The Best American Essays 2014 (34 page)

Boredom, headachey Sunday boredom: I blamed Christianity. On those English Sundays, the knowledge that all the shops were religiously shut (even the little back-alley record shop where my best friend and I fingered the new LPs) simmered like a sullen summer heat and made me lethargic. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. My brother was somehow more adept than I at slipping away to sin; he made it to his bedroom, and I would hear Robert Plant whining up there, the euphoric, demonic, eunuch antidote to Fischer-Dieskau's settled baritone. (“I should have quit you, long time ago.”) My sister was too young to count as audience. My mother steered clear. So I would sit with my father, and sometimes when he fell asleep I would fall asleep too, in companionable torpor.

For ages I associated those three composers with that Sunday world. Haydn was killed for me. Even now I can't listen to him, despite the adulatory testimony of several musicians and composers I know. For quite a long time I thought of Schubert only as the composer of snowy, trudging lieder. I refused to hear the limpid beauty of the songs, or the dark anguish; I knew nothing about the piano sonatas, now among my favorite pieces. Most terribly, I thought of Beethoven as the calm confectioner of the
Moonlight
Sonata; I heard the beauty, but not much more. It was music to go to sleep to. An idiotic assessment, of course. All the tension and dissonance, the jumpy rhythms, the fantastic experimental fugues and variations, the chromatic storms, the blessed plateaus (the sunlit achievement, once you have got through the storms, as at the end of Opus 109 and Opus 111)—in short, all the fierce complex modernity of Beethoven was lost to me.

And then Beethoven came back, as probably my father knew he would, in my early twenties, at a time of solitude and anxiety—came roaring back with the difficult romanticism that my incuriosity had repressed in childhood. I can't now imagine life without Beethoven, can't imagine not listening to and thinking about Beethoven (being spoken to by him, and speaking with him). And, like my father, I have quite a few recordings of the piano sonatas, especially the last three, and I listen to the young Barenboim playing, and think to myself, as my father did, Not quite as lucid as Kempff, but much better than Gould, who's unreliable on Beethoven, and perhaps more interesting than Brendel, and, yes, I think I just heard him make a little mistake, which Pollini certainly never does . . .

Sometimes I catch myself and think, self-consciously, You are now listening to a Beethoven string quartet, just as your father did. And at that moment I feel a mixture of satisfaction and rebellion. Rebellion, for all the obvious reasons. Satisfaction, because it is natural to resemble one's parents, and there is a resigned pleasure to be had from the realization. I like that my voice is exactly the same pitch as my father's, and can be mistaken for it. But then I hear myself speaking to my children just as he spoke to me, in exactly the same tone and with the same fatherly melody, and I am dismayed by the plagiarism of inheritance. How unoriginal can one be? I sneeze the way he does, with a slightly theatrical whooshing sound. I say “Yes, yes” just as he does, calmly. The other day I saw that I have the same calves, with the shiny, unlit pallor I found ugly when I was a boy, and with those oddly hairless patches at the back (blame for which my father unscientifically placed on trouser cloth rubbing against the skin). Sometimes, when I am sitting doing nothing, I have the eerie sense that my mouth and eyes are set just like his. Like him, I am irritatingly phlegmatic at times of crisis. There must be a few differences: I won't decide to become a priest in my fifties, as he did. I'm not religious, and don't go to church, as he does, so my Sundays are much less dull than those of my childhood (and the shops are all open now, a liberty that brings its own universal boredom). I'm no scientist (he was a zoologist). I am less decent, less ascetic, far more materialistic (
pagan
would be my self-reassuring euphemism). And I'm sure he's never Googled himself.

 

This summer I happened to reread a beautiful piece of writing by Lydia Davis, called “How Shall I Mourn Them?” It is barely two and a half pages long, and is just a list of questions:

• Shall I keep a tidy house, like L.?
  
• Shall I develop an unsanitary habit, like K.?
  
• Shall I sway from side to side a little as I walk, like C.?
  
