France and Italy and other places …

.. said Robert Dessaix (just after discussing ‘Uzes, a gem’) at about 8.30 into this Slow TV broadcast, meaning perhaps that other places, other countries, the 180 odd there are, count collectively less than France or Italy.

On a more quotidian level it’s the sort of thing someone might say (unremarkably) at a picnic – that’s where they are going or want to live or mostly travel. And thinking about it that’s the two countries I’ve been the most places in outside my home country (perhaps more time all up in London than Italy). I’m sure there are more ads for flat swaps in the New York Review of Books for those three countries etc.

So what is it about the two of them?

nowhere to go

Image of cover of Arabesques

Modern travel:

He was exploring his own mind’s labyrinths rather than the casbah’s. This was a moment of pure self-discovery, not a heroic quest to find the Northwest Passage or the sources of the Nile; this was merely dallying with danger rather than a swashbuckling fight to the death with monstors or marauding natives. Dispiritingly this sort of adventure is the only sort left to most of us now that there’s virtually nowhere left for us to go – nowhere wildly unfamiliar – and absolutely nothing left to do when we get there except photograph it. Dessaix Arabesques p17

.. photograph it or perhaps write about it? … and it might be a mere quibble but there was ever – by dint of personality as much as resources and opportunities – rather few adventure options for ‘most of us.’

Another option: die, or nearly so, doing it (Into the Wild; Touching the Void).

narrowing choices (from 2004)

Susan Johnson Hungry Ghosts Picador 1997

He was of the generation that had indulged in a long, extended youth and which would have trouble coming to terms with the finite nature of life and its unfortunate habit of ageing the body and narrowing choices.

For Anne-Louise life was still a stream in which she was swimming upwards, bound for some unimaginable open sea. She supposed herself destined for happiness as if happiness were a beautiful landing where you stopped and got out, eternally harboured. (p 20)

It struck me that until this moment our troubles had been small, surmountable, that we suffered only bad tempers and yearning. We had possessed the arrogance of the lucky, believing misfortune to be something which happened only to failures, to the unlucky, people who had somehow rendered themselves powerless. I saw now that there was no such division between the blessed and the unlucky, merely life passing over us all. (p 128)

Good: yearning. Next sentence not so good – lucky and unlucky aren’t logical – the belief we are lucky and (others?) unlucky is a tautology;  she seems to hold it true while it is also the chimera she learns to un-know? I like this idea but think that it can be said better.

Same page:

… we were supposed to swim forever upwards, never intending to be swept down.   … this new unexpected diversion … The grief of life cleaved to me and I knew it had come for good, settling within me deeply, beyond light.

[These notes from 2004; the year my ever-progressing narrative definitively stalled! I've just found similar ideas in Simone de Beauvoir's account of her twenties]

seriously fragmented

As you’ll maybe know, I’m a big fan of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow; a magically serious book on the surface about late 20th century Turkey;  collusions as much as tensions between liberals and socialists and fundamentalists and lust and business and pride and history and isolation and fairy stories. It evokes many moods, two of them curiously like the fantastical plot twists of the Master and Margarita or the air of parallel reality in the scenes of the castle with beasts in Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

My last post was a celebration of Philippe Delerms’ celebrations of tiny moments of everyday life; and, perhaps related, I have been reflecting on – or rather justifying the brevity and idiosyncracy of -  my own miniscules,  these blog entries.  Comforting then to read Pamuk reporting his friend’s remark about Walter Benjamin: [His] oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this is why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I [Pamuk] smile and say, “One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.”*

Fragments more than whole stories or argued essays are places from where sparks of association strike in the reader’s mind. Or in this case the author’s.

My first link is to the richness of Elliot Weinberger’s fragments -  An Elemental Thing for example – the text’s purpose being obscure, no plot or line of argument to guide it, the reader’s mind is challenged to make something of it but, if the challenge is accepted, free to move in many directions.

A second: one can’t help thinking of Taleb’s rails against storytelling/cause finding when we seek to mollify history and downplay the randomness of events.

* Orhan Pamuk Other Colours: Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities p xi