Book #33: The Turbulence of Moving

"As he walked slowly about the empty, echoing rooms on that bright September morning, the Professor regarded thoughtfully the needless inconveniences he had put up with for so long; the stairs that were too steep, the halls that were too cramped, the awkward oak mantles with thick round posts crowned by bumptious wooden balls, over green-tiled fire-places."  -Willa Cather, The Professor's House

Sadly, I have not been able to write or blog much lately, because we're in the process of moving.  Our loft has been dismantled into a series of half-packed boxes and our magnificent wall of books is no more.  (When Chris first asked me if I wanted to move in with him eight months ago, the thought of combining our book collections to expand his already impressive library was most alluring....  But now, the shelves are bare, leaving my soul feeling a little barren.  Tools are cast on the coffee table and the place looks like such a construction site that we've even stopped washing the dishes.)

I was thinking about novels about moving houses....  The Professor's House came to mind.  It's a novel about a professor who should be on cloud nine - he's just won a prestigious academic prize enabling him to build a luxurious new house - but instead he finds himself melancholy and nostalgic.  In the midst of packing, he becomes lethargic and irrationally attached to his old house, which, despite all its inconveniences and shabbiness, is replete with the memories he associates with "home."  So he turns inward, recoils from reality.  Curls up in a ball in his attic study.  Memories of childhood give way to fantasies of his best student, a young man named Outland who died in the First World War.  But before his death, Outland and the professor became close and the stories that Outland told him about his youth linger on in the professor's imagination.  Outland spent one summer exploring a mesa in New Mexico, where he discovered the relics of a dead civilization - the treasures of antiquity.  The romance of Outland's life catches hold in the professor's mind as everything his own life is not.  Vigorous.  Manly.  In touch with nature.  The more he fantasizes about Outland's adventures the more paltry his own accomplishments seem.

Moving, in other words, can be very dismantling to one's identity.  All the familiar objects that surround me in my everyday life feel strangely animate, touched with memories and emotions, as I rip them out of their familiar context and box them up.  Take them away from me and my very sense of "self" starts to slip away....

Since my undergrad days until present, I've moved thirteen times.  Maybe that's why I was so unstable during my twenties, while pursuing grad school, research fellowships and the peripatetic life of a professor peddling her trade, suitcase overflowing with scruffy books and crumpled syllabi.....  A lot of packing up house, a lot of purging (my books were always the hardest to part with).  I'm glad to have kissed that life goodbye.

Next week, Chris and I will be in our new place, and the front room with the bay window will be set up as our new library, where I will do my writing.

Book #9: Musing on Photography via Sontag

I made a resolution to put together Daddy’s reading list by the end of the week. Just because I was initiating my practical-to-a-fault father into the world of high literature, while desperately investigating every possible alternative career to being an English prof, didn’t mean I had to lose my mind. I was giving myself the summer to get my shit together. If I hadn’t figured out by August how to reinvent myself – flight attendant? speech pathologist? librarian? esthetician? – then I’d be condemned to the gulag of academia for another year.

Ugh. The lecture podium. The thought turned my stomach.

Daddy was trying to snap me out of my malaise by drawing on his life experience. “Remember the two years we spent in Trinidad? That was no picnic.”

He was talking about the job he’d accepted in Port of Spain in the late 70s, shortly after I was born. The company had been building a steel plant there and the opportunity to live in a tropical paradise had struck my parents as a grand adventure.

The first few months were the honeymoon phase, but then reality set in. Power outages. Cultural isolation. TV programming for only one hour a day. The supermarket rarely had onions, cheese and diapers.

Daddy’s point in raising Trinidad was obvious: everyone has to pay career dues. I was paying mine teaching out in the boondocks of Nova Scotia. Things would get better. Think positive.

Yeah, whatever.

I dug up an old photo album. “You didn’t have it half as bad as me.” I pointed at a photo of him lounging on the beach, eating a shark bake sandwich. Mommy was sunbathing in a turquoise paisley bikini.

“Oh, you have no idea what was going on behind the scenes,” Daddy said. “I was losing my hair.”

“No you weren’t.” I pointed at the photo, at his peculiar 1970s hairstyle. Long bangs brushed forward, layers falling over the ears.

“Trust me – the place was a gong show.”

Yet deep down I didn’t believe him.

Later that day, I was surfing the New York Times online archives and I stumbled on Susan Sontag’s brilliant 1974 article on photography. Each sentence hit me with a new insight, illuminating my reaction perfectly:

“Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.” “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” “Photographs furnish evidence.”

This illusion of utter transparency, as Sontag explains, is a frank difference between photography and writing. Where writing is assumed by its very nature to be an interpretation, photography has the guise of being an immediate representation of reality, a window on fact.

Although I understood on a rational level that this effect was photography’s sleight-of-hand, the photo still asserted its visceral force.

Daddy’s unhappiness paled compared to mine. I had photographic evidence.


Photo from: here

Book #1: Searching for Thoreau on a Cold Winter Night

I’d tried to make the best of moving to the boonies by imagining a great escape to nature was in store.

"To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the feebler notes of other birds—think of it!"

"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

Startling epiphanies were just around the corner. Or maybe I’d just been reading too much Walden.

Right. Nature. Through the eyes of a naïve city girl. What had I been thinking?

Now that I had my first semester of teaching under my belt, I knew that was fiction and this was reality.

Reality was having to call in sick and take the bus two-and-a-half hours to Halifax to see my therapist, Harriet, to deal with these emergency days that incapacitated me every so often. Days when I just couldn’t bear to get up in front of the swarm of rosy, all-too-wholesome faces that blankly stared while I lectured on the figure of the madwoman in the Victorian novel and cross-dressing actors on the Shakespearean stage.

Harriet was a pudgy blond woman with sad lines fanning out around her eyes. She looked at me like she really did understand my suffering, but so far I’d been less than dazzled by her insights.

"The students hate me," I said. "They look at me and they don’t see a professor. They expect a professor to look like a grizzled old hag whose life has passed her by."

"Well, thank god you’re not in that camp," Harriet said. "You hardly look older than the students."

Maybe it was true – I was a fake. The eve I defended my dissertation, I had no idea what I was getting into. I didn’t have a clue what was involved in becoming a professor. Who could have foreseen the amount of work involved in writing lectures on the fly to teach a full course load? Although I’d pulled my share of all-nighters as a grad student, those were nothing compared to the string of sleepless nights that left my brain feeling like sawdust behind the lecture podium.

My office clock said 11:55. Once again, I’d fallen asleep at my desk, my face plastered to a sandwich wrapper. The night lights from the football field outside my window streamed in, giving my bookshelf an eerie glow. So much for marking papers.

As I waited for the elevator in the pea green corridor, a bearded man came out of nowhere.

"Howdy," he said, standing too close. My stomach did a back flip.

But he was just the caretaker. Smiling awkwardly and standing a little too close.

I rushed outside and stood on the cement piazza surrounding the Arts Building. Beyond the empty parking lot loomed the low, undulating hills known, for some strange reason, as "the highlands."

I remembered how when I’d landed this job, I’d imagined myself going for long walks in the woods, communing with birds, brushing against ferns, my ears attuned to every rustle and sigh of a blade of grass. Like Thoreau, who'd luxuriated in his sojourn living in a cabin at Walden Pond, my thoughts would become serene: "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself."

The hills around me weren’t very high, yet they hemmed my soul in. They might as well have been the Andes.

Photo from: here