• Shall I write letters to the editor, like R.?
  
• Shall I retire to my room often during the day, like R.?
  
• Shall I live alone in a large house, like B.?
  
• Shall I treat my husband coldly, like K.?
  
• Shall I give piano lessons, like M.?
  
• Shall I leave the butter out all day to soften, like C.?
  

When I first read this story (or whatever you want to call it), a few years ago, I understood it to be about mourning departed parents, partly because a certain amount of Davis's recent work has appeared to touch obliquely on the death of her parents. I think that the initials could belong to the author's friends—seen, over the years, falling into the habits of grief. It is a gentle comedy of Davis's that those habits of grief are so ordinary (piano lessons, leaving out the butter) that they amount to the habits of life, and that therefore the answer to the title's question must be “I can't
choose
how to mourn them, as your verb,
shall
, suggests. I can mourn them only haplessly, accidentally, by surviving them. So I shall mourn them just by living.” But I spoke recently to a friend about this story, and she thought that I had missed something. “Isn't it also about
becoming
one's parents, about taking on their very habits and tics after they disappear? So it's also about preserving those habits once they've disappeared, whether you want to or not.” My friend told me that before her mother died she had had very little interest in gardening (one of her mother's passions); after her mother's death, she began to garden, and it now brings her real happiness.

If you are mourning your parents by becoming them, then presumably you can mourn them before they are dead: certainly I have spent my thirties and forties journeying through a long realization that I am decisively my parents' child, that I am destined to share many of their gestures and habits, and that this slow process of becoming them, or becoming more like them, is, like the Roman
ave atque vale
, both an address and a farewell.

My parents are still alive, in their mid-eighties now. But in the past two years my wife has watched both her parents die—her father quickly, of esophageal cancer, and her mother more slowly, from the effects of dementia. She bore one kind of grief for her father, and she bore a slightly different grief for her mother, for an absence that was the anticipation of loss, followed finally by the completion of that loss—grief in stages, terraced grief. I say to her, “I haven't yet had to go through any of what you've gone through.” And she replies, “But you will, you know that, and it won't be so long.”

My parents know much better than I do that
it won't be so long;
that their life together is precarious, and balances on the little plinth of their fading health. There is nothing unique in this prospect: it's just their age, and mine. Twice this year my father has been hospitalized. When he disappears like that, my mother struggles to survive, because she has macular degeneration and can't see. The second time I raced over to damp Scotland, to find her almost confined to the dining room, where there is a strong (and pungently ugly) electric fire, and living essentially on cereal; the carpet under the dining table was littered with oats, like the floor of a hamster's cage. When my father returned home, he had a cane for the first time in his robust life, and seemed much weaker. My brother took him around the supermarket in a wheelchair.

I spent a week at my parents' home, helping out, and it took a couple of days for me to register that something was missing. It nagged at me, faintly, and then more strongly, and finally I realized that there was no music in the house. In fact, it occurred to me, there had been no music during several previous visits I'd made. I asked my father why he was no longer listening to music, and was shocked to discover that his CD player had been broken for more than a year, and that he had put off replacing it because a new one seemed expensive. He was much less perturbed than I was by this state of affairs. I could hardly imagine my parents' life without thinking of him sitting in an armchair, while Haydn or Beethoven or Schubert played. But of course this idea of him is an old memory of mine, and thus a picture of a younger man's habits—he is the middle-aged father of my childhood, not the rather different old man whom I don't see often enough because I live three thousand miles away, a man who doesn't care too much whether he listens to music or not. So even as I become him, he becomes someone else.

Most likely he is simply too busy looking after my mother to have time to relax. He is the cook, the driver, the shopper, the banker, the person who uses the computer, who gets wood or coal for the fire, who mends things when they break, who puts the cat out, and who locks up at night. Perhaps he is too busy being anxious about my mother, being slightly afraid for both of them, to sit as he used to, triumphant and calm and secure.

