Tag: writing

My Passion for Literature: Reading’s Gifts

My fierce love for books has its ancient beginnings as a seven year old, sprawled on a Philly tenement floor, enthralled with a Christmas gift, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Moments ago I rediscovered this passage from France’s Michel Houellebecq, who has this special capacity to rattle the cages of accepted opinion—daring, provocative, forthright—writing novels you simply don’t walk away from.

I had read his Submission several years ago, an initial novel that launched his fame. His take on literature, a dying indulgence in a digital age, is poignant with meaning for me, for literature has surely been among life’s greatest gifts to me:

“…the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define. Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant. Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend” (Submission).

I have not found a more eloquent articulation of my own passion for literature and think often of what I would have missed had I not been introduced to literary reads—above all, to see past the literal text and be transported into a galaxy of resonance where words could mean beyond themselves, open new vistas, shaping life, capable of numinosity, a sense that life exceeds appearances, infinite in its labyrinthian corridors, a non-ending conversation with what is, has been, and will endure.

On Reading A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Serendipitous Find

I’ve been reading A. S. Byatt’s Possession, published in 1990 and now hailed as a contemporary masterpiece.

Each year, I compile a carefully chosen list of books I hope to read. Possession was among them, though I can’t quite recall how I first came upon Byatt.

It has turned out to be an inspired choice—a rare literary mystery centered on a scholarly quest to uncover a suspected love affair, pieced together from newly discovered letters between the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, modeled on the married Robert Browning, and poet Christabel LaMotte, inspired by Christina Rossetti.

If such a relationship can be proven, it would mark a major coup for the novel’s modern-day protagonists, Roland and Maud, who join forces to solve this academic puzzle.

I won’t be a spoiler; I’m still reading, mesmerized by Byatt’s creative brilliance. Drawing on her vast knowledge of Victorian literature, she invents letters, diaries, and poems that feel astonishingly authentic—plausible echoes of Browning and Rossetti themselves.

There’s also a compelling counterpoint: as Roland and Maud pursue their literary investigation, they, too, seem to fall in love. And the suspense deepens with rival scholars competing to uncover the same secret.

Possession won the Booker Prize and became an international favorite, translated into more than thirty languages. A film version followed—all of which amazes me, as I wouldn’t have expected a novel so steeped in academia to achieve bestseller status.

Byatt, an academic for many years and fluent in several languages, left teaching in 1983 to write full time. Gifted with formidable imagination, she could also be intimidating in her intellectual precision and resistance to literary fashion. Critic, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, she produced twenty-five books and, in 1999, was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to literature.

Her prose is detailed, introspective, and resonant—at times, poetic. More than any writer I’ve read, she possessed an extraordinary gift for mimicry, able to write convincingly in many voices.

I’ve especially liked this passage, though there are many others:

It is a dangerous business, reading of the passions of the dead. We try on their feelings, like garments, and for a moment we seem to stand in their light — and yet, as we close the book, we find ourselves once again alone in our own darkness, aware that our borrowed flame is only memory’s trick.

She is the writer’s writer.

As Jay Parini wrote in his 1990 New York Times review, “Possession is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.”

–rj

My Journey Through Books: From Childhood to Lifelong Learning

I’ve been a reading addict since childhood, when as a young boy I’d walk a mile—sometimes more—just to lose myself in a library’s cool hush, seated at a table, surrounded by shelf-lined books inviting adventure.

My love for animals found early confirmation in the Dr. Doolittle books I devoured. I read every one. Years later, that same fascination with the speech of creatures led me to Jane Goodall’s revelatory studies of chimpanzees—proof that empathy can grow into insight.

Another passion took root in the dusty bleachers of Shibe Park—later Connie Mack Stadium—in Philadelphia. I loved baseball with an intensity only children know, lingering outside the gates, hungry for autographs as players boarded their buses. I read passionately about my idols—Ruth, Gehrig, immortals who remain with me.

Travel books, too, called out to me. Mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath on Pitcairn’s Island transported me to the South Seas, where I imaginatively romped through Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. In later years, that early enchantment led me to consider emigrating to New Zealand. I was, in fact, approved.

