Broadbent….I find the world quite good enough for me, quite a jolly place in fact.
Kegan: (looking at him with quiet wonder): You feel at home in the world, then?
Broadbent: Of Course. Don’t you?
Kegan (from the very depths of his nature): No.
Bernard Shaw: One Man’s Other Island

Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider made a huge impact on me in 1956, perhaps because it began with the kind of subversive, sneaky sexual fantasy that substituted for actual sex in that era. The man is outsider to the woman, and she to him. This was not so much transgressive sex as regressive sex. Imagination was everything.

The book opens with this passage from the novel L’Enfer (Hell) by Henri Barbusse

“In the air, on top of the tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But then a block in the traffic separates us. The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare. Moving in both directions the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and do not lift.”

This tells us at once who the Outsider is. He is the voyeur, the fantasist, the hole-in-the corner man. The world does not seem quite real to him, but he watches it avidly like a movie.

Colin Wilson’s book caught me at exactly the right age. All teenagers feel that they have been kidnapped by aliens and forced to live on a strange planet, and I was absolutely convinced of it. The Outsider gave my condition a name and, better still, a literary and philosophical justification. The names that echo through its pages are a catalog of creative genius: Wells, Sartre, Camus, Hesse, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Eliot. Nobody could call it an adolescent book.

Wilson himself was very young when he wrote The Outsider. He led a romantically free and intellectual lifestyle outside the university, sometimes sleeping rough, and working in the library of the British Museum. I thought he was very deep, but that may have been simply a reflection of my own shallowness. However, almost half a century later, I’m still half-convinced that the book is a masterpiece. Wilson never again wrote anything remotely up to that standard. His later preoccupation with the supernatural has, from my point of view, disqualified him as a writer to be taken seriously.

Who or what is the Outsider, and what does he have to do with sensible, well-balanced writers like us?

He is the stranger who comes and stays, but always remains a stranger. America is full of strangers. It is the most mobile society in the world, and has more immigrants than any other country. This doesn’t make us a nation of Outsiders, even though some of us speak different languages, or different versions of the same language, and live within different cultures. The essence of the Outsider is that he always remains a stranger. He is not integrated, assimilated, acculturated or absorbed. He doesn’t feel at home in this world.

(I use the generic “he” partly because Wilson’s examples are all male. But there are plenty of female writers who fit the description – Virginia Woolf springs to mind, and the fine young British/Bangladeshi novelist Monica Ali. Can we take it for granted that this is about both sexes, to avoid the awkwardness of “s/he” and “he or she” etc. all the way through?)

Being an Outsider, then, is a habit of mind, a way of dealing with the world by being not quite in it. In fact it is a habit of mind common to many writers. Consider, for example, T.C.Boyle’s East is East which uses an Outsider (a stranded Japanese sailor) to comment on a bunch of other Outsiders (the members of a writing community). This plot could never have been imagined and carried off so brilliantly by an author who felt thoroughly at home in the ordinary world.

The Outsider is an observer by avocation, rather than a planner or an actor. He concentrates on what he can see. He watches and asks questions, but he doesn’t do much. Seeing is enough, careful observation can resolve almost any human question. There’s no need to get involved. L’enfer, c’est les autres said Sartre, summing up the Outsider philosophy. Hell is other people.

The Outsider is therefore necessarily innocent, or wants to be. “I’m not responsible, I didn’t make the world like this!” The Outsider does not make a good military officer or business leader. He would rather watch others do it, and let them take the blame for the results. For the outsider, life is one continuous escape attempt, and writing is one form of escape.

The Outsider is often a foreigner, like me. I carry a little card with the title “Resident Alien.” It is a liberating identity. I love the way the American government defines foreign nationals as “aliens” as if we are not quite human. Aliens see things differently – we can’t help it. Almost everything in America seems a little odd to us, just as things in England or Eritrea seem a little odd to traveling Americans. Many foreign-born writers have made superb use of this psychic disconnection – think of Naipaul, Malamud or Nabokov. The alien viewpoint is not necessarily more accurate or more objective. But it is an important source of humor. Social scientists call it the “anthropological viewpoint.” The rest of humanity is seen as a rather peculiar tribe with inexplicable customs and habits. The writer’s job, like the anthropologist’s, is to describe and explain what is going on.

First year students of anthropology are often given an article to read titled “Body Ritual Among the Nacerima” by Horace Miner It describes the freakish personal habits of the Nacerima tribe. “The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease…. Man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of powerful influences of ritual and ceremony.”

The article then goes on to describe American bathroom habits. Some students get it, some don’t.

