“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

For weeks now, I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to write about Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” #462 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve started reading books on literary theory to get inspiration. Most books on the subject are awfully dry and filled with the sort of academic jargon English departments are notorious for. 10-dollar words like “philology” and “hermeneutics.”

The issue isn’t that the book is hard to understand. Sure, the dialogue is written in dialect, but it’s not difficult for the average reader to comprehend. And the issue isn’t that the subject matter is inherently depressing, even though you do feel somewhat drained as you flip through the pages. A lot of bad things happen, and it can be difficult to read such a novel when we live in a world with so many bad things happening.

That isn’t the problem with my blogging about the book, though.

The problem is something usual, something that I experience with a lot of the books I read that are on this list: This book absolutely isn’t written for me. As a straight, white, American male, I am about as far from the “target audience” for “Their Eyes Were Watching God” as you can possibly get.

Zora Neale Hurston, **“Their Eyes Were Watching God”**

I feel like I’m bogged down by thinking of this blog as a “book review” blog, which is not what I want it to be.

I don’t want to give books five-star ratings. I don’t want to sell you on a story. I don’t even really want to give plot synopses, to be honest, although it’s hard to think of a way around it. What I want to do is have a chronicle of my journey (if you want to call it that) toward reading these 1,000 books. Something I can look back on in seven years’ time and think, “Oh, that was right around when the election happened and the whole world went to shit. My how time flies.“

The whole thing is steeped in nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time when blogs were popular, when the internet wasn’t an ad-riddled, subscription-based nightmare of trackers and trolls and propaganda. Nostalgia for when we didn’t refer to this sort of thing as “content.” Nostalgia for when the internet was populated by people and you had a sense of community.

It seems as if we’re intent on killing that version of the internet. More’s the pity.

Anywho.

Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty after being nearly forgotten by the literary community. She had become popular during the Harlem Renaissance, but many people thought her work focused on the wrong topics — she tried to capture the everyday lives of black Americans rather than writing about social justice and the struggle for equality, which, naturally, were prominent topics in African American literature.

This is a simplification, of course, but sometimes books go against what are considered “modern trends” and fall out of public consciousness. This was the case for Hurston and many other “Harlem Renaissance” artists.

After Hurston died, scholars like Alice Walker “rediscovered” her writing and realized its uniqueness and importance. Suddenly, Hurston’s work was like a diamond that had been found in the garden, and Hurston has since become somewhat of an American staple — she is still taught in many U.S. classrooms, including my own.

I often think about what it’d be like to be forgotten in that way. It isn’t quite the same, but recently I’ve been wishing I could experience it. I’m not saying I’d like to disappear, but I’ve been having this desire to…hibernate, if that makes any sense. I’d like to experience what it’s like to crawl into a cave, cover myself with leaves, and sleep for three to six months.

In fact, I have been sleeping a lot more than I usually do. When I get home from school, the first thing I do is crawl under the covers for a quick nap. After dinner, I also go to bed relatively early, often sleeping for 9-10 hours.

Is it seasonal depression? Maybe. Nights are getting longer, and the weather has finally turned into the bitter cold that’ll be tapping at our windows around until March. Ultimately, though, I think I’m just craving the feeling of sanctuary you get when you crawl into a warm bed in winter. The coziness, the safety. Much like I imagine a hibernating bear feels when her nature tells her it’s time to go into her cave. No expectations, no responsibilities, just me and my earthen hovel and my leafy blanket.

It’s interesting to consider the impact of a book upon someone who isn’t the book’s target demographic. I said earlier that “Their Eyes Were Watching God” wasn’t “for me,” but that thought is slightly more complicated than it seems on the surface. Whatever literary theory you subscribe to (which may be no theory at all, and God bless you), it’s difficult to read a book if you can’t put yourself into it. There have to be characters, themes, settings, plot points, whatever that resonate with you. Or, at least, that’s the way our modern education system has trained us to approach literature. Right or wrong, we read books and ask ourselves, “How does this make you feel?”

In the case of Zora Neale Hurston, I can recognize that there are elements in the novel that readers might identify with, but they just don’t hit me the way I think they’re supposed to. I don’t know any people who are like these characters, I’ve never had these sorts of marital issues, and I’ve never been to Florida.

I would probably say that it’s a “difficult” book for these reasons, but there are others. There’s a lot of dialect in Their Eyes. It’s enough that you often get the impression that you’re reading two separate books.

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

The prose itself is not written in this voice, but whenever we hear a character talk, that’s what it looks like. It made the novel an interesting and…er, novel experience, constantly switching between standard prose and prose in dialect, and there are many people in American society who use a variety of voices when they speak. Depending on the context, people can often have what you might call “dual personalities.”

