskar meets a Mr Black who lives in the apartment exactly above him. He's certainly my favourite character in the book. He's so alive. He's just bursting. I wish I knew someone like him--or could be someone like him. I think some of the reason why I marked one page of his bit is because he talks about Winston Churchill--and Americans love Winston Churchill. We really do, Americans are like Winston Churchill's little fangirls. Also, Mr Black says that he was born on January first, nineteen-hundred--So, he's "'lived every day of the twentieth century!'" (152). Wow! So that would mean--I didn't realize it until just now--that he's one hundred and three, if I've done my math correctly. But really, wow. That's amazing. I wonder what it would be like.
"'So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!'" (153).
"'[My wife] died twenty-four years ago! Long time ago! Yesterday, in my life! ... 'You don't feel bad that I asked about her? You can tell me if you do.' 'No!' he said. 'Thinking about her is the next best thing!'" (154).
"It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me" (154).
"'It's not a horrible world,' he told me... 'But it's filled with a lot of horrible people!'" (156).
"'I've lived long enough to know I'm not one-hundred-percent anything!'" (156).
"'Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!'" (159).
So Mr Black--the one talking in all exclamations--is the veteran of both World Wars, I believe, and a few others, mayhaps--he's not quite specific with it and of course he's seen every other war of the twentieth century... He also has a bed made from a tree he cut down and carved himself. "'Which was your last war?' He said, 'Cutting down that tree was my last war!' I asked him who won, which I thought was a nice question, because it would let him say that he won, and feel proud. 'The ax won! It's always that way!'" (161).
"It made me wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about 'Eleanor Rigby'. It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?" (163). I tried to pay attention to the use of the words incredibly and extremely and close. Mr Black was incredibly close--one floor above--but incredibly lonely. But you don't have to be alone and isolated to be lonely, and vice versa. You can feel alone in a room of people... And so on.
And in the next heartbeat, Oskar immediately thinks of an invention. His idea is that you would absorb a chemical through your skin that would change colour depending on your mood--red would be anger, sad would be blue, pink would be pleased, and so on. The water of a special shower would automatically reset you to your base mood, if you know what I mean. It's so you would know how to treat people--you wouldn't get mad at a blue person, you wouldn't want to ruin the mood of a pink person (although it would make you incredibly guilty if you had no choice), and so on. My favourite application for this invention: "Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I'm happy! That whole time, I was actually happy! What a relief!" (163).
"'That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!'" (164).
Mr Black also reveals that he hasn't turned his hearing aids on for a long time--I just assume that it's been since his wife's death. (He's been reading Oskar's lips.) So Oskar turns them up, and it says that at that moment, a flock of birds flies by outside the window "extremely fast and incredibly close" (165). Like I said earlier, I've been paying attention to when Jonathan uses the words in the title, and in this, all but one word is the title. Was the title referring to this? I have to admit that I never thought particularly about what the title could refer to or what it truly means before just now. Could it be this? It would be loud, very loud to Mr Black. And clearly it was also incredibly close. Hm.
Oskar is upset by his mom. His mom has been seeing a person named Ron--she met him at a support group for people who had lost parts of their families. Oskar doesn't know this, and of course he doesn't understand, and he tells her that if he could have chosen who was killed in the towers, he'd have picked her. He of course instantly regrets it, and then changes his mood in his feelings book to incredibly alone. Again, the word usage.
"We spent our lives making livings" (175). Oskar's grandma, this time.
"He could have rebuilt the apartment by taping together the pictures" (175).
"I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces" (176).
"It's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life" (179).
"When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Is that growing world? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness" (180).
"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life. I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me. I would jump with Mary on the bed, even if I made a fool of myself. I would send out ugly photographs, thousands of them" (185). That was all Oskar's grandmother again, no surprise.
"I turned on the radio and found a station playing 'Hey Jude.' It was true, I didn't want to make it bad. I wanted to take the sad song and make it better. It's just that I didn't know how" (207). Oskar again.
"You can't love anything more than something you miss" (208).
I already talked about the scene where Oskar's grandfather talks about killing the animals at the zoo. I can't be more specific. I just can't. If you're so serious, it's on page 213 in the hardcover, right next to a picture of a doorknob.
