On attention and reciprocity
Stories by Tove Jansson, Part 3 (“The Squirrel”)
The earlier sections of this essay can be found here: Part 1, and here: Part 2.
“The Squirrel” in A Winter Book: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson, Sort Of Books, London, 2006, pp. 127-152. Story was originally published in 1971, translation from the Swedish by Sylvester Mazzarella dates from 2005.
To read it in Swedish, look for it as “Ekorren” in Lyssnerskan or listen to a recording online, e.g. on Spotify.
Many years ago an old friend and I broke off from a group to step into a little tourist store in a little tourist town.
We were the only customers, except for a drunk man who wandered around making comments that he clearly thought were friendly.
After a tour of the whole, I suggested to my friend that it was time to leave.
“Soon,” she said vaguely, and continued to browse among shelves that we had already looked at.
“Soon,” she said again, when I looked at her a few minutes later. She moved on to another set of shelves that we had also already looked at.
A bell signalled that the shop door had been opened, and I looked up to see the drunk man going out.
There was a silence, and then the woman who worked in the store came out from behind the counter. “Thank you,” she said to my friend. My friend smiled and said “I thought you might like us to stick around a little.”
I hadn’t noticed that the woman who worked in the store was alone there, or that when we left she’d be on her own with the overly-friendly drunk guy.
My friend had been paying attention.
After that I swore to myself that I’d start paying attention. In the years since then it’s come to seem to me that attention — well-meaning, intelligent attention — is one of the biggest gifts that we can give our fellow human beings. This kind of attention can be fleeting — a few minutes on a bus — or part of the give and take of a lifelong relationship, but it matters. It can transform lives.
When we receive it in the right way at the right time, we blossom. That sense of opening up, a flower to the sun.
I’ve seen it in others, and I’ve felt it in myself.
Attention here has a specific meaning, which has nothing to do with praise or with fame.
It’s well-meaning (because attention that is not well-meaning is terrifying) and it’s intelligent, which is to say thoughtful (because thoughtless or facile attention can do more harm than good), and it is full-on, or as much as is called for by the situation.
My definition might be: attention is when one focuses both one’s good intentions/generosity and one’s intelligence/thoughtfulness on someone else, whether for a short time and in a narrow context, or regularly and in a broad context.
Attention is when one focuses both one’s mind and one’s generosity on someone else
This kind of attention does not need to be reciprocal to have immensely positive impacts. If one is, for instance, a teacher, at any level, from preschool to Ph.D. programs, the attention properly flows in one direction, downhill so to speak, and that is its great strength in some ways. As a student, to be the recipient of such attention, with no expectation of return, can change the world, and the same is true for children, or in therapeutic contexts, and so forth.
But it’s interesting to think about how we address reciprocity of well-meaning, thoughtful attention in relationships, especially romantic relationships.
Long after that day in that gift shop, I was thinking back over a relationship that had recently ended. It had seemed to be reciprocal in the amount of attention that was given and received. We had shared a great deal about ourselves with each other, and probably knew equal amounts about the other by the end of it.
But afterwards it occurred to me that the reciprocity of attention had been a self-created illusion. The mechanism of the illusion was even transparent. I had asked him questions about himself, which he had answered, and I had then volunteered the answers to the questions about me that he had not asked. At the end, an equal amount of information had been shared. It was as if we’d been two actors on stage together, but when the other actor was silent I’d spoken his part as well as my own, and convinced myself that we were performing a dialogue.
When I told this story, as what I was thought was an unusual and slightly amusing anecdote, I was surprised to find that it was apparently a common experience. Somehow I had always thought that one-sided relationships involved one person deluding oneself about how much affection was being offered. So was interesting to see how people recognised the process I described, this deluding oneself into believing that there are reciprocal amounts of attention being paid, or rather deluding oneself into thinking that because one is paying enough well-meaning attention for two, the appropriate amount over all exists in the relationship.
