Beware those who claim to have ‘found the key’

At the Perth Writers Festival many years ago I went to a talk by an author of a very well-known autobiography. He came across as a bit of a demagogue. Confident and charismatic, he told us he’d been a criminal spurned by his own society until he was embraced by the poorest of the poor. He saw the light, and now spends his time helping other downtrodden folk. The vibe of his talk was – I found the key – in a very profound sort of way – and now I am here to bring you with me. His story was colourful and appealing in its biblical simplicity. But his energy was overpowering, and a little intimidating.

Profound transformational experiences can happen, and there’s nothing to say he didn’t have one. But there are reasons to be suspicious of people who think they’ve found the key and are very confident about it. Particularly where the transformation has happened very quickly and radically – they were lost and now they’re found – and they are very attached to the particular thing that ‘saved’ them, such as eastern religion or martial arts or a particular diet. Then the next minute they’re self-mutilating, having a nervous breakdown etc. They’re still on the journey.

Literary nature descriptions

I’ve always hated literary descriptions of landscape and nature, and particularly those that present nature as metaphor for emotion. I realised this at my Albany high school where we were force-fed Tim Winton (a sunset and an ocean convey a thousand words….). Not only does nature description bore me, but I’m not a very spatial person, so I find it difficult to position all the physical things in my mind, to compose an image. I’ve always felt a bit ashamed about this, like I’m missing some vital ecological sensibility. I’ll read the passages over and over, struggling to absorb meaning, but just end up staring into space. I rewrite the passages in my head: ‘They went down to the beach. It was quiet. There was a nice sunset.’

Like a tractor

Just now the ALP decided to change their platform to extend the legal definition of marriage to same sex couples. But they also voted for their politicians to have a conscience vote on the issue of gay marriage, rather than having to vote according to party lines. This means that any gay marriage law is unlikely to get enough votes to pass.

In the debate Senator Helen Polley said it was hard for people like her to stand up and, ‘as a minority’, argue against ALP support of gay marriage. Similarly, MP Deborah O’Neill suggested, sounding like an annoying first year arts student, that the gay marriage supporters’ tactics included construing the anti-gay marriage as ‘other’. These politicians felt, as opponents of marriage equality, that they were somehow a persecuted minority, and were unable to see the irony in that.

A lack of imagination, and the closely related inability to understand or acknowledge nuance, is what makes politicians and politics so boring. On message on message on message, driving their message home in the same predictable way, like a tractor.

They think that’s what people want, the certainty and predictability. Maybe they’re right. Just repeat the words ‘Make History Melbourne’ (Greens) or ‘Victorian families’ (Labor) or ‘environmental vandal’ (Greens) or ‘bad tax’ (Liberal) and the voters will roll over and show you their bellies, the logic goes.

I’ve just been reading this, another David Foster Wallace gem from Up, Simba, an essay in Consider The Lobster.

‘It’s hard to get good answers as to why Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough. Surely one reason, though, is that…cool, interesting alive people are not drawn to the political process. Think back to the sort of kids in highschool who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game…In fact, the likeliest reason that many of us care so little about politics is because modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard to name, much less talk about.’*

*1) I was a prefect at school, and occasionally suffer from being ambitious in a sad way 2) I do know some nice politicians who don’t hurt me deep down in ways that are hard to name*

Review: Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

‘What twenty-seven-year-old Johan Harstad has written is quite plainly a work of genius,’ claims a recommendation on the cover of Buzz Aldrin: What Happened To You in All the Confusion? My inner cynic was immediately suspicious of such effusive praise. But the Norwegian author’s novel has done well: it’s been made into a TV series and the rights have been sold in over ten different countries.

Mattias, the protagonist and narrator, is a gardener at a local nursery, delivering flowers to the dying. He’s excellent at most things he does, and also happens to be an extraordinary, blow-you-away singer. But Mattias is desperately afraid of attention. He wants to be useful but forgotten: ‘a smooth-running cog in the world’.

It’s an interesting aspect of the human condition, the tension between wanting to avoid attention entirely, being happy to do good work unseen, and seeking recognition. Mattias is at the extreme end of the spectrum. His desire to vanish is all-consuming and destructive,  leading to relationship breakdown and mental illness. In this respect, his fate echoes that of his idol, Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, who also suffered from the pressure of being in the limelight.

