Autumn Light and Pico Iyer - rush and distraction as foreign words

I have posted a few times about the British essayist, novelist, travel writer, Pico Iyer. I never tire of reading his work, experiencing vicariously his travels all across the globe, or his memories from boyhood to yesterday. The most recent book of his I read (in August of this year) was Autumn Light, a book Publishers Weekly recounts as being about "aging, death, and family fracturing...seen through the lens of Japanese culture," with Iyer describing his and Hiroko's (his Japanese wife) "efforts to cope with her father’s death, her mother’s entry into a nursing home, and her estrangement from her brother." 

Although there is much given to reflection in this book, there is still a lot going on, stirring one's stomach juices not toward gastronomy but toward hopefulness, anxiety, isolation, you name it, it went on inside me. He tells us 90+ pages into the book, "Autumn is the season of subtractions, the Japanese art of taking more and more away to charge the few things that remain. At least four times as many classical poems are set in autumn and spring than in summer and winter."


I jealously read onward, as he compares the life he left in New York City with the one he's living now:

"There's no car to take in for a smog test..., no breaking news banner...from CNN. I take my watch off the minute I arrive in Deer's Slope [the neighborhood Iyer and his wife live]. I'll never have to be anywhere at 3:00 p.m., and when I pull back the door to the terrace and walk out for an hour with a book and a cup of tea, I feel as if "rush" and "distraction" are words in a foreign lexicon."


For Iyer, who was often referred to as Pico-san by his neighbors, adjusting to the culture of modern Japan was as interesting as it was trepidatious.


"For so long..., the local men seemed a kind of alien species impossible to get close to. Women were always welcoming; everyone from the older ladies in shops, who spoke to me in crystalline Japanese, patient and kindly, to the young girls at cash registers, deliberately chirpy and full of processional smiles, did everything they could to make communication possible."


His socialization with many of the men and women at the athletic club he visits daily is where the real friendship-making takes place. Mostly elderly men and women playing ping pong and other activities, they eventually become warm and inclusive, as they are  "Allowed to be human again--their responsibility formerly to protect their families by being away from them, is now to protect their families by being with them...."(pp. 78-79)


With his wife, trying to make sense of her brother's estrangement from the family...,

  "That time, little they showing children many pictures. Then ask: Which face happy? Which face calm? Which person you think beautiful?
  "One boy, he every answer perfect. So intelligent. Every answer correct. But then my brother show him two picture--'Which one beautiful?' And this boy choose one with very strange face. Not so gorgeous.
  "They so surprise! Little shock feeling. Then, test-finish time, boy's mother coming, take him home. She look exactly same face, so strange."
  She smiles back up at me. "Every kid, mother's face so beautiful." (p.92)


Waking from a nap, Iyer writes: "As I come to consciousness, she's waving incense all around, as in a church, and throwing open every window to the predawn chill--the way we'll fling out roasted soybeans in early February, crying, "Devil, go out! Happines, stay in!" then, dread moment, she puts on a recording of low-voiced Tibetan chants, and sits stock-still for 20 minutes, before hauling every spare piece of clothing she can find into the washing machine and whipping up in 8 minutes or less tonight's dinner. ...This from the woman who runs out of the room, hands clamped to her ears, whenever I put on Leonard Cohen...." (p. 93)

Pico Iyer, The Dalai Lama, Hiroko Takeuchi

Hiroko is a marvelously good-hearted, sweet, and kind woman. You can't help but love her dearly.  When Iyer tells her over the phone, calling from Marrakesh to say that he feels darkness everywhere, "she told me to put salt in my pocket." [For Hiroko], her whole country is for her a teeming network of chattering crickets and tutelary spirits and heavenly forces she has to appease and watch closely, as she might a boss." (p. 98)

the Heart Sutra

One morning, Hiroko dressed to go outside in the rain, sat on the bed and drew on Iyer's back with her index finger, then blew on the "characters" she made: "An impromptu Hiroko blessing, to protect me from all evil, copying a little of the Heart Sutra onto my spine before she puts on her shades and struggles into her tall black boots." (p. 98)



