Monday, April 30, 2012

The Estranged

So, yes, I've returned to Camus.

Years ago his example summoned me to the artist's life. I opted instead for traditional joys, which were real enough; but traditional suffering always comes with traditional joys, and in the end one must choose between living and dying. It's easy to mistake death for life—easy enough that, at some point, just about all of us do it. For many people it's the mistake that defines their lives. For a long time it defined mine.

What I loved most about Camus when I first read him was that despite his elegant, extraordinarily lucid prose, I couldn't understand him. Reading The Stranger, I thought, This is a little, simple book. It's taught in high school. Why can't I understand it?

François Camion, one of my life's many brilliant teachers, released me from that particular anxiety when he pointed out offhandedly that to understand and to love are, at some level, opposites. Ideas like that come from somewhere: I never asked François if that idea came from Camus. It certainly could have.

In any case, my inability to understand Camus became an enduring source of pleasure, and—more to the point—it served as a thrilling artistic model. Be clear, I thought, yet  mysterious. Write sparely yet mythically. Do not articulate the trivial despairs of domesticity. Be in the world—he repudiated the commandments of my youth—and of it.

Of course we're attracted to our opposites, and in many respects Camus is my opposite: African-born; a sensualist, a success with women; hard-working; brave; stylish; free of religious dogma; French-Mediterranean (in a nutshell); a smoker (somehow, that's important); prolific. A romantic figure who managed to be above romance. A man at home in the world, in his time.

But we must recognize something of ourselves in those we love, too, and I had the audacity to think of him as a kindred spirit. In the 1958 Preface that opens Lyrical and Critical Essays, I recognized myself time and again:
I was placed halfway between poverty and the sun. Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything. . . . The lovely warmth that reigned over my childhood freed me from all resentment. I lived on almost nothing, but also in a kind of rapture.
After some soul-searching . . . I can testify that among my many weaknesses I have never discovered the most widespread failing, envy, the true cancer of societies and doctrines.
I don't know how to own things.
I have never been able to succumb to what is called "home life" (so often the very opposite of an inner life); "bourgeois" happiness bores and terrifies me.
I don't envy anyone anything, which is my right, but I am not always mindful of the wants of others and this robs me of imagination, that is to say, kindness. 
I don't think I ever found delight in re-reading a finished page.
Differences and similarities of this order—this intensity—mark most love affairs. The good thing about falling in love with an author is that he's easily returned to. If he's changed, it's because we are. Noting those changes can be both a relief and a heartbreak.

I finished re-reading The Fall last night and with relief still found it incomprehensible. Which probably means that it's the mirror Jean-Baptiste (and, by extension, Camus) meant for it to be.

Art, life, love—the words are synonyms—are all incomprehensible. With Camus as my model, I am, I hope, also incomprehensible—not least to myself. Certainly I hope I'm incomprehensible to those who love me or have loved me. If they have ceased to love me, it's probably because they have decided that they comprehend me.

Camus warns against that decision. While humanity is inclined to interpret incomprehensibility as a mark of evil, of guilt, his work reminds us that it's often a kind of beauty, and worth treasuring.

At least I think that's what he says.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

TFTD

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practice charity.

— Albert Camus, The Fall

Saturday, April 28, 2012

The Laughter of the Doomed

A few days ago I was at Vivace, the only decent restaurant within walking distance of my place. I'd ordered one of their Happy Hour margherita pizzas; I was sitting alone in a booth for two, not far from the bar, watching a Giants game.

At the bar itself two men, one of them about my age, the other at least a decade older, were laughing, talking, drinking. Their laughter made them impossible to ignore. Also I found the face of the older man intriguing. He had dyed his graying hair black; it was swept away from his fleshy, gleaming forehead—away from his nose, too, which dominated his little eyes, his thin mouth, his recessed chin. It was a tremendous, beautiful nose: the nose of a character from Bellow.

I quickly discerned that the two men were talking about money.

The older man was turned toward the younger man as if flirting with him. I envied their laughter—their camaraderie.

At one point the older man acted like he was pushing a button on bar. "$10,000!" Dink. "$10,000!" Dink. Again the laughter. A bit too cliche, I thought.

The younger man said, "They ask me what I do, I say, 'I provide liquidity to the markets.'" [Laughter.] "I provide liquidity to the markets!" The older man, holding his gin & tonic, nearly fell out of his chair.

After wiping his eyes the older man said, "Get up, push a button, back to bed!" More laughter. It went on like that for a while, and only stopped when the Giants scored, which the two men celebrated—this behavior, at least, I recognized—as if they'd scored the Giants' runs themselves.

Anyway, when I was leaving I took some consolation in the fact that they seemed to find their lives—their money—as absurd as I did.

~

Wendell Berry has written an essential essay—the essay of the year, an essay for our time.

"It All Turns on Affection," which takes its title from Howard's End (a novel I've never read), argues that the fundamental orientation of our civic and economic lives must change, that we're doomed if it doesn't. Yet Berry manages to make this argument with the same generosity, resolve, and transcendent tranquility that has defined his writing—his sensibility—for decades. "It All Turns on Affection" offers hope for the rest of us—not least for the discouraged man, still hungry after eating his little pizza, who stepped from Vivace's luxurious bar into Belmont's early evening sunlight and headed for the place he's supposed to call home.

TFTD

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent. . . . That's what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything would be just a joke.

— Albert Camus, The Fall

Monday, April 16, 2012

Reality as Analogy

Entering Half Moon Bay:

Zach:  "Cool.  Look at the sky."
Me:  "Yeah.  Amazing, isn't it?  It looks like a pearl."
Zach:  "It looks like clouds."

Friday, April 13, 2012

Monday, April 9, 2012

Is Consuming Sugar More Dangerous Than Smoking? (II)

In my English 101B class at Chabot College this semester, we're studying the American diet, which increasingly appears to be, by just about any measure, a nutritional and cultural catastrophe.

In an earlier post I asked if consuming sugar is more dangerous than smoking cigarettes. "60 Minutes" finally addresses the dangers of sugar, introducing new research that suggests that sugar might be as addictive as cocaine.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

American Football, American Culture

Care to see how the sausage gets made?



Yeah, I'm tired of NFL America. "Captain America" America. George Zimmerman America. Rick Santorum America. Secret Drone Program America. High fructose corn syrup America. Paul Ryan America. Ke$ha America. Incarceration America. Goldman Sachs America. Kim Kardashian America. Chicken nugget America. "The Avengers" America. Yes on 8 America.

Yet I'm not tired of America, not quite.

After all, we've still got Bruce.