Science fiction writers from Wells to Vonnegut have used the device of the literal alien from outer space to highlight the strangeness of humanity. Jonathan Swift used the same device with a different spin in Gulliver’s Travels. The lands visited by Gulliver seem bizarre at first, but then we realize that they are only slightly distorted images of his own society. It’s a sneaky trick, but it works.

The Outsider finds other people’s lives much more interesting and indeed more real than his own. It’s a pleasure to live them at second hand. Their passionate enthusiasms, plans, faiths and certainties, none of which he (the Outsider) can share, seem like a wonderful show put on for his benefit. Perhaps it is.

This is not a recommendation for a personality change. The Outsider viewpoint can produce powerful and disturbing writing, but it’s not a point of view that you can just choose, like first or third person. Some writers are so profoundly embedded into their world – their families, their work, their times, their culture, their religion – that they can’t and don’t want to write outside that box. A lot of fine writing depends on the intense involvement of the author in the world as it is, although a little irony adds the necessary spice: think of Austen, Trollope, James, Wolfe, Updike, Tan, Tyler, and Welty as examples.

The Outsider, when he chooses to write, raises the stakes in a dramatic way. The ordinary world evaporates, empathy vanishes, and ironic distance turns into an almost pathological separation. Camus, Sartre, Barbusse, Hesse and the later writings of H.G.Wells are not comforting bedtime reading. But ever since I was introduced to them in 1956 I have admired writers like these. They may not be nice, but they are necessary. They may have taken a step towards the light outside Plato’s cave. The rest of us may be writing about shadows.

Copyright: David Bouchier

People who insist on telling their dreams
are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
Max Beerbohm

At a dinner party I was seated next to a charming lady who had a professional interest in fantasies and fairy stories. This intrigued me at once because I really admire authors who can conjure up fantastic worlds, stories, and characters. Some storytellers have this gift of imagination, all poets must have it, and most of us prose writers simply envy it. The real world is prosaic.

Consider the explosive inventiveness of a book like Alice in Wonderland, or of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series that held me enthralled when I was a teenager, or of Rowling’s highly successful Harry Potter books, or for that matter of Shakespeare’s magical Midsummer Night’s Dream. Could you imagine any of that? I couldn’t.

So I asked my neighbor where such strange inspirations come from. She said: “It’s mostly dream material.”

I was afraid of that.

It’s not that I am dream-deprived: I have an intense dream life. Some people have accused me of dreaming all the time even when I am awake, but that’s unkind. Every night I have long and complicated dreams, some of which I remember for a few minutes when I get up. Like you I have been advised to keep a dream diary so that the acrobatics of the sleeping brain can be recaptured for later use. When I tried this I got a notebook full of slightly disturbing nonsense.

Robert Louis Stevenson tells the story of waking up in the night after a powerful dream. He was convinced that the most profound secret of the universe had been revealed to him. Half asleep, he scribbled it down.

When he woke up in the morning he read: “The whole world is pervaded by a strong odor of turpentine.”

Some African cultures make an important distinction between “Big Dreams” and “Little Dreams.” The latter are the ordinary nighttime dramas: erotic dreams, anxiety dreams, frustration dreams, and so on.

Big Dreams on the other hand come like revelations from another world. They are usually about the meaning of life and death, and appear as vast adventures of the imagination – as in the visions of the old-time prophets. Big Dreams are rare, and highly valued in those cultures.

Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) gave us a language to talk about this universal experience. He proposed that dreams are not meaningless brain static, but reflect our deepest fears and forbidden wishes. The theory caused outrage at the time, but it always made sense to me.

Once I started on this topic I realized that I should offer dream material of my own, so I went back to keeping a notebook beside the bed. Here’s a record of eight dreams I noted down from consecutive nights. Erotic dreams are omitted on grounds of good taste, and simple anxiety dreams are boring. These are some of the others. I admit in advance that these dreams make no sense. But they are all genuine according to my morning-after memory, allowing for the fact that the waking mind tends to edit and tidy things up in accordance with daytime rationality.

Dream 1: I have stolen a steamroller (a massive, heavy, noisy machine), but I cannot find a way to return it to its owners discreetly. There are many complications. (I often have dreams about odd forms of transportation).

Dream 2: I have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. This mathematical paradox, proposed by Pierre de Fermat about 1630, states that: xn + yn = zn has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2. Nobody has ever been able to solve it, but I solved it in my dream. Needless to say I could not remember the solution, and I don’t even understand the problem, so what was Fermat’s theorem doing in my brain?

Dream 3: I meet Fanny Mendelssohn and her brother Felix, the great German composer, at a party. They have both been dead since 1847, but I wasn’t surprised to see them. Fanny is really rather lovely with big, liquid eyes like her portrait. Felix is rather pompous. I feel sad because they are both so talented, and they will both die (have died) young. So I am especially kind to Fanny.