The book is full of meditations and remembrances, both by Iyer and Hiroko, by her father and by her mother. It's a wonderful book. Let me leave you with this:

"I marvel at the clueless kid I'd been, barely out of my twenties, wandering around Japan not knowing a thing and therefore seeing so much. It reminds me of the time last week when I had a revelation--change itself is an unchanging truth--so new and unlike anything I'd caught before that I had to scribble it down. A few days later, going through my notes, I found that I'd had precisely the same revelation, word for word, a year before. Eerily, on the same November day. Later, I came upon exactly the same "discovery" once more, in my notes from six years before." (p. 159)

Wendell Berry: A man who is depending on the truth to console him is in a hell of a fix.

I am so smitten with Wendell Berry's writing after having read A Place on Earth, Nathan Coulter, and just a few days ago The Memory of Old Jack.

Here are a few snippets from A Place on Earth and from The Memory of Old Jack--

[Gideon Crop is a farmer working the land of one Roger Merchant, a reprobate.]

To Gideon Crop, standing in front of the barn in weather that has been wet for days, the clouds so low now that they snag and unravel against the wooded bluffs on each side of the valley, it seems that he is still just barely ahead of his circumstances. He is thirty-seven years old, and in the years of his manhood be has held tight, and come out finally a little ahead of where he was when he began. Not much, but a noticeable little. That is how he is able to see it in his good moods. In the bad weather of his mind it can seem to him just as undeniable that the settled account of these years shows him falling behind. There is the money in the bank..., 

[Gideon is looking for his little daughter Annie in the storm and flood of the river.]

He goes up onto the mud and sits down and drains his boots. He is shaking hard now from head to foot, though, blunted with fatigue as he is, he cannot determine the location of his misery, does not know if it is in his mind or in his body. Sitting on the mud, he can hear himself moaning at the end of every breath, and an old knowledge out of childhood tells him that he is trying not to cry. His clothes feel so heavy he cannot imagine that he will get up again. 

It is as though his mind, which like his body has begun to work apart from his will, is gambling that absurdity will be more bearable than reasonableness. 

[Mat Feltner, a farmer, head of his family, one of the main characters, one of the most brilliantly written characters.]

This new work must be done for the sake of the land itself--and for the sake of no one he can foresee, some one who will come later, who will depend then on what is done now. 

[Wheeler Catlett is a farmer-lawyer, and Mat Feltner's son-in-law.This is what he has to say.]

It is just the truth. And a man who is depending on the truth to console him is sometimes in a hell of a fix.

[Here we have Old Jack Beechum, a wonderful, expansive, ascendant character.  He is in conversation with a young man who is farming Old Jack's land. He is Elton Penn.]

They talk briefly about the weather and about the prospects for the crops. Old jack asks a question or two, and the young man answers. He is a lean, hard-muscled fellow, clean-cut, with the curious ability to look neat in dirty work clothes. Respectfully and good-humoredly he fulfills what he considers to be his duty to his landlord, explaining what he has and how he has done it and what he plans to do and what his thoughts are about the work of the farm. And beneath the pleasantness with which he does this explaining can be felt his confidence in his own work and his own judgment. A good head. Old Jack gets the impression that his opinions and approval are not being asked for, and instead of being angered by the young man's independence as he would have expected, he finds that he is delighted. It is a meeting of two of the same kind. While he was taking the measure of the younger man, his own measure has been taken. That tickles him. When his last question has been answered, he raises his hand. 

"You go right ahead. Satisfy yourself, and you'll satisfy me." 

Old Jack never said that to anybody before. He looks at the young man, wondering if he understands, and sees that he does.

[Because of his loveless marriage, Old Jack, when he was a younger Jack Beechum, has entered into an affair with Rose McGinnis, a young widow.]

The town talked and looked askance, and waited eagerly for more news out of that dark and fragrant garden from which it felt itself in exile.  And so this coupling went into the town’s mind, to belong to its history and its hope, even against its will.  Even as the knowledge of it fades, it remains, an inflection of the heart, troubling and consoling the night watches of lonely husbands and wives like a phrase from a forgotten song.

