The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (19 page)

The beauty of lessons learned in this way is that they are absorbed more fully than by abstract instruction. After reading Proust you know, in the marrow of your bones, in your DNA, the craziness and absurdity of living perpetually in expectation.

But the novel which does most to re-enchant everyday life is Joyce’s
Ulysses
. As Proust’s intention was to make every reader an interpreter of his own self, so Joyce’s intention was to transform every reader’s insignificant days into adventures as strange, rich, heroic and mythical as those in Homer – to turn every day into an Odyssey. Firstly, the stream-of-consciousness technique revealed the richness of the average ruminating mind with its endless flickering phantasmagoria of observation, perception, memory, imagination and desire. Then the inclusiveness of Joyce’s vision and the beauty of his style lifted up into literature much that had previously been rejected as too boring or sordid. Even now, almost a century after it was written, there are scenes in
Ulysses
which startle by the ordinariness of their everyday squalor. Even in the age when anything goes, few novelists would devote several pages of loving attention to a man reading
Titbits
on the toilet: ‘Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big to bring on piles again. No, just right.’
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We all yearn for renewal but imagine that it may be found only in novelty – a new place, a new lover, a new job. More effective, and much cheaper, is to see the familiar with new eyes. And a few writers offer just such transfiguring eyes. They smash the crust of habit and permit us to see life anew. In the contemporary world, such crust-smashing is both more difficult and more necessary. Once there was no crust at all and most people were exposed to hunger, cold, disease and violence. Experience was unavoidably immediate and real. But now most are increasingly protected from the old dangers, and the new danger is that, as the crust becomes thicker and stronger, the life it shelters is more likely to wither and die in its shell.

So seek out the crust-breakers and the eye-openers. Read authentic writers – and then begin a new job in your current post, enjoy a holiday where you actually live and, most thrillingly, plunge into a tumultuous affair with your own spouse.

Of course, it is true that writers like Proust and Joyce are difficult – but it is also true that difficulty increases satisfaction. Reading is always assumed to be easy because the technique learned so long ago has been forgotten and we now do it unthinkingly all the time. So, if a book appears too difficult, it must be the fault of the book rather than the reader. But, like learning to play a musical instrument, reading is a skill with levels of difficulty. What makes Proust and Joyce seem hard work is the absence of plot, the device most novelists use to drive readers forwards through a book. Plots are effective – everyone wants to know what happens next – but the
denouement
of plot-driven novels is often implausible and disappointing.
Is that all it was?
This is because there are no plots in real life – only a complex web of continuum and connexity – so the reader has the unpleasant sensation of having been conned. And plots are instantly forgettable. Try explaining the plot of the thriller you read only last week. The pleasure of plot is all expectation and sensation, illusory and short-lived, so plot-driven novels leave no residue of beauty. Whereas a novel that reproduces the texture and feeling of life will be harder to read, but provide richer satisfactions and live longer in the memory. The bad news is that such novels are rare. Proust and Joyce showed how to succeed triumphantly without plot but this lesson has been forgotten by the age of potential. It is common now for reviewers to rate novels as ‘well plotted’ or ‘poorly plotted’, as though plot is an essential feature, and to express astonishment and consternation at the absence of plot.

So literary reading can deepen and extend experience by improving understanding of the self, the world and other people. One of the greatest gifts in a writer is the ability to create characters who behave atrociously but are entirely sympathetic. The supreme example is Falstaff, who is a compendium of everything most contemptible in human nature – he is a thief, a coward, a liar, a braggart, a glutton, a drunkard and, worst of all, a callous mercenary happy to send men to their deaths for money. Yet everyone loves him. As an exercise in intellectual and moral discipline, I once listed Falstaffs faults before going to see
Henry IV: Part II
and was determined to disapprove but, like everyone else, laughed and loved the old reprobate. And when Prince Hal was about to become king and rejected his former drinking companion as, of course, was essential – such a corrupt man could never be allowed anywhere near power – like everyone else I ached for poor Falstaff and loathed Hal for being a cold-hearted prig. Hal’s six words of rejection are among the most grievous in literature: ‘I know thee not, old man.’
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So, although there can be no prescriptions for writing, as there can be none for living, here is a prescription nevertheless. A work of fiction should be plotless but compelling, surprising but inevitable and full of appalling characters who are entirely sympathetic.

And there is such sensuous pleasure in lifting a book in the left hand to feel the satisfactory theft, then allowing it to’fall voluptuously open and release its unique fragrance, and finally taking a group of pages in the right hand and allowing them to riffle past the right thumb, with a pause now and then to permit the leisurely perusal of a random page. This is the sovereign, ruminating pleasure of the sultan. And the reading itself is as sensuous. Reading is a contact sport – physical, strenuous, a grappling with another of superior strength, trickery and speed. Another who may become a close friend. Postmodernism attempted to remove authors and make literature only a set of ‘texts’ – but true readers agree with Proust that reading is friendship. Writers are such friends, a secret social network extending throughout time and space.

And the stereotype of the reader as a dysfunctional, short-sighted, body-hating, effete wimp unable to face the world is disproved by the regular and extensive surveys of readers carried out by the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA. According to the NEA, readers are more likely than non-readers to take exercise, become actively involved in sport, go to museums, theatres and concerts, engage in voluntary work and vote in elections.
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The beauty of the contact sport of reading, according to Proust, is that this form of contact provides the benefits of conversation with none of the tedium, because it is ‘a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately’.
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It is an encounter of depth with depth, undistracted by social conventions and froth, and more rewarding than any encounter in the flesh (which is why meeting writers is usually disappointing).

