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January 20, 2006
On Reading (again)
I got up early this morning. It had been the same the morning before, and the morning before that. Why? I have stopped drinking (largely) and so the body has adjusted to nights spent reading, and writing, and thinking. Reading. That’s what this piece is really about.
I had bought Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking last Saturday—a lazy day, first spent watching gay cowboys and then spent pontificating about the silliness of it all (the culture wars, that is, not the gay cowboys). When that was done I returned home and it was dark and I took up the reading habit again.
Took it up again.
I had lost the ability to read. I still read around books—I still read Harper’s reviews, or studied the NYRB online. I would still talk about books, and I would still purchase them—each practice made with enthusiasm. But I had stopped reading. It had something to do with writing a 20,000 word thesis—and the attendant texts that weighed heavy and thick. It was something in the having to read them. I was subject to an ugly didacticism that I unfairly and unhappily ascribed to all reading.
When I submitted the thesis I thought the curse would lift. I would have the time, the freedom, to read. I made lists of what I would start first, second, third: Joachim Fest’s Hitler; John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration; Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. They sat there and they sat there. I bought more books; I flicked through others. Nothing. It went this way for months, until I picked up Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. I read it in a day. It felt good. Real good. Then… nothing.
Until last Saturday. I had read Good Words about Didion’s latest, and of course her reputation is one of the brightest and firmest in American journalism. I paid $27 dollars and brought it home. I pulled up a chair on the porch and swatted away some mosquitos. I poured a small Bailey’s.
And I read.
I read and I read and I read. I read about Didion writing about her husband’s death, and her daugher’s collapse and eventual coma. Her pain/mourning/grief (she makes clear and smart distinctions between them all) moved me as so I breathed differently.
I read about her reading—in her grief her instinct was to “go to the literature”. She does. She reads Freud, Shakespeare, and a neurologist from California. Also, Cummings, Milton and psychiatry journals. She becomes both an intellectual and visceral expert/victim of grief, and she tells doctors what she thinks about extubation.
What emerges is a text so honest, so brave, that grief emerges as the worst possible demon, and Didion as the strongest and strangest and most beautiful voice of it. Her logic is strangled by grief, but her courage and good instinct never leave her.
Zadie Smith says Didion “is essential” on the subject of death. I have never read Smith, but I want to hug her for saying this. I also want to eat crème caramel with Didion.
I am reading again.
Posted by Marty at January 20, 2006 7:51 PM
Comments
i read that on a 13-and-a-half hour leg of the journey home, in weird aeroplane limbo. it seemed right: the vacuum of grief, the way it suspends some things, devours others, the suction that drags things long-lost loose.
i can tell how much you loved it because the way you write about it sounds in some way didion-ish. it's become part of you.
and i have to add, it's the only book i've ever read that's made marriage make sense.
miss you already, tiger.
x
Posted by: clara at January 23, 2006 9:05 PM
i'm glad you said it first... it did come out kinda didion-ish, huh? can't believe you read that too--it DOES make marriage make sense, and children, and i have neither... christ knows the soft-bomb it'll set off in those who have, or had, both...
miss you too; you asked (text) for the name/number of my house? ** Glendower.
here? well, i'm afflicted w/ a strange rash on me hands, but... the atmosphere is charged... the sun's setting and there's a storm coming... i've viscerally registered the pressure change, and the park is a lusher green. i'm gonna take my book out to the porch & watch it all come in.
oh, & fuck "A Current Affair"
Big Love,
M
Posted by: marty at January 24, 2006 5:42 PM
i sent a book to you, but not knowing your house number, decided that 32 was a good fit for you. go hassle your neighbours at number 32 for it. it's already the second time i bought it for you, doggone it.
just imagine having your own horizon... enjoy the muchness of the weather - it's powdery, toe-aching cold here. i think the word is bracing...
x
Posted by: clara at January 24, 2006 6:12 PM
"32 was a nice fit" for me? god bless you. thinking about it, there may not even be a 32, seeing as for most of the street, the houses are only on one side, and those houses are given odd-numbers. i'll try 31 and 33. i like this, a strange book pursuit...
the word for the weather here is "trying"... 30-odd today, but it's the humidity that's significant. it's night here, the rain pouring down, the inside of this house like an old glove.
i'll find that book.
thank-you.
m
Posted by: marty at January 24, 2006 7:32 PM
oh, oh, oh and oh. the part that got me yesterday was her way of describing how desperately frustrating and enraging it is to be a helpless maternal figure. The part that got me was, "When my mother was near death at age ninety she told me that she was ready to die but could not. "You and Jim need me," she said. My brother and I were by then in out sixties.
you're safe.
I'm here"
p.s so beautiful when she was young: http://www.log24.com/log/pix04/040228-Didion.jpg
Posted by: panda at March 4, 2006 3:52 PM