Or perhaps this is just my fear projected onto him. When I was a teenager, I used to think that Philip Larkin's line about how life is first boredom, then fear, was right about boredom (those Sundays) and wrong about fear. What's so fearful about life? Now, at forty-seven, I think it should be the other way around: life is first fear, then boredom (as perhaps the fearful Larkin of “Aubade” knew). Fear for oneself, fear for those one loves. I sleep very poorly these days; I lie awake, full of apprehensions. All kinds of them, starting with the small stuff and rising. How absurd that I should be paid to write book reviews! How long is
that
likely to last? And what's the point of the bloody things? Why on earth would the money
not
run out? Will I be alive in five years? Isn't some kind of mortal disease likely? How will I cope with death and loss—with the death of my parents, or, worse, and unimaginably, of my wife or children? How appalling to lose one's mind, as my mother-in-law did! Or to lose all mobility but not one's mind and become a prisoner, like the late Tony Judt. If I faced such a diagnosis, would I have the courage to kill myself? Does my father have pancreatic cancer? And on and on.

There is nothing very particular about these anxieties. They're banal, even a little comic, as the mother in Per Petterson's novel
I Curse the River of Time
understands when some bad medical news is delivered. She had lain awake, night after night, worried about dying of lung cancer: “And then I get cancer of the stomach. What a waste of time!” It's just the river of time, and a waste of time. But there it is. And sometimes I murmur to myself, repetitively, partly to calm myself down, “How shall I mourn them?” How indeed? For it sounds like the title of a beautiful song, a German lament, something my father might have listened to on a Sunday afternoon, when he still did.

FROM
Grist

 

A
YOUNG MAN
decides to stow away. He could scrape together the money and buy a ticket. Many people have done that so they could go to America, people much poorer than he. They sold whatever they had—a donkey, a table, a necklace. They borrowed. They stole. He is improvident, however, an instinctive romantic. He detests the very notion of saving. Or he feels that there is nothing to save. There is endless movement; light and air cannot be saved. He understands the word
ontology.
In his quiet way he revels in metaphysics, but he doesn't care about definitions. He cares about paint, though not as a fine artist. He makes signs and paints houses. Paint cares for the world. Paint is practical.

Like everyone, he has notions about America. Largely they stem from the movies. America is the land of fantasy, of Chaplin and Keaton. He likes the humor, the drollery, the commerce between the possible and the impossible, the grimace of longing. Even from afar he understands the loneliness of the place, all those little human molecules bouncing off one another as they pursue the chimera of happiness. Yet the absence of any overarching goal reassures him. Europe is the home of kings and their great, grinding purposes. Chaplin and Keaton have no purposes. The beauty they make is contingent on the mere fact of their being human, their walking down a street, looking in a window, eyeing a woman, tipping a battered hat, waving a cane. They have no apologies to make. Their vulnerability goes without saying; lacking as Americans do an aristocracy, their pretensions have no pretense. Despite the many stories he has read as a child about Indians and buffalo hunters and pioneers, the bravery of Americans does not impress him. They could not help themselves in that regard; the vastness of the continent demanded tenacity. It is their innocence that impresses him, their smiling blindness, their offhand candor. He sees all that on the screen while he sits in the stale dark and chuckles and roars. Chaplin fiddles with his tie; Keaton stretches his mouth until it is a sort of prairie. He, the viewer, can laugh until he cries; he understands what genius is.

Where he wants to go isn't the width and breadth of America, all those strangely named states he barely can remember; it's the former Dutch enclave of New York City. Among the advertisements and crowds, he can be who he wants to be. He can't define what that will be, but he can say what he doesn't want to be. He doesn't want to be another bourgeois. He doesn't want to pretend to be more solid than he is. He doesn't want to surrender his life to history. There is the feeling in Rotterdam of trying to hold on to something that has died already. That is what makes his mother violent and his father distant. They are trying to live, but they have no room to breathe. So they try harder and breathe less. They barely exist, but they keep trying.