"One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second" (215). And more than that. It's like Everything is Illuminated again--such a beautiful, vibrant history, erased in a little more than one second but just the same, completely erased.
"It was her touch that saved my life" (214).
"'Life is scarier than death'" (215).
After Oskar's grandfather talks about the bombing, Oskar's grandmother talks about 9/11. She stays with Oskar before his mother gets home, but when she goes back home--"When I no longer had to be strong in front of you, I became very weak. I brought myself to the ground, which was where I belonged. I hit the floor with my fists. I wanted to break my hands, but when it hurt too much, I stopped. I was too selfish to break my hands for my only child... I didn't feel empty. I wished I'd felt empty... I wanted to be empty like an overturned pitcher. But I was full like a stone" (231).
"'It was terrible. All the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having'" (278).
"I wish we could have wasted time" (281).
By the way, Mr Black had a lot of cards--index cards with names and one word describing the person. Ghandi is war, Marilyn Monroe is sex, et cetera. When Oskar goes back he says he left something in the apartment and looks to see if his father's card was added. Instead he finds his own name. His word is son.
And the very first--or one of the very first Mrs Blacks Oskar visits he asks to kiss. She says no, of course, but when he visits her again she offers to (what!??). He says that they were incredibly close--the word again--and he refuses. He asks to hug her instead, and he starts crying and says that he wishes he could use up all his tears because he wants to be empty--like his Grandmother said (if you'll look a few quotes up).
Also, major spoiler in a second. His mom knew the whole time. Mrs Black--the one Oskar wanted to kiss--called her and told her everything. Meg was really annoyed with that the first time she read it (she just reread it, but I don't know her opinion on it now). I don't know how I feel about it. It's funny, I kind of feel the same sort of indifference I've got with my own life. You know? It happened and there's nothing we can do with it. It is what it is. It's funny, I don't think I've ever really reacted that way to a book. Well, it kind of kills me because he starts wondering if Mr Black ever really liked him or cared about him or just hung out with him as a favour to Mrs Schell. That sucks, the poor kid.
He also describes himself as being incredibly close to Mrs Black's ex--they got divorced in the time between since they first met. I won't spoil everything (like why Mr Black is important), but I think it's an interesting parallel done for a reason. (STRUCTURALISM? Maybe? New criticism...? Damn, I definitely failed that final...) ...Crud, a little bit of spoiler coming up. Or a lot. Still, you've been warned.
Well, this different Mr Black met Oskar's father once. "'For what it's worth, your father was a good man. I only spoke with him for a few minutes, but that was long enough to see that he was good. You were lucky to have a father like that. I'd trade this key for that father.' 'You shouldn't have to choose.' 'No, you shouldn't'" (300).
Did I mention about how I wondered if that letter from Ringo was real? I wonder the same thing about the letter from Stephen Hawking on page 304-305.
Grandmother's bit again: "I tried to notice everything. I've forgotten everything important in my life... Some nights I lay awake for hours trying to remember my mother's face" (308). This scares me so much. This is so scary.
--But on a parallel note... Thomas SR says his problem was never letting go. Hers is letting go. Parallels again.
After the bombing destroyed their home: "I wanted to stay with him. But I knew he would want me to leave him. I told him, Daddy, I have to leave you. Then he said something. It was the last thing he ever said to me. I can't remember it" (307-308). Again... It scares me. It kills me. It's like in A Single Man, when George leaves Doris at the hospital and thinks that he ought to remember the moment because it could be the last time he sees her alive, but he doesn't become emotional, and in a moment he can't even fix upon the moment. (Also, in a moment of annoyance, Wikipedia erroneously lists George in the book as George Falconer. He's only Falconer in the film! Also, as of this very moment, it has been fixed in the characters section. YEAH UPPITY ISHERWOOD FAN!)
"In my dream, painters separated green into yellow and blue... Children pulled color from coloring books with crayons, and mothers who had lost children mended their black clothing with scissors..." (309).
"The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did" (309).
"Lovers pulled up each other's underwear, buttoned each other's shirts, and dressed and dressed and dressed" (311). I don't know what it is about this part, but it grabs me, it does, so much more than anything else...