Languages fascinated me. One day, at ten, I brought home books in Russian from Philadelphia’s Free Library, expecting the Cyrillic script to magically transform itself into English. That early infatuation would one day carry me across the world to Russia and the homesteads of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.

I call myself an autodidact, though I’ve graduated from several reputable universities. I started behind most students, having fled a troubled home at seventeen, enlisting in the Air Force, which sent me to Korea. Our base library was a single room, yet its shelves were somehow populated with a few classics. One off-duty evening, I pulled down a book called Look Homeward, Angel. It changed my life.

After Korea, I read everything Thomas Wolfe wrote, visited his home in Asheville, eventually enrolling as a Ph.D. student at his alma mater—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Pulpit Hill” in Wolfe’s novel. On my first campus day, waiting to register for classes, I bumped into a retired professor, who asked what brought me to Chapel Hill. “Thomas Wolfe,” I said without hesitation.

A serendipity moment, that professor had known Wolfe. Becoming lifelong friends, they traveled together to prewar Germany, where Wolfe witnessed the Nazi persecution of Jews, which he would later feature in You Can’t Go Home Again. He shared anecdotes about Wolfe, who stood six feet, six inches. His hands too wide to use a typewriter, Wolfe wrote standing up, a refrigerator top serving for a desk.

Despite the scores of books I’ve read, there remain gaps I want to fill. The books I’ve read have been my faithful companions along life’s road, shaping who I am.

Were I granted another life, I think I’d come back as a librarian. No other choice comes close.

The Thinking Machine That Makes Us Stop Thinking

AI excels at counterfeiting the human mind. If we’re not vigilant, it will think for us—leaving our own intelligence dormant, our creative impulse atrophied.

Already, much of our news is machine produced at news outlets like AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg, recapping the latest happenings in news, sports, and entertainment.

It can project us into videos, put words in our mouths, falsify who we are.

Writing in the Free Press, Tylan Cowen warns that within the next few years, AI will author most “of the words written in the United States.” He contends AI is much smarter than us, encyclopedic in scope, capable of writing our books and news for us.

New advances in technology assure its omnivorous takeover of much of everyday life. Indeed, we’re on the threshold of Ray Bradbury’s apocalyptic new world.

Bradbury foresaw a future of stupefying distraction—a civilization that traded reflection for amusement. With AI, his warning no longer reads as metaphor but as prophecy.

AI’s intelligence is borrowed; it knows only what its creators feed it. In the wrong hands, it becomes a megaphone for manipulation—its outputs polished, persuasive, and perilously biased.

AI cannot think for itself. What it spews out can prove toxic, prodigious in conspiracy, disseminating division that may spill into violence.

Algorithms are predictive. They know our wants and pile-on their overtures. Increasingly, they orchestrate our choices. Corporate driven, they offer a pecuniary bonanza servicing their interests.

AI outsources cognition. Invading scholarship, it’s become the campus Cliff Notes, shortcutting inquiry, analysis, and reasoning. It can summarize a complex Faulkner novel in milliseconds, replete with analysis. Why read at all? Why bother with the professor?

AI’s convenience comes at the price of serendipity: the unplanned discovery that alters our thinking, robbing us of the slow astonishment that once expanded the boundaries of our knowing.

AI proliferates plagiarism, the theft of another’s thought, masquerading as one’s own. It’s become the teacher’s nemesis: how do I know the student’s writing is their own?

AI homogenizes the writing act, making us all sound alike—the short, staccato sentences; simplified vocabulary; the annulling of the cumulative, crafted sentence, subtle in its syntactical variation, rhythms, and nuance. It’s the ultimate in dumbing down.

The heart of the matter, however, is AI’s largesse as a substitute for thought, straying into amnesia—a prosthetic for our inner murmurings.

—RJ

A Polarizing Artist: Rudyard Kipling’s Legacy

I remember it well. I was a young graduate student, privileged to study under one of the world’s foremost professors of Victorian literature, a renowned authority on Thomas Hardy.

The course was rigorous. We read the greats of the age—Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Mill, Newman, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, Pater, and of course Hardy. Yet strikingly absent was Rudyard Kipling. Our professor dismissed him as the mere voice of imperialist Britain—an attitude then dominant in the Academy, and one I suspect still lingers on American university campuses.

I had never read Kipling. I had not yet learned to question. I accepted what I was told.