But there are no psychological revelations here. Mattias’s condition is explored in a flat, predictable manner; through repetitive internal dialogue, rambling passages extolling the virtues and dilemmas of Buzz Aldrin and other indispensable sideliners, and obvious plot twists, like Mattias losing it when a journalist tries to take his photo.

Perhaps this is how those eternally vexing personal dilemmas play out in real life: as the annoying voice in your head’s echo-chamber, the hang-up that you’re somehow attached to, but that you’d be better without. But Buzz doesn’t illuminate this predicament in a believable way.

Mattias breaks down when Helle, his girlfriend of 12 years, dumps him, and he loses his job. On the way to the Faroe Islands, where he’s reluctantly agreed to sing with his friend’s band, he loses consciousness and wakes up to find himself alone on the island with his face squashed in asphalt.

After wandering around confused for a few days, he’s picked up by a kindly psychiatrist called Havstein, who takes him back to his halfway house, an alternative psychiatric facility. Havstein assures Mattias that he’ll be there for a while. This seems kind of creepy, and for a while I wondered whether the novel was going to turn into some kind of thriller.

As it turns out, Havstein does have his own issues, but the halfway house, more homely commune than institution, becomes a place of healing for Mattias, and its inhabitants a second family. Yet despite these people being seemingly crucial to his personal development, we never get to know them at all. They are only constructed as types, a supporting cast to his emotional journey.

We are given little signs about the characters, including pop culture references, but it’s difficult to piece these together. Enen, for example, Mattias’s best friend at the facility, is insatiably interested in what other people do, listens only to the Cardigans, and when unwell, used to travel around on buses waiting for strangers to fall in love with her. But these indicators don’t give you a coherent sense of her personality.

The sparse characterisation may be an attempt to convey distance and the sense of not knowing someone even though you’re close, or the author may have intended to evoke Mattias’s fear of getting entangled. But given that Mattias’s friendships with the Faroe Island inhabitants are how he overcomes this fear, breathing more life into them would have made sense.

Buzz feels like it’s taking place at a distance. It might be because the characters don’t seem like anyone you know, or might conceivably know. It could also be the translation, Mattias’s oddly detached voice, or the uneasy discord between the very concrete, prosaic elements of the plot and its more colourful, imaginative aspects.

Mattias narrates in fluid, restrained, poetic fragments, and in the end, it was the grace of the prose that carried me through. There are some unexpected moments, too – like when Mattias matter-of-factly picks up a self-help book from the airport without expecting too much from it, and concludes that it’s not too bad, because at least it has a simple, useful message. But in general, Buzz’s problem is that while we’re often told how Mattias is feeling, we’re never there with him.

Cross-posted from Killings blog.

Jonathan Franzen and sentimentality

Jonathan Franzen, giving the Melbourne Writers Festival keynote address last night at the packed Melbourne Town Hall, told a story about sitting at his mum’s deathbed confessing all his ‘dark secrets’, like how he used to climb out of his window at night and how he always wanted to be a writer. ‘You’re an eccentric,’ she said, seeming to care little about the details of his misadventures. So much to relate to in this story: the desire for your parents to understand who you really are, and the eventual recognition that they won’t – or can’t – know you that way. That’s what I love about Franzen — his insights on the less palatable aspects of our relationships and personal motivations – those confronting little truths that we brush over in search of a more appealing narrative.

What I find most difficult about Franzen’s writing, however, and I believe I’m not alone here, is that while it’s clever and ambitious and sweeping and social, it sometimes seems to lack heart. In one of the most interesting Q & A sessions I’ve seen for ages, a girl said she’d been reading the late David Foster Wallace’s essay E Unibus Pluram, which attacks the culture of excessive irony. Is there a place for sentimentality in your writing, she asked Franzen.

Franzen said he didn’t care for Arcade Fire, because they were like Talking Heads but without the irony. He suggested that if he’d had a chance to talk to DFW about it, then DFW would have redefined his boundaries. He pointed out that there’s a halfway point between absolute irony and sentimentality. He seemed deeply uncomfortable with the idea of pure sentimentality, but also unable to explain why, apart from saying that it’s too easy to satire, a point which seems more about self-protection than the inherent undesirability of sentimentality.