We are coming to Tove Jannson’s wild, hilarious, completely over-the-top short story “The Squirrel,” I promise. It’s about exactly this: the process of self-delusion about reciprocity of attention.
But first I’d like to take a detour into a more recent piece of fiction.
In Solvej Balle’s recent novel Om Uträkning av Omfång I,1 a woman wakes up one day to discover that the world has become stuck in time. For everyone else, it is the same day that it had been the day before.
She happens to be on a trip that day; she takes the train home to her husband, who is astonished to see her, as she was not due back yet on the day that he is still living in. She explains, he believes her, they finish the day, they go to bed, and in the morning he wakes up astonished to find her in bed with him; he is back in the day he had been in before she came home, along with the rest of the world. Every day it is the same: except when disrupted from the pattern by her, he would do exactly the same actions, moment by moment, as on the day before.
After months of this she decides that it’s easier just to live in the house, in the spare bedroom, without telling him that she’s back. Since his day is identical every day, she can adapt herself precisely to his life — his actions and presences and absences.
This is how she describes it:
I have fallen into a rhythm. I wake up in the mornings. I hear Thomas in the house. I keep myself still when it is quiet in the house. I move when his sounds cause me to disappear. I boil water in the kettle when he has gone upstairs, when he opens the tap in the bathroom, when he flushes the toilet. The water filling the cistern covers my sounds. …. I go around in the house when Thomas is away. We have a rhythm that we harmonise. It is a rhythm that should not be broken. I go out when I am covered by the music, when the doors I open disappear in sound. I open bags that rustle when the rustling bags cannot be heard. (p.107)
….
I hear Thomas’s footsteps in the house. There is almost no distance between us. I count the days, but they no longer cause the distance to grow. I have found a way into his day. We move in measure, in harmony, we play a duet, or we are an entire orchestra. …. It’s easier now. If I follow his day, if I keep to the rhythm, if I don’t break the pattern. (p.107-108)
(My translation from the Swedish translation of the Danish original)
Notice how she convinces herself, against all evidence, that she and her husband are sharing a mutual level of attention, when in reality he is not even aware that she is in the house.
Balle’s novel — this is actually part one of a seven-part novel; there are two out in Swedish now, but I’ve only read the first so far — has been a big hit here. I read the first volume as a clinical exploration of isolation in all of its forms, and this passage as an illustration of just one particular form, the kind of isolation in which one is so desperate to be part of a mutual giving and receiving of attention that one provides not only one’s own share but also the other’s.
And now on to Tove Jansson’s short story. If Solvej Balle’s illustration of this process is clinical and deadly serious, with a character who is not a particularly reflective person, Tove Jansson’s look is the opposite.
She imagines a thinking person — in fact an over-thinking person, a writer — engaging in the same process, and gives it to us hilariously, exaggeratedly. It is painful sometimes, but also just simply a joy to read.
It begins like this.
On a windless day in November, near sunrise, she saw a squirrel at the landing place. It was sitting motionless near the water, scarcely visible in the half-light, but she knew it was a real live squirrel and she hadn’t seen a living thing for a long time. You can’t count gulls: they’re always leaving; they’re like wind over waves and grass.” (p.127)
You can see already that this is a different character from either the tant or the Fillyjonk. Those two we saw either entirely from the outside, or partly from inside and partly from outside. Here, we are only in the mind of the writer, and we hear her language, her way of seeing the world.
She is more self-aware than either the tant or the Fillyjonk. The tant has relatively little self-awareness and almost no inner life, at least as can be seen from the outside. The Fillyjonk is exquisitely attuned to her own anxieties, but not much else, at least until the ending. (One wonders what she will blossom into, after that ending — who the Fillyjonk will turn out to be.)
The woman in this story lives alone in a small house on a tiny Finnish island. There are no other houses on the island. She’s running low on supplies, but has been resisting taking her little motor boat to a larger island where she can shop. She has no telephone, though there is a two-way radio that sometimes works.