"The night before I lost everything was like any other night" (313). Again, George and Doris.
"I thought we would be awake all night. Awake for the rest of our lives. The spaces between our words grew" (313). She's talking about that last night--she shared a room with her sister.
Oskar now--I won't explain the big scene with the Renter, I suddenly feel guilty about spoiling things, but...
"I kept thinking about how they were all the names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing that dead people keep" (319).
"The renter reminded me that just because you bury something, you don't really bury it" (322).
And Oskar has a photo of a man jumping from the towers as they burned: "Was it Dad? Maybe. Whoever it was, it was somebody" (325).
And the end--I love the ending. I have to have it be here:
"If I'd had more pictures, he would've flown through a window, back into the building, and the smoke would've poured inside the hole that the plane was about to come out of. Dad would've left his messages backward, until the machine was empty, and the plan would've flown backward away from him, all the way to Boston. He would've taken the elevator to the street and pressed the button for the top floor. He would've walked backward to the subway, and the subway would've gone backward through the tunnel, back to our stop. Dad would've gone backward through the turnstile, then swiped his Metrocard backward, then walked home backward as he read The New York Times from right to left. He would've spit coffee back into his mug, unbrushed his teeth, and put hair on his face with a razor. He would've gotten back into bed, the alarm would've rung backward, he would've dreamt backward. Then he would've gotten up again at the end of the night before the worst day. He would've walked backward to my room, whistling "I Am the Walrus" backward. He would've gotten into bed with me. We would've looked at the stars on my ceiling, which would've pulled their lights from our eyes. I'd have said 'Nothing' backward. He'd have said 'Yeah, buddy?' backward. I'd have said 'Dad' backward, which would have sounded the same as 'Dad' forward. He would have told me the story of the Sixth Borough, from the voice in the can at the end to the beginning, from 'I love you' to 'Once upon a time...' We would have been safe" (325-326).
Perfect ending. I also just realized: a few pages before, Oskar's grandmother talks about how she rarely ever told her sister that she loved her, because they were sisters and they knew. She ends it with how she never said that she loved her sister that night before the bombing--it didn't seem necessary because they both knew. She says that the point is is that it's always necessary. I didn't just realize what I just said. I realized what Oskar was going to say. He was going to say I love you, but he got shy and backed off.
So... Yeah. There's the book. This took me a ridiculously long time to write, but. It's such a good book. Really, you should read ittttt.
MLA Citation Information: Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Houghton Mifflin Company: New York, 2005.
Last Post's Cryptic Song Lyrics: Cinnamon Lips by OK Go
This Post's Cryptic Song Lyrics: Language is the liquid that we're all dissolved in, great for solving problems after it creates a problem
(This one is ridiculously easy, by the way. Ridiculously.)
(And spellchecker hates me as always.)
Saturday, January 15, 2011
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Well, with this I've completed both of my Christmas books. I'm a little unused to doing these awkward beginner paragraphs, so just bear with me as you always have.
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on. Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book. Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem). Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties. His partner, Jim, has recently died. George is a single man*. In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George. What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is. We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce). The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human. One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I. He's almost too much. Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him. When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him. You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too. You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.
So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be. Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9). Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style. Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play." And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament." These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.
And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative" (10). Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination? Desperation? Fear? It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing. JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'. That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost. Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism. He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically. So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old. Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one. My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).
"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face--the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man--all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us--we have died--what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed" (10-11).
"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic" (15). I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him". I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while?" (15). This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once. When my poppy died, I was six. Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind. That idea shook me, as one can imagine. My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing. What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch. Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven. In fact, it was borderline creepy. I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling. But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since. It seems impossible to me now.
"And [George's neighbours] are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth--crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese--who are nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27). Death, of course. Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death.
"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35). I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence. What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.
"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought of and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good)" (45).
So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work. On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).
"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65). He is teaching the class about Endymion.
What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it. Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism. What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life. We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany. He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).
"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause'" (70). This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic. Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation. What you perceive is what is real to you. I never quite put it together in this manner. George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point:
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70). Again, the definition of the situation. This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly. Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world. Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71). Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).