Some of my students are prime examples. To hear them speak in the hallways is one thing, but the way they talk inside the classroom makes them come off as entirely different people. Are teenagers everywhere like this? Probably, to some extent. Teenagers all over the world act one way with their peers and another way around adults.

That, I suppose, is something we all can identify with. While all of us don’t have modes of speaking with such dramatic and noticeable differences, there are times when all of us feel like we are someone we’re not.

In my case, I often feel like I’m pretending to be a “good teacher.” I’m not sure if I even want to be what I’d call a “good teacher.” I’m a competent teacher — don’t get me wrong — but the line between “competent” and “good” is one that, in my own mind, I’m not sure I can cross. “Competent” teachers have to do a lot, but “good” teachers take on extra. Often times, they take on more than is healthy.

There are teachers at my school who are there 11 or 12 hours a day, teaching regular classes and then doing sports or activities after. They work on weekends, organize field trips, do fundraisers, and generally throw everything they’ve got into the teaching profession. I do care about my students, and I do everything I can to make my classes engaging and useful, but when that final bell rings, I want to go home and do other things. I want to have a life outside the building.

When I first became a teacher, things were different. I wanted a career I could throw myself into with every element of my being. I wanted to be like one of the characters on The West Wing, a kind-of Sam Seaborn who sleeps, eats, and breathes his work. The problem with shows like that is the fallacy that there are intelligent and moral people in charge of things. In reality, there are no whiz-kid doctors who’ll stay up all night to diagnose your medical condition, there are no tough-as-nails police detectives working overtime to catch the guy who broke into your house, and there certainly are no brilliant political officers who are trying to make the world a better place.

I know it’s putting awfully high expectations on myself when I say that I need to work 60-hour weeks in order to be “good” at my job. One thing that you learn if you study mindfulness or Eastern philosophies is that a person should be okay with being “okay.” You don’t need to be brilliant — it’s enough just to exist.

That’s just a tough pill to swallow when you live in a country filled with bozos who brag about how little sleep they’re getting or how much overtime they’re putting in. As if it’s some kind of badge of honor to work yourself to the bone for a system that couldn’t give less of a shit about you.

Last night, a freezing rain fell that covered the whole city in a layer of ice. Sarah and I went out to get some drive-thru chicken and quickly realized that we wouldn’t be able to get out of our neighborhood — there was no way to drive up even the slightest hill. We saw cars hopping curbs, cars that were stuck at intersections unable to move forward or backward, people who’d gone out for a walk and were slipping helplessly down the sidewalks.

Some nights you’re just stuck. Nature will always remind you of that fact.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

I try to emphasize in this blog (as well as in the classes I teach) that literature is a conversation that’s been going on since the invention of history. Authors respond to authors, books to books, and #21 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die is Maya Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” It drives home one of the practical reasons why viewing literature this way is apt: For years and years in America, people were excluded from that conversation.

I just finished teaching a unit with my Juniors in which we had a chance to read and discuss people like Frederick Douglass, as well as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other authors from the Harlem Renaissance. “Hughes was one of the first black Americans who was able to make a living as an artist,” I tell my students. “That’s an astounding fact when you consider he’s the same age as my great-grandmother.”

Maya Angelou is one of the major African American voices to follow the likes of Hughes and Bontemps and has become essential reading for anyone who is interested in African American literature.

I read the book mostly while sitting at my desk in the teacher’s plan center, thinking about how I just don’t “get it.” Not that I dislike it or don’t understand, but that it wasn’t a book meant for me.

Race and issues of race were about as far from my experience growing up as they could have been. The town I’m from has about 1,500 people in it and is about as ethnically diverse as Sweden — very white, very middle-class; a town that existed as a place where highways met and where there was a John Deere dealership. I don’t consider that a good thing, necessarily (it was a safe place to grow up, certainly), but books like Caged Bird were one of my only windows into the experiences of black America.

Was it a good window or a window that provided an accurate depiction? Probably not. I can only try to understand what Angelou is talking about. I didn’t “get it.”

Crispity, Crunchity, Peanut Butter-y

One of my first memories of Angelou comes from Saturday Night Live, in a satirical sketch starring David Allen Grier. It’s a sketch I still randomly quote to this day:

The joke being, I suppose, that Maya Angelou would never stoop so low as to to advertise for anything, much less a candy bar. Such was her integrity that the very notion of her appearing in a commercial was comical. That was my impression of her — she was a serious woman who talked about serious issues and spoke the kind of poetry you were supposed to frown at and say, “Hmm, yes, I see,” in very sombre tones.

Which is, quite honestly, one of the things that has prevented me from ever really connecting with Angelou’s work — it’s the sort of thing that seems to preclude humor. The sort of thing that you daren’t laugh at or make light of.