He would care for Rose.  …He would care for the night’s coming, and for the light that his desire cast around him, and for his arrival at the door, and for their talk and laughter falling to silence.  And for nothing beyond the reach and touch outside itself, she had so imparadised his mind.  She so received and welcomed him, and made him such delight, that it seemed to him his very life struggle and broke free and passed into her….   [Did you notice the word "imparadised"?  Berry is using paradise as a verb of action.  I love that.]

[From the beginning pages of The Memory of Old Jack]

Old Jack has become a worry to them.  In the last several weeks his mind seems to have begun to fail.  …And they have watched him, those who care about him, because they feel that he is going away from them, going into the past that now holds nearly all of him.  And they yearn toward him, knowing that they will be changed when he is gone.

[18-year-old Andy Catlett, Old Jack’s great-great grand nephew (Mat Feltner’s grandson) remembering a moment when he was a little boy.  He’s reflecting on the working men, Mat Feltner, Joe Banion, and his uncle Virgil (then a young man)] 

They came down on a wagon drawn by a team of mules, one black and one, in her old age, nearly as white as snow.  He remembers the early morning sunlight slanting in, the dew shining, the hummingbirds at the tobacco blooms, the solemn quiet of the woods. The clarity of that morning hour and the freshness of his eyes mythified the place, so that now it seems to him that he came there first, not fifteen years ago, but generations ago beyond memory--that when mat and Joe and Virgil brought him there it was not new to him, but more familiar than his own flesh, and the place and the hour held him like his mother’s lap.

Photo credits from top to bottom: John Eddy; Floodlist[dot]com; Chuck Redman; John Eddy; Kentucky New Era; Mississippi Dept of Archives & History.

Halldor Laxness' Independent People - Posting No. 3

Halldor Laxness, Nobel prize winning author of Independent People (1946).

I completed my reading of Laxness' Independent People.  This post is the third of a few that  highlight why I think he is a well-deserved Nobel laureate, and why his writing still matters, at least to me anyway.

Novelist Jane Smiley said "I love this book.  It is an unfolding wonder...one of the

Jane Smiley

best books of the 20th century.  I can't imagine any greater delight than coming to Independent People for the first time."


Excerpts from INDEPENDENT PEOPLE-
[regarding the life of independent people, lone workers, and what they're up against when it comes to banks, businessmen, politicians, great landowners, churchmen--thieves the whole lot of them]

"In foreign books there is a holy story that tells of a man who was fulfilled by sowing his enemy's field one night.  Bjartur of

Summerhouses' story is the story of a man who sowed his enemy's field all his life, day and night.  Such is the story of the most independent man in the country."  

"Once again had they laid waste the lone worker's farm; they are always the same from century to century, for the simple reason that the lone worker remains the same from century to century.  A war on the Continent may bring some relief, for a year or so, but it is only a seeming help, an illusion."  

"The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty for ever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man's protector, but his worst enemy.  The life of the lone worker, the independent man, is in its nature a flight from other men, who seek to kill him."  

"From one night-lodging into another even worse.  A peasant family flits, four generations of the thirty that have maintained life and death in this country [Iceland] for a thousand years--for whom?  Not for themselves anyway, nor for anyone of theirs.  They resembled nothing so much as fugitives in a land devastated by year after year of furious warfare; hunted outlaws--in whose land?  Not in their own at least."  

Laxness, Halldor.  Independent People: An Epic,  New York: Vintage International, 1997.

Halldor Laxness Matters: Posting No. 2

Halldor Laxness, Nobel prize winning author of Independent People (1946).

I've been reading Laxness' Independent People for the past few weeks.  This post is the second of a few that will highlight why I think he is a well-deserved Nobel laureate, and why his writing still matters, at least to me anyway.

Excerpts from INDEPENDENT PEOPLE-

[Regarding Nonni's grandmother and her morning ritual of starting the fire in the stove.]

