On feeling oppressed by time…

I have realised it’s an aspect of growing older: the further I get in life’s journey, the more oppressed I feel by the very idea of time. At one level, it’s a personal thing. I look back to my early life and my parents, and realise how long ago all those memories are now; when I can say it’s half a century since I did my O levels, that feels overwhelming in a way. I look back to my own children’s early lives – they’re grown, now – and that feels an age away, looking at photographs and thinking, ‘thirty years ago?’…

Literature is interesting (though not particularly helpful) at this point in my reflections. Think of Shelley’s Ozymandias, and how much time has gone by between the making of the statue, now ruined, and the visit of the traveller who brings back the account of what he has seen. Even the situation, in the sands of the desert, feeds into our notions of time measured in the sands of an hourglass, remorselessly slipping away.

Ursula Le Guin is very interesting in the way she presents the pain of the passage of time. In the Hainish stories and science fiction novels, faster-than-light travel and communication is possible, and the officials of the Ekumen, the collective of known worlds peopled by human-like creatures that are sprinkled across the universe, often travel between worlds on journeys that take centuries in real time. This means that a person leaves their world knowing that even if they ever do return to it, their return will be centuries later, and everyone and everything that is familiar to them about home, will no longer exist, or will be radically changed. Ivan Yefremov, in A for Andromeda, takes us a thousand years into the future, to a world where communism and the Soviet way of life rules the planet, has created a utopia for humanity and abolished religion completely, and yet has his characters contemplating similar themes.

Socrates said that the unconsidered life is not worth living, and anyone who spends time reflecting on their life will surely at some time experience how hard it is being aware of both the enormity of the universe in time and space, and the brevity of their own personal existence. For some, religious or spiritual beliefs offer solace; for others, not.

We can look back over centuries, millennia even, of literature, and see same these preoccupations voiced: Horace’s poignant ode to his friend Postumus (even his name evokes mortality!), reflections on life and death in Chaucer, Shakespeare (Hamlet’s famous soliloquy!), Tolstoy… nothing has changed. And I have admired the way that somehow Tolstoy managed to capture the sense of the broad sweep of history and the individual’s place within it, in War and Peace. But, given that better minds than mine have wrestled with time over so much time in the past, I’m not sure I will ever resolve anything… What was one our present becomes our past, the past; becomes history, and then we are part of it. As an Arab sage once said, ‘One day you will only be a story. Make sure that yours is a good one.’

The Virago Book of Women and the Great War

     This anthology was compiled and published over twenty years ago, and it is a worthy but flawed collection, I feel; worth having, but the curating and editing could have been better done. I wasn’t impressed reading in the introduction that the bulk of the literature of the Great War was written by British writers – a sweeping statement which is easy to challenge. And decimal currency was introduced in 1971, not 1972…

Having griped a little, I will admit that this is a pretty catholic selection, from some French and German sources but largely from British women writers. The main interest lies in the individual pictures of life and work in those times, and the way that many excerpts counter the general, broad sweep of ‘official’ history: not everyone partied and rejoiced at the outbreak of war, not everyone was eager to volunteer and join up. We also see British women involved, mainly in medical and caring roles, in all sorts of places I hadn’t expected: Serbia, Russia, Austria and other countries.

The editor ranges very widely in her choice of sources, but even to this experienced and hardened student and reader of Great War literature, there’s rather too much information, as the current saying puts it. And yet, I can accept that such an anthology needed compiling before all sorts of material disappeared. There is a clear focus on women’s very real role and contribution to the war effort, men’s reluctant realisation and acceptance that this was both the case and very necessary to the achievement of Britain’s war aims. Women established themselves widely in the workforce and strove for equal pay and conditions with men; clearly the desire for suffrage and other rights was also in the forefront of the efforts of many, and this is evidenced in great detail from contemporary accounts and material.

And yet, there’s a bit too much here; the best is the personal accounts of front-line experiences.

Ella Maillart: Ti-Puss

     I’ve long enjoyed the travel writings and photography of the Swiss traveller Ella Maillart (you can find reviews elsewhere on this blog if you’re interested) and this, as far as I’ve been able to find out, is chronologically the next to last of her books, dating from her time in India during the Second World War. By this time, she had largely moved on from roaming far and wide around the globe and the focus of her personal journey had moved inwards: in India, she explored Hindu philosophy and spirituality under various teachers, and remained in the country for a number of years, and subsequently returned regularly,

Ti-Puss is a curious little book, largely focused on Maillart’s deep relationship with an Indian street cat which she adopts, and through this relationship she learns and writes much about love, affection, attachment and separation, in personal as well as spiritual ways.