Oh, there’re funny bits in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — or, at least, bits that are supposed to be funny — but it’s the sort of humor that you feel obliged to laugh at. Like when your drunk uncle tells the same joke for the 10th time that Christmas and you better laugh or you’re going to get it — that’s the sort of energy Angelou brings to telling a story about how she laughed so hard one time in church that she peed her pants.

A Book Club Member’s Book of the Month Club Book

The particular edition of Caged Bird that I have features a foreword by Oprah Winfrey, who uses her introduction to express her disbelief at finally reading a book that spoke to her, a book that seemed to capture an experience both she and Angelou shared — namely, the experience of growing up as an awkward black girl.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt the same way about a book. Sure, there have been books that I liked — I would even say there are a few books that I have absolutely loved — but I’ve never felt as if an author were reaching across some unfathomable gulf to tap directly into my brain, saying, “We’re alike, you and I.”

Mostly, I admire books by thinking, “Jesus Christ that author is talented.”

Even if it were possible that I could connect with an author like that, and it very well may be, I’m not sure I’d want to read that book. I barely like myself on the best of days and don’t particularly want to spend any more time in my own head than absolutely necessary. (Hello, darkness!) And if a person were able to capture what it was like where I was born and raised — really capture rural Nebraska — I probably wouldn’t care. It’d be like accurately capturing the essence of a random pigeon. Small towns are mostly boring and there’s a reason why Nebraska is called “fly-over country.”

(I have a theory that books and movies are only set in Nebraska if the authors/producers want a setting that is a metaphor for depression. I don’t have a problem with it. I think that’s fair.)

Still, I suppose I do take for granted that there are a plethora of books and movies that are about little white kids who go off on adventures. I never had to deal with the dissonance of wanting to play with a doll that didn’t share my skin color because I thought the other one was “normal.” That’s part of what Angelou is responding to — there’s an inherent question of why can’t we normalize books about the black experience?

Which is a fair question that a lot of people have asked and now it seems like we’re making progress in that direction. Or, at least, there are more published black authors today than at any point in America’s history. That doesn’t make up for anything, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Even if Maya Angelou is awfully dry.

What’s That Tractor For, Though

I’ve known several people who were that way — the kind of people that you’d just better laugh at or there’s going to be trouble. One of them was Grandpa Don, who was the sort of person who, when he retired, moved from a regular house in Iowa to a full-on farm where he had a tractor and a barn even though he wasn’t a goddamned farmer. He was just a guy who listened to Rush Limbaugh and thought farming was just peachy.

At Grandpa Don’s funeral, one of my cousins stood up at the pulpit and told a story about how Don one time pulled him, my cousin, and my other cousin around on a trailer behind his tractor. The boys were eating apples for some reason — that’s what they did for fun, I guess, was drive around on a tractor trailer and eat apples all afternoon. Anywho, Don cut a massive fart, presumably loud enough to be heard over the sound of a tractor, and turned around to say, “How do you like them apples?”

Everyone in the church laughed when my cousin told that story, even though nobody thought it was funny. Even my cousin didn’t really think it was funny — he’d only gotten up to tell the story because his mom had made him. It was a funeral, goddamn it, and you were supposed to tell stories. And you’d better laugh at those stories because we’re a family and that’s what family’s do.

I didn’t cry when we buried Grandpa Don, even though I very explicitly tried to. I stood right next to the casket and looked at the hole in the ground and thought, “Alright, better start the waterworks.” I got sidetracked though when everyone said the Lord’s prayer and I thought, “When in the hell did everyone memorize this nonsense?”

Seriously, were we supposed to know that? Just, like, at the drop of a hat?

We’re Dying to Know

Maya Angelou died in 2014 when I was in South Korea teaching kids how to write essays very quickly.

I said to the children, “Maya Angelou died today. Do any of you know who that is? Er, was?”

They all unsurprisingly said that they didn’t. South Korea is just as homogenous as the town I grew up in — almost everyone who lives in Korea is Korean. And, while Koreans are mostly….ambivalent towards the Japanese, there isn’t a whole lot of racism going around, and thus there has never been a struggle to overcome it. They’ve got a whole different set of cultural issues; sexism, ageism, a tremendous teen suicide rate; they’re just as messed up as Americans are, but for entirely different reasons.

I thought about how best to explain who Maya Angelou had been, but struggled to do so without bringing up how goddamned racist America was. In the end, I just said, “She was a very talented author.”

Which is, quite honestly, what I think about her. Maya Angelou speaks to experiences that are beyond my reckoning. I recognize that she’s very good at writing and I can get lost in her prose just as much as the next guy, but she’s never been an author that spoke to me.