George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!). George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical. The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there. Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that. Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know. (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)
"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).
After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course). Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82). Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought. Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work. One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament. It is communion. If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important. The scene is important. It could be a turning point--but, I digress. My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list. I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament! Yes, yes! ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune. Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway. (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)
George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85). To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before. I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).
George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman. In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female. Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact. Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).
"Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive. Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing" (102). He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering? This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least. Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it. Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something. There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.
I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral. Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'. In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral. Family only.
"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138). George's friend, Charley. She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.' 'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!' 'No, Charley, I mean it. The past is over. People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums. But that's not the past. You won't find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).
The two get very drunk. In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim. ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.) Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145). Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.
"'You don't need the past, yet. You've got the present'" (156). George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.
"'What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other. How can we ever be friends?'" (158).
"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).
The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George. George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip. Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*
Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off. George of course now lives alone. "'You know something, sir? I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life! ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?' 'Sure it is!'" (167).
"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176). Possibly my favourite quote from the book...
Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator. This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down. Again, George falls prey to a heart attack. Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for. Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186). It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose. And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22. But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it. Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact. Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact. Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.
Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man. It was great. I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie. However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge. When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track. It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before. Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially. When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock. Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying. Same with the book--it took me about the same time. I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me. Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic. So... that was good in its own way. (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!) So... Where was I? Oh yeah, the book is fantastic. I love Christopher Isherwood's prose. I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today. But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.
*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it. Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas. However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book. It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships. He is also a single man in the terms of the population. He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things. As Kenny puts it--he's invisible. They're both invisible. Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible. Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications. It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.
EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it! So here we go. I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark
First of all, for those of you who recognize the title--yes, this is the book that the movie starring Colin Firth was based on. Correction, the amazing movie starring Colin Firth that was based on this book. Not to let my personal biases creep in or anything... (Ahem). Secondly, what the book is about--a single day in the life of one George, English professor in California in the early sixties. His partner, Jim, has recently died. George is a single man*. In the fact that it is just an average day in the life of George (in the movie it is presented as his final twenty-four hours, as we see him over the day settling affairs before he intends to shoot himself) it is like James Joyce's Ulysses, but this realization came only after the first few pages of meeting George. What I realized first is how much a Leopold Bloom George is. We are privy to everything that goes through George's poor mind, we are immersed in the way George thinks, in his cynicism and his fantasies and, yes, his bathroom habits (though Christopher Isherwood treats it a little more tastefully than James Joyce). The conclusion I've come to is that difference between Leopold Bloom and George is that Leopold Bloom is too human to be really human. One can sympathize with him, but like I said when I originally wrote about Ulysses--he's more human than you or I. He's almost too much. Leopold you watch and you can enjoy and agree with (or be disgusted by) but George is just the right amount of human to really feel for him. When he hurts, you hurt because you know how it hurts because you are him. You want to comfort him and tell him it will be all right because you want to be told that too. You aren't merely an observer connected by humanity, you are him, and you love him.
So, perhaps those are weak connections and comparisons, but let's get to where we want to be. Unsurprisingly, the book starts with George waking up in the morning: "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefore deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home. But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Even now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until--later or sooner--perhaps--no, not perhaps--quite certainly: it will come" (9). Already, unsurprisingly, I have fallen in love with Christopher Isherwood's style. Though George (in the movie) does say a variant of the last line and not the rest, it starts out just as attractively: "It takes time in the morning for me to become George, time to adjust to what is expected of George and how he is to behave. By the time I have dressed and put the final layer of polish on the now slightly stiff but quite perfect George I know fully what part I'm suppose to play." And: "Looking in the mirror staring back at me isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament." These may be out of order, by the way, I can't remember--I've collected the quotes from IMDB.
And, actually, now that I re-notice it, that second quote is taken almost directly from the book: "Then to the mirror. What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative" (10). Heroism out of lack of--dare I say, imagination? Desperation? Fear? It's nothing new, but it is a curious thing. JRR Tolkien had a theory--Marky Mark explained it to us, about 'Northern Courage'. That is, pressing on even when all hope is lost. Clearly George is doing so, but like Isherwood tells us, it is not out of heroism. He is pressing on because he can out of quiet desperation... And yet, he is still following JRR Tolkien's theory, technically. So I guess my point to this tangent is, what would Tolkien have had to say about this?