Dream 4: I am teaching at a third-rate theological college. All the other professors are gay priests, and I seem to be the token heterosexual atheist. All the students are older women who want to be priests, but act like radical feminists. One of the younger priests propositions me in a joking way. I reject him, citing religious differences.

Dream 5: (Another transport dream). I’m driving a huge black stretch limo into La Guardia airport in New York. I get stuck slantwise outside the departure building, blocking all lanes. My father – long dead – comes up to the driver’s window, riding a very sleek black Italian motorcycle. “Why are you driving that ridiculous car?” he asks, and rides off.

Dream 6: (Another dream with motorcycles). I am trying to buy a Dunkin’ Donut – something I almost never do. I am passionate about it. But every time I see the famous sign, something is wrong. One place is a hut half buried in the ground, full of sleeping Indians, the donuts covered in flies. The next is a combination donut shops and out-patient surgery center, I get on the wrong line and nearly get taken in for anesthesia. The third is like a biker bar, where female bikers are fighting with donuts. One of the bikers asks for my autograph.

Dream 7: (Another dream about music). In this dream I am obsessed by a simple tune from childhood – a sad melody with a hint of joy in it, origin unknown. I pick out the tune on my electronic keyboard, planning to write it down. Then I begin embroidering variations. They become very complicated (and to me) very beautiful. They seem to solve something. My hands just flow over the keyboard. I am a fine player, in my dreams. Then I wake up and realize that I never wrote down the basic melody. But it’s gone, and I can’t recall it.

Dream 8: I encounter my oldest friend Bob in a very strange place, like the ultra modern lobby of an airport hotel. He has been very ill but now looks much better, and amazes me by saying he is learning Latin. I begin to suspect he has died (he has), and we are both in a kind of limbo. Other people around are dressed ancient Roman style, and don’t recognize my existence. At last I meet a character who looks like the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. “Are we in hell?” I ask the Commendatore. “Why else is Bob learning Latin?” The Commendatore replies cheerfully: “Latin is just the beginning. Then he will learn history, psychology, literature, art, and all the rest of human knowledge. We are teaching him to understand himself. Then he will be in hell.”

Those are my dreams over a period of about a week, or at lease the ones I can remember. If you can make any sense of them, or see any way they could be used by a creative writer, let me know. If you can solve Fermat’s Last Theorem I’d like to know that too.

Copyright: David Bouchier

“The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
Oscar Wilde

The basement of a house, like the Freudian subconscious, is the place where we store all the things that we don’t want to remember right now, but that we can’t bear to throw away.

In preparation for a house move I was forced to clean out my own basement, which included a large closet assigned to “David’s stuff.” This category included everything mechanical and electrical, plus all my personal files and souvenirs. I put off this chore for a long time, because I knew that a lot of memories were hiding in that closet.

A writer is supposed to cling to memories. What else does s/he have to work with? How many novels and short stories, to say nothing of memoirs, depend on the accumulation of vivid details, trivial facts and conversations recalled by the author, perhaps many years later?

Marcel Proust is the doyen of all memory men. His vast autobiographical novel, Remembrance of Things Past, fills seven volumes and is almost ten million words long. It begins and ends with memory. Characteristically, the story begins on page fifty-one. In this famous passage he visits his old Aunt Léonie in Combray, when he is already a grown man. He drinks tea, and eats a little shell-shaped cake called a Madeleine. The taste brings back every vivid detail of his past life and sets in motion the unstoppable narrative of the book. Here’s just a fragment from that episode, in the classic translation by Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin.

“When from a long distant past nothing remains, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

That’s writing! Just count the subordinate clauses. Proust forgot nothing, and this quality brings his novel almost uncannily to life. The reader knows he is in the hands of a master craftsman with total recall.

Most people’s memory doesn’t work like that. My own memory is highly selective in a positive way. I find it easy to remember the good things in my past, and forget the bad and the boring. This doesn’t make for good fiction, but does makes for better sleep.

Two boxes of memories came out of the closet. They contained all the things I couldn’t bring myself to throw away over the past twenty or thirty years. They might be scrapbooks in embryo, if I was in the habit of making scrapbooks.

Taking a deep breath, I plunged into the oldest and dustiest box. I hadn’t forgotten Pandora’s mistake, but I told myself that there would be great material there.

It seems that all my memories are made of paper – no floppy disks, no material mementos or souvenirs, not so much as a ring or a lock of hair. The boxes were filled with letters, photographs, old writings, posters and ads for events where I appeared: nothing but paper. A splash of barbecue lighting fluid and a match would wipe out all my memories at once.

Would I miss my paper memories? I think not. It is always best to delete the real past, and substitute our edited memories of it.