I’m sad about that. Should I be? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just that I want to feel like I “get it” when I really don’t, when I’m just some kid standing by a hole in the ground wondering why he can’t cry, mouthing along with some alien litany. “Our father who art in heaven…”

“Complete Stories” by Clarice Lispector

Brazil has apparently been sleeping on one hell of a writer and refusing to let the rest of the world know about her. Well, I’ve got some choice words for you, Brazil:

Share the wealth! There’s no reason for you to actively hide a writer from the rest of us for entire decades all while secretly giggling with each other in your beach-side bairros while sipping on Brahma.

In actuality, the United States is fairly notorious for excluding literature from other countries when it comes to “bestseller lists,” so it’s no wonder a writer like Clarice Lispector, whose career spanned 38 years, never really achieved mainstream success in North America. She wrote in Portuguese, not English.

However, and quite thankfully, “Complete Stories” by Clarice Lispector is #565 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I’ve had a chance to spend a few days with these stories, and I have been nothing but impressed.

Lost in Translation

It is exceedingly rare for a translated work to “make it” in America, but even so it is strange that Lispector’s work only ever caught on in literary circles. She started publishing at the age of 18 (in 1938) and kept writing until her death one day before her 57th birthday. In that time, she published 9 novels and 8 short story collections. All of these works with successful with Portuguese readers, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that she started gaining much traction stateside and started really selling.

“But those are just numbers,” you might say. What was it that made her popular enough that Brazil has erected not one but two statues in her honor?

*A math teacher once tried to bury that dog.*

She was one of the first female authors to bring the modernist movement to Brazilian readers. Modernists, you might recall, have a penchant for exploring the psychological workings of their characters and using new narrative forms such as stream of consciousness. Two of Lispector’s English-language influences were Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, so that ought to give you some idea of the style she was bringing to the Portuguese language.

Not to imply that she doesn’t stand on her own! Based on the stories I’ve read over the last few days, Lispector strikes me as substantially more accessible than Woolf or Joyce. Her stories have a dream-like quality that couple the mundanities of life with profound psychological revelation. They examine how simple events — like a chicken running away before being killed and cooked — can drastically impact a household.

You May Say I’m a Dreamer

Psychologists have long understood that language impacts thought; the language in which we speak dictates the thoughts we think. There’s that urban legend going around that Eskimos have 40 words for snow, which is a huge oversimplification, but the point holds true: We can only think about things we have words for.

This, I think, is what gives translated works like Lispectors’ such a dream-like quality and makes them seem so other-worldly: The authors, in their native language, are often using words and ideas that don’t have a direct English corollary. In the hands of a bad translator, this can make the stories seem clunky or dull. In a good translation, however, they can capture a poetic sort of magic that’s lacking in works that were written originally in English.

We literally get to see the world through a different set of eyes.

*And those eyes are lookin’ at you, Rio!*

What a Body

There are a few authors who put their work out there in “complete” editions (Ginsberg, Dickenson, and now Lispector), creating some absolute bricks that would strain any shelf. I have the same problem with these that I have with plays — they aren’t books.

I mean. Physically, yes, they are books, but they aren’t meant to be read all at once. I can’t imagine anyone who would want to sit down and read every short story that Clarice Lispector ever wrote all in an afternoon.

I have a certain philosophy when it comes to the lengths of these works and how much time you should spend on them. Let me put it in food terms:

Poems are a quick snack.

Short stories are a single meal.

And novels are a trip to the grocery store.

To read the entirety of Lispector’s work all-at-once would be akin to sitting down at Chili’s and ordering one of everything. Even if the meals are good — even if some of them are the best meals you’ve ever had — they will ultimately be lost in the mix and you’re going to come away feeling like you’re A) bloated, or B) dying. Probably both.

As I do with any big collection, it’s better to read them a little bit at a time, every once in a while, just when the mood strikes you. Bearing that in mind, I didn’t read the whole thing — I read (and listened to the audio versions of) about 15 of these. I will, however, wind up reading them all.

Lispector’s are stories I’d pick up and read on a spring morning when the weather has just become pleasant enough — still crisp, but pleasant — to open a window and let nature take over the room. The unique feel of this new, purer kind of air would make me notice things in minute detail, like the way my pencil hangs off the edge of my desk, as if that particular placement were somehow profound.

And it would be, simply for my thinking it so.

*You should bring a pencil everywhere you go.*

The Self on a Shelf

Sarah and I have a . . . confusing shelving system. We have a couple thousand books between us — me being an English teacher and she a librarian — and while our system makes sense to us, I imagine any other bibliophile would recoil in Dewey horror.

It’s organized loosely by genre, but mostly by feel. Alphabetizing has absolutely nothing to do with it, and it’s not uncommon to find scary books at a lower level than humorous books. Why? Because they deserve it.