He may have also said it was self indulgent to over-romanticise your emotions – it was getting late and unfortunately I can’t remember. Perhaps Franzen thinks pure sentimentality is a conceit. He might be right – if I’m honest with myself, often when I sentimentalise, there’s a part of my brain that celebrates the image of myself sentimentalising. But I did think his reaction to this question seemed overly emphatic (defensive?) and I wonder whether his perspective on sentimentality will shift with the years.

Also: Stephanie Convery’s short thoughts  on the event.

Book review: The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne

Cross-posted from LiteraryMinded.

If you’ve read any of Craig Sherborne’s writing, you’ll know not to expect a rosy-eyed view of the world. The Amateur Science of Love follows the grim journey of a love affair gone wrong.

Colin leaves the unglamorous environs of his parents’ farm to pursue an acting career in London, seeking recognition in the eyes of others and satiation of his own ego. In London, Colin meets Tilda, a young artist whose hint of tragedy and complexity only makes her more attractive. In the fiery early stages of their affair, love and lust are almost inseparable; an all-consuming, visceral illness. Even love, Colin realises, is a small-scale form of fame and power.

Consumed by this desire, so heady and self-affirming as to be a kind of vanity, the two lovers set up a life together, moving to country Victoria. Beset by a series of unfortunate events, and strained by the stifling banality of a deadbeat country town, the lovers’ hastily rendered relationship sours into something deeply unpleasant.

As the affair deteriorates, Colin’s unkind thoughts grow like a cancer, rotting his integrity. He abjectly neglects moral responsibilities (there’s one particularly horrifying example), and treats Tilda like inconvenient baggage. He determines women’s worth based on callous assessments of their physical appearance. Colin’s dark ruminations, laid bare by Sherborne, are both confronting and utterly familiar.

Yet Colin’s not entirely devoid of moral conscience – he periodically segues into a retrospective voice, regretfully ruminating on his ‘lopsided record’ and expressing a desire to ‘square his soul.’ There are even times when he genuinely cares for and looks after Tilda, although we’re still left guessing whether it’s more about his ego.

Tilda, physically vulnerable and sensing Colin’s fading interest in her, is naturally insecure, making her fits of jealous pique, manipulative behaviour and vindictiveness understandable. But it’s difficult to pity her, as we’re never given a sense of her inner self. And this is possibly the author’s intent; the cardboard cut-out version of Tilda is a realistic perception of her through the eyes of self-obsessed Colin.

Sherborne’s humour is acerbic, his prose fluid and sparing. He tells cruel human truths in poetry, often with caustic, biting humour – ‘just a thought-sip of suicide, nothing more’ (a failed interview), and ‘it was like he was from hospital and she was from Spain’ (lusting after the glamorous wife of a cancer patient). The tale moves at a cracking pace, and Colin’s recollections are used to foreshadow his inevitable comeuppance, creating a sense of foreboding which culminates in the uneasy ending.

Colin and Tilda experience the common epiphany experienced by young people with aspirations; that in reality, life can be mundane and unrewarding, that it’s not necessarily a carnival designed for your own enjoyment, or an indomitable escalator of achievement. Colin is left feeling hollow, and wondering whether other people, like him, are living what they feel is a second-class life. Yet there’s still a sense of possibility; the future is pulling him to an unknown destination.

Sherborne doesn’t let much of what’s human slip through his net, especially if it’s unsavoury. The Amateur Science of Love is a brutally honest exploration of what can go wrong when naïveté, vanity, and unrealistic aspirations meet with the curse of misfortune. It’s packed with psychological juice.

Ingrid Betancourt on shades of grey and tough decisions

Columbian politician Betancourt was captured by FARC guerrillas during her presidential campaign in in 2002. She had run on an anti-corruption platform, and one of her campaign activities involved handing out condoms on the street, something which her dad was a bit uneasy with. The gesture was intended to indicate that she’d keep people safe from corruption – she’d say to people, “If you vote for me, it’s like you’re in a condom.” I’m pretty sure something here was lost in translation, but you get the picture. “Why was your party called the Green Oxygen party?” interviewer Peter Mares asked. “Because, if you’re in politics in Columbia, it’s like you can’t breathe [for the corruption],” Betancourt explained.