The photographs were the most disturbing. Old color photos don’t fade the way black and whites used to, becoming sepia and “historic” and therefore harmless. They stay bright and sharp, revealing people who should now be faded or dead in their Technicolor prime. It’s like The picture of Dorian Gray in reverse. Nobody was as beautiful as my memory paints them. Time has made them ordinary. I prefer not know that.

Old letters carry the same time bomb of disappointment. Re-reading them, I realized that none of us were as clever as we imagined. We were often dull, trite, pompous, and seriously sentimental. My own early writings were even worse. How flat and artificial they now seem. Just occasionally I found something really brilliant, and then I was crushed by the thought that I might have passed my peak as a writer thirty years ago. The box was full of things I couldn’t write today, because that particular passion has gone, that old freewheeling turn of phrase has been too much disciplined.

Some small things snapped my lazy memory to attention, like Proust’s Madeleine: a card for my father’s funeral service; a wedding invitation from somebody I had intended to marry myself, but forgot; a restaurant menu that reminded me of a unique evening; a train ticket that recalled a memorable error of judgment on the way to Amsterdam. But a lot of things had slipped my mind, including names that should have been engraved on my memory forever. Have they forgotten my name too? That would be justice.

“Reader, what is etched in your consciousness? What collarbone, what little patch of textured skin, what dangling pendant? Think! Remember! Keep back the glacier of age by the sheer warmth, the sheer force of sexual recollections, wild imaginings! It can be done: it is worth the doing.”
Fay Weldon: The Shrapnel Academy

After going through one moldy old cardboard box of paper, I had uncovered enough memories for a Proustian epic. I wish I could hand the whole box on to some other writer and say:

“Here, you write this…write about my first best friend who was killed beside me in Cyprus and who left nothing but an ironic sketch of himself in uniform; write about the bridesmaid at my first wedding who broke all the rules; write about my first dog, my first motor cycle, my first love. You write it, because I don’t want to remember it.”

“Every man’s memory is his private library,” wrote Aldous Huxley. The great thing about a library is that you can choose what to read when you want to read it. The rest stays quietly on the shelves.

Amnesia is a great gift for a writer. Everything is new, every day. That’s why we must write against the sedimentation of life into moldy old boxes. We write to keep life alive. Memory has nothing to do with it.

Copyright: David Bouchier

All returns from vacation abroad begin to seem the same to me. There is the painfully early start to the day, made even earlier by the ludicrous security precautions: long lines, long lines, and yet more long lines. Then comes the long and tedious flight, breathing bad air, eating bad food, and trying to catch some sleep in an impossibly cramped seat. Then the arrival in the inferno of JFK Airport, with more long lines at passport control, and the endless wait for checked baggage. Finally the depressing ride home along the transcendentally ugly Long Island Expressway, worrying all the way about the state in which we will find the house and (more important) the cats.

Why do we do it? Why do so many millions of others do it? We want to “get away.” When it comes to long distance travel the “to” is often less important than the “from.” A few hours in a plane flying in any direction at 550 miles per hour gives a powerful impression of getting away. We hope that things will be different at the other end, and of course they are for a while, until we contrive to make them the same (“Wherever you go, there you are” as the cliché aptly expresses it).

Much of the human race suffers from restless leg syndrome. That’s how we spread from Africa over the entire globe, and how we would spread through the universe if we could figure out how to do it.

At the other end of the scale of restlessness are people so attached to one place that they never want to leave. They cling to remote villages in the Chinese hinterland, or dull houses in dull British towns, as though their lives depended on it. How often have you heard or read: “I was born here, and I want to die here.” Such people are afraid of change, and skeptical that the larger world has anything more satisfying to offer than the pleasures of home. Who can blame them?

Once I lived in an English village where some of the older inhabitants had never even been to the nearby town five miles away, let alone to London. Now I live part of the time in a French village where most of the locals can trace their ancestors back for generations, and live in the same houses as their parents and grandparents. Meanwhile I jump in and out of village life like a migrant bird, or a stray cat. They think I must be mad, and they are probably right.

For a writer this counterpoint of movement and stability is a vital part of the human comedy. Moreover a writer can choose either kind of life: to be a traveler or to be a reclusive stay-at-home like John Updike or J.D.Salinger. As I make arrangements for my next journey I rather wish I had chosen the latter habit. But it’s too late now. The non-refundable air tickets are already in my pocket.

Saint Quentin la Poterie
France

One of the first things you see when driving out of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris is a gigantic sports stadium – the monumental Stade de France. At the entrance to the stadium is the Place des Droits de l’Hommes – the square of the rights of man – which says as clearly as it possibly could that one of the most important rights of man, as distinct from the rights of woman, is to watch other men pushing a football around.