She is clearly familiar with India and some of its ways, having already been there some two years before she meets and takes up with her new companion, and we see a genuine affection develop, which appears mutual – and we all know how independent cats are! The very idea of a cat as a pet or companion is a very unusual concept in India and Maillart is aware of being perceived as self-indulgent, but clearly craves and needs the closeness. From reading all her books (and I’m aware that these are not necessarily any clue to the wholeness of a life) I’m unaware of any similar attachment to another person…

What she learns at this stage of her journey is largely mediated through life with the cat. She is as descriptive as ever: in the days when travel was relatively limited, photography a complex and quite expensive process, and television in its infancy, a writer’s ability to create a real sense of being somewhere still largely depended on the skilful use of words. We also have brief accounts of some of her discussions with various sages, as well as mentions of other westerners who seem to be on variations of a similar journey to hers. Again Maillart embeds herself as far as possible in the local way of life, habits and routines, and this has always seemed natural in all of her travels. Clearly as a published writer and relatively privileged European she has sources of income, but she remains true to the way in which she had begun some twenty or more years previously, immersing herself in her surroundings and observing people and places very closely.

As I said before, the cat is at the core of the book, and when Maillart leaves her for two weeks to go climbing in the Himalayas, the cat finally asserts her independence, and the sense of loss, at leaving the cat behind and never knowing what has become of her, is genuinely moving, even painful – if you’ve ever been a cat-owner, you will know what I mean. Although it’s a good read, I would have liked to know more about the places and the spiritual quest, too…

Philip Pullman: Serpentine

     It’s another of the slim volumes complementary to His Dark Materials, like Lyra’s Oxford, and Once Upon A Time in the North, with a chapter’s worth of narrative and some good illustrations in a nicely-produced little volume, a sort of taster to keep readers alert for the next big volume, which will probably be the final volume in the Book of Dust series, as well as the end of Lyra’s adventures…

We’re back in the frozen north, as Pullman and Lyra explore the interesting idea of humans able to separate from their daemons, which of course Lyra and Pan have been able to do since she and Will travelled through the world of the dead. How many others can actually do this? Witches can, but evidently there are more humans with this ability, and of course the situation in Will’s world is quite different. And what about the effect on both the human and the daemon of separation? How can Lyra manage her changed relationship with her daemon? There is now the potential for each to know and experience things that the other does not…

This also sent me back to thinking about the enforced separation of human and daemon – intercision – for which the centre at Bolvangar was set up.

If you’re a fan of Pullman’s alternate universes, then this little book, which time-wise sits between the end of the Dark Materials trilogy and The Secret Commonwealth, then you won’t want to miss this one. And you get an afterword where Pullman explains the genesis of the story…

Hermann Hesse: The Journey to the East

     I decided to take this one down from the shelf – last read 1975! – partly because I’m in the mood to revisit Herman Hesse at the moment, partly prompted by a fellow-blogger. My edition has a pretty weird introduction by Timothy Leary (!) who wants to persuade us that Hesse must have taken psychedelic drugs because of some of the experiences he writes about… I found this weird, and was then rather surprised by my reaction; I’m getting old.

A mysterious League enables various people to engage in a journey to the east, which appears to involve movement through space and time, too, and also links in various personalities from the early twentieth century with whom Hesse was familiar (I was surprised to find Ferdynand Ossendowski in there as a possible ‘fellow-traveller’). It’s obviously a metaphorical journey – perhaps too obviously – and as I read on, I found the story mirroring the rather more comprehensible journey we read about in Siddhartha. But the focus is different. And a strange distancing effect is created by the shifting sense of time and space.

Perseverance and steadfastness in the journey are stressed, but Hesse seems to be rather more concerned about becoming lost on the way, and the fact that he fairly obviously writes himself into the narrative through his initials is an autobiographical hint, at least to this reader.

