[Thursday 3pm #26] The Book of Life September 24, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Library of Babel, Thursday 3pm feature posts, death, writing.6 comments
An extract from The Library of Babel
I was on the bus after work to visit Grandad when my mobile started vibrating in my pocket. Its urgency disturbed me: phones were always for bad news in my mind. This time I was right – it was Dad and he was calling to say Grandad had died a few minutes ago.
My voice turned to a whisper. I didn’t want these strangers on the bus knowing my business. I asked Dad if he was coping okay, a stupid question, but I didn’t know what else to say. He said he was okay. I told him I was nearly at the hospice.
The book I’d been reading sat forgotten on my lap. I felt cheated that I’d nearly got there, that I could have seen him one last time and I hadn’t. I looked all around me on the bus, and then I couldn’t get my eyes off the stupid advertisements on the inside walls. There was nowhere I could go without people trying to sell me stuff.
I wanted someone with me but I couldn’t bear to ring Anita. I didn’t want to say Grandad was dead. Spreading the news would make it seem more real. The best thing would be to tell no-one, and then, as far as the world was concerned, he would go on living.
I suddenly realised I had no grandparents left, then I reproached myself. I was being so selfish. The person I should be thinking about was Grandad. I wanted to think precisely of what had just happened to him, to get past the words to the event itself. His consciousness had been extinguished. As far as his body was concerned, he no longer existed.
Everyone always said how sad it was for the people left behind, but I was thinking how the real tragedy was for dead person. How could it be possible to die? For your mind to be thinking thoughts one moment, and then not thinking thoughts the next? How could it be possible to have a final thought?
He had a final thought, and no-one will ever even know what it was. Let alone what came next for him. I wondered if he had last words. No-one even cared about last words these days. People used to care about last words; they probably used to rehearse them, to make sure they had them right. Your last words were the culmination of your life.
I went a few stops past the hospice. It wasn’t like I was thinking very straight. Stepping off the bus into the dusk, I had to walk back along the highway. Bus shelter ads, fast food litter on the uneven slabs of the footpath and all the cars rushing past with such violence. The sun was gone and chill of the night was setting in. I needed to ring Anita, I still couldn’t bear to. This could be an ordinary Tuesday night, I could be going to a pub – not that I ever did, but wouldn’t it be such a comforting, ordinary thing to do tonight? – or going to see a cheap movie at the cinema. But these weren’t options tonight.
An innocuous blue sign pointed down a sidestreet to the hospice. It was a residential street, lined with trees. None of these people in their houses knew that a long had just ended in their street. It happened daily, people’s long life stories coming to an end in beds inside a building on their streets. Did they know how much was being lost around them?
Dad, Uncle Graham, Aunty Pat were gathered in the room where he had died. His body had already been taken away. The bed was empty and unmade. I gave everyone subdued hugs.
Dad asked in a low voice if I wanted to see his body. I said no. Even seeing the empty bed was too much. I hadn’t seen a dead body this far in my life and I didn’t want to start today.
On the beside table was an old paperback. I picked it up; a bookmark from his local library was stuck between pages 190 and 191. He only had a few chapters to go. While everyone was talking, I slipped the book into my bag.
That night, I sat in the lounge room until one a.m. reading the old paperback. It was A.J. Cronin’s autobiography, Adventure in Two Worlds. Uncle Graham had probably grabbed it from Grandad’s shelf. I wondered if Grandad had read it before, or if it had been one of those books he had bought at a garage sale and been meaning to get to for the last twenty years.
It was a cheap paperback edition from the 1960s, the cover declaring it an international bestseller. I disliked bestsellers, but I had sympathy for the forgotten bestsellers of the past. Their obsolescence was touching, as was their misplaced self-confidence. They encapsulated their time and its passing.
Grandad liked to read old paperbacks. Whether it was chosen for him or he chose it, it was a fitting book for his last read. It was a life story imbued with the same old-fashioned notion of common sense that Grandad lived by, and the same refusal to be subversive, crude or despairing. It starts out in typical autobiographical fashion, full of the young doctor’s struggles to succeed in the world. But as the doctor becomes a best-selling writer, the narrative becomes more and more choked with anecdotes until it seizes up altogether in sermons.