Betancourt, beautiful and sophisticated with long, black-stockinged legs, has a warm, intelligent, animated face. She spoke passionately, articulately, and with perfect diction, even sounding out the ‘h’ in her ‘whys.’ As she retold the story of her capture, as she has done many times including in her book Even Silence Has An End, I wondered what effect the constant re-telling would have on someone who must surely still be suffering trauma – is it therapeutic, or ultimately damaging? Perhaps cognisant of this, interviewer Peter Mares asked his questions carefully and respectfully, occasionally looking down at his well-thumbed copy of her book, which was extensively peppered with post-it notes.

Betancourt’s a great storyteller – using well-timed pauses and bringing out ominous little details, she evoked a palpable sense of dread as she retold the story of her capture. She was captured while she was attempting to travel to San Vincente del Cagua as part of her campaign. The area was thought to be quite safe – flooded with government military and with helicopters buzzing overhead. The President had even decided to hold a press conference there, presumably to illustrate his powerfulness in driving out the FARC. Presumably for this reason, Betancourt said, he didn’t want the presence of an opposition politician and withdrew her security escorts at the last minute. She decided to go anyway, realising that if she acquiesced, the President would control the rest of her campaign.

Because of the strong military presence, nobody thought FARC would be audacious enough to set up a roadblock. And Betancourt didn’t expect to be targeted by them – she’d been sitting around a table with its leaders, joking and talking about politics, only weeks before. In general, it’s difficult to tell the difference between FARC and the military – they both wear the same khaki uniform – but Betancourt had been told that you had to look at the boots – the army’s were leather and FARC’s were rubber. So when she was stopped at a checkpoint that day, she gazed down at the rubber boots of her apprehender and realised she was in trouble. Picturing those boots in my head, I had flicker of the sick, queasy, limp, shaky feeling she must felt at that time.

Betancourt explained the moral ambiguity of the capture situation. In one sense, she said, you could say that the captors were the evil ones and the captives the good ones. ‘That’s true,’ agreed Mares. But no – the reality, Betancourt explained, was vastly different – there were shades of light and dark in both. The guards, some of whom were as young as 12, were regularly replaced. Some became friends, and she noticed some of them struggling with their conscience. What’s more, they spoke to her of the misery of their situation, situations of hunger – at least, working for FARC, they were fed every day, even if it was only rice and beans. But their behaviour deteriorated the longer they stayed there – “they could be quite humiliating.” This evolution towards cruelty was perhaps a result of their progressive indoctrination by FARC, the gradual entrenchment of a hostile groupthink, and constant threats of repercussions if the hostages were to escape.

The situation was also difficult with her fellow captives. Apparently – and I haven’t had time to look into this properly – that some of them have written books that were quite critical of her. But Betancourt spoke of the difficulty of maintaining your integrity in trying situations, and how what seems like a practical decision to make in the moment may not be the right one in the long term. For example, on the first night they were captured, they were in a compound with lots of lights and surrounded by barbed wire – it reminded Betancourt of a concentration camp. One of the guards yelled something along the lines of ‘give me your numbers’ and the captives started yelling out their numbers. Betancourt refused to comply with this dehumanising edict, requesting that they call her by name instead. For this, she attracted considerable resentment from fellow captives, who accused her of being a Prima Donna. And you can understand why they acted like this – there’s nothing that makes you feel worse than when something you know does something which implicitly questions a decision of yours that you feel uncomfortable about.

Like everything else, the jungle was both darkness and light. It was the impenetrable site of her captivity, but also provided a cloak for her escape. It was a source of diseases and bugs, but also gave her thoughts a clarity, pace, and rhythm. The river was like a highway through the jungle, allowing her to escape, but also a black, threatening pool of water teeming with unsavoury creatures like piranhas. Betancourt said she became very good at planning to escape – snaffling materials like fish hooks and flotation devices (water containers). Ironically, when she finally did managed to escape with one of her fellow captives, they caught heaps of fish but then realised they didn’t actually know how to light a fire! Her companion was diabetic, so Betancourt chopped up the raw fish in an attractive arrangement and then presented it to him, saying, “Look, it’s sushi,” and popping it into her mouth, “Mmm… delicious.”