The entire narrative shifts suddenly when certain objects and documents apparently vital to the travellers are misplaced, stolen or disappear, and I found myself thinking of Siddhartha’s wariness of teachers, in the sense that one should find one’s own way rather than someone else’s; the absence of these papers throws the narrator completely off course, and we suddenly find him engaged in a clearly futile attempt to write an account of his journey: why must he do this? Would he become a teacher, one of those whom we have learned that we should become wary of? HH’s realisation of his utter failure at this point leads him to suicidal thoughts, and I realise we are at the same point reached by Siddhartha after his years of enjoying worldly success and wealth, and then perceiving that he has completely lost sight of the journey he is supposed to be on.

The story’s ending becomes increasingly hallucinatory and Kafkaesque (and we should remember that Kafka was also writing in the early twentieth century), and the final moments of revelation are an obvious reprise of the final pages of Siddhartha.

I’m glad I came back to it; equally I’m glad it only took up an evening of my time, and I can mentally file the knowledge that Siddhartha is a far better representation of our journey to meaning and purpose…

Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha

     I’m not sure what exactly it is that occasionally but regularly draws me back to a couple of Hermann Hesse’s novels. It’s probably the idea that the whole of life is a quest for meaning and understanding. Hesse was a very popular writer in my student and hippy days – oh so long ago now! – and I acquired almost all of his novels and short stories, most of which have sat untouched on the shelves since then. Only Narziss and Goldmund, and yesterday again, Siddhartha are the ones I return to. And in some way, I find them both very hard to read, not in the story sense, but because they confront me so forcefully with my own life and yearnings and search for understanding…

Siddhartha is short, readable at a sitting, and there is also a good librivox recording I’ve listened to a couple of times whilst on my travels. As the title suggests, it focuses on the Buddha and his followers, but with the focus on the spiritual quest of a single individual. As I read this time, I tried to plot out what he actually derived from his different life experiences.

He starts out with everything a young person could wish for: beauty, popularity, intellect but these are not enough: he rejects these, along with his father’s expectations of him. Already he has inklings that ultimately the answer to one’s yearnings must lie within oneself. He flees from his self, denying it and following the path of asceticism. He becomes suspicious of teachers: he has realised the importance of seeking one’s own enlightenment, not someone else’s. The parting from his lifetime friend Govinda, who makes a different choice, is painful to read, and yet the importance of fidelity to oneself is emerging. Alone-ness of the self, the utter aloneness of one’s individuality, is scary, and yet cannot be avoided.

He tries the worldly path of material success, wealth and beautiful women: self-gratification is shown to be both incredibly pleasurable and highly seductive, capable of permanently diverting one away from the quest. It is not the solution, for pursued to its end, even what you had previously learned will be lost. Finally, realising that this is happening to him, he walks away from it all. Indulging the self had repulsed him.

Water, a river becomes a metaphor, as he returns to a ferry crossing he used many years before, and attaches himself as an apprentice ferryman for the remainder of this existence, realising that time does not have to exist, and that the long search which has occupied his life in different ways, is actually an ongoing and unending preparation of the soul…

Or, that is what this novel said to me this time around. I hope I have another call to read it one day.

Nicolas Offenstadt: Le Pays Disparu

     As a teenager I travelled twice through the GDR en route to Poland. It was a weird experience – almost empty motorways, which were the original autobahns built by Hitler, and certainly showing their age by the 1970s. No stopping allowed; strict border checks; enormous and beautiful transit visas in our passports; compulsory driving insurance that was completely useless to us… now you can drop in and visit the museum that was the enormous car and lorry checkpoint at Helmstedt/Marienborn, completely deserted.

Offenstadt’s book – only available in French, and I don’t imagine a translation is very likely – is a very thorough and timely exploration of how an entire country has been thrust into the 1984 memory-hole, erased deliberately from existence, and the reasons for this are also touched upon.

The GDR was not just a dictatorship; as a workers’ and peasants’ state it was conscious of, and proud of, its connections with the workers’ movements and history from the pre-Nazi days. It was very easy and convenient for the triumphalist West to label it as one dictatorship following on another, eliding Nazism and Stalinism, and to completely gloss over what the GDR achieved in forty years of existence. Clearly it ultimately failed as a state, though the final push came from outside; economically it was unable to satisfy all its citizens’ wants and needs, and it watched over them as closely as does China or North Korea today, and it killed people trying to leave ‘illegally’, but it enjoyed successes in many areas and also the loyalty of many of its citizens, as Offenstadt amply documents. But the West ‘won’, and the victors had the power to de-legitimise the predecessor.