It was only later, during a summer course at Exeter College, Oxford, that I encountered another view: one that esteemed Kipling’s literary brilliance without committing the American folly of conflating his politics with the merits of his artistry.

Kipling’s literary range was astonishing. His verse, endowed with rhythmic command, borders on the hypnotic. He opened poetry to colloquial speech and became a supreme craftsman of the ballad form.

Yes, he gave voice to Empire in works like The White Man’s Burden, Kim, and The Jungle Books. But he also revered Indian culture—its spirituality, wisdom, and sensory richness. Often, with subtle irony, he questioned the very order he seemed to affirm.

Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the short story. With precision and nuance, he crafted narratives of extraordinary compression, modern in their suggestiveness, wide-ranging in their scope. The Man Who Would Be King remains a masterpiece—its sweep and power undiminished. Kipling’s influence on Conrad, Maugham, Hemingway, Borges, and others is beyond doubt.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907—the first English-language writer to receive it—honored for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.”

Kipling’s stories, like all enduring art, probe psychological depths. They are complex, skeptical of conventional wisdom, and riveting in their precision.

In today’s multicultural Britain, he is taught in context: his genius as a storyteller acknowledged, his colonial perspective rejected. Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman have recognized him as a precursor to modern fantasy.

In India, where he was born and spent his early years, his reception is understandably ambivalent: many readers disdaining his imperial condescension, yet acknowledging his literary craftsmanship. Salman Rushdie has called Kim “one of the greatest novels written about India,.” Other Indian writers continue where Kipling left off, offering vivid vignettes of India, but through an Indian prism.

Controversy about his place in the Western literary canon remains. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Cornell lectures, dismissed Kipling for his moralizing, He deemed his indulgence in exotic adventure stories as juvenile. Great literature, he argued, obeys the aesthetic imperative of narrative neutrality, or distance, as in Flaubert and Joyce.

On the other hand, the late eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom came to Kipling’s defense. In his The Western Canon. Bloom lists Kipling among hundreds of writers deserving inclusion in the canon. Bloom saw Kipling as a myth maker and gifted story teller, especially in his short stories. On the other hand, he found his poetry “scarcely bear reading.”

While I find merit in both Nabokov’s and Bloom’s arguments, I lean towards Bloom’s appraisal as more balanced. I have long resisted either/or equations, particularly as to the political or aesthetic. Over a lifetime, I have frequently found reasoned judgment occupies a middle place. I have given my own arguments earlier in this essay for his belonging in the canon.

Whatever a reader’s verdict, Kipling was a singular voice, very much his own man. In short, authentic. As he said in an interview shortly before his death,

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” (Qtd. in the Kipling Journal, June 1967).

rj

Sorry Emerson: Money is NOT the Prose of Life

Ralph Waldo Emerson ranks high on any list of frequently quoted American sages. He has a special way of rendering human experience palpable.

Among his many essays, I’ve especially liked “Compensation,” which I first read as a young graduate student in an American Lit class.

Undoubtedly a residue of his exploration of Eastern thought, this essay has journeyed a lifetime with me in its karma undertones, buoying me up in its harbinger of moral recompense for life’s myriad inequities.

But on occasion, Emerson fumbled, as when he wrote that “money represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses” (“Nominalist and Realist,” Essays: Second Series, 1844).

Critics were quick to pounce, Marxists in particular seeing it as capitulating to capitalism. Emerson probably meant that the pecuniary is an integral component of the natural order.

Still, it seems a passage one wants to expunge like disturbing phlegm.

I like Saul Bellow’s correction: “Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you were a dummy, a dummy! You had to excuse yourself from the face of the earth!” (“Seize the Day”).

But let me also share psychologist and poet Pamela Joyce Shapiro’s response to Emerson’s remark. Her poem speaks for me and perhaps for you:

If money is the prose of life
as beautiful as roses,
poetry it seems must be
the soil and sun of infinity,
without which surely nothing grows.
I see the pleasures each might bring,
when flourishing in abundant spring.
Though stocks and petals tend to fall
in drought or storm or just because,
poetry survives it all.
What losses can define what loss is?
Waning wealth or stolen roses?
Forget the till and till the mind,
plant poetry and praise the sky.

rj

 





Why I’m Still Reading Yeats

I’ve always been a devotee of the poetry of William Butler Yeats, though not of his metaphysics or his politics. Certainly, his reception in Ireland over the years has been bleak, the latest hostile critic, contemporary novelist Sally Rooney piling on, dismissing his politics as fascist, with the takeaway he isn’t worth reading.