At the end of her talk, Ingrid Betancourt was asked how she sustained her spirit during six years in capacity. “Love,” she said, and something along the lines of “Love is the answer.” This prompted a slightly awkward silence amongst audience members, who may, like me, have been flinching at the cheesy-ness of this Barbra Streisand-associated phrase, however apt. Or perhaps they were just moved. She went on to talk about how focusing on those moments where you gave or received love from family or friends helped salve her sense of self, which became bruised as a result of the hatred she received from others. Faith, too, helped – Betancourt is a Christian and carried a bible on her the whole time. Betancourt explained faith as a greater version of love – love from God or whatever higher power you believe in.

Betancourt was also asked what Columbia should do about the FARC, who are no longer negotiating. There are two possible reasons for this, Betancourt explained. It could either be because they are simply a drug cartel – and have no interest in politics anymore – or it may be that there is no central control. In either of these scenarios, she saw the only possibility as military intervention. Her view is surprising, especially as she acknowledged that unless the root causes for widespread displacement of people and poverty were addressed, another FARC would be likely to spring up. But if a war were to commence, wouldn’t it make it even harder to address these root causes? I guess there is no real right answer.

Mares concluded by asking her about the politics of hostage-taking. By advocating for her release so vociferously, did the French government, her family, and other supporters play right into FARC’s hands, by making her more valuable as a hostage? Not at all, Betancourt said firmly, explaining that it doesn’t really work that way. She reminded us that twenty of her fellow captives, who are not high-profile at all, are still in captivity.

It’s so rare to see an Australian politician, or any politician really, who so obviously practises heart politics. I mean, with a few exceptions, half the time, it’s like they forget why they’re even there, I mean, on a human or emotional level. In this context, Betancourt’s obvious passion, combined with an ability to advocate clear, considered solutions, offers welcome inspiration.

DavidMitchellwhipped

Last night, while we were waiting for the Wheeler Centre’s David Mitchell talk to start, my friend and I were talking about geeks who come full circle. That is, when they’re at school or whatever, they’re not really comfortable in their skin – their geekiness is like an itch or something that they try to hide – but when they grow up they become one with their geekiness, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold.

I came to this talk with almost zero knowledge of Mitchell. In general, going to author’s talks when you haven’t read the book is highly recommended – it’s more surprising. I have a copy of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet on my floor, and am now burning to read it.

The predominant mood last night was Swoon. Michael Gawenda, the Wheeler Centre guy, almost seemed a bit fluttery and stuttery himself when he introduced Mitchell, although that could have been for other reasons. And Jenny Niven, the Program Manager at the Melbourne Writers Festival, who has this beautiful, lilting, Scottish accent, was gazing at him almost lovingly the whole time. You got the feeling that she had devoured his whole oeuvre, and was just dying to ask something like, ‘You know, I still can’t understand why you killed off that minor character in page 500 of your unpublished manuscript, the one that nobody else has read yet, and yet it worked so perfectly?’

Mitchell seemed like a bit of a blank canvas when he first emerged from behind the curtain – storky, with a sticking-up fringe, cotton slacks, and daggy lace-ups. Like, he could have gone either way – been kookily funny; quiet, serious, and academic; or completely disengaged.

Mitchell said that the decision to write about late 18th century Dejima, a tiny island of Dutch traders in the bay of Nagasaki, was a mistake. Why? Novels thrive on coincidences and chance meetings, and the Japanese government’s policy of strict segregation between the Japanese and the Dutch was completely antithetical to that. Only a very select group of Japanese families were allowed to mix with the Dutch, and they weren’t even allowed to learn each others’ languages. But in the end, after thinking about elaborate plot contrivances to bring the two together, he realised that the solution lay within the problem. ‘Memo to self,’ he said, ‘The solution lies within the problem.’ A useful dictum, methinks, but what the solution was in this case, I’m not sure – I’ll have to read the book.

