advice/living

I couldn’t make a decision and she felt it; I was afraid, in fact, that she was betting on that and her calm was due to a calculation. I asked her affectionately, “Do you say that because you think you can’t act otherwise? That you don’t have a choice? There’s always a remedy, at least greater harm can be avoided. You’ve been his lover, right?” I saw her blush violently. “That concerns me alone.” So I lost control again. “Shameless!” I said. “Aren’t you ashamed of speaking like that?” “No,” she answered firmly. “And whatever my response, it wouldn’t change anything. You can impose your will on me, even for a few months; you can shut me in a convent or throw me out of the house. You have full rights, and I will obey you. Those are the relations between you and me. The rest concerns me alone.” Annihilated by that coldness, I replied, “So morality has no importance for you?” She was silent for a moment, then said softly, “Oh, I reflect a lot, believe me. I ask myself constantly what’s good and what’s evil. You always accuse me of being cynical, cold, but it’s not so. It’s not true. I’m different from you, that’s all. I’ve said to you many times: you are able to rely on conventional models of good and evil. You’re luckier. Whereas I need to review them according to my judgment before accepting them.” “But what can your judgment be, at twenty?” I exclaimed angrily. “You have to rely on those who have experience, submit.” She smiled. “If things were like that, nothing would ever change, everything would be transmitted intact from generation to generation, without improving, slaves would still be sold in the square, don’t you think? It’s precisely now that I can rebel. At forty, when I’m old, I won’t be able to do much, I’ll want to stay comfortable.” I was about to say that, on the contrary, it’s precisely at forty that one rebels, but I don’t know if it’s true, and then Mirella is so much more educated than I am, she always cites names and books that say I’m wrong. “You’re not religious, Mirella?” I asked her instead.

Anabel only gave me the job because, she said, I was naturally maternal. It had come up after I asked Anabel how she had gotten married in the first place. Anabel said, “Well, darling, it was simple. I had not been in touch with many men at that age, or at least any good men. Anyone who was sweet was surprising. It seemed unbelievable to me. One day he looked at me and said, ‘Anabel, I will never look up or down at you. Let’s get married.’ And we did of course. Things didn’t turn out how either of us thought they would, but we have a beautiful child together, and that’s enough to celebrate from that union. A piece of advice: You’ll come across many people who will want to be with you. People’s imaginations aren’t entirely idle; they can slot you into their futures easily. You have qualities that people wouldn’t mind spending time with, at least for a while. You could be the perfect girl for Anybody. We are conditioned to be obsessed with people falling in love with us. Reaching that point is seen as a success. We’re always asking, ‘Why do they act this way?’ and then morphing, cooing, comforting. By the time you win them over, you don’t know how to really love them in return because we never ask ourselves enough about what we want. Don’t ever forget you have the ability to choose. Never wait to be chosen by someone who came ready to treat you right. I know it may not seem this way in art and literature, but we are not mere vessels for love and admiration. If I said yes to every proposition I was given just because I was flattered by it, well!” What she means is have an idea of what you want and never get talked out of it. I am slowly learning to never accept less than I deserve. Deciding how much I deserve is another matter. I wish someone would say to me, “I will never look up or down at you.”

Negative aspects of travel? Everyone will say that it distracts you from that horizon of set objects that constitute your own poetic world, it disperses that absorbed concentration which is a condition (one of the conditions) conducive to literary creation. But in the end, even if it is a dispersal, what does it matter? In human terms, it is better to travel than to stay at home. First of all live, and then philosophize and write. Writers above all should live with an attitude towards the world which effects a greater acquisition of truth. That small something which will reflect this on the page, anything, will be the literature of our time, nothing else.

Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression dwindles, the aesthetic stigma increases. It’s not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It’s the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you’re either healthy or you’re sick, you either function or you don’t. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what’s depressing you, you’re inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed. You decide that it’s the world that’s sick, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy. You embrace what clinicians call “depressive realism.” It’s what the chorus in Oedipus Rex sings: “Alas, ye generations of men, how mere a shadow do I count your life! Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and, after the semblance, a falling away?” You are, after all, just protoplasm, and some day you’ll be dead. The invitation to leave your depression behind, whether through medication or therapy or effort of will, seems like an invitation to turn your back on all your dark insights into the corruption and infantilism and self-delusion of the brave new McWorld. And these insights are the sole legacy of the social novelist who desires to represent the world not simply in its detail but in its essence, to shine light on the morally blind eye of the virtual whirlwind, and who believes that human beings deserve better than the future of attractively priced electronic panderings that is even now being conspired for them. Instead of saying I am depressed, you want to say I am right.

At Castlemaine it was very warm. Even the night was milder than I’d expected. Discouraging memories presented themselves as I roved about the slopes picking up firewood. What does this almost-finished book say about men and women? There doesn’t seem to be a way of planning this. My attitude emerges as the story tells itself. I couldn’t help agonising over it, thinking of the smallness of my scope, the ordinariness of it, its bourgeois nature. What critics will say. What my friends will think and not say. How I will appear before the world. Oh shut up.

We stood on a slope and watched the moon rise: up it came, round as a drawing. We saw how the stars became brighter, sat deeper in space. M and her friend struggled to philosophise. They laughed, and were excited. ‘I can’t sort of grasp,’ said M, ‘what there is beyond the universe.’ We all played the ukulele when we felt like it. She made up a song called ‘In the Paradise Cafe’. The boy read Tom Sawyer aloud: he couldn’t restrain his laughter. I woke at two in the morning, lay there filled with a kind of shame. Looking out at the moonlit bush, silver by night, grey by day. Don’t be so proud. Accept criticism, accept editing and guidance. No one will think less of you. I got up at dawn. There were tasks and I did them: finding wood, making a fire, boiling water. The sky became more orange and the wind began to stir. The coming light. It creeps across the dull grass and pinkens it, between the thin trunks. My panic left me. The problem becomes merely the work I still have to do, rather than an indictment of my whole personality and talent and social position.