Also, as for George's age, I forgot he was meant to be so old. Almost immediately after I read that I must have forgotten about it, because I spent the book thinking he was fifty-one. My best guess as to why I should have stuck to that is because it's closer to Colin Firth's age when he played George (forty-nine).
"Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face--the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man--all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us--we have died--what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed" (10-11).
"[George and Jim] talked about everything that came into their heads--including death, of course, and is there survival, and if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic" (15). I originally marked this for those last two sentences--yes they are, that was the word no-one can ever seem to think of--but now I've noticed the use of "for the life of him". I think that's an interesting phrase to choose to insert here, in the remembrance of discussions of death and afterlife.
The very next paragraph following: "Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while?" (15). This is a question I myself struggled with, but very far in the past, to the point where I hardly remember anything more than that I did wonder about it once. When my poppy died, I was six. Now, he was Catholic, and Catholics believe (or at least are more vocal about it) that the dead watch those who they have left behind. That idea shook me, as one can imagine. My only memory regarding my wondering about this took place in my bathroom, standing in front of the full-length mirror, in attempt to see what my poppy was seeing. What I do remember wondering is why he would want to watch. Not out of some inferiority complex or something (at least, I don't think it was), but I just wasn't sure why he'd want to, surely there must be something better to do in heaven. In fact, it was borderline creepy. I was never big on praying, at least not real praying, I do beg, but I prayed right there that he wouldn't watch--that came from mostly embarrassment and again, that creepy feeling. But yeah--the point is, I've been there, I've wondered the same--though curiously, I've never wondered that since. It seems impossible to me now.
"And [George's neighbours] are proud and glad. For even the least among them is a co-owner of the American utopia, the kingdom of the good life upon earth--crudely aped by the Russians, hated by the Chinese--who are nonetheless ready to purge and starve themselves for generations, in the hopeless hope of inheriting it. Oh yes indeed, Mr Strunk and Mr Garfein are proud of their kingdom. But why, then, are their voices like the voices of boys calling to each other as they explore a dark unknown cave, growing ever louder, bolder and bolder? Do they know that they are afraid? No. But they are very afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid of what they know is somewhere in the darkness around them, of what may at any moment emerge into the undeniable light of their flashlamps, nevermore to be ignored, explained away. The fiend that won't fit into their statistics, the Gorgon that refuses their plastic surgery, the vampire drinking blood with tactless uncultured sips, the bad-smelling beast that doesn't use their deodorants, the unspeakable that insists, despite all their shushing, on speaking its name" (27). Death, of course. Or, if you'd prefer, the future, which of course terminates in death.
"There is nothing to fear, as long as you let yourself go with it; indeed, you discover, in the midst of its stream-speed, a sense of indolence and ease" (35). I like it well enough on its own, lopped off at the semicolon, but that didn't seem fair to the rest of the sentence. What Isherwood is actually talking about is driving, but I think it survives rather nicely even without that introduction.
"A veteran, calm and assured, [George] pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly... speaks his opening line: 'Good morning!' And the three secretaries--each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style--recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply 'Good morning!' to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church--a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought of and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good)" (45).
So, as you've gathered, George has made it to work. On the way to class, he converses with a colleague and is distracted by a tennis match, rather, the members of the match:
"His opponent, the big blond boy, already knows this; there is a touching gallantry in his defense. He is so sweet-naturedly beautiful, so nobly made; and yet his classical cream-marble body seems a handicap to him. The rules of the game inhibit it from functioning. He is fighting at a hopeless disadvantage. He should throw away his useless racket, vault over the net, , and force the cruel little gold cat to submit to his marble strength. No, on the contrary, the blond boy accepts the rules, binds himself by them, will suffer defeat and humiliation rather than break them... He will fight clean, a perfect sportsman, until he has lost the last game. And won't this keep happening to him all through his life? Won't he keep getting himself involved in the wrong kind of game, the kind of game he was never born to play, against an opponent who is quick and clever and merciless?" (53).