This is also why skipping is acceptable but skimming is not. Skipping is disengaging for a breather, but skimming means that the challenge is proving inadequate, that the contact is with a superficial, lazy, coarse, uninteresting mind. Any book that encourages skimming should be immediately thrown away. And our brains seem to understand this. Brief skim-reading causes more severe eye strain than long, concentrated reading.

The reading experience has been investigated by neuroscien-tists, who also seem to have a thing for Proust. There is even a book called
Proust was a Neuroscientist
.
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And, in
Proust and the Squid
, Maryanne Wolf explains that reading, unlike speech and vision, is not genetically programmed and therefore must be learned by each individual, and that this learning process creates in the brain distinctive connections, which depend on the language used. Doctors treating a stroke victim bilingual in English and Chinese found that, as a consequence of specific brain damage, the patient could no longer read English but could still read Chinese. So, in a real, even physical, sense, ‘we are what we read’. And, when children are learning to read, major areas of both brain hemispheres are involved but, as reading skill improves, activity is mostly concentrated in a small area of the left hemisphere, though the right may be activated anywhere in unpredictable ways. In other words, the left hemisphere develops a dedicated reading function and the more parallel right hemisphere, which produces insights, is set free to speculate and associate, to romp and gambol like the mind of God. ‘The secret at the heart of reading,’ Wolf concludes, is ‘the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those which came before’. And the problem with skimming is that it loses this ‘associative dimension’, ‘the profound generativity of the reading brain’.
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This potential for ‘Aha!’ insight distinguishes reading from viewing. The pace of reading may be varied by the reader, but the pace of viewing is set by an editor (and this editing has become increasingly frenetic). Viewers do not have the luxury of looking raptly into the far distance while the right brain performs its associative magic. If they hold a screen on pause, it is usually to get another beer from the fridge.

Deep reading creates attentiveness; heavy viewing destroys it. And this may have consequences at both ends of life. In early childhood, heavy viewing inhibits the development of brain networks for attention and reflection
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, and heavy viewing in later life encourages brain deterioration and Alzheimer’s disease.
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So, reading is not only intensely pleasurable in itself, but is also crucial in developing and maintaining the associative brain. And it is so much more satisfying if it also enhances experience. Flaubert: ‘Do not read as do children, to amuse yourself or, like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to
live
.’
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The Loss of Transcendence

U
nusually for an ageing rocker, Bruce Springsteen has retained both creative and performing vitality so that his new songs are as good as his classics and he belts them out for a generous three hours with undiminished gusto and relish. But the young couple next to me sit in what appears to be frozen misery. In the row in front, four men suddenly stand up and leave with grim I-demand-to-see-the-manager expressions. Are these people genuinely disappointed? What more could they want? And those who appear to be still in good humour talk, laugh and drink beer all through the performance, as though they are out for the evening in a bar and the music is on a high screen in a distant corner. It is true that The Boss is indeed a long way off – this is a stadium concert – but, of the many thousands standing in the playing area, closer to the stage and with plenty of free space, few are disposed to dance. Compare and contrast this with the early days of rock and roll when audiences went crazy, smashed up theatres and ran riot in the streets. This evening is summed up by a family a few rows in front, all with bleached blonde hair and new designer leisurewear, who are entirely ignoring the performance to photograph each other on mobile-phone cameras.

It is easy to understand why so many commentators talk of the flattening tendency of contemporary culture. Constant exposure to entertainment has left many incapable of sustained interest, never mind transcendence.

And there is an equivalent indifference in high culture, caused by the neutralising effects of relativism, which makes everything equally meaningful and therefore equally meaningless. To praise writers, musicians or artists extravagantly is considered naive, childish, certainly embarrassing. For a critic to express simple liking would be unforgivably gauche. In popular culture the tyranny of cool has the same deterrent effect. The language is different but the strategy is the same – to pass off indifference as the height of sophistication. Enthusiasm is not acceptable because it is an affront to indifference.

As well as chronic general indifference there is chronic general ingratitude – an inevitable consequence of the era of entitlement. If everything is deserved there is no reason to be grateful. Yet gratitude is the basis for affirmation and transcendence.

But what
is
transcendence? The term covers a wide range of imprecisely defined and overlapping beliefs, feelings, attitudes and states, including religious faith, mysticism, exaltation, joy, ecstasy, zest and delight, on down to humble enthusiasm and absorption, and then right down to drinking a pitcher of margar-itas and dancing on the table on Saturday night.

The common factor in various forms of the feeling is escape from the self – and this can range from a spiritual desire to lose yourself in God to a more materialistic desire to get out of your head at weekends. The paradox is that the most intense experience of the self is loss of the self. This is why transcendent states have to be short-lived. Being out of your head is fun but not practical – and the longer you stay out the harder it is to get back in. So, the more intense the experience, the shorter the duration. Low-level loss of self in absorption can last for hours; ecstasy is sadly brief (though adepts of tantric sex may disagree).

Transcendence is important because it seems to be necessary to escape every now and then from the burden of self-consciousness. Even the earliest cultures sought this escape. In ‘primitive’ societies around the world there were remarkably similar rituals involving face painting and group dancing to rhythmic accompaniment.
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Complicated circle and line dances were especially common – and it is heartening to know that, when my in-laws have one of their ‘big nights’ culminating in the hokey-cokey and a conga, I am participating in a ritual at least ten thousand years old. Western observers of the ‘primitive’ dances were often alarmed by what they interpreted as abandonment and frenzy intended to work up a mood for orgies – but most of the rituals were carefully planned, tightly disciplined, chaste and took place only at certain periods in the calendar as a reward for community endeavour. Primitive cultures understood that there were no easy, free highs. The ecstasy had to be learned and earned.