by
The Point
advice/living
Helen Garner,
Simone de Beauvoir,
Constance Debré,
Jennifer Egan,
Sally Rooney,
Jonathan Franzen,
Patricia Highsmith,
Vivian Gornick,
Mario Levrero
just like life advice. ideally philosophical rather than pragmatic
As it happens, I borrowed How Literature Saved My Life from the Los Angeles Public Library. A previous reader had left a post-it in the book. S/he’d written on it something that sounds like a thought David Shields would quote: “In a universe so indifferent to our fate—how best to endure—to go on.” My first thought was that the universe isn’t indifferent to our fate, any more than my desk is indifferent to my fate: the universe is not the kind of thing that could be interested or indifferent. My second thought was that I have a family and friends, none of whom are indifferent to my fate.
My third thought was to look up the sponsor of the Post-It, Kaletra. It’s a brand of AIDS medication.
There really are some people for whom life is a daily struggle. I’m pretty sure that the point and meaning of life is to ensure that as few as possible have to exist in that way. And that’s only possible if we stop assuming that we all do.
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I wanted to hear more about Laura’s experience, but I noticed that my own attitude toward the visit was one of cynicism. Not only was I treating the cadaver as a mere curiosity, but there was a hint of self-satisfaction in my conviction that its sight would not affect me—I think it derived from a leftover tomboyish belief that invulnerability is always preferable to fear. I envisioned the piece I would write (the organs gleaming like gemstones), as though the visit itself were a formality. Yet such irreverence troubled me. The notion of going to see a cadaver with the prior knowledge I would write about it struck me as manipulative. If I described the lab scene to a trusting reader, but while in the lab had thought only of its literary potential, must a truthful rendering of that scene thus include admission of my mindset? And what of the poor cadaver, whose former occupant had decided to bequeath her body to the medical school, but had likely not foreseen an outcome such as this? Finally I wondered about the repercussions of undergoing certain “significant” experiences simply because they might provide fodder for one’s stories. In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard asks her students which of them want to be writers, and then she tells them what the decision must mean: “You can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax…” The line had long appealed to me—Dillard’s vision of the artist, whom she later describes as a kind of sacrificial flame, is flattering, particularly if, as she asserts, “the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.” But until I visited Laura’s cadaver, I had always assumed it was one’s past one must attack. It had never occurred to me that one must “go at” one’s present and future as well.
What Paul says about having children seems to me to ring equally true of marriage. Until you have spent a lifetime in the company of another person, you can't possibly know what it's like to do so. When we get married, there is an important sense in which we really don't know what we're doing. This doesn't make marriage a complete leap into the dark, of course you can be pretty sure that another person is well-suited to you, that you have similar goals, that you love each other, and so on. Even so, no matter how much you know about another person on the day of your marriage, you still don't really know what yourte doing in marrying them. This doesn't make you wrong or irrational to do it anyway; it's just part of what it is to be human. Living as a finite being means projecting oneself toward the unknown.
referring to L. A. Paul's paper 'what mary can't expect when she's expecting'
‘I differ with Miss Stackpole,’ Ralph went on more gravely.
‘I think it very good for you to have means.’
Isabel looked at him with serious eyes. ‘I wonder whether
you know what’s good for me — or whether you care.’
‘If I know depend upon it I care. Shall I tell you what it is?
Not to torment yourself.’
‘Not to torment you, I suppose you mean.’
“You can’t do that; I'm proof. Take things more easily.
Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for
you. Don’t question your conscience so much — it will get out
of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.
Don’t try so much to form your character — it’s like trying to
pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best, and
your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for
you; the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable income’s
not one of them.’ Ralph paused, smiling; Isabel had listened
quickly. “You’ve too much power of thought — above all too
much conscience,’ Ralph added. ‘It’s out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet
your fever. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It’s
never wrong to do that.'
maybe good advice lol
—Damn it, it isn’t, it isn’t. It’s a question of . . . it’s being surrounded by people who don’t have any sense of . . . no sense that what they’re doing means anything. Don’t you understand that? That there’s any sense of necessity about their work, that it has to be done, that it’s theirs. And if they feel that way how can they see anything necessary in anyone else’s? And it . . . every work of art is a work of perfect necessity.
—Where’d you read that?
—I didn’t read it. That’s what it . . . has to be, that’s all. And if everyone else’s life, everyone else’s work around you can be interchanged and nobody can stop and say, This is mine, this is what I must do, this is my work . . . then how can they see it in mine, this sense of inevitableness, that this is the way it must be. In the middle of all this how can I feel that . . . damn it, when you paint you don’t just paint, you don’t just put lines down where you want to, you have to know, you have to know that every line you put down couldn’t go any other place, couldn’t be any different . . . But in the midst of all this . . . rootlessness, how can you . . . damn it, do you talk to people? Do you listen to them?
—After what he did, and he learned only through her suffering, Stephen brought out more loudly, —Now . . . If she comes to him carrying lilies that turn to fire? And the fire, what do you think it is? If that was the only way he could learn? So now do you see why he sends me on? If somewhere I’ve . . . done the same thing? And something’s come out of it, something . . . like . . . he has. While I’ve been crowding the work alone. To end there, or almost end running up to the doors there, to pound on the doors of the church, do you see why he sent me on? Look back, if once you’re started in living, you’re born into sin, then? And how do you atone? By locking yourself up in remorse for what you might have done? Or by living it through. By locking yourself up in remorse with what you know you have done? Or by going back and living it through. By locking yourself up with your work, until it becomes a gessoed surface, all prepared, clean and smooth as ivory? Or by living it through. By drawing lines in your mind? Or by living it through. If it was sin from the start, and possible all the time, to know it’s possible and avoid it? Or by living it through. I used to wonder, how Christ could really have been tempted, if He was sinless, and rejected the first, and the second, and the third temptation, how was He tempted? . . . how did He know what it was, the way we do, to be tempted? No, He was Christ. But for us, with it there from the start, and possible all the time, to go on knowing it’s possible and pretend to avoid it? Or . . . or to have lived it through, and live it through, and deliberately go on living it through.
Diana rises from the couch and walks across the room to pour herself another drink. She stands in silence with her back to me. Then she turns around, leans against the mahogany bar, and says: “I was vain, shallow, pretty, and energetic. Mad for sexual success and popularity, and yes, secretly wanting bourgeois comfort and bourgeois success. But,” her head goes back, the dark helmet-like hair swinging out in a graceful, defiant arc, “I was a Communist. And being a Communist made me better than I was. It was the great moral adventure of my life. I wouldn’t—not then, not now—have traded it for anything. There’s been nothing else in my life of which I can say that.”
When I ask her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party, Maggie’s face loses its now-blurred appearance, the blue eyes clear and spark. She leans forward on the couch, one hand on her hip, her mouth breaking into her irrepressible smile, and she says: “Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were in the world-changing business. You can’t get much better than that. What’s better? Money? Position? Are you kidding?”
"I don't tell her a thing of that sort. It seems to recoil." Caroline Bell having discovered in childhood that achievements can be transformed to hostile weapons. ("Everything falls in your lap, why should you care about a life like mine?") A childish struggle between the wish to show, or tell, and the need to hoard silent strength had long since been resolved. She said, "I'm not sure I can explain that."
"Or the best." He smiled. His hound-face had lines, at eyelids and mouth, that were now at rest but might be put to use. His dark hair, greying, fell loose over his forehead. His body, too heavy and indolent for the precise little chair, was that of an active man who had taught himself to wait: an incongruous patience that could trouble those who wondered what might be restrained. He said, "Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self."