France is officially a secular country, but football is more of a national religion than Catholicism ever was. We arrived back here last week at the beginning of the World Cup soccer series, which has riveted the attention of the nation much as the wars of religion must have done in the fifteenth century. The official saints of this cult are Les Blues, the French national team, although they haven’t done very well so far. But saints are not graded on performance: the fact that they exist is enough.

You can see why sport has replaced religion here, as it has almost done in America. Most religions demand sacrifice and moral discipline. Sport demands only that you choose a side, slump on the couch, and watch. In my supposedly serious morning newspaper sport occupies eleven full pages out of forty – everything from football to cycling and sailing. Business and economics get five pages, the news from the whole world nine pages, culture and entertainment the remaining fifteen pages. Given that the world is in a state of turmoil and changing fast, and sport is always the same, this seems an odd balance. But there’s no use arguing with a football fanatic, or any other kind, Vive le sport. The World Cup will finish eventually.

“Travel broadens the mind –
but first you must have the mind.”
G.K.Chesterton

Travel writers lead romantic lives. They explore the world at other people’s expense, and they don’t even need to invent their material. They simply describe the places they visit. Anybody can do that.

You know as well as I do that the above paragraph is nonsense, but the romance persists. It would be a kindness to future travelers and travel writers to lay the myth to rest here and now.

There are several varieties or genres of travel writing. The most profitable type (for the writer) is essentially a branch of public relations. This is the stuff you read in brochures and glossy magazines, and also in newspaper travel supplements. Every destination is described as beautiful, welcoming, unspoiled, and so on, with digitally enhanced pictures. This is essentially a branch of fantasy fiction, as you soon discover if you actually travel to any of these places.

Secondly there’s what I call straight travel writing that gives the reader real, accurate, and unbiased information. This is quite rare. The “Rough Guides” series is the best example I know. Straight travel writing is enormously hard work, because it demands so much detailed on-the-spot research. Stamina, attention to detail, and an iron stomach are the basic job requirements.

Thirdly (in no particular order) comes “literary” travel writing of the kind practiced by Paul Theroux or Adam Gopnik. Books and essays of this type are usually great fun to read, and can be more eye-opening than any number of guidebooks. However the literary travel writer gives no information about hotels, ferries, restaurants and so on.

Fourthly, an increasingly popular genre is what might be called the “hair raising travel adventure.” The author deliberately sets out to do something idiotic, like climbing Everest on one leg, crossing the Sahara on a unicycle, or rowing the Atlantic in a bathtub. We don’t have any new frontiers, so these writers are doing the best they can to create some excitement. As my mother would say, they should have their heads examined.

Fifthly (I’m almost done!) we have “travel pornography,” of the type exemplified by Peter Mayle’s hugely successful A Year in Provence, and its many imitators. The pornography here is not sexual but cultural. These writers take a place and a culture and recycle it as an idealistic dream fantasy.

Finally we have travel writers who use humor and satire, from Mark Twain to Bill Bryson. I enjoy these a lot, but they are not the place to look for practical information.

Americans on the whole are not great travelers. Only 8% of citizens have a passport and (almost incredibly) only 12% of U.S. Senators. This may help to explain the resolute parochialism of American culture and politics. Foreign countries are experienced mostly at secondhand, through the media, or by young soldiers who have been sent to places off the regular tourist routes in order to teach their citizens the benefits of democracy. This set me thinking about the role of travel writers. If 92% of Americans and most of their representatives glimpse the world only through the eyes of travel writers and war correspondents, what do they see?

Obviously they see only a tiny part of the planet – the regions that are designated as safe enough for tourism or weak enough for military adventures. This leaves out just about the whole of the ordinary world that most people live in, and that can only be experienced by going there.

Most of my travels are fairly conventional, so I’ve not had the opportunity to write about exotic places and extreme experiences. But even conventional travel can be written about in very different ways.

For example, we were traveling in Europe a couple of years ago. On the final leg of our journey we abandoned the rented car and look a train ride from Nice, across northern Italy and to Milan. The city was new to me, although I had driven around the bypass several times. Before leaving home I had asked my Italian barber Milan, which was his birthplace. He said: “It’s like New York but full of Italians.” When I pointed out that New York is also full of Italians he said: “Then it’s like New York.” He was quite wrong. New York has no trams.

A travel writer might handle the transition between Nice and Milan something like this:

“The train from Nice sped along the Côte d’Azur, offering spectacular views of the sea and the mountains, before turning inland at Genoa to glide across the fertile plains of Lombardy and into Milan’s imposing Stazione Centrale.”