Offenstadt is an urban explorer as well as rather obsessed by the disappeared country. His is a full, serious and thoroughly documented work, based upon personal exploration and a wide range of interviews and conversations with former-GDR citizens. It is important that he goes so much deeper than the trite Western picture of an economically failed state, and an economic system that allegedly cannot work, a picture that deliberately throws the baby out with the bathwater for its own ideological reasons. Equally, he does not slip into sentimental ‘Ostalgia’ and is conscious of his rather curious status of very interested non-German.

The GDR was not a warmongering 12-year nightmare like Nazi Germany, but a country that rebuilt after the Second World War along totally different lines from its Western counterpart, and without the massive financial support of the USA. It was a country for 45 years, for its citizens to grow up and live in, make lives and careers in, to build and be proud of, and Offenstadt catalogues the advantages it gave its citizens, particularly in terms of women’s rights, childcare, education, employment and housing, many of which were lost when the two Germanies were ‘re-united’. Increasingly there are historians who judge that actually it was another anschluss, an annexation of a weaker state by a more powerful one.

Interestingly, Offenstadt advances the idea that the Federal Republic’s drive to remove all trace of the GDR (and he catalogues the removing of plaques, statues, the re-naming of streets, schools and public buildings, the closing down of institutions, demolition of landmarks and much, much more) and play up the evils of the Stasi as reflecting back on its earlier almost complete failure in the de-Nazification process after the Second World War…

It was an interesting and useful read, though in the end perhaps a little too detailed when it came to the eradication of plaques and monuments to the various celebrities of the GDR, and it’s a shame that the photographs reproduced so poorly in what is a mass-market paperback, but these are minor gripes, and I’ve yet to come across a similar work on the GDR in English…

Andrzej Franaszek: Miłosz, A Biography

I’ve been familiar with Czesław Miłosz’ autobiographical and literary writing for many years, but haven’t really got to grips with his poetry yet; my interest stems from his being from the part of Poland where my father and his forebears originate, and the interplay between the notions (and nations) of Poland and Lithuania in past centuries. The more I read, the more complicated it all seems. I found myself reading about him now as I grow older myself and look back on my life and consider how much I have been affected by my fifty percent Polishness.

This is a very detailed and well-written biography that anchors the poet’s life very firmly in his poetry. There are excellent, copious notes and a full bibliography; it’s also very nicely produced and once again reminded me of how much higher US production values for books are than our own. I like books that are physically good to handle and pleasurable to read.

Miłosz is one of the true greats of recent Polish literature and culture, and clearly deserved the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. We read of his life as a student, and of intellectual life generally, in the poorest region of the second Polish Republic, as well as the incredibly complex interrelationships of races, nations and peoples in that borderland region, the troubled history of which has been so well recorded by Timothy Snyder.

The second republic was not terribly stable and what with being sandwiched between Russia and Germany and learning to become an independent country again, was increasingly chaotic as the 1930s progressed, particularly in the borderlands. Eventually it became a political quagmire as well as a military dictatorship, torn between a narrow nationalistic vision and a broader one which wanted to encompass at least some of the ideals and the peoples of the nation’s great past. The anti-semitism of the right-wing government was appalling.

Miłosz travelled widely, spending considerable time in Paris with his uncle, womanising and sorting out his attitudes to politics and religion, specifically Catholicism, which had and still has a leaden hold on the country. Having survived the insanity of Nazi occupation during the Second World War, he then faced the tragic dilemma of many Polish intellectuals after the war, seeking change and progress and yet faced with the inevitable Sovietisation of Poland. How to slow this down, how to distance oneself from the old rejects of the second republic, now emigres, but the ones who had aided and abetted the calamity of the war, and still hankered after the past?

Having initially thrown his lot in with the new order, Miłosz reached a point where he had to break with it and went into exile, first in France and subsequently living, working and teaching in the US for the second half of his life, tarnished for many Poles with the brush of collaboration with the Stalinists…

His was an incredibly full and complex life, a very reflective one which he mirrored in his poetry, which I am now hoping to begin to come to grips with, as it does exist in decent translations on which the man himself collaborated.

I rarely read biographies; I find them hard going unless it’s a person whose life really interests me, and in the end this one was worth it for all the insights into person, places and the intellectual difficulties of those times.