She drinks a little too much, and is in the habit of hiding her drinking from someone else. She chops wood for winter. She cooks. She keeps track of the sea and the wind, the temperatures. She writes.
Once the squirrel arrives, she pays attention to it. She frets about its well-being. She gets mad at it. She pretends indifference to it. She worries that it might leave. She tries to enter into its thoughts, to guess what it thinks about her.
She adapts her life to it.
The following passage comes about three quarters into the story, when she realizes that the squirrel might be making its home in her woodpile:
She was woken by an awareness that had matured during her sleep, about the winter firewood, the wood she would need every day right throughout the winter. Constant ant-like expeditions up the hill, to saw and chop her way deeper and deeper down into the pile, an obstinate and implacable enemy getting nearer and opening new apertures of cold and light around a seduced and accursed squirrel lying in its home of tangled waste.
“They must divide the winter firewood between them, that was absolutely clear. One pile for the squirrel and one for her and it must be arranged at once. (p.140).
She spends the next day making two piles, then worries that she did it wrong, didn’t put enough attention into what would be best for the squirrel. Finally she goes to bed.
This evening she didn’t light the lamp, a breach of ritual, but it showed the squirrel how little she cared what happened on the island.
“Next morning the squirrel didn’t come to eat. She waited a long time, but it didn’t come. There was no reason why it should be offended or suspicious. Everything she’d done had been simple, unambiguous and just: she’d divided the woodpile between them and withdrawn. More than just: the squirrel’s woodpile was many times bigger than hers. …. [S]he made a serious attempt to understand how the squirrel might perceive her and in what way the scare at the woodpile might have changed its attitude to her. Perhaps it had been on the point of forming an attachment to her only to be gripped by distrust at the crucial moment. (pp. 142 - 143).
In the meantime, the squirrel goes about its life. It takes anything she offers it, like food. It breaks into her house and destroys her belongings.
In the end, it steals her boat.
If you ever happen to want to give someone a step-by-step manual to all the different ways one acts when deluding oneself that there is mutual attention being offered in a relationship, this story is not a bad start. Long after I read it, I recognised some of its processes in myself at the start of a new relationship, realised that it was going nowhere, and was able to laugh and drop it off with no harm done.
But the point of this essay is not to avoid paying attention to other people. The point I think is that attention of the kind we’re talking about here is so vital, so important, that it pays to take it seriously, to notice when we are offering it to others and when we are not, and to be perceptive about whether or not someone else is offering it to us.
One of the most lovely experiences I have had in the past several years was a series of conversations that took place in the tiny village that I had just moved to. The pastor of the nearest church had organised these discussions, simply called “conversations about existence.” They were open to everyone, not just members of that church or that religion. There was no fika (coffee and cake), no introductions beyond names. Some people were new to the town, like me, while others had grown up knowing their grandparents here and now were growing old knowing their grandchildren in the same place. For an hour and a half, people talked, and listened. They paid attention to each other. I cannot think of anything that matters more.
Solvej Balle, Om Uträkning av Omfång I, translated into Swedish from Danish by Ninni Holmqvist, Wahlström & Widstrand, 2020. I gather that the title is ambiguous in both Danish and Swedish; the last word in particular can have many meanings. But I happened to be sitting in a cafe one day when the man at the next table started to chat. He had a Ph.D., as it turned out, in abstract mathematics, and when eventually the conversation turned to the book I was reading, without hesitation he translated the title along the lines of “On the Calculation of Circumferences.” So that is what I offer to you as a possible English translation. (Although in fact on a quick check just now I see that it will come out in English as On the Calculation of Volume. See https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/faber-snaps-up-first-three-in-balles-addictive-septology-in-a-six-way-auction. I like “circumferences” because it seems to me that the first volume, at least, is all about limits and circumscriptions.)
Lovely!
This is lovely! The squirrel story is unforgettable - and I love your emphasis on the simplicity of reciprocal attention.