Though he flirted with authoritarianism, agitated by the chaos he associated with democracy, he supported the Free State and later repudiated Mussolini, whom he initially admired. He was never the likes of Ezra Pound. In one of his final poems, “Politics,” he expresses his disillusionment with political ideologies proffering easy remedies for society’s ills.

Yeats should not be judged removed from the convulsions that gave birth to an Ireland free of its English masters.

Ireland’s ostracizing of its literary giants has a long history, not only with Yeats, but James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faoláin, and the late Edna O’Brien, all of whom chose exile.

I bristle against censorship and book banning to which it often leads. Things are changing in Ireland, a nation I know well, but old attitudes can find an audience still.

Yeats remains worth reading, his poetry arguing for itself in its craftsmanship, beauty, and relevance. His often quoted “The Second Coming” hovers over us in its prescient warning of autocracy’s sinister reach.

“A Prayer for My Daughter” remains among my favorite Yeats poems—subdued in tone, subtle in rhythm, redolent in wisdom.

Written in 1919 in the context of Ireland’s incipient nationalism that would spark a civil war and the country’s ultimate partition, the poem expresses Yeats’ hopes for his new daughter in a less turbulent future.

A poem abundant in symbolism, Yeats prays she shun hatreds, value inner over external beauty, find solace in tradition and ceremony.

I value the poem, not least, for its relevance to our own time.

Excerpt:

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

This last stanza obviously alludes to Maude Gonne, who had become a strident voice of Irish nationalism and to whom Yeats had twice proposed marriage, but was rejected.

In 1990, I was privileged to meet and converse with Anne, the daughter in this poem.

Whatever our views on artists such as Yeats, or antisemite T.S. Eliot, or Chilean fervent communist Pablo Neruda, I subscribe to the autonomy of art. It’s narcissistic to think artists must share our views.

rj

Remembering Edmund White (1940-2025)

I’ve just come off reading Edmund White’s 2005 New Yorker essay, “The Women I Dated as I Tried to go Straight.”

Whatever your sexual orientation, reading Edmund White’s essay is worth your time—the unchecked wit; the metaphoric grace; the vivid, often astonishing anecdotes; the shimmering brilliance that makes experience palpable. Like essayists Orwell, Woolf, or Sontag, he has that rare ability to make you pause, reassess, change course.

Above all, there’s his candor.

This morning I was heartened to see The New York Review of Books commemorating him by featuring six of his essays, written for them over the years.

Just a few weeks ago, June 3, 2025, White slipped into eternity. He had long faced declining health: a heart attack, a stroke, and his decades-long reckoning with HIV. He was 85.

I read somewhere that Vladimir Nobokov, that other preeminent prose prodigy, admired White’s literary acumen, so much like his own. What writer wouldn’t relish Nabokov’s compliment, bestowed upon so few.

White was the high priest of gay literature, writing prolifically on its themes and torments, addressing with fearless clarity the culture’s imposed shackles of shame.

Across five decades, he authored thirty books—novels, memoirs, plays, hundreds of essays, many of them distilling the gay journey into a language of self-acceptance and grace.

A devoted Francophile, he spent nearly twenty years in France, where he would write his erudite The Flâneur and Genet: A Biography.  

In A Boy’s Own Story, a blend of fiction and autobiography, White chronicles the interior landscape of a young gay man confronting the burden of identity.

His 2005 autobiography, My Lives, unflinchingly narrates his first 65 years.

With the essay “The Women I Dated as I Tried to Go Straight,” White reflects on his early sense of same-sex desire, repressed under the weight of cultural condemnation: “In the past, when homosexuality was still considered shameful, I was slow to confess my desires to anyone.”

To atone for those hidden desires, “the fire in the crotch,” White dated women—many drawn to his intellect, good looks, and sensitivity. Empathy pervades his essay as he recalls these women, acknowledging the structural inequities they faced, confronted with a patriarchal hegemony: “I came to think of men as monsters with absolute power, the darlings of the Western world, and of women as their unfortunate victims.…This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.”

