Being here
On staying in and dropping out. Includes references to novels by Stig Claesson, Bodil Malmsten, and Claire-Louise Bennett.
I
A friend has a story she sometimes tells about a dog. It happened a long time ago.
The dog was a large German shepherd. It spent its days in the yard of a house down the road from where she and her boyfriend, now husband, were living temporarily.
She had to pass the dog to get home, and every time she did it came right up to the fence, barking aggressively, sometimes growling.
The two of them, she and her boyfriend, were living in that country for just a few months, while he did a short-term, fill-in job for his company.
Neither of them knew anyone in the area, so while her boyfriend worked she explored the city on her own. She walked everywhere, checking out museums and so forth; and in the evenings they met up on their front porch and had a beer together and talked over their respective days.
It was wonderful and an adventure, my friend said, with the only dark or unfriendly moments coming from the dog down the street.
One evening she and her boyfriend sat on the porch with their beers late into the night. A thunderstorm had begun. They were looking out at it, all the display of summer lightening and the uproar of the thunder. In the midst of the thunder they heard a crash, which they eventually learned was the sound of the fence down the road falling over. A few moments later the dog appeared, running, and without looking left or right, without seeming even to notice her boyfriend, it came straight up onto the porch, whimpering, and put its head into her lap.
II
When I moved in my little house in this little village in the middle of the pandemic, it was deep winter and I didn’t know what the roses were going to be like.
When spring came around, and then the summer, and all the different kinds of roses began to bud and then finally bloom, I walked around every day to find out what they would be. I was curious about the colour of their flowers, and the size, and especially, the scent, if any.
I bent over slowly-growing buds for weeks, trying to smell them. At a certain point, I realised that among my principal activities was, quite literally, smelling the roses.
At that time I was accomplishing very, very little else, other than sustaining myself and entertaining my elderly neighbour and occasionally serving coffee to others (outdoors only, because of the pandemic).
I saw my neighbors almost every day.
III
Is it ever legitimate to say, “I have done enough,” when it comes to the world at large? I’m not asking in terms of anyone else, just for myself, because it is a question that troubles me.
Sometimes I think that it is. A long time ago I left a university job in a field that is devoted to the public interest. I had taught many students and had written a handful of things, mostly commissioned by one UN agency or another, that seemed to be doing a reasonable amount of good in the world.
I felt that now I could stop that work and write the novel I wanted to write. If the novel failed to do anything valuable, as it likely would, that would be all right, because I had already done the other work that I felt needed to be done.
As it happened, something came up after a year, and I ended up teaching again for a long time after that.
But was all of that justification necessary? If someone told me that their goal in life was just to smell the roses, and always had been, and that it provided them with a good, and rich, internal life, would I think that an abdication of duty towards humanity?
I can’t imagine that I would. Except that I think that I do, maybe, when it comes to my parents and the complicated era of the 1970s.
IV
Stig Claesson’s novel Vem Älskar Yngve Frej (“Who Loves Yngve Frej”) which I’ve written about a little here, begins with repeated use of a Swedish expression that often comes up in the context of retirement.
I think that the phrase has to do, precisely, with this question of when or whether one is doing or has done enough.
I first heard it in speech from an acquaintance not long after I moved to this village. We were sitting in the garden drinking coffee (outside, because of the pandemic) and she mentioned that she’d worked at the same job for a long time and would soon be becoming a pensioner.
“Jag har gjort mitt,” she added. “I have done mine.”
Claesson’s novel uses that phrase (in the third person, not the first), in its opening passages. The story begins:
The man who had done his walked unhurriedly down the path towards the lake and the postbox.
He was wearing a light blue shirt and dark trousers with suspenders, and freshly polished lace-up boots.
The man who had done his was, that is to say, well-dressed, as befits a person of leisure. He was even freshly shaven, and the gray locks had had a pass from a brush before he walked out bare-headed into the sunlight.
The sun shone from a clear sky and he was only going to the postbox.
But bare-headed!
A man who has done his does not walk to the postbox bare-headed.
A postbox stands after all on a main road.
The man had in fact hesitated for a while between his grey felt hat and his cloth cap with a visor, but had gone out right in the middle of making the decision.
He is bare-headed out of pure distraction of thought.
He has a problem.1
The only translation of this I could find — and I can’t put my hands on it right now — translated “the man who had done his” as something like “the man who had retired,” but it seems that the phrase does, or could, mean much more than that.
The next few pages of the novel talk about different ways in which a changing world is failing “those who have done theirs” in the countryside, both men with paid employment and women who have sustained households. The pages suggest a meaning for the idiom that goes far beyond retirement.