Figuring out what happened in the 18th century required both hard research – what were the major historical events of the time – and soft research – how was a room lit, how did they heat themselves, how did they shave, how did they bath, what did they eat? So you’ve got to work all this stuff out, he said, and then hide it, otherwise you’ll have a sentence like, ‘Jacob, I’m not sure if we should use the whale oil lamp, because that might be very expensive… maybe we should use the pig fat candle.’ It’s not easy to write a novel, he pointed out, when you have to check Wikipedia every time you write a sentence. He also had to think carefully about language. At first he thought it needed to be completely archaic, but after writing a few pages of that ‘slew,’ he realised it sounded like Black Adder and nobody was going to want to read it. Eventually, he realised he had to create his own ‘bygonese’ — an inaccurate but plausible language – with a different type of bygonese for the Japanese and the Dutch. Anyway, here’s an essay he wrote about writing historical fiction – have a read if you’re interested.

At first, I thought Mitchell’s disarmingness was incidental, and then I realised this guy was actually quite self-aware, conscious of his need to entertain the audience. When asked about his elaborately constructed plots, he said it was really an atomistic process, and then rejected this terminology, ‘It’s too late in the night for that kind of language… ok, it’s more like Lego.’ He’d started as a short story writer, and then gradually built up from there. Did he plan his novels? No, ‘life’s too short to plan a Lego cathedral.’

Mitchell’s stutter seemed almost cultivated, as it usually preceded some selection of the perfect adjective or a cracking metaphor. He fielded quite a few sycophantic questions from the audience, like ‘in XXX novel, which hasn’t been mentioned enough tonight I don’t think, there are so many great ideas in each chapter. Aren’t you concerned about using up all your good ideas at once?’ There was a little pause, a nod of the head, and then he’d be fluently expounding about how when he first started writing, he was dead-scared of committing the novelist’s cardinal sin of being boring, so he tried to fit in as many ideas as he could. Now, he was content to really work hard on developing the one plot and set of characters. ‘Now I’m growing a pumpkin whereas before I was….popping doughnuts.’ A look of glee at the marvellous metaphor he’d selected and then he mimed making doughnuts with his fingers.

They’re making a film out of Cloud Atlas, with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, and Nevin asked Mitchell something along the lines of whether he was concerned if it was capable of fully realising the potential of the book. He said that that was really up to them, and he didn’t mind as long as they paid him the money – but at the same time, he’d read the script and was really excited about it, ‘I think it could be at least a good a film as my book is a book, however good you think that is.’ He was quite pleased with his own quip, deeming it the quote of the night.

It was really quite lovely, sitting and listening to Mitchell in the cosy, elaborate, Athenaeum theatre with its mellow lighting and all the other like-minded audience members in their woollen scarfs. Almost like meditating, I could just focus on his voice, his beautiful constantly gesticulating hands, and the warm, lilting, interjections from his interviewee. A welcome end to a day in which I’d had a spate with my colleague at work, whom I’ll dub Lolly Boy (origin of the nickname is another story), because he’d call me ‘Young Lady’ one too many times. Removing distractions, turning your phone off, and absorbing interesting thoughts and conversations, without having to participate, is a welcome reprieve from the grinding mundanities of the office day.

At the end of the show, there was this mile-long line of fans trying to get their book signed, so my friend and I decided to get a sneaky glass of red wine and then come back. Serendipitously, when we returned to the Athenaeum, there were only three people left in the line. It was this young girl, the one who had asked Mitchell an earnest, kind-of-cheesy but still cute question about whether it was lonely being a writer. She was with her mum, and the mum was being kind-of-embarrassing in a way I recognised. We could hear something along the lines of, ‘My daughter taught English in Japan and she really.. and it’s really…’ and this just went on for ages. Mitchell, of course, was being really interested and polite and warm. When the mum finally retreated, he said to the girl, ‘Your mum’s lovely. Kind of intense, but worth having.’