Anywho, I’m probably going to put “Complete Stories” by Clarice Lispector on the shelf with the poetry books I take down and look at when the mood strikes me. Emily Dickinson is up there, along with Walt Whitman, Robert Pinsky, and a few others that I read at certain times of year.

“Chicken” just strikes me as a story that I’ll want to read again, and there are a few others that I’m sure will stick with me. “Love.” And the one about the math teacher unburying the dog.

I’m also going to be on the lookout for a few of her novels — it’ll give me an excuse to hit up one of the few used bookstores that survive in this midwest literary hellscape.

*An accurate depiction of the state of bookstores in the midwest.*

* * *

Here’s Clarice Lispector on Goodreads.

“Notes From Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Note: This is based on the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

By the end of “Notes From Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky, #285 on the list of Books to Read Before You Die, I’d gone from thinking, “This book is an absolute waste of time,” to thinking it really was essential reading. There were also lyrics to a Tool song going around and around in my head. The lyrics go like this:

Disembodied voices deepen my
Suspicious tendencies
Conversations we’ve never had,
Imagined interplay…

It took a while to get into, but by the time I reached the end of this novella penned by the guy who wrote books notorious for being some of the longest books ever, I had a pretty clear understanding of where Dostoevsky was going — it’s a character study of a man who takes a natural tendency to an absolute extreme, resulting in his self-isolation.

*“I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man.”*

Existentially Speaking

Fyodor Dostoevsky led a difficult life. That sounds like I’m about to write a floppy research report on the guy, but it’d honestly take too long to get into all of it — people write books about the subject. Still, it’s good to know some basics:

Born into a somewhat wealthy family in Moscow in 1821, Dostoevsky was exposed to literature at an early age and worked as a translator before joining literary circles and beginning to publish his own work. His association with those same literary circles resulted in his being exiled to Siberia and then being forced into military service.

If all of that sounds miserable, you’re right, and the difficulties he faced no doubt contributed to his particular style of writing, which would charitably be called “depressing” and accurately referred to as “essentially Russian.“

“Notes From Underground” was published in 1864 and is widely considered to be one of the first examples of existentialist literature.

*“Two heads? Yes, I noticed, but I’m trying not to freak out about it.”*

Existentialists look at the world through the lens of the individual and his search for meaning in a world that is often cruel and absurd. Other popular existentialists include Sartre, Camus, and Kafka — three people who, if they were playing a round of golf together, wouldn’t finish the first hole because they’d be too busy arguing about why they had to use clubs.

The way I think about it is this: You can’t spend years and years in Siberian exile without wondering if there’s a purpose to all this. Dostoevsky wanted to explore man’s search for meaning in his writing, which meant forgoing certain tropes you might find in earlier literature — heroes, plot, catharsis — and creating works that delved (too?) deeply into characters and their relationships.

The unnamed narrator of “Notes From Underground” is a man (widely referred to as “Underground Man“) who is so neurotic that he can’t do . . . anything. He can’t really work, he can’t form relationships, he can’t communicate with anyone. He tries, but he overthinks every aspect of every relationship and ultimately screws it up. All that’s left for him to do is live (literally) underground and isolate himself from everyone and everything.

I Think You Ought to Know I’m Feeling Very Depressed

In the first half of the novella, Underground Man talks directly to his readers about what is wrong with him and what is wrong with the world, but readers will agree with almost none of his observations — nearly every statement he makes is contradicted by another. At one moment, he calls himself “wicked,” and in the next he is “noble.” He hates love and loves hate, resents everything but blames himself, and cannot seem to stick with any decision he makes without second-guessing.

This is where the song lyrics I mentioned earlier started to go through my mind in a loop — Underground Man isn’t actually talking to anyone. He’s talking to himself. The “gentlemen” he continually addresses, as if the book were written for someone, don’t exist — the book itself is part of his downward spiral.

*“And he’s a real sonofabitch for writing it!”*

We all imagine conversations. You think about what you’d like to say to your boss, or what you’d tell the guy who just cut you off on your way to Chick-Fil-A, or how you’d win over that girl at work you’ve had a crush on for six months. In your own head, you’re a hero, you’re noble, you know just what to say.

Of course, we never say those things. Or, at least, we rarely do. And we very often feel guilty about not being able to be the person we think we ought to be, the person we imagine we are.

Underground Man takes that self-talk to an absolute extreme — it is the only kind of talking he does. The whole book is him speaking to himself in this way.

He thinks about what he’d like to say, what he’d like to do, he realizes he can never do or say those things, and then he beats himself up for his cowardice.