"'And it's not much fun being beautiful for ever and ever, when you can't even wake up and look at yourself in a mirror'" (65). He is teaching the class about Endymion.
What George was actually teaching the class about that led into Endymion was an Aldous Huxley novel by the name of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Some of the students responded, and their responses are recorded, and on those alone I am very curious about the Huxley book, I think I should like to read it. Here are some of their responses to the book: "The novel is arid and abstract mysticism. What do we need eternity for, anyway? ...This novel... teaches us that we aren't meant to pry into the mysteries of life. We mustn't tamper with eternity. Huxley is marvelously zany. He wants to get rid of people and make the world safe for animals and spirits. To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean... Pete was a good guy until Mr Propter brainwashed him and he had a failure of nerve and started to believe in God" (68-69).
"'The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause'" (70). This comes from a student asking if Huxley was antisemitic. Interesting, because they did have a cause, just not a correct one--WI Thomas's theory--the definition of the situation. What you perceive is what is real to you. I never quite put it together in this manner. George goes on (a couple of paragraphs later) with another good point:
"'A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary'" (70). Again, the definition of the situation. This impresses me, I admit--Leopold and his wife think things here and there that make you breathe a sigh of relief and say "so it's not just me who thinks that, or can't stand that, et cetera"--and George has just turned a way of thinking on its belly. Rather, it is like a stone turned over to reveal all the bugs and nasties of the truth open-faced to the world. Even in this day and age where we'd like to think of ourselves as equal and friendly and perfect George's sentence is still correct and applicable, whether anyone would like to admit it or not.
"'So, let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them than if we try to smear our feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality... We all keep trying to believe that if we ignore something long enough it'll just vanish'" (71). Of course, George speaks well to what he knows, no dollar for guessing where this lecture comes from.
"'...Suppose this minority does get persecuted... political, economic, psychological reasons. There always is a reason, no matter how wrong it is--that's my point. And, of course, persecution is always wrong; I'm sure we all agree there. But the worst of it is, we now run into another liberal heresy. Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?'" (71-72).
George talks about an experience where he takes mescaline--his student, Kenny, asks him if he ever has (outside of class, of course!). George's answer is, compared with other reports of doing so, rather atypical. The only thing is, he says people become rather like caricatures, and though some become beautiful, others seem to be decaying or dying right there. Usually accounts focus on people, and how beautiful everything about them seemed, how beautiful everything suddenly seemed to be, the tangible and intangible and all of that. Just a note there, I've never taken the stuff, so I wouldn't know. (By the way--speaking of Aldous Huxley, one of said accounts was his.)
"'There are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked... Someone has to ask you a question,' George continues meaningly, 'before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions.'" (79).
After conversing with Kenny, George goes to the cafeteria for food (of course). Anyways, that section starts off with "If eating is regarded as a sacrament..." (82). Why I bring that up is that as I've said, I often don't pay as much attention to the title or certain details of books and stories as I ought. Marky Mark gave us a packet of common motifs, themes, symbols and more in literature--some of them are obvious, some of them make sense after some thought, and some shock you when you realize that they work. One was exactly this, that eating is a sacrament. It is communion. If characters are eating together, that is incredibly important. The scene is important. It could be a turning point--but, I digress. My point is that while I don't usually have this giant list in my mind at all times when reading, while I read this book my mind was constantly in harmony with both the book and the list. I was picking thinks out instinctively, and by the time I got here, I almost laughed out loud: Why yes, it is sacrament! Yes, yes! ...I don't know, it just seemed so curious to be so instinctively in tune. Interesting enough for me to feel the need to inform you of, anyway. (I also tried to figure out why Isherwood would have chosen that particular book to have George teaching his class about, which is another like semi-singular occurrence.)
