Nathan Hobby’s blog

I did not have a coffee with Paul Auster. I did not shake hands with Paul Auster. I didn’t even really have a conversation with him. But I went to Adelaide and heard him speak (I was just out of the tent in the sun and he was very small but distinguishable) and he was wise, cynical yet generous, amusing and weathered, just as I imagined and hoped for.

And I did exchange a few words with him.

I was waiting in the autograph line wondering what I could say to a man who I had spent so many hours with and who had been so important to me. In the end the exchange went like this:

NH: ‘You’re my favourite writer, Mr Auster - it’s an honour to hear you speak.’

PA: ‘Well thank you. Thank you reading for my books.’

(Paul Auster indecipherably scribbles in my battered copy of Moon Palace.)

NH: ‘In my new novel one of the characters reads Moon Palace.’

PA (looking surprised): ‘Really? Well thank you.’

What happened then? Did he move onto the next person or did I walk away, spoiling a promising opening because there were a thousand people behind me waiting in the hot sun? I don’t know.

The reality is that you can’t hope to know a writer in ‘real life’ with any of the intimacy or depth that you know him or her through their books. It’s just not possible. It’s the wonder of reading and writing. Auster even said something to this effect at some stage, or I think he did.

There was a time when I would have thought of a witty or controversial or brilliant question to ask and I would have asked it, and I would have waited by the tent for hours, and I would have pushed my way into talking to Auster. But I’m 27 now, as of yesterday, and I’m old and shy. I’m mistrustful of people who push their way forward and I’m sick of egos.

I was glad I went, because I had to and because I enjoyed it, and yet it was in an important sense exactly as I feared.

I watched the documentary of the book with Alain De Botton this week and it’s ironic to be blogging about it, because blogging is probably very tied to the status anxiety he talks about. We want success; we want people to think we’re good (or witty or insightful or intelligent or brilliant); we want to be noticed; we want to be remembered; we want attention.

So some of us keep blogs.

If I get over status anxiety it will probably mean not ever, ever, checking my blog stats. And that’s just for a start.

I’m going to read the book, because I’m really impressed. He gets to the malaise of society and of me with insightful and clear analysis, while also being interesting.

I’ve revamped my other blog, http://perthanabaptists.wordpress.com . It’s now called ‘An Anabaptist in Perth’. I’ve made a few posts in the last week, given it a new template, pruned the categories and updated the blogroll.

For the forseeable future, I think I’m going to be posting to it more than to this one. I’ve been living in this dreamworld where I read too many novels (not even writing that much) and not thinking enough about all the questions of faith which I need to explore. So I’m going to be reading less fiction in 2008, hopefully writing more, and spending more time on theology and faith. Working in my new job as librarian at the Baptist Theological College will help with this shift.

The Perth Anabaptists site started out as the blog for Perth Anabaptist Fellowship, the house church which was such a big part of my life but disbanded in April 2006. I imagined originally that lots of people would contribute to it, that it’d be a multi-voiced blog reflecting our theological ideas about everyone having a say. That didn’t work out. Rather than start again, I kept on contributing to it occasionally. Now it’s time has come properly.

I’m re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement ahead of the release of the film on Boxing Day. It’s an exquisite treat. Each sentence is so well constructed, so revealing of some truth of experience, that I feel guilty reading it quickly. It’s like an extremely expensive meal that can’t even be replicated if you had the money: there are only a couple of books this good in the whole world and you can only read them so many times.

McEwan, my second favourite writer, and Auster, my first favourite writer, will both be speaking at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. And I won’t be there. Like a fool, I hesitated, scared to ask for time off work when I was just starting a new job, and the event is sold out. It feels like a dream that first they could be speaking at the same event in the same country as me and second that I missed out.

I had a moment of perfect connection to the album I put on.

I was cooking, and drinking a glass of Cab Merlot (and enjoying it more than I’ve enjoyed red wine for a long time) and I was listening to The Whitlams’ Little Cloud album. The wistful lyrics and sound of Tim Freedman connected with me and felt so poignant.

