If there are no games, what is left?

Tolstoy at 20

Early on in his memoir Childhood, which he started writing in Tbilisi (which is written თბილისი in the beautiful Georgian alphabet, or "anbani") at the age of 23, Tolstoy recalls his disappointment when he was around the age of 10, and his brother, a couple of years older, declined to play make-believe while the family are out on a picnic after a hunt. The ten-year-old Tolstoy saw his older brother's point, but reflected: "Ежели судить по-настоящему,  то игры никакой не будет. А игры не будет, что ж тогда остается?" (translated in the 1964 Penguin Classic edition by Rosemary Edmonds as "If you only go by what's real there won't be any games. And if there are no games, what is left?").

Los pasos perdidos

I have been rereading Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos — The Lost Steps. After about 20 years I have been surprised at how much I misremembered the book, as though the jungle of my thoughts had destroyed the image of the book the way the jungle burst apart the hut at the Greeks' abandoned mine.

The main character is a composer who has lost his way in the modern world of city life & its pressures to earn a living which he says "que había torcido mi destino" (that had defelcted my destiny p.11 of the 1956 edition translated by Harriet de Onís) It was "como la de vender, de sol a sol, las mejores horas de la éxistencia. "¡Vacío!" "Además — gritaba yo ahora — ¡estoy vacío!" (like selling the best hours of your life from sunrise to sunset. "Besides I'm empty" I screamed at him "I'm empty" p.24)

He travels up remote South American rivers, and is awakened by the simple pre-historic directness of existence there ... "Por lo menos, aquí no había oficios inútiles, como los que yo hubiera desempeñado durante tantos años." (At any rate, here there were no useless callings like those I had plied for so many years.  p.173)

The narrative traces a classic hero's journey, as per Joseph Campbell's analysis, and presents the protagonist's return to the modern world, and the difficulty of integrating the knowledge/treasure found on the adventure. There's also a final failed attempt to re-enter the dream, to retrace the steps of the adventure.  "He tratado de enderezar un destino torcido por mi propia debilidad y de mí ha brotado un canto —ahora trunco— que me devolvió al viejo camino" (I had tried to make straight a destiny that was crooked because of my own weakness, and a song had welled up in me - now cut short - which had led me back to the old road, p.274)

A way of seeing, a stance, an aesthetic

I'm reading in Mark Doty's memoir Heaven's Coast, and he talks of the lasting influence on him of his close friend, the poet Lynda Hull, who died in a car accident at the age of 39.

"We shared a sensibility, so much so that I can't help but think of Lynda now as almost a way of seeing, a stance, an aesthetic. (Is that one thing the dead do for us, become a set of codes, an approach to describing the world?)"

Die Männer waren vollauf damit beschäftigt

"Die Männer waren vollauf damit beschäftigt, Geld zu verdienen, den sozialen Aufsteig der Familie zu betreiben und gegebenenfalls für einen aus der Art geschlagenen Sohn oder Neffen zu sorgen, der sich irgendeiner künstlerischen oder sonstwie brotlosen Laufbahn verschrieben hatte." — Friedrich Torberg, in Die Tante Jolesch.

The men were very busy trying to make money, improve on the family's social standing, and, where appropriate, support those stricken sons or nephews who were dedicated to artistic or otherwise unprofitable careers.

Just a lot of things to do

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen's new album Old Ideas. An early stanza from the song 'The Darkness' stands out with its plain-speaking directness & economy, and marvellously effective internal rhymes in lines 3 & 5. There is a Buddhist stripping away in this stanza & the song, and it reminds me of something Cohen said in an interview in 2005 about his time in a monastery ... "there you get so tired that you can’t pretend, and that’s all that a monastery is. They make you so tired that you give up pretending."

I got no future
I know my days are few
The present's not that pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too.

How easily the habits of luxury take root

When did the long trajectory to consumerism start? The burgeoning wealth of 17th-century Amsterdam in its mercantile heyday gave rise to a genre of domestic portraiture where families were depicted with their prized stuff. It's not a big step from bourgeois figures showing off & memorialising their purchases, to our advertising-bombarded world where the good life is a photogenic one.

And we have always known that it is essentially a one-way road, and the mechanism by which we easily morph our natures into dependence on comfort, and the innate programming of ambition for worldly success (which pays off in reproductive success) is today exploited by manufacturers and lending institutions to entrap us into slavery. Dostoevsky captures the essence of the demon: "В эти пять лет ее петербургской жизни было одно время, в начале, когда Афанасий Иванович особенно не жалел для нее денег; он еще рассчитывал тогда на ее любовь и думал соблазнить ее, главное, комфортом и роскошью, зная, как легко прививаются привычки роскоши и как трудно потом отставать от них, когда роскошь мало-помалу обращается в необходимость." ... "There had been a time, at the beginning of those five years of her Petersburg life, when Afansy Ivanovich had been particularly unstinting of money for her; he was then still counting on her love and thought he could seduce her mainly by comfort and luxury, knowing how easily the habits of luxury take root and how hard it is to give them up later, when luxury has gradually turned into necessity." (Pevear & Volokhonsky).

Poor wretch! he read, and read, and read

More on the dangers of reading, this time Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads

So he became a rare and learned youth:
But O! poor wretch! he read, and read, and read,
Till his brain turned; and ere his twentieth year
He had unlawful thoughts of many things.

See also earlier posts on the same therme on Dostoevsky and on Flaubert and Dante

Greatest delights deferred

Lucius Annarus Seneca, in Letter XII, writes of the benefits of age: "deditos vino potio extrema delectat, illa quae mergit, quae ebrietati summam manum imponit; quod in se iucundissimum omnis voluptas habet in finem sui"

"It is the final glass which pleases the inveterate drinker, the one that sets the crowning touch on his intoxication and sends him off to oblivion. Every pleasure defers till its last its greatest delights." (Robin Campbell's translation in the Penguin Classics edition)

Invariant under wisdom

Paul Halmos on the difficulty of teaching people to write: "The ability to communicate effectively, the power to be intelligible, is congenital, I believe, or, in any event, it is so early acquired that by the time someone reads my wisdom on the subject he is likely to be invariant under it. To understand a syllogism is not something you can learn; you are either born with the ability or you are not. In the same way, effective exposition is not a teachable art; some can do it and some cannot. There is no usable recipe for good writing."