    "The flame in the wall-lamp would gutter low on the wick.  But his grandmother's ritual gambling was never so protracted that it didn't carry with it the promise of coffee.  Never was the smoke so thick or so blue, never did it penetrate the eyes, the nose, the throat, the lungs so deeply that it could be forgotten as the precursor of that fragrance which fills the soul with optimism and faith, the fragrance of the crushed beans beneath the jet of boiling water curving from the kettle, the smell of coffee."

"She had another trick too.  After having lain for hours as if dead, life would rise to the surface in her like the slow bubbles rising at long intervals from the bottom of the stagnant pools down in the marshes--life revealed in strange mutterings, whisperings, and grumblings, in odious psalms from another world.  ...No one who sang so many hymns and knew so much about the joys of the eternal life and so on could be more devoid of missionary fervor than his grandmother."

"...True, she taught him to lie down to sleep with its language on his lips; he discerned nothing of its landscape through the words, and still less of its insubstantial inhabitants."

     "The alien life of the hymns, as it rose to his grandmother's unconscious lips, aroused in him the same dread as the pools in the marshes with their muddy, acrid water, their slime, and their shaggy, loathsome plants, their water beetles."

"Presently the smell of coffee began to fill the room.  This was morning's hallowed moment.  In such a fragrance the perversity of the world is forgotten and the soul is inspired with faith in the future; when all was said and done, it was probably true that there really were far-off places, even foreign countries."

Laxness, Halldor.  Independent People: An Epic,  New York: Vintage International, 1997.

Halldor Laxness Matters: Posting No. 1

Halldor Laxness

Halldor Laxness, Nobel prize winning author of Independent People (1946).

I've been reading Laxness' Independent People for the past few weeks and I must say the language in this book is startling.  This post is the first of a few that will highlight why I think he is a well-deserved Nobel laureate, and why his writing still matters, at least to me anyway.


Excerpts from INDEPENDENT PEOPLE--

[Conversation between little Nonni and his mother.]
"When anyone grows very old he becomes like a little baby again."
"And dies?" asked the boy.

Mother horse and son

It was a string in his breast that snapped, one of those delicate childhood strings which break before one has had time to realize that they are capable of sounding; and these strings sound no more; henceforth they are only a memory of incredible days."

[the relationship between little Nonni and his father's prize ram]
This was a most unpleasant prospect, for no animal scared him half as much as the Reverend Gudmundur.  This ram, which hated the sight of human beings, had a nasty trick of chasing the boy all the way into his dreams and through his dreams, and the boy would run as hard as he could, from one dream into another, fleeing in terror from this monster, which in spite of his father's faith in its pedigree was as preternatural in its hideousness as the Christmas cake and the meat soup in their splendour.  Thus there may also be an element of danger in a person's dreams.




   But as morning came nearer, his father's snores gradually lost their resonance, the resounding chest-notes dissolved on a slowly ascending scale, moved by degrees into the throat, from the throat into the nose and mouth, on to the lips with a whistle, sometimes only with a restless puff--the destination was near, the horses prancing with the joy of traversing scatheless the sounding wastes of infinity.  The homeland lay spread before the eyes.
   The breathing of the others lacked altogether the range and the magnificence of his father's snores, and was, moreover, heedless of time.

[Nonni and his mother]
There must have been something on his conscience to make him so attentive to her tonight: he had held her hand, a thing he had never been seen to do before, and then he had rushed off somewhere in the middle of the night, as if he were afraid.
   Few things are so inconstant, so unstable, as a loving heart, and yet it is the only place in the world where one can find sympathy.  Sleep is stronger than the noblest instinct of a loving heart.  In the middle of his mother's agony the night began to grow dim.  ...the drowsiness of midnight, so sweet, so heavy, began again to flow through his limbs; and little by little, like a hundred grains of sand, his consciousness filtered down into the abyss of his sleep-world until oblivion had once more filled it full.




Laxness, Halldor.  Independent People: An Epic,  New York: Vintage International, 1997.

The Last Echo in "34th Parallel Magazine"

My latest short story, The Last Echo, has been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, yesterday actually.  Very glad to share this news and this magazine with you all.