I always find it so hard to choose an album to match my mood. I misjudge so often - the same way I misjudge my mood for film, novels and treats - but for once I chose well. I wonder if there are truly only a few pieces of music that will match a particular mood.

Tim Freedman keeps talking about the ‘year of the rat’ and ‘the rodent got back in’, and I suddenly realised that he might have been talking about John Howard - famously called (my wife reminded me recently when she dressed as) the Lying Rodent. Did he write these songs during the 2004 election, feeling depressed about Howard getting in yet again?

I remember when I saved up to buy my first CDs. It was the mid-nineties and there weren’t many cheap CDs around. Big W was wonderful because it sold the top 30 for $25; five weeks pocket money, and that’s five weeks of no chocolates or books or comics.

So I didn’t have many CDs.

Me and my brother got a secondhand copy of U2’s The Fly single with our first CD player from the pawnshop. We played it to death, and then Bush’s Glycerine single. I think the first album I bought was Metallica’s Load, maybe followed by Ash’s 1977. I got to know every single song so well. I’ve got this theory that if you listen to a decent CD enough times with enough desire to like it, you will like it eventually. (Am I saying Load is a decent album? I don’t know! It certainly suited who I was at the time.)

Fast forward to today, where there’s a whole CD shop full of great albums for $10, which with inflation is something like $5 in the mid-nineties. I can borrow eight great CDs from my local public library and battle to play them all through once in three weeks. (Back in 1996, my local library only had classical CDs.) I have a very modest 2800 songs on my I-tunes, which would still take me 8 days to play and about 200 CDs mouldering away in racks, 200 LPs inherited or bought at opshops in noughties and at least 50 tapes.

Consequently, there’s not many albums I know really well any more. Not in the way I knew Bush’s Glycerine single with it’s two B-sides ‘Solomon’s Bones’ and ‘Alien’. I think a mindset of acquisition is a dangerous one. If only I had this CD and that one, then I’d be happy, then I wouldn’t need any more.

 Imagine a situation similar to the one in Borges’ story “The Library of Babel”, except with songs, not books. You have every single song ever released. But instead of bringing you happiness, it brings you dissatisfaction, because every time you hit random, you get yet another song you have no affinity with. Just the task of scrolling through your album titles is an odious one. It’s too hard to find what you want. You sound like a radio station.  

Sometimes more isn’t better.

Reading David Copperfield I feel like I understand my grandparents better. Dickens’ England seems closer to their worldview than my own - which seems remarkable, given they were born fifty years after he died in a different country. Mr Murdstone and Miss Murdstone believe in ‘firmness’ above everything else. Manners dominate everything. Order is the most important thing.

It all seems so clear in the cinema. All it takes is passion and dedication,  and you can free the slaves. You can change the world. You can make your life into a burning torch which sets the world alight.

But I get out of the cinema and time is no longer compressed. It passes with all the boring bits left in. The conversations we have to have about what groceries need buying. And the reality: I am not William Wilberforce. I am a librarian with a job to go to in the morning and dishes to be washed.

People talk so much about life being a journey that it’s a standard way to talk and think about our lives.

But is life like a journey?

Journeys have a destination. Journeys are about getting from one place to another. Sure, they’re more than that; we should enjoy the scenery as we go. But in the end, if there isn’t somewhere we are headed, then we don’t set out on a journey.

Life doesn’t have a simple destination like that - unless it’s death. And death isn’t a culmination, a completion of life so far.

Unless you’re Elizabeth Kubler Ross.

Or maybe even in the Christian story - if death in Christian thought is not a destination as such, then it is at least the transition point to the Christian destination. Maybe it is the expectation of eternal reward or punishment at the end of life that has pushed this metaphor of life as a journey.

And that’s a very individualistic Christianity - it doesn’t factor in Christian hope for the renewal of the Earth, for the establishment of God’s reign on Earth.