An honest non-fiction writer might describe the experience more like this:

“The train from Nice was cancelled. All trains were cancelled due to unspecified trouble in the tunnel at Menton. Buses were laid on to take us over the mountain to the station at Monaco. But there weren’t enough buses, and a great mass of passengers had to wait for an hour in the blazing sun. When we got on a bus the air conditioning was broken and the windows were jammed shut. Instead of stopping at Monaco as promised the bus driver (ignoring the loud complaints and threats of the passengers) continued right on into Italy and dumped us all out at the station of a miserable little town called Ventimiglia where we foreigners were mildly harassed by the local police (enjoying themselves enormously, the most fun day they had had in Ventimiglia for years) before being allowed on the train. All seat reservations had been cancelled in the confusion, so there was a huge scrum for seats. The train started two hours late and crawled very slowly towards Milan, stopping at every village and sheep station to take on more passengers, none of whom could find seats. There was no food or drink on the train, and the journey took five hours (not counting the wait in Nice and the bus ride). This traveling inferno finally arrived at Milan Central Station, which is more filthy, graffiti-encrusted, crowded, hot, and infested with bums, beggars and drug addicts than even a New Yorker could imagine.”

An honest non-fiction writer might also mention that Milan’s two major tourist attractions were effectively absent. The spectacular façade of the Duomo Cathedral (1386) was covered in plastic for cleaning, and the world-famous opera house, the Teatro Alla Scala, was closed for restoration. However s/he would also feel impelled to make positive comments on the superb public transportation system, the fine restaurants, and the friendly and helpful people of Milan.

Which experience would you prefer to read about? The second one is 100% true.

Over the years I’ve published a few travel pieces. But more often I have stalled, as you may have done, in the process of trying to translate my observations into the right language. The gap between real travel experience and the conventional style of travel writing is very hard to bridge. Humor is one way to do it. Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad, told more unwelcome truths than most travelers of his own or any other time.

Modern travel writing is indeed a form of fiction, and most of those who read travel articles in magazines and newspapers probably understand that they are indulging a kind of dream, where everything is beautiful and every encounter is picturesque and satisfying. But fiction understood by its readers to be pure invention, and travel writing is sometimes less innocent.

Many freelances and full-time journalists who do this kind of work depend on travel companies to give them a free ride. Whenever I publish a travel piece, however small and obscure, I receive a bunch of offers from PR companies – five days in Iceland, a gastronomic tour of Burgundy, a week in sunny Kabul, and so on. These offers suggest that the PR company flacks never actually read anything that I wrote. My travel writings tend to be ironic and acerbic. No sane PR person would invite me on a tour that they wanted to promote. When I accept one of these offers (which happens rarely, and only after stating clearly in writing that I will tell the truth about the experience) I always feel guilty. My fellow hacks don’t see it that way. For them, it’s just a free ride and a joke.

The earth is an imperfect planet. It is a mess. The alien peoples of the world speak incomprehensible languages, eat peculiar foods, subscribe to bizarre religions, and march to a whole timpani section of different drummers. In short, they have no idea how to live properly. Their nations, unlike ours, are often chaotic and alarming. Even their TV schedules are not always completely reliable.

The job of the travel writer is to make these stressful foreign places seem interesting enough to justify the investment of thousands of dollars in travel costs. He or she must draw on a rather limited range of images, all of which have been used tens of thousands of times before. Commercial travel writers, like travel agents, have created a new language with its own unique resonances. Water is always “crystal clear,” restaurants are “vibrant,” anything built before 1950 is “olde worlde,” views are “breathtaking” or “big sky” or “unspoiled,” hotels are “romantic gems” or “fairytale hideaways.” It takes real skill to write like this without laughing. The travel writer’s tool kit of appealing and improbable clichés also includes the following:

• Beautiful weather (usually exaggerated and unreliable).
• Glorious golden beaches (rare, usually artificial).
• Fine and/or exotic restaurants (if you are very lucky).
• Exciting nightlife (you can probably do better at home unless you live in Iowa).
• Friendly natives (usually the biggest fiction of all).
• Interesting historic ruins (almost never interesting except to professional archeologists).
• High profile cultural credits (art, music etc., a lot of hard work).
• Natural wonders (waterfalls, mountains, lakes, deserts – just like we have at home).
• Amiable wildlife (possible glimpses of the vanishing rear ends of furry creatures).
• Unique sporting opportunities (hang gliding in the Himalayas, skateboarding through Baghdad etc. – ideal for the under-twelve crowd).

It is difficult for those of us not gifted with powerful imaginations to make the connection between these descriptions and the places we actually visit on the ground. The latter can be described, certainly, but not in language that any travel editor would publish.

But the essential dishonesty of travel writing is not so much its bizarre language as its intense selectivity. Even Paul Theroux, a serious and excellent travel writer, admitted in a British newspaper interview that even he leaves out the really bad parts – the disgusting illnesses, the interminable delays, and the predatory people he encounters on his travels. Travel writing is the art of choosing a few bright fragments out of the chaos of experience and reassembling them into a complete picture.