*“I’m sinking and I frankly deserve it!”*

I Resent the Implication

The second half of the novella sees the Underground Man discussing some of the things that have gone wrong in his life. It’s basically him mucking up relationships with old schoolmates and then hollering at a prostitute one night when he’s really drunk.

It’s clear that, while he blames himself for his wickedness, he also resents everyone else for not being as messed up as he is. Can’t anyone see? Doesn’t anyone realize how terrible it all is? Of course they don’t; they’re all fools. But if only he could connect with them, then maybe he’d be able to turn his life around.

He is very nearly able to make some kind of “real” connection with the prostitute (Liza) that he hollered at, but he ruins it, of course, by vacillating between wanting to “save” her and calling her a fool for thinking she can be saved.

Underground Man ultimately breaks down briefly and hits upon one of the truest moments in his entire existence when he says, crying,

“They won’t let me . . . I can’t be . . . good!”

It’s All Good

If you’ve never felt that way, then existentialist literature might not be your bag. Odds are, though, that you can sympathize at least a little with Underground Man. Like it or not, most of us search for meaning in life. We want there to be an answer, and for a lot of us that answer is that we want to be “good” people.

But what if you were never able to figure out what it meant to be “good?” What if that meaning eluded you, or if you felt like you could never achieve it because society wouldn’t let you?

There aren’t a lot of books on this list from which I can glean some kind of practical moral, but “Notes From Underground” does provide some semblance of a lesson: Don’t talk to yourself the way Underground Man does.

Modern psychology calls this negative self-talk and its characteristics are a list of issues that the narrator faces: catastrophizing, mind-reading (supposing the thoughts of others), blaming yourself for things outside your control, and approaching life as an all-or-nothing event.

I’m certainly guilty of all of these things, and reading Notes puts a lot of those thought processes into sharp relief. So, even if you find the Underground Man to be utterly reprehensible and you struggle to finish the book because he’s just so thoroughly dislikeable, there’s still value to be found.

Psychopathy
Misleading me over and over
Psychopathy
Misleading me over and over and over
Don’t you dare point that at me

* * *

Here’s a biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky from Britannica.

“Notes From Underground” on Goodreads.

Here’s that Tool song (Culling Voices):

(Watch out: It’s over 10 minutes long. (Insufferable.))

“To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf

After reading “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I thought it would be FUN to read a little bit of the beast herself. So, I took a trip to a used bookstore and found a copy of “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf which is #987 on the list of Books to Read Before You Die.

It was cheap.

By “cheap” I mean the bookstore paid me to take it. They seemed happy to see it go. “Finally,” the cashier mumbled, reaching into her pocket and tossing a pinch of confetti onto the counter by way of celebration.

Since finishing the book, I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to talk about it in a positive way. I don’t think I’ve landed on the perfect “format” for a blog like this, but one thing I don’t want is for this to be the sort of thing that rips books apart for their perceived failings. I’d rather it be something that focuses on the positive. A “Ted Lasso” sort of book blog, even if I constantly struggle to maintain that positivity.

Let Me Think About It

Honestly, though, I did not enjoy “To the Lighthouse.” Reading it was more work than my actual job, and I kept losing the thread and having to back up a page or so to reread parts. Was I distracted by how stressed I am due to work and personal stuff? Sure. But, based on what I’ve read, I’m not alone in finding my mind wandering when reading Virginia Woolf.

The issue is that Woolf is a Modernist author who is most famous for exploring “stream of consciousness” writing. Born in London in 1882, Woolf was raised in a wealthy family and began writing at the age of 18. Her first book was published in 1915 and she continued writing nearly until her death in 1941. “To the Lighthouse” was published in 1927 and examined one large family’s attempt to … visit a nearby lighthouse?

That’s actually the plot?

Anyways. This part of thee early 20th century was Prime Time for Modernists, who reacted to the literary establishment by testing out new forms and narrative styles. A whole slew of young authors seemed to collectively rise up and shout, “F you, Dickens! We’ll do was we damned well please!” I’m sure it didn’t hurt matters that Woolf was wealthy enough to start her own publishing company, Hogarth Press.

Essentially, Woolf wanted to try new things, so she got all caught up in trying to write in a way that captured the inner workings of her characters. I heard that she used to sit around and think about thinking — metacognitive reflection — and would use that in her writing.

Marcel Proust probably did the same thing, but he did it in bed while thinking about his mom.

*“I don’t WANNA get up and YOU CAN’T MAKE ME.”*

You Got Psyched Out

Was Woolf taking an important step in the development of modern literature? Absolutely. In a sense, “stream of consciousness” is an attempt to marry literature and psychology. Woolf literally tried to get into the heads of her characters, embracing the difficulty of it and the way thoughts seem to form as if out of thin air, inexplicable and confounding.

There are two problems with this, in my opinion.

