Monday, June 14, 2010

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski

I could not read this book.

For a while I tried, with a highlighting pen. But I was using the pen to defend myself. By marking it I hoped to turn it into an object of contemplation; I was keeping it at a distance. Eventually highlighting became intolerable—obscene.

So I tried to simply read it. The stories were slow going. I would read a few lines and put the book down and stare at the ceiling. I'd think about my breathing. I became convinced that the book wanted to destroy me.

In the end, in a technical sense, I read the book; but I don't call what I did reading. It felt—feels still—more like surviving. I finished the book and thought: I survived.

Or perhaps I didn't—shouldn't. I don't know if it's possible to make your way though this book without some part of you—perhaps your hope or innocence (which might be nice words for your delusions)—dying.

In The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz calls Borowski "the disappointed lover." He says: "[Borowski's] nihilism results from an ethical passion, from disappointed love of the world and of humanity."

But I don't think Borowski is disappointed by the world. Near the end of the book Borowski writes:
I sit in someone else's room, among books that are not mine, and, as I write about the sky, and the men and women I have seen, I am troubled by one persistent thought—that I have never been able to look also at myself.
That's Borowski's disappointment: He survived the camps. Unable to accept that he'd survived, unable to look at himself because he survived, he put himself into an oven and did not survive.

But first he wrote this book. He used his writing to tell us why he had to die. So we shouldn't be surprised that This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen is unbearable, unreadable. The fact that it's unbearable makes clear that his suicide was justified, necessary.

Most of us are killed by the lies we tell ourselves. He, at least, was killed by the truth—a truth that he resolved to see, before it finally killed him.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

I Will Never Understand

In class today we considered the value of art, and I suggested—hardly the first to do it—that art makes us aware that much of life, much of ourselves, we will never understand. As a follow-up to our conversation, I've asked this quarter's English 1B class to note a work of art that they value, for reasons they're free to keep to themselves.

I open the exchange with this song from Elliott Smith. It's sacred to me—so much so that I drew the title of my novel-in-progress from its lyrics. The fear and hope in Smith's voice give this song an honesty that anyone who has fallen in love will recognize.



I invite those who would like to join our exchange to add your contribution below. If you can provide a link to the work you recommend, that would be great—but it's not necessary.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

The (Im)Perfect Game

All sports are art-forms, and are subject to imperfection. That vulnerability gives art its sense of danger and its humanity. Baseball would lose much of its suspense if a wrong call were never possible.

The beauty of baseball is in its details as metaphor: you never know when it will end; it's extremely difficult to do well; when done well, it's beautiful; our differences are best resolved from a distance; excellence is often not rewarded.

The metaphor also applies to the way the game is umpired. We don't watch the game "because we value the idea that the umpire might screw up." We watch the game becomes it remains beautiful—complex—even when the umpires do screw up. Painful, frustrating, yes—but human, graceful, and worthy of our time.

If you don't believe me, look again at Armando Galarraga's smile when Joyce got the call wrong. Consider Joyce's tears acknowledging his error. Life, like art, is that way sometimes—a record of missed opportunities. What can you do?

Keep playing.