George, while in the cafeteria, reflects upon a book he read in Paris: he threw it away in disgust during the middle of a sex scene. "...Let them write about heterosexuality if they must, and let everyone read it who cares to. Just the same, it is a deadly bore and, to be frank, a wee bit distasteful. Why can't these modern writers stick to the old simple wholesome themes--such as, for example, boys?" (85). To expect that some gay people wouldn't be offended by heterosexuality as some straight people are offended by homosexuality is ridiculous, yet it's not something that I've ever really considered before. I imagine it's like how a white person tends to assume that Mexicans or black people or Asians aren't racist against them, racism only exudes from the white (going back up to what George lectured us on earlier).
George visits a woman in the hospital--in the movie, Jim says that he has never had sex with a woman. In the book, however, this woman, this Doris, is his one and only experience with a female. Of course it happened many years ago, and clearly nothing came of it, and George has accepted it as a passed fact. Anyways, Doris has a Stations of the Cross book on her bedside table (?) and George describes it with disdain, but amends: "Ah, but when the road narrows to the width of this bed, when there is nothing in front of you that is known, dare you disdain any guide?" (101).
"Did she mean goodbye? This could be, soon will be. As George leaves the room, he looks at her once again over the top of the screen, trying to catch and fix some memory in his mind , to be aware of the occasion or at least of its possibility: the last time I saw her alive. Nothing. It means nothing. He feels nothing" (102). He can't possibly assign meaning to the moment until she has died and at that point--the likeliness of him even remembering? This--though I've never been in this exact situation--is a familiar feeling for me, at least. Being unable to assign meaning or remember that exact second--it applies to other things... Kissing someone, or waving goodbye to someone, in almost all situations I try to fix something in my mind that can't be fixed because I can't feel it. Not in some cold evil uncaring way, but it gets removed, like a negative exponent or something. There are exceptions, of course, but rarely are there.
I feel the need to mention that in the book, George is invited to the funeral. Of course, in the book, Jim's family just knew George as a 'roommate'. In the movie, George's relationship with Jim is known for what it truly is, and although a cousin of Jim's informs him of the accident, he is not invited to the funeral. Family only.
"'There isn't anyone who'd make me feel guilty about leaving them.... Now, Geo, be absolutely honest--is there anyone, anyone at all, I ought to feel guilty about leaving behind?'" (138). George's friend, Charley. She is in the midst of a divorce, and the two drink together.
"'The past is just something that's over.' 'Oh really--how can you be so tiresome!' 'No, Charley, I mean it. The past is over. People make believe that it isn't, and they show you things in museums. But that's not the past. You won't find the past in England. Or anywhere else, for that matter'" (141).
The two get very drunk. In the movie, we are told that the two had a quasi-relationship once, many years ago, pre-Jim. ("I have sex with women, but I fall in love with men", I believe is what Colin says to Charley's flirting.) Well, we aren't told anything like that in the book, but Charley (of course she is drunk as a skunk) kisses him as they embrace goodbye and attempts to French kiss him. "Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn't attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no resistance" (145). Again, it works just as well with just those two first sentences, but to erase the last two sentences didn't seem quite right.
"'You don't need the past, yet. You've got the present'" (156). George runs into Kenny at the bar he goes to after leaving Charley's.
"'What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people--well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other. How can we ever be friends?'" (158).
"'They keep telling you, when you're older, you'll have experience--and that's supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?' 'What kind of experience?' 'Well--places you've been to, people you've met. Situations you've been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that's supposed to make you wise, in your later years.' '...For other people, I can't speak--but personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me'... 'Then experience is no use at all? You're saying it might just as well not have happened?' 'No. I'm not saying that. I only mean, you can't use it. But if you don't try to--if you just realize it's there and you've got it--then it can be kind of marvelous'" (160).
The two end up going swimming--Kenny suggests it to test George. George, to Kenny's surprise, agrees to, and they go to the ocean and skinny-dip. Kenny starts walking from the beach still naked and George asks him if he's mad--Kenny laughs it off and asks him: "'We're invisible--didn't you know?'" (164).*
Anyways, the two of them go back to George's to dry off. George of course now lives alone. "'You know something, sir? I believe you've discovered the secret of the perfect life! ...You don't realize how many kids my age just dream about the setup you've got here. I mean, what more can you want? I mean, you don't have to take orders from anybody. You can do any crazy thing that comes into your head.' 'And that's your idea of the perfect life?' 'Sure it is!'" (167).