First, you can’t ever accurately capture a person’s thoughts. (I’m secretly solipsistic, it turns out.) Virginia Woolf didn’t know that, of course, and it shouldn’t have stopped her from trying, but the fact of the matter is that our experiences are our own and understanding — truly understanding — the perspective of another person is nearly impossible.

What we’re getting in Lighthouse is how Virginia Woolf thinks people think, and that is represented in the printed word, which doesn’t ever accurately portray its subject matter. It’s a fallacy within a fallacy, a wheel within a wheel.

The second problem with stream of consciousness is that it’s just bad writing.

*“HOW DARE YOU!?! **WARGARHARBLARGH**!”*

Before you get up in arms at my disparaging a literary titan, let me explain what I mean; stream of consciousness is often riddled with run-on sentences. It’s one nonsensical aspect of trying to capture “consciousness” that a lot of Modernists fall into.

Check out this monstrosity:

“Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul.”

I just typed all that and I still feel like I’m not understanding the thought process that’s going on. I mean, if you get it, great. Maybe it resonates with some people. But it’s work to read, and literary diarrhea like that is half the reason I lean towards minimalism.

It reminds me of the parable of the avant-garde violinist.

*“Get ready to have your ASSES BLOWN OUT.”*

Once Upon A Time…

…there was a violinist whose skill and knowledge of the violin surpassed all others. He lived and breathed his instrument; when he slept, he kept it clutched to his chest; when he ate, he wiped crumbs off its lacquered surface; even when he bathed, the violin was not far from his reach.

Nobody, the violinist figured, had ever truly explored the sounds of which his instrument was capable. So, he began composing.

Typical music notation was of no use to him — the violin, he knew, could play notes between the notes — and the blazing speed and languid slowness of which it was capable could not be expressed on paper. No pen could write the sound of his nails scratching the wood or the creaking of the violin’s neck as it was brought close to snapping. You could not write the sound of a pen knife slowly cutting through the strings. No; his compositions could only ever exist in his mind, and there they burned.

The songs he composed tested the limits of not only music theory but the tensile strengths of wood and gut. He played notes higher than any you’d ever heard, and notes so low that fog horns grew envious. He played notes that droned on and on for weeks, and some notes that were over so quickly you weren’t sure if you’d heard anything at all. He tapped on the violin’s back with a hammer and slapped the instrument into shallow water, creating sounds no one had ever dreamt of.

One evening, he put on a concert that was to be the grandest performance of the violin ever to grace a stage. In the audience were countless celebrities & politicians, along with world-famous musicians & composers. Bach was there, along with Chopin, and Beethoven too. Impossible! you say?That’s just how unique this violinist was.

The violinist soared that night. He leapt and he twirled and from the violin issued an unimaginable cacophony. When he was finished, he was covered in sweat, tears, and not just a little blood. The violin lay in ruin at his feet like the body of a conquered enemy.

And when the last note echoed through the concert hall and out across the open sea, nobody clapped. Nobody cheered and nobody cried “Bravo!”

Because, as technically masterful as it might have been, in the end it was just two hours violent noise that nobody could understand.

The point, of course, is that the avant-garde might be appreciated by some, but even if you’re the absolute BEST at what you do, the end result might not be appreciated.

Did Virginia Woolf achieve something by trying to get into the heads of her characters using stream of consciousness? Sure she did, but to a lot of us it sounds like a madman whacking a violin with a hammer while mumbling, “Listen to how unique it sounds!”

When sometimes all you want is a song you can dance to.

Here’s Virginia Woolf on Goodreads.

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

There is a long and detailed history of books about war that stretches back just about as far as the written word; name a big war in the past 3,000 years and it’s likely you can find a book that someone wrote about it. Sure, books like “The Iliad” or “The Histories” or “The Art of War” aren’t novels, but they do show that readers have always had an absolute fascination with fighting and death.

It’s hard to say what effect “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien has on readers today. The Vietnam war was looked at differently 30 years ago when the book was published, and people my age — children, then — would have grown up hearing stories about it from relatives, making it fresher than it seems now. (Most of my students today wouldn’t be able to find Vietnam on a map, let alone discuss its psychological impact.)

Does “The Things They Carried” transport you to the jungles of Vietnam; does it let you feel the mosquito bites, the dampness in your socks, or the burn of chlamydia? Maybe not. But there are some absolute gut punches in here that are revealed as if in slow motion, showing Tim O’Brien’s understanding of how the literary conversation was evolving at the time.

*“Hello? Jungle? I heard there would be fun and games.”*

You Can’t Ever Really Know Anything, Man

And of course the book doesn’t transport you there. One of the themes is that memory is fallible; we can’t trust what we put down on paper. It’s technically “fiction,” after all. Even if there are real people in it doing real things, it still carries that label — Tim O’Brien chooses to call it a work of fiction rather than a memoir. (Hearkening after Norman MacLean, maybe?)