White’s sympathy undoubtedly owes its genesis to the gay community’s own troubled quest for validation.

I found his retrospective vignettes of women moving, bringing alive each woman’s individuality in vivid, lyrical prose replete with introspective finesse:

Sally was celebrated for her big breasts and her face, which was that of the Apollo Belvedere—bow-shaped lips, a long, straight nose, a wide, domed brow, an ensemble that was classical and noble and oddly mature. She looked like a woman, a grownup woman, not a raddled adolescent. She said little, but she smiled dreamily with veiled eyes. Her smile had a way of lingering two beats too long, after the conversation had moved on to a different mood. Was she lost in her own thoughts and not paying attention? Had someone told her that she was at her best when she smiled? She never guffawed or squealed or made violent movements, though catty classmates told me that when boys weren’t around she was a real sow, rolling on the floor, drinking beer, and giggling with the other girls at obscene speculations about penises they had known or divined through Speedos.

He thinks that had he not been gay, he might have fulfilled their myriad longings: “Unhappy women! How many of them I’ve known. Sniffling or drinking with big reproachful eyes, silent or complaining, violent or depressed—a whole tribe of unhappy women have always surrounded me.”

For most of my life I’ve been a shoulder to cry on, and all of that time I’ve wished I could do more to ease the pain of the women in my life. If I were straight, I could have married one of them. I would have known how to comfort her. I would have worked hard to provide her with the security and even the luxury she required. I would never have run off with another woman. I would have been as sensitive to her needs as a sister, as protective as a father. And I would always have told her where I was going and exactly when I’d be coming home. This was what distinguished me from the straight men I knew, who, it seemed, were united in their ability to treat women badly and then laugh it off.

White remembers falling in love with fellow schoolmate Marilyn Monroe, a recollection tender and adolescent, full of longing and projection:

In the middle of my sophomore year, I was sent to boarding school, at the Cranbrook School for boys, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where I fell in love with Marilyn Monroe. I knew that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet she was in pain, in need. She was unhappy. I believed that I could help her. My fantasies weren’t specific as to what I would actually say to her or do for her. I never got beyond her little smiles of love and recognition, which burned with a brighter and brighter glow.

My favorite daydream was that she’d come with me to my senior prom. All the other guys would be astonished: the toad, Eddie White, was really a prince. I pictured her on my arm, her sequinned gown glittering, her voluptuous body undulating as we entered the dining hall, which had been transformed by crêpe paper into a ballroom. It was like a mermaid’s visitation. The thin boys with their brush cuts and spotty faces, their dinner jackets and burgundy cummerbunds with matching bow ties, would gape at us. No way, man, the biggest dweeb of them all with . . . Marilyn!

Fortunately, not all the women in his life were unhappy. Some lived fulfilled lives outside a dependency on men, easing his guilt:

What I loved about Anne and Marilyn {another Marilyn}, even Alice, Sally, and Gretchen—was that they weren’t unhappy. Marilyn wanted nothing from me but my friendship, and she has it still.

Because she and the others I’ve written about here were the first women I knew who weren’t unhappy, who never once made me feel guilty, they showed me the way to friendship with women. 

White’s essay emerges a paean to women across the years who were there for him in the hard places, lending solace and fostering courage.

I will miss Edmund White keenly, a voice in the wilderness.

—rj

 

Reading Ove Knausgaard at 4 AM: A Friend to See Me Through the Night

I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning, dawn’s light still absent, an annoying habit of mine, worsened by turning-in too late, despite ardent resolve to do better. God knows, I need more than four hours of sleep, and I pay for it, drifting off repeatedly as day unfolds.

To cope, I try teasing myself back to slumber—whatever works—like counting up to 100 in Italian, gleaned from daily Italian lessons. Or better, groping for the iPad beside me to resume my daylight read, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s massive My Struggle, despite blue light barriers to sleeping well.

I read a lot—mainly books I often list in Brimmings each New Year’s Day. Right now, I’m deep into Book Two of My Struggle, part of a six-volume series totaling nearly 3,600 pages—or three times the length of War and Peace.  In contemporary writing, only Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, at roughly 2,000 pages, come close in length. (Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past runs to 3000 pages across seven volumes.)