I got to Grandad’s bookmark and powered on past it, reading what he had never got to read and thinking how he would have loved the end of the book, as Cronin at the height of his powers looks back on a successful life in a self-congratulatory tone I found difficult.
I got to the last word and shut the book. The book was finished, Cronin was at the height of his powers and Grandad was dead. But Cronin wasn’t really at the height of his powers. I got onto the internet and looked him up. He’d died in 1981, twenty-nine years after he wrote the story of his life. The year I was born. His narrative had started in 1917 when he was 18, the year Grandad was born. The coincidences didn’t lead anywhere, were all vague, but they gave me a sense of appropriateness. The book was finished, the book was out of print, Grandad was dead but Cronin was dead too.
There should be a book for people to read on their deathbed which explains everything. So that you’ve got something to look forward to. The last book you read should be the one which makes sense of life. But what if you lived on too long, finished that book, and then had to start something else? What were the odds of dying at the right time, when you’ve just finished a book? It wasn’t good to leave a book unfinished when you died. Poor Grandad. At least I’d read it for him, that had to count for something.
I had thought that when I finished the book I would want to sleep, but I still felt dissatisfied. I wished I could write in my diary and capture the feelings and thoughts of the day, but I didn’t feel able to. I wanted to listen to the radio, but there was never anything good on that late and it would wake up Anita. She stirred as I came to bed and asked me if I was okay. I told her I was probably more okay than Dad and I was definitely more okay than Grandad.
[Thursday 3pm #25] Endpoint and other poems : a dispatch from the afterlife September 17, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in John Updike, Thursday 3pm feature posts, book review, death, poetry.add a comment
Reading John Updike’s final book, a collection of poems, is like receiving a dispatch from the afterlife. The poems take us nearly up to the point of his death from lung cancer in January this year. He sent the manuscript off and then he died.
The cover photo has a poignancy to it, with its spontaneous, snapshot quality, the sombre ordinariness of it in its black and whiteness, and the sense that John is about to head off down a path we can’t follow him down, not yet.
The collection starts with the ‘Endpoint’ sequence that takes us through each of his last birthdays, starting with his seventieth in 2002, and then into his diagnosis and swift death. His thoughts range across his life, from childhood to old age, as he reflects on mortality, aging, memory. In 2005 he writes
A life poured into words – apparent waste
intended to preserve the thing consumed.
For who, in that unthinkable future
when I am dead, will read? (p.8)
In hospital, having learnt of his death he writes:
Must I do this, uphold the social lie
that binds us all together in blind faith
that nothing ends, not youth nor age nor strength,
as in a motion picture which, once seen,
can be rebought on DVD? My tongue
says yes; within, I lamely drown. (p. 23)
His final reflections are baldly honest. His poetry is less ornate than his prose, and it makes him seem more vulnerable, frail. He has let me in on the final secret journey he took, which I only learned he had taken when his death was announced that hot, hot January day.
After the ‘Endpoint’ sequence, are pages and pages of other poems, as if to say John is not really dead, as if to say he’s still alive like he should be, like I thought he would be.
[Thursday 3pm # 19] Journal writing : a quote August 6, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Thursday 3pm feature posts, death, writing.add a comment
Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. it proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
- E.L. Doctorow Ragtime, p. 63
[Thursday 3pm #12] Art that never dies? June 18, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in Christian writing, Christianity, Thursday 3pm feature posts, death, writing.Tags: Borges, Surprised By Hope, Tom Wright
6 comments
I picture a different audience for this, my literary blog, than my theology blog. (Theology students, at least the ones at the library I work at, don’t read novels, except maybe Tolkien, to their great loss.) You, my imagined reader, are probably not a christian. In fact, you probably have a distaste for evangelicalism and for anyone who talks about the bible too much. There are good reasons for this. I am in sympathy with you. I have these two sides of me, that aren’t separate in my mind or soul, but are often separate socially – the literary world and the christian world.