In a postmodern sense, you can’t understand anything at all by reading a book.

Want to know what war is like? Join the army. Want to experience Vietnam? Buy a plane ticket. The only thing we’ll possibly be able to understand by reading “The Things They Carried” is what Tim O’Brien felt like when he was sitting at his typewriter, and we’ll only get a partial understanding of that.

You might disagree with it, but I bet Tim O’Brien agrees with me.

*Just as he’ll agree this portrait is 100% accurate.*

Don’t Drink The Milk

There are a few books that I’m not worried about “spoiling,” and “The Things They Carried” is one of them. It’s non-linear and only a breath away from being a short story collection, so telling you what’s happening on the last few pages won’t ruin anyone’s experience.

The reason I want to talk about the ending is this: O’Brien is right on the cutoff point for what I would consider to be a “current” author. I’m showing my age by saying so, but anything published before 1990 isn’t current — sorry “A Farewell to Arms” and “Catch-22,” you’ve been relegated to the realm of the “Classic.” “The Things They Carried,” though, is still quite sensible as a “modern” war novel (postmodern, really), and it has a particular effect upon modern readers.

A part of that is related to the ending, which flashes back to when the narrator was 9 and he had his first encounter with death — a girl he was “in love with” died of brain cancer, and the last chapter is an exploration of how dreams keep that little girl (and all his war buddies) alive in his mind. It’s an emotional twist of an ending considering the number of people who explode in the story.

Death and Dreams

As you get closer to the final pages, you expect there to be some sort of violent climax. It’s a war novel, after all. Certainly there could be an action-packed thrill ride of an ending. People get shot and step on landmines and have their legs blown off and there must be a bridge somewhere that needs exploding — but the actual climax is this subtle little story about a girl who wears a red hat to cover her bald head and how little Timmy O’Brien hears on the playground one day that his girlfriend “kicked the bucket.”

It’s like that “My Girl” movie or one of those other horrible tales that only exist to make children confront death before they really need to.

More than the stories of his buddies drowning in a shit river, that last chapter about the girl in the red hat clings to you, especially if you’ve experienced that kind of significant loss. We all have those dreams, and they stick around for years and years and years. Enough to make you wonder if they ever really go away.

I still have dreams in which my mother is alive. Instead of being dead and cremated and poured into a box buried on a hillside, she’s instead “retired” from life and now lives in a facility somewhere. Like a facility for “dead” people; a post-hospice hospice. The same way cops turn in their badge and gun and uniform when they retire, Ellen has turned in her friends, her home, and her family. Death isn’t the end of existence, just the end of that existence.

In my dream, that’s what happens to old people. Instead of dying, a bunch of guys in white coats come get them and take them somewhere else. A retirement village for the dead. She has her own little room with a single bed and a TV with 13 channels.

She doesn’t have what you’d call a “life,” this woman. She follows a schedule that’s “the best thing for her, really.” She’s a shell of her former self, and all of us survivors — the men in her life who are still clinging to all this absurd bullshit we bumble through every day — are supposed to just let her exist in some sort of half-life of field trips and cafeteria meals and plastic bowling balls being rolled down long, carpeted hallways.

Every now and then, we run into her in the wild, out on the street. Like we’ll see her getting off a bus and heading into a museum with the rest of the “retired from life” folks. The same way you might see a group of students getting off a big, yellow school bus. I stop whatever I’m doing, I run over, I grab her by the shoulders and say, “What are you doing here? Why would you rather do … this than be a part of our lives? You’re being led around like a geriatric elephant that gets to go see all the other zoo animals!”

And someone, an orderly, a tough guy, will pull me aside and say, “Leave her alone. That’s just the way it is man. People gotta retire. And you gotta let ‘em alone.”

She looks at me and she sees me and she knows me but it doesn’t matter anymore. She’s moved on to a new phase of existence. This is her life now, and all of us are no longer a part of it. The whole world stands on a sidewalk in the sunshine and shrugs.

*Hop aboard!* *We’re headed off to our impending doom.*

It’s odd for a war story to make you think about these things — dreams you have of dead people. People who didn’t blow up or get shot; people who disappeared in more common, even mundane ways. I don’t think even Hemingway would have had the balls to end a war novel like that. Joseph Heller might have, and Vonnegut probably thought Tim O’Brien was a-okay. But it hits you, that ending. All of it hits you, and even if it doesn’t really capture WAR, it captures something.

Me? I just wish I had different dreams. Better dreams.

Christ, I couldn’t dream her onto a beach or something? Texas, at least?