When it was said out in the garden of my house, I didn’t know precisely what it meant.
It could have meant “I have done my bit,” or “I have made my contribution,” or maybe “I have done everything I was supposed to do, and now can do as I like.”
But perhaps all of that that was just projection on my part. Perhaps she meant more like “I have done as much as I am willing to do,” or even “I have done as much as I can.”
I didn’t know my guest well enough to ask. But what I wanted it to mean was what I had meant when I quit the academic job. “I have done all that I have any obligation to do,” was what I wanted it to mean, not just in the sphere of paid employment but on some larger existential scale.
I wanted to think that that notion, that one could legitimately decide that one had done enough after putting some amount of one’s effort into the world, was so well-established that a language had a phrase for it.
But do I really believe that? If a person told me that they felt that they had done enough for others and now would do no more, I would not believe them.
There must be something that can encompass both devotion to smelling the roses and an ongoing sense of duty towards the world.
Parents presumably never lose the second, but I have no children, and no partner to share reciprocal duties with, so my thinking does not, just now, encompass that particular domestic sphere in which so much of what we do for our fellow human beings takes place.
On the other hand, I feel a deep sense of duty to my own generation, and those before and after me, in the world at large.
V
We’ve recently had the hottest days on the planet since the end of the last ice age.
I was told the other day that changes to many everyday fruits and vegetables — the kinds of produce that we buy in grocery stores — make them sturdier for transport, but also mean that they have fewer micronutrients than before.
Much of the produce that is sold in the US, someone told me — I have not fact-checked it — now contains about 50% of the nutritional value that it had when I was a child.
That idea, if true, shakes me almost more than climate destruction does. The notion that successive generations of children may get less food from their food terrifies me in a visceral way.
VI
I once had a dream in which I was walking down an empty country road among the fields. There was only one house in a sight, and as I approached it I could see that it was derelict, just a shell of a wooden house, with loose boards moving in the wind.
A small girl was playing at the edge of the house. When I was quite close she took hold of one of the loose pieces of wood and began to tug.
As an adult, with more knowledge of the world, I could see that that piece was a major structural element, and that if she tugged hard enough the entire structure would collapse. I called to her to stop, and she dropped the board and turned to look at me.
In that moment, in the dream, it became clear that she was not in fact a little girl, but rather the goddess who oversees the cycles by which, from time to time, the world is destroyed and made new again. The house was not a house; it was a metaphor for our universe.
The child who was not a child looked at me and said, “Since you interfered, and since you think you know better than I do, it is your decision now. Does the world keep going as it is, or do I destroy it and start it again fresh?”
The dream ended with me standing there, staring at the little girl, who waited calmly for my answer.
I woke and felt deep gratitude that in fact I had no responsibility for the future of the world.
Is it the dream sense of complete responsibility, or the waking sense of no responsibility at all, that is the more fantastical?
VII
In Bodil Malmsten’s novel The Price of Water in Finistère, the main character leaves her life entirely. She gets in her car and goes, and when she finds a place she wants to be she stops.
A couple of months, that’s all it took. I left the country I’d lived in for fifty-five years, the time had come. Drunk on freedom I drove away; I wasn’t looking, but I found Finistère. Not far from Brest I felt that I was getting close and then it wasn’t long before I was standing in front of the parcel of paradise that is mine.2
She doesn’t know anyone and has no particular reason to be there rather than anywhere else.
But the character is engaged in her new world. Her main focus is on planting her garden, and on writing, but her attention is constantly on the people around her. Her mind also swings to people she knew in the past, to her parents and grandparents, to society as a whole. She is filled with moral convictions about society, and with literature. She is, above all, present.
I won’t share the whole book with you, because the primary reason for bringing it up is to contrast it with a different book on a similar theme, but I’ll quote one more passage, from towards the end, to give a sense of the feel of the whole.
I want to write a book about my Finistère, but it can’t be done.
When I try to capture it, it becomes words, mere words, and it’s unbearable.
I want to put paradise on paper, but when I do, it dies.
Still I want to try, that’s part of who I am, without it I’d have no self.
The desire exists, but I can’t connect with it.
There’s not even a pile of dry pages to burn together with the leaves from the rose hedge, those black-spotted leaves.
“Gather up diseased leaves and burn them,” the gardening book says. I burn the gardening book, the sparks rise to the sky and unite with the stars, the marvellous stars in Finistère like rips in the canvas of heaven giving on to eternity.
What I want to convey are the stars themselves, the dusk and the happiness, the gospel to go forth but not the sermon.
I am filled to the brim with happiness, but what good is that?