But the two have to come together at the moment, because I’m writing a paper for the Newbigin Group (a theological discussion group) called ‘Beautiful Stories : writing novels for the kingdom’. In this paper, I have to use the framework for building for the kingdom laid out by Tom Wright in Surprised By Hope to talk about how my particular activity – writing – might be thought of as building for the kingdom.
Here’s a blurb on Wright’s book from the publisher:
Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation—and if this has already begun in Jesus’s resurrection—the church cannot stop at “saving souls” but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God’s kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life.
While you, my intelligent reader, might be most suspicious of Christians who believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus, Wright uses the resurrection as the basis of Christian hope and action for justice, beauty and evangelism in the world. (You probably like the first two and not the third.) For Wright (and for me) God’s action in the world is not confined to the saving of some individual souls, whisked off to ‘heaven’ after death. Instead, God is at work redeeming, renewing the whole creation, which one day will culminate in an intervention when everything is finally set right.
You might remember weeks ago me quoting Julian Barnes piece on the fate of all writers:
For writers, the process of being forgotten isn’t clear-cut. ‘Is it better for a writer to die before he is forgotten, or to be forgotten before he dies?’ But ‘forgotten’ here is only a comparative term, meaning: fall out of fashion, be used up, seen through, superseded, judged too superficial – or, for that matter, too ponderous, too serious – for a later age. But truly forgotten, now that’s much more interesting. First, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the secondhand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much. Eventually, the publishing houses forget, academic interest recedes, society changes, and humanity evolves a little further, as evolution carries out its purposeless purpose of rendering us all the equivalent of bacteria and amoebae. This is inevitable. And at some point – it must logically happen – a writer will have a last reader. I am not asking for sympathy; this aspect of a writer’s living and dying is a given. At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader. (Nothing to be frightened of : 225)
Yet the incredible claim that Wright makes is that not all art will pass away. For him, God has given us tasks to do here and now that are part of his/her ultimate plans. Part of the task artists have is to depict the beauty of creation – while taking seriously its woundedness and looking forward to its redemption. The picture he offers is of Christ’s resurrected body, still with the nail wounds in his hands – and not as something incidental to Christ, but as the means by which he is identified.
Wright doesn’t know how God will use art (or anything else) in his/her renewed heavens and earth. We have to do our bit, without yet seeing the masterplan. When the time comes, it will fit into place somehow.
A wonderful, comforting idea. But I can’t help thinking of the practicalities. It’s okay for me, writing literary fiction with claims to seriousness and meaningfulness. What about the genre writer writing another crime novel? Does their novel get forgotten or remembered?
Are novels transformed and redeemed themselves? Do they become what they should have been? Does God take their potential and fulfill it? (What would a novel look like edited by God? If the Bible is the book we have from him/her, God seems less interested in perfection and tidiness than we might expect.)
And who reads them? What form do they take? I hope it’s not anything like Borges’ Library of Babel, where very possible book, every combination of letters has been written; that is a kind of hell.
If you want to hear my paper, you’re welcome to come listen at Vose Seminary, 20 Hayman Rd Bentley on Monday 29 June at 7:30pm. Alternatively, stick around and I will be posting it here and on An Anabaptist in Perth.
A film about everything: a review of Synecdoche, New York May 18, 2009
Posted by Nathan Hobby in death, film review.Tags: Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche
4 comments
Spoiler alert
Synecdoche, New York is one of the most ambitious films I’ve ever seen. It has a span of decades and attempts to depict, on a huge scale, themes of mortality, loss, the meaning of life and the relationship of art to life. It’s the directorial debut of my favourite screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and stars my favourite actor, Philip Seymor Hoffman (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Capote; Charlie Wilson’s War).
The film begins mutedly. A sad, poetic meditation comes over the clock radio announcing the first day of fall and reflecting on the decline of all things. The main character, theatre director Caden, is entering the ‘fall’ of his life. Over breakfast each morning he reads a new obituary of someone famous dying.