From the teaser on the website--

"...Animals were not allowed in the Green Zone. What was this cat doing here? Animals in the closed-in-island-that-is-not-an-island of Baghdad were rounded up and disposed of, as per orders of the war contractor. The contractor said nothing about the burning embers of a Dell computer outside a bookstore or the irascible conscience of a junked Mercedes Benz—the ground beneath the car ringed by spreads of bullet casings. The smell of cordite, although thin, was ever present and unmistakable. Please don’t let that cat lead to bad luck, he thought...."

Link to the magazine's site: https://www.34thparallel.net

However, the link to purchase is below:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/34thparallel-magazine/34thparallel-magazine-issue-64-bw-print/paperback/product-24073622.html

I love quotes about pain, how wonderful it is to be young, one's parents, and about being a fool.

I love quotes about pain, how wonderful it is to be young, one's parents, and about being a fool.

Those mentionables and other snippets from the good novel, Time Will Darken It (1948) by William Maxwell, are what I'm posting on this rainy Sunday afternoon in Santa Monica.

It's been about 20 years since I first read William Maxwell.  That's when I read  The Folded Leaf (published in 1945).  That book went straight to the heart for me, and I wished I'd read it when I was in high school.  But I didn't.  Time Will Darken It is a thoroughly sympathetic and engaging novel.  While reading it, authors and their connections to Maxwell began to pop up.  It was crazy.  I began to find William Maxwell's link to another author I just finished, Mavis Gallant, whose Paris Stories I couldn't get enough of.

He was her editor at "The New Yorker" magazine.  I then I found out that John O'Hara, John Cheever, John Updike, Frank O'Connor, were all Maxwell's authors at that beloved magazine for decades.  My god, I thought, he's everywhere.

Eudora Welty said that "...his sensitive prose is the good and careful tool of an artist who is always doing exactly what he means to do.  [Time Will Darken It is a]...careful, meditative examination of unfolding relationships among people of several sorts and ages...the story's quiet and accumulating power a dark and disturbing beauty that has some of its roots, at least, in fine restraint."  

The book opens one fine evening in Lincoln, Illinois, in 1912.

(from page 350 of the David R. Godine edition, 1983; a misfortune involving fire has occurred)--

"Pain is movement, the waves of the sea rising, receding; waiting is the shore they break upon, the shore that changes, in-time, but never noticeably.  The will that waits and endures is not the same will that makes it possible for people to get out of bed in the morning or to choose between this necktie, this silk scarf, and that.  It is something you never asked for and that never asked for you.  You have it and live.  You lose it and give up the ghost."

Earlier in the book, from p. 120--

"The house next door is never the sanctuary it at first appears to be. If you reach the stage where you are permitted to enter without knocking, you are also expected to come oftener and to penetrate farther and in the end share, along with the permanent inhabitants, the weight of the roof tree."

"...their musical selections and their behavior (especially when they grabbed up their clarinets and trumpets, shoved their chairs in a double line, and indulged in a mock sleigh-ride) were light-hearted and long remembered.  The grey-haired members of the audience, guardians of a gentle Calvinistic era and with fixed ideas of what entertainment was appropriate to a day of worship, sat shocked and disapproving.  The rest applauded wildly, reminded of something they had almost forgotten or known only in snatches--of how wonderful it is to be young."
(p.152)

There is nothing so difficult to arrive at as the nature and personality of one's parents.  Death, about which so much mystery is made, is perhaps no mystery at all.  But the history of one's parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and character guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of a smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, proves to be too large ever to move, though each year's frost forces it up a little higher. (p. 222)


After a significant tragedy, a fire, takes place toward the end of the novel...--

"The knowledge that you have been a fool hurts just as much, is just as hard to admit to yourself if you are young as when you are old.  Every error that people make is repeated over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum...if they know what they are doing and cannot help themselves.    There is not only a second chance, there are a thousand second chances to speak up, to act bravely for once, to face the fact that must sooner or later be faced.  Windows that have been nailed shut for years are suddenly pried open, letting air in, letting love in, and hope.  (p.348)

Williams Keepers Maxwell, Jr. 1908-2000