This is not a diatribe against traveling, or even against conventional travel writing. I love to travel, even though I feel guilty about the pollution and waste involved, because I have great curiosity about how other people live, and I need the escape from everyday life. My complaint is that inexperienced tourists often set out with unrealistic expectations, nurtured by books, magazine articles and TV programs, so they fail to get the most out of their trip while it is actually happening.

The crucial distinction here is between travelers (us) and tourists (them). Tourists expect what the travel writers have told them to expect. Travelers expect anything and everything.

The interesting thing about tourists is that, in the end, it doesn’t seem to matter whether they enjoy their trip or not. Years ago, when I was much younger and even more foolish, I took on a summer job as a driver and guide for a company called Minitrek Expeditions, operating out of London. They offered what they humorously called “Adventure Holidays” in Greece, Turkey, parts of Eastern Europe and north Africa, using heavy-duty buses and stretched Land Rovers. These holidays appealed mostly to young people who were strong enough to survive the experience. The “adventure” was created by the fact that most of the driver/guides were, like me, complete amateurs. My own groups enjoyed an extra level of uncertainty because I was not good at reading maps. My tours might end up anywhere.

These trips were hard work. It’s no accident that the English word “travel” derives from the French “travail” (work). We camped, often in foul weather. We had so much sickness that I carried a box full of antibiotics and sulfa drugs, illegally purchased in what was then Yugoslavia. The vehicles often broke down. The passengers fell in love and fought with each other, usually at the same time, and found a common enemy in their driver/guide. The places where we stopped were often poverty-stricken and grim, and sometimes dangerous. Nobody could or did call it fun. But we always had plenty of customers, and even repeat customers.

After a particularly diabolical journey in the Sahara, I decided to run a little experiment. A week before the trip I had the victims (sorry, passengers) fill out a questionnaire about their expectations. Halfway through the trip those passengers who were still conscious and coherent filled out another questionnaire about how their expectations were being fulfilled. Two weeks after they returned home the survivors filled in a third questionnaire about their memories of the trip. This was repeated over several dozen trips to different places with different guides.

The result was an almost inverted perfect bell curve. Expectations started high, and plummeted down to zero in the middle of the experience. Two weeks afterwards, false memories were firmly in place. The travelers looked back on their adventures with nostalgia, and their memories were almost as rosy as their original hopes.

I published this finding as an article in a small weekly magazine, and tried to sell it to a wider audience. But nobody wanted to read it. Being funny about vacations (à la Chevy Chase) is fine. Telling the plain truth is almost sacrilegious. This was, admittedly, an extreme and unusual example, but my knowledge of the tourist industry is slightly broader than that. I’ve worked as a guide the northern Italian cultural boot camp circuit (Florence, Pisa, Sienna, Venice etc.), and also as a troubleshooter in the villa rental business in Cyprus and Turkey. None of my experiences have contradicted the impressions recorded above.

All vacations probably follow the same curving path from anticipation, down to experience, and up again to nostalgia, and experiences are less powerful than memories. To paraphrase something that Professor John Gagnon said about sex: “First there’s the expectation, then there’s the memory. But best of all is the expectation of the memory.”

This lets travel writers off the hook. The Technicolor fantasies they create may cause travelers to suffer a rude shock during the vacation itself, but they provide essential material for the re-creation of happy memories afterwards. Once tourists have recovered from the jet lag, stomach disorders and the credit card bills, they begin to imagine that they actually did enjoy the golden beaches, exotic restaurants, and unique cultural experiences that they read about before booking the trip.

The main lesson for tourists themselves is not to take detailed notes during the journey. Like any diary, these notes will make unwelcome reading afterwards. Tourists must allow the ever-inventive travel writers to stock their dreams and refurbish their memories, and not ask too many questions.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Talk given to the faculty Emeriti at Stony Brook University, May 7 2010

It is an honor for me to speak to such a distinguished gathering as this – an honor, and a challenge too: so much accumulated knowledge and experience, so much intelligence, so many hearing aids, and I must assume so much wisdom. Wisdom is the topic I chose for this event, which tells you right away that I’m not wise myself. To address a group like this on the subject of wisdom is rather like addressing the Academie Francaise on the subject of French irregular verbs. So let me say right away that I don’t claim to have wisdom, I am simply interested in it as a student of lost causes. You could say that the whole history of the human race has been a search for wisdom that isn’t going well so far. We have a ton of knowledge, but a cynic might say that wisdom seems to be stuck somewhere about the time of the First Crusade. I myself am more of an optimist. In my opinion we are at least as wise as the folks who unleashed the Second Crusade in 1101.