The mode is mainly realist in these early scenes, as Kaufman skilfully documents the breakdown of Caden’s marriage and the way the small success of his production of Death of a Salesman is unfulfilling. There are beautifully handled, bleakly funny scenes of domestic drama and conflict – driving in the car, their daughter becomes distressed when Caden tells her she has blood running through her body. His wife Adele assures her she doesn’t have blood; Caden tells her it’s not good to tell her daughter she doesn’t have blood.
As Caden’s health deteriorates and he visits doctors in dark Kafkaesque corridors (another text mentioned early is Kafka’s The Trial) his wife leaves for Berlin with their daughter. His search for his daughter becomes a recurring subplot for the rest of the film, a surreal nightmare as he reads of her being tattooed, sees a poster of her as a stripper and final only meets her again as a dying middle-aged women who blames him for what happens.
If I’m getting ahead of the film it’s because from here the narrative fragments further and further; time and reality become unstable. Rather than a cause and effect narrative, we have echoes, recurrences and variations of themes, played out on a loose narrative.
The loose narrative is this: just as Caden’s life has unraveled, he receives a genius fellowship, a massive grant to do something important for his community. He buys a massive warehouse to stage his biggest production ever. Working with a burgeoning cast of actors, he begins rehearsals that are to go on for the rest of his life. He is attempting to recreate the experience of life itself on the stage, with hundreds of scenes in different buildings running simultaneously. The play just keeps on expanding, a new warehouse built over the top of the city to engulf the previous warehouse and blocks of the city, and then another.
Meanwhile, he becomes entangled in a love triangle that has a key part in the film, a triangle that evokes the spirit of Woody Allen, albeit played out in a surreal universe. Over the decades he switches between the two women, but the relationships are further tangled as actors are recruited to play their parts in the play.
Caden’s own part begins to be taken over, first by the man, Sammy, we’ve glimpsed throughout the film, a man who has dedicated years of his life to following Caden, observing everything he does and is now capable of assuming his role in the great play. The idea of Sammy, of an observer who cares about everything someone does, is one which has fascinated me in the past: if only there was someone watching and remembering, then what we do wouldn’t be forgotten and wouldn’t be wasted.
Life and art inevitably blur; what is being staged and what is being lived? I let go of any attempts to completely comprehend what I was watching and just let the scenes delight me in their variations on the themes Kaufman set up.
Just as the whole thing seems impossible to end, more time passes; Caden moves out of the director’s chair and a final apocalyptic scene ends things perfectly. The last years of his life, Caden has what perhaps we might sometimes long for: a director speaking to him through an earpiece, telling him exactly what do next, right down to the final command, ‘Die now.’
9/10
Some photos of that day August 15, 2008
Posted by Nathan Hobby in death.add a comment
A series of poloarid photos of everyday life, indeed one for EVERY day from March 1979 to October 1997. No explanations, no words but the dates themselves. If you like a mystery, go straight to http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/ and see if you can piece together the story yourself. I wish I’d done that, instead of googling to find out more.
Still here?
The fascinating story of one person’s unravelling of the story behind ‘Some Photos of That Day’ is here on the Mental Floss blog.
Basically, a New Yorker named Jamie Livingston took a photo for every day of the last eighteen years of his life. Right up to the day he died.
His death haunts me. The last series of photos have so much gravity and sadness even when people are smiling. I saw them without knowing what was going on, but I sensed it was something important and sad.
I can taste death in the series of photos running into this final blurred one, which seems as close as we can get to a picture of what death feels like.
In 2001, I attempted the same project, but I only lasted nine months. I wish I’d kept it up. The shopkeeper in Paul’s Auster film, Smoke, does it too, but he takes a picture of the same street corner each day.
The final effect of Jamie Livingston’s art is a portrait of life which can’t be achieved through any shortcut. Some novels try to do something like what he has done, but they cannot. It is a gradual, steady, banal masterpiece.
NOW UPDATED EVERY THURSDAY 3PM WST (+8GMT).
This blog is about the literary life of a writer in Perth. Expect reflections on reading and writing and feature posts on whatever's caught my attention, from historical curiousities to autobiographical reflections. I have a separate blog for theology - 