What I want is to write happiness, not to go around being happy.3
In Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, the main character is also living alone in a cottage far from the life that she had before. She has a less clearly-drawn biography than the character in the Finistère novel, but she apparently recently left, or was asked to leave, her graduate studies in literature.
This character is brilliant, and possibly going mad. She is very present — at least to herself and her own thoughts and her observations about the world.
Reading the book is a pure pleasure, just for its sheer intelligence inside the mind of the character.
Here is one chapter in its entirety:
Stir-fry
I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that,
so I put in it all the things I never want to see again.4
And here is a longer passage from the following chapter:
…After all, isn’t a party a splendid thing not only because of the people there but also because of the people who aren’t and who suppose they ought to be? No doubt about it, there’ll be a moment, in the bathroom most likely — which will naturally exude an edgeless, living fragrance because of the flowers I picked earlier from the garden — when I feel quite triumphant for having developed the good sense at last to realize that people who are hell-bent upon getting to the bottom of you are not the sort you want around. This is my house — it doesn’t have any curtains and half the time the door is open, that’s true. The neighbours dog comes in, that’s true too, and so do flies and bees, and even birds sometimes — but nobody ought to get the wrong idea — nobody ought to just turn up and stick a nose in! I wonder whether it will become wild or whether people will stay in the range of tomorrow and leave all of a sudden around midnight. I wonder actually if anyone will ask what the party is for. Because of the summer, I’ll say. It’s because of the summer — this house is very nice in the summer — and that’ll be quite evident to anyone who asks. Yes! It’s for the summer, I’ll say, and that’ll take care of it.5
What we see in these passages, I think, is a character for whom her own mind is completely real, but other people are, to a certain extent, abstract.
There isn’t space here to go into a great deal of depth, but I wanted to try to illustrate the contrast between the two novels, as promised in an earlier piece, because I think that it’s precisely that sense of abstraction that makes the second character, despite the pleasure of the overall intelligence, represent a kind of troubling no-responsibility “dropping out” in a way that the first, despite the similar storyline, does not.
VIII
My friend who tells the story about the dog added some details the other day.
“I’d never had much to do with dogs before,” she said. “And this one was being so impolite. It was so big, and so angry.
“I couldn’t imagine why it should be so angry at me.
“On the first day I stopped by the fence and told it kindly, but firmly, in Swedish, what I thought of its behaviour.
“My words didn’t make any difference, but occasionally when I went by after that I reminded it that I had shared my views on this matter, and that it knew what my position was.”
What I take from this is that she was present, to that dog, and that that made all of the difference in the world.
I don’t know what I think of myself, just now, essentially smelling the roses a great deal of the time.
But I think that the answer to the question I’m trying to address in this essay can be found, for me, in a sense that my friend, in being present for that dog, was, in that moment, “doing hers.”
And that any of us, when we are sharing the simple fact of our presence with other people, who are not abstract to us, in whatever form that takes, are “doing ours.”
That is to say that I think that it all might all come down to a notion that presence, and simply being aware of and tuning into each other, no matter the context, is an astounding act of fulfilling our jobs as fellow creatures in a complicated world.
There may be more, but that alone is enormous, and sometimes it may be all that matters.6
(Deleted: info about a poetry “chat” thread that appeared in the original version of this essay, but now is out of date)
Many thanks to
, , , , , , , , , , and for recommending Pen, Book and Garden: Notes from Linnesby to their readers.Vem Älskar Yngve Frej, by Stig Claesson, Bonniers, 1968. P. 7. My loose translation from the original Swedish.
The Price of Water in Finistère (Priset på vatten i Finistère), by Bodil Malmsten, translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry. Vintage Books, London, 2006. (Original publication date 2001; original translation date 2005.) P. 1.
Id., p. 183.
Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett. Riverhead Books, New York, 2016. (Original publication date 2015.) P. 71.
Id., p. 75.
My friend had now read this piece, and I can share the following corrections :).
Her husband was already her husband.
The dog was a Newfoundland or a black lab, not a German shepherd.
The fence did not fall over.
The dog did not put its head into her lap, but rather ran straight under her chair and hid there, behind her legs.
Huh, so interesting! Thanks for sharing these!
You know, I haven’t read any of the novels, but have read other things by some of the writers, and reading the list was really engaging. It made me think about the difference between what one might call “warm” literature on alienation and “cool” literature in the same topic. Will have to think more about it. And about Wings of Desire.
Also have Checkout 19 on the shelf, waiting to be picked up when the time seems right😊
What an interesting, complex post. I think I have to read it again tomorrow...