Then my friend went up to get her book signed. I just hovered behind her, trying to look cool and all-knowing, but not desperate. Mitchell said sympathetically, ‘You guys must have been waiting for ages.’ ‘Actually, we just popped off to get a drink,’ we said, feeling pretty shiny. Mitchell wrote flourishingly with a black texta all over the inside cover page, and I commented, trying to be cool again, ‘That’s a pretty flamboyant signature.’ My friend gushed about how good his book was, and I think he tuned out until she said, ‘I had to take a few deep breaths after I finished it,’ at which point he re-engaged and smiled at her thankfully. We left, and his Wheeler Centre minders swooped in on him, looking concerned that the signing had gone on for so long. They were probably, like, ‘David, are you OK? It’s been a long night,’ whereas I think he was loving it.

Death, ageing and a review of Somewhere Towards The End

Up until your late twenties, you’ve never known anything but being young, it’s almost part of your identity. Intellectually, you know things will change eventually, but it’s hard to imagine it. Then you get a grey hair or two, some back problems, and those little wrinkles around your eyes – chicken feed, really, but it’s a sign of things to come. When you complain about it, people say, ‘that’s ridiculous, you’re still so young,’ almost like it’s a virtue, which is comforting, but eventually they’re going to stop saying that, because it won’t be true anymore.

One of my main fears about ageing (this is a bit embarrassing) is loss of physical attractiveness. How much of our happiness stems from looking good? A little bit, I think. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective – if you’re less physically attractive, it might be more difficult to find a mate and perpetuate the proverbial gene pool… The other fear, nicely summed up in the annoying dictum ‘carpe diem’, is that you’ll run out of time to do the things you want to do. But this seems a bit gimme-ish – do we really need to do everything, fit everything in? Most significantly, though, when you discover that first grey hair, it’s a reminder of mortality.

Since I was a child, I’ve been quite scared of death; the inevitability of eternal loss of consciousness, and the unknowability of that final state. Thoughts of the afterlife once helped (I was force-fed Catholicism), but it’s really a self-delusion, an artificial panacea to the idea of mortality, which is a difficult, uncomfortable idea to get your head around.

The world is only experienced subjectively. So practically speaking, death is the end of the world – there’s probably still a world, but you won’t be in it, and you’ll have absolutely no awareness of it. Indifference to post-death events, even those happening to those you care about, is one possible manifestation of this belief. Maybe people feel differently if they have children; again, there might be an evolutionary basis for this apparent altruism.

I picked up Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards The End over the Easter weekend. She offers rare insights into topics sometimes treated as taboo, like: What does it feel when your beauty ebbs away? What happens to people’s sex drive when they get older? How does it feel to be forced to care for someone? How does an atheist cope with the thought of death? How do we come to terms with our regrets?

Athill’s take on the deterioration of beauty is that the vanity (if that’s what it is) doesn’t go away just because you get a bit wrinkly. Old people need to look good too, mainly for their own satisfaction – in this respect, she thinks modern day cosmetics are a great help. She describes the process of losing her sex drive. By the end, she was ready for it – ‘there was no reprieve, nor did I want one’- and she even saw some benefits. In Athill’s view (this is probably controversial), biologically, women are more consumed by sex, because they can’t walk away from the results (kids). Thus the ebbing away of sex drive endows women with an enhanced sense of individuality. In her case, she feels that this more firmly established her atheism.

Athill defends atheism as a belief system which, perhaps even more than religion, has the beauty of mystery: ‘Perhaps it is intellectually uninteresting to believe that the nature of the universe is far, far beyond grasping, not only by oneself as an individual but by oneself as a member of the species, but emotionally, or poetically, it seems to me vastly more exciting and more beautiful than any amount of ingenuity in making up fairy stories.’ To Athill, atheism has integrity too, including when it comes to the prospect of death: ‘not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true…and it also remains when I contemplate my own extinction.’ Despite her refutation of religiosity, she does believe a single human life has cosmic signficance, because because every individual makes some kind of contribution or leaves a trace on the world, however minor.

Somewhere Towards The End meanders and digresses, and my attention occasionally wandered. However, the gentle rhythm of her prose, and her intimate, gently contemplative tone, make you feel like you’re in a relaxed, fascinating conversation with a friend, whereby digressions are par for the course. Athill’s famous for her memoirs, and this one, to me, exemplifies a particular type of really good writing; honest, fearless, and bare of affectation.