Overall, Book Two details Knausgaard’s move to Sweden, his family life with second wife, Linda, and their three children; the tensions arising from his obligations to family life and dedication to writing:

Now I had everything I had dreamed of having since I was a teenager: a family, a wife, children—yet none of it made me happy. On the contrary, I was constantly on the verge of tears, I was always angry, always tired.”

The love I had for Linda was not stable and warm but consuming and often destructive.

I’m attempting all six volumes. I wonder how many have done this and for what reasons. My guess is very few have climbed the mountain, but I’m liking the climb.

In his penchant for recalling past event, interspersed with personal reflection narrated over several volumes, Knausgaard has often been compared with Marcel Proust.

While his prose may lack Proust’s lyricism, it compensates with acute playback of places lived, voices heard, and life’s everyday ironies. It’s like he’s sitting across from you, filling the room, talking to you directly.

Though he’s won several Scandinavian literary awards, he’s yet to take home a prestigious International Booker translation prize or Nobel.

Writing in Norwegian hasn’t helped. There are only 5.5 million Norwegians. It’s the uphill climb all non-English writers face in an industry still dominated by native Anglophones.  And so I commend  The New York Review of Books for its continued effort to revive works originally not written in English.

Some critics think Knausgaard narcissistic for his self-focus, but they forget: he’s writing memoir. Anyway, when is writing anything but a quest to be heard or validated? I think they’re being simplistic.

In Norway, readers were shocked at Knausgaard’s inclusion of family and friends, names unchanged, intimate details not held back. An uncle threatened to sue and former wife, Linda, suffered mental distress, requiring therapy.

Knausgaard can make anyone uncomfortable. He doesn’t hold back about life’s often brutal truths. But to me, that’s his strength. I like writers who unflinchingly deliver human experience.

Knausgaard writes what’s known as autofiction, a blurring of the distinction between the factual and the fictional. Memory, subject to filtering, is unreliable. We cannot even say we fully know ourselves. By this yardstick, even autobiography becomes an act of arbitrary inventory—selecting, omitting, fabricating—and, hence, approximates fiction, or as Knausgaard puts it, memory “is not a reliable quantity in life” as it  “doesn’t  prioritise the truth, but rather self-interest.”

I admire his directness and minute detail. I revel in his feel for nature’s splendors, vignettes of people and their eccentricities, the fiery fever of first love; thoughts on today’s politics, obsessions imposing self-censure, the ennui often accompanying contemporary existence, and not least, the myriad burdens of the writer’s life.

I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

The foregoing passage helps explain the series title, My Struggle, with its provocative echoes of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  Knausgaard’s struggle, however, is an existential one—that of locating oneself in a world often hostile to individuality, of finding balance between writing and family, each under pressure of cultural conformity.

…perhaps it was the prefabricated nature of the days in this world I was reacting to, the rails of routine we followed, which made everything so predictable that we had to invest in entertainment to feel any hint of intensity?

Knausgaard’s critique of cultural homogenization, creeping across Europe like some unchecked fungus, especially resonates with me:

There was the revulsion I felt based on the sameness that was spreading through the world and making everything smaller? If you traveled through Norway now you saw the same everywhere. The same roads, the same houses, the same gas stations, the same shops. As late as the sixties you could see how local culture changed as you drove through Gudbrandsdalen, for example, the strange black timber buildings, so pure and somber, which were now encapsulated as small museums in a culture that was no different from the one you had left or the one you were going to. And Europe, which was merging more and more into one large, homogeneous country. The same, the same, everything was the same.

Thoughts arise of  a visit to Moscow’s Red Square with my students, of fast-food chains—TGI Friday’s, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC—littering its periphery, exporting America’s consumer culture and eroding local identity; memories of a journey to France—a student lamenting time and money visiting Europe, only to find blue jeans, blaring American music, and global brands echoing home.

There ‘s a humility clinging to Knausgaard’s narrative, a confessed reticence to assert himself in a society indifferent and perhaps judgmental in its appraisal of those differing from the norm:

I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine.

I saw myself as the weak, trammeled man I was, who lived his life in the world of words.