"'I want like hell to tell you. But I can't. I quite literally can't. Because, don't you see, what I know is what I am? And I can't tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about'" (176). Possibly my favourite quote from the book...
Here I must warn you, lie spoilers.
Instead of the monologue Colin Firth gives us at the end of the movie (which is beautiful), George's narrative turns to a different, un-George omniscient narrator. This narrator ends it beautifully and sadly, yet without any really sadness--it hit me once I put the book down. Again, George falls prey to a heart attack. Though George wasn't planning on killing himself in the book, the night with Kenny still made him realize, you know, he could go on and he would--so it's the same reaction being sought for. Even the way the book ends isn't heartless, never does it seem heartless--maybe out of context I will, but it ends with the same melancholy it began with: "' This [body] is now cousin to the garbage on the container on the back porch. Both will have to be carted away and disposed of, before too long" (186). It's not so much heartless as it is... fact, I suppose. And George died happy, knowing he could persevere--true, he didn't have the chance to, but he died feeling optimistic, and that's better than nothing, right?
Also... Let me go back to depressing you real quick: "He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret"--Joseph Heller, Catch-22. But look: even though they're saying the same thing, there is a beautiful melancholy about the way Isherwood does it. Heller is being bitter--maybe not bitter, but he's being straightforward and painful about the whole fact. Probably that he just says "Man is garbage" has something to do with that fact. Isherwood is nicer about it by saying 'cousin', while in truth he is still saying essentially the same thing.
Well, there you have it--my take on A Single Man. It was great. I'm not going to lie, having seen the movie first, I'm a little more affectionate towards the movie. However, I clearly still have great affection for the book--if you'll note some changes in my little 'Top Books' sidebar, there... I mean, there are differences, but they're not huge. When differences from the movie started occurring, I kind of got disconnected, but by the time Charley appears, things go right back on the same old track. It kind of swells, you know, in the middle, but deep down I knew it would eventually end in the same line as it did before. Despite differences, both ways get pretty much the same reaction, all in all--the end especially. When I saw the movie, I sat for five or six minutes in absolute shock. Finally when I got up and walked out I started crying. Same with the book--it took me about the same time. I stayed there just staring at the page, again, in shock, and after a few minutes I got up to put the book somewhere that wasn't my bed and to put my sonic screwdriver away (it was about 2 AM and my mom had told me to go to bed, so I was reading it under the covers by the light of the screwdriver, because I'm so cool) and that's when it hit me. Actually, that caused a gigantic anxiety attack, which sounds bad but it actually ended up rather cathartic. So... that was good in its own way. (Better at the end, and after all of it completely, though!) So... Where was I? Oh yeah, the book is fantastic. I love Christopher Isherwood's prose. I think I'm going to rewatch this movie tomorrow... Eh... Later today. But yeah, certainly a book well worth reading regardless of whether you saw the movie or not... And what part of the bookshelf will be this book's destination is practically a rhetorical question.
*Normally when I watch a movie, I don't think too deeply about it. Normally when I read a book, I don't think too deeply about the title, unless if I must write about it and I'm that stuck for ideas. However, this movie particularly struck me, and I've thought about the title many times in between first seeing it and while reading the book. It has multiple meanings, clearly--George is now a single man in the sense of relationships. He is also a single man in the terms of the population. He is one single personal tiny man in the whole scheme of things. As Kenny puts it--he's invisible. They're both invisible. Individually, and even coupled, they're invisible. Maybe that seems rather obvious to you, reader, but I can't help but think about those things and their implications. It drives me mad because even though I've worked it out to what seems like the end of the string, there still seems to be so much more that could be there that I'm missing, or I can't verbalize and therefore cannot really comprehend.
Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota, 2001.
EDIT: I've realized that I've said Colin Firth's monologue at the end of the movie was beautiful, but I didn't even think to include it! So here we go. I love it: "A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be."
Answer to last post's cryptic song lyrics: Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 by Bob Dylan
This post's cryptic song lyrics: If heaven and hell decide that they are both satisfied, illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs--if there's no-one beside you when your soul embarks, then I'll follow you into the dark
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