Self-Improvement and Its Discontents

For the record, I am now hopelessly addicted to a certain Web site Robin sent me that teaches geography. It is highly educational and yet fun. I wish there were a site like this for learning the Polish language. Well, there probably is, but not free, as the geography site is. And would I actually use it if I owned it? That is the question. It is humiliating to reflect on how many years I have been married to someone whose first language is Polish while failing to learn anything but the very basics of the language. But then, there are many things that are humiliating to reflect on, all the ways that one could be a better, kinder, more well-informed, more accomplished, fitter person than one actually is.

For some reason I am thinking about this today, yet also conscious that the thought itself is not above reproach, that is marks me as somehow as an idler, someone with the margin of comfort to even worry about such things. The people in Iraq who are trying to surviving another day, the people in many parts of the world who do not have enough even to eat -- they would long for such shortcomings as I complain of.

One thing I started doing, in the self-improvement line, last year that is easy and yet worthwhile is to make a note of every book I read, month by month, usually with a brief comment. It has made me more aware of my reading habits and helped me remember books I might want to advise others to read. It has also made me aware of something I really wasn't before: the sense almost of bereavement when you come to the end of a great book and have to close it and note it down. It's over -- you have been expelled from that paradise. You can read the book again, of course, but it's not the same. A particularly excellent book also makes it paradoxically harder to pick up the next book -- can it possibly be as good as the one you just finished? There is a cure for that, sort of, which is to have several books under way at a time. In this way the pain of finishing and of starting over is lessened. Right now I am reading "Reading Like a Writer" by Francine Prose. I like this, although I find myself not always agreeing with some of her examples of fine writing -- some seem to me overwrought and ponderous, for example the end of Joyce's "The Dead." (But he is a writer I loved deeply at one time and now cannot bear to read, so that might not be the best example.) I am also reading "Master and Commander" by Patrick O'Brian, the first novel in an acclaimed series of seafearing novels set at the turn of the 18th/19th century, a series I have been planning to read for years. The voyage is barely under way, but I am quite at sea, no pun intended. (Though isn't it remarkable to consider how many turns of phrase come from the world of seafaring, living on in language much longer than in most people's lives?)I find myself longing for a glossary; the nautical terms are washing over me like waves in a stormy sea, and I am just holding my head above water.

Hey, Denver, the East Coast called. It wants its snow back.

I am so very, deeply, intensely sick of snow.

By the way, it's supposed to snow again this weekend. For the FIFTH time since the blizzard.

Look Homeward, Angel

I went back to North Carolina, despite Thomas Wolfe's express warnings against it, for the first time since leaving almost two years ago. Robin has already been back a few times but has never really written about it here. I understand now better why; it's a hard sort of thing to put into words, perhaps.

To begin at the beginning, the night before we left, a Saturday, I remember walking along the Promenade in the dark, looking at the lights from Manhattan reflecting in the water and thinking that I did not want to go back South. Maybe at some point, but not that particular next morning. It might just have been journey nerves, but I also felt: my life is here. What good will it do to go back there, into the past?

The following Saturday night, I remember standing in the driveway of the house where we stayed in Chapel Hill, looking up at the stars, thinking not only that I did not want to go back North, but that perhaps I had made a fundamental and unfixable error in choosing one life over another.

What happened in between? I can't really say.

The wide roads that lull you into a trance, the pine trees, the silence. Seeing people I had missed so badly. The smoothness and ease of life, the light. All that, and the oddity of being in North Carolina, a place where I no longer had a life or a home or responsibilities, but only memories. All this created a curious sensation of detachment that at moments reminded me strongly of my very first weeks in North Carolina, almost 20 years ago, when I arrived on a whim to visit a friend and decided to move to Chapel Hill for a while. I remember the sense of openness, of possibility, that here was a place to be optimistic in, and for some reason was reminded of that passage from Conrad that has stuck in my memories lo these decades:

"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more -- the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort -- to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires and expires, too soon, too soon -- before life itself."

But I came back of course, because this is my life now. It was hard to describe how strange Brooklyn seemed at first, as I saw it again with eyes that had gone briefly Southern: cold and gray and stony, the people skinny and crazed-looking and mean, the motorists unforgiving. And I thought: Home at last.

On Location

Robin asked me what it's like living in a town that you can see so often on TV and in the movies: "Sex and the City"; "Ugly Betty," "Seinfeld," "Friends," Woody Allen movies ad nauseum. She didn't ask, but might have, what it's like living in a place where there are also so many literary associations: from Holden Caulfield and Harriet the Spy's Upper East Side, to Henry James's Washington Square and Walt Whitman's Brooklyn Ferry, or to "The Emperor's Children," which I recently completed, set in contemporary New York City.

I guess the short answer is, it is strange. Real places, fictional people. There is that shock of recognition, as I recently had watching a Woody Allen film from 1971 ("Bananas") at Film Forum, when a brief scene suddenly put Mr. Allen and his girl at the Promenade, which faithful readers of this blog know is a place I visit almost daily. "Wow!" I thought. "The Promenade circa 1971!" And stopped paying any attention to what the actors were saying to try to figure out how things looked different or the same. Manhattan was barely glimpsed in the distance, only a brief hint of skyline. The same blocky buildings sticking out into the water from the Brooklyn coastline. The WTC twin towers would have been still under construction at that time, but the camera missed them. There was a good look at a large, square building near the water that now sports a giant banner advertising its conversion to luxury condos; needless to say, the banner was not there. Otherwise, it looked exactly like now, and I found that oddly comforting.

Depictions of New York often seem hilariously unrealistic, like the giant apartments the "Friends" characters lived in or the hermetically sealed, cushy Upper West Side existence of so many Woody Allen characters. But then, there are many New Yorks; it's a hard place to take in in its entirety. Who's to say there are not people out there who actually live in such a world?

The other funny thing is the sense I get sometimes of feeling as though I myself have suddenly stepped into a movie or a book. It's that odd feeling when you are confronted in reality with something you have read of or heard of or seen on TV a million times, the visual cliches of New York. I get this feeling a lot in Rockefeller Center, in Grand Central Station, outside the public library on 42nd Street with the famous lions, looking up at the Chrysler Building, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Look, here I am! You want to find the camera and wave: Hi, Mom!