My Struggle abounds in quotable reflections that I hasten to underscore like this hauntingly melancholic passage, evoking a past where dignity, nature, and artistry coexisted—however harsh the drawbacks of its era:

…if there was a world I turned to in my mind, it was that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its enormous forests, its sailing ships and horse-drawn carts, its windmills and castles, its monasteries and small towns, its painters and thinkers, explorers and inventors, priests and drugstores. What would it have been like to live in a world where everything was made from the power of your hands, the wind, or the water? What would it have been like to live in a world where the American Indians still lived their lives in peace? Where that life was an actual possibility? Where Africa was unconquered? Where darkness came with the sunset and light with the sunrise? Where there were too few humans and their tools were too rudimentary to have any effect on animal stocks, let alone wipe them out? Where you could not travel from one place to another without exerting yourself, and a comfortable life was something only the rich could afford, where the sea was full of whales, the forests full of bears and wolves, and there were still countries that were so alien no adventure story could do them justice, such as China, to which a voyage not only took several months and was the prerogative of only a tiny minority of sailors and traders, but was also fraught with danger. Admittedly, that world was rough and wretched, filthy and ravaged with sickness, drunken and ignorant, full of pain, low life expectancy and rampant superstition, but it produced the greatest writer, Shakespeare, the greatest painter, Rembrandt, the greatest scientist, Newton, all still unsurpassed in their fields, and how can it be that this period achieved this wealth? Was it because death was closer and life was starker as a result? Who knows?

Knausgaard has this way of arresting you mid-thought and making you reassess your values.

Book 2  emphasizes the fissure between the expected of you and living your true self. For writers living in a world of the utilitarian with its compromises, the challenge of finding equilibrium can be daunting :

To write is to carve a path through the wilderness. It is to find something that has not been said before, something you can believe in, something that gives meaning to your life.

Again, the unstinting honesty, whether commenting on contemporary mores, engaging in philosophic reflection, or offering informed opinion separating the trivial from the significant.

They say Book 6, 1000 pages long, is steep in philosophical reflection. Whatever, I look forward to the climb.

The New Yorker critic James Wood praises Knausgaard’s ability to extract the profound from the mundane as “hypnotically compelling.”

The Atlantic’s William Deresiewicz applauds Knausgaard’s philosophical depth as a “contemporary Proustian endeavor.”

Life is never simple for Knausgaard in his dense weave of mystery and randomness, of inheritance and free will, of human frailty and moral striving..
I find that compelling.

And so, even when I awake, the silent stars my sole companions, I find pleasure in his company, a friend to see me through the night.

–rj

 

Celebrating Emily Dickinson’s Birthday

Yesterday, Dec. 10th, marked the 194th birthday of Emily Dickinson (b. 1830), one of America’s most gifted poets.

Her love of nature, keen observations on life’s ironies, and daring truthfulness won me over early. I know of no poetry with more nuance.

Of her many poems, my favorite is “A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” with its nature analogies exhibiting the incongruity of the outer appearance with the inner reality. We are often masters at concealing life’s griefs.

Though I’ve visited The Homestead (Amherst , MA) on several occasions, I’m ready to visit again to take-in the Dickinson Museum updates, which include the restoration of Emily’s beloved garden, her father’s gifted conservatory to Emily and her sister, Lavinia, and the recently completed reconstruction of the family’s carriage house.

In short, The Homestead is my literary Mecca, as there is much in Emily’s sensibility that resonates with me.

Below, Emily’s upstairs bedroom where she composed her nearly 2000 poems and many letters:

It was cerebral musician Patty Smith who reminded me of Dickinson’s birthday in her substack post, replete with quotations from her poems and letters.

I’m repeating them here, as they superbly express Dickinson’s keen sensitivity and writing acumen. Smith observes that any of them would serve well as a writing prompt:

“Forever is composed of nows.”

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

“We turn not older with years but newer every day.”

“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”

“That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”

“The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul–BOOKS.”

“The lovely flowers embarrass me. They make me regret I am not a bee…”

“I don’t profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.”

“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”

“Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.”

“To shut your eyes is to travel.”

“your brain is wider than the sky”

“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,–you must have noticed them in the street,–how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”

“I have been bent and broken, but -I hope- into a better shape.”

–RJoly