The traditional cliché is that wisdom comes to us as we get older. It may have happened to you, but it didn’t happen to me. When I passed the Biblical three score and ten a couple of years ago I hoped that wisdom might descend on me like arthritis. I got the second but not the first. In fact the opposite seems to have happened. Every month I know less and less about more and more. My mother is a hundred years old, and she confirms that this is usually how these things work.

But then nobody expects wisdom from the old anymore. We are told, though we may have trouble believing it, that age and authority once went together. A lifetime of experience added up, like books in a growing library, so that old people really were wiser. Now the connection between knowledge and wisdom has gone with the wind. Knowledge moves too fast for wisdom to catch up. Any knowledge we happen to grab is made obsolete next week or next year, so that most people know less than their kids and old people know nothing at all. Nothing worth knowing, that is: about computer games, or the sex lives of the TV celebrities, the cutting edge of Hip Hop Music. Who has time for wisdom? When your computer screen goes blank you can be as wise as Solomon, and it will stay blank. To be old today is not to be wise, but to be drowning in knowledge we don’t know how to use.

What the Oxford dictionary says about wisdom is simply: “Having knowledge, and able to make good use of knowledge.” The two things go together, and that is exactly where the difficulty lies. What is the good or wise use of knowledge? For example if physicists discover the elusive Higgs-Boson particle, the basic particle of the universe, what would be a good or wise thing to do with it? We haven’t found anything wise or good even sensible to do with technological marvels like television. The question about “wise use” is never asked, because it sounds archaic, and slightly crazy.

Even the word “wisdom” is unfashionable, if not dead. In a nineteenth century novel I read, one character described another as “Intelligent, but not very wise.” We would never say that now. We might describe a person as being not very sensible, or not very talented, but never as lacking in wisdom. The word has dropped out of the language, along with other useful descriptive words such as stupidity, usury, and posterity. We may describe people as intelligent, well-educated, talented, qualified, but seldom as wise.

I don’t think that the eclipse of the word “wisdom” is trivial. In theory at least wisdom is the higher goal of thought – it’s deep and complicated. It addresses tricky things like the meaning of life and the sources of happiness. But there is no obvious payoff to having wisdom. Nobody since Solomon ever got a job by being wise.

When the word “wisdom” does come up, especially on Public TV, it is usually in the context of what is portentously called “the Wisdom of the ancients.” The ancients, whoever they were, are given special reverence and credited with mystical powers of understanding. Yet you don’t have to be much of an historian to know that the ancients were a bunch of complete dunderheads who understood almost nothing about anything and would certainly have flunked an SAT test. Look at the pyramids, mountains of misdirected effort. Think of the paintings in the Lascaux caves, created by artists who thought it was a great idea to work deep under the ground in pitch darkness. Think of the Maya, who abandoned their cities without having had the foresight to develop suburbs. The latest piece of ancient wisdom from the Maya tells us to expect the end of the world – yet again – on December 21, 2012 – mark your calendars. No, in spite of our limitations we are smarter than the ancients in every way. It’s a mark of desperate insecurity to look for wisdom in a bunch of superstitious tribal lunatics wandering the desert or the jungle without so much as a Blackberry between them. Wherever wisdom is, it’s not in the rear view mirror.

Maybe wisdom is up ahead.

The German philosopher Hegel said something about wisdom that everybody remembers, but almost nobody understands:

“Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.”

Or, in other words, “The Owl of Minerva flies only with the gathering of the dusk.”

Minerva was the Roman Goddess of wisdom, and the owl was her symbol. Unfortunately modern ornithology has shown that owls are unusually stupid birds. The European barn owl, for example, is an endangered species because it insists on flying just at the height of car windshields. So the owl may not be our best teacher, but never mind.

My old philosophy teacher Alistair Mcintyre explained that Hegel’s statement about owls meant we could only expect wisdom to arrive at the end of the age. In other words, wisdom is simply hindsight – and Hegel’s deep philosophical insight is essentially the same as the refrigerator magnet that says “Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.” But Professor McIntyre didn’t say which age had to end, and nor did Hegel: our personal chronological age? The age we live in? A macro-historical age like the bronze age or the plastic age? How do we know when an age has ended? None of this is clear, but then nothing in Hegel is clear. This has given him the reputation for being very wise.

About fifty years ago in Greece I bought a little stone statue of the owl of Minerva, and she has been sitting on my desk ever since as a kind of lucky charm. I hope she might deliver wisdom, but nothing yet. And if Hegel was right, not ever. By the time the owl speaks it will be too late for me.

Wise men have said that the beginning of wisdom is to take the full measure of one’s own ignorance. As a young man I took this to heart and searched for wisdom in books. Actually it wasn’t precisely wisdom I was after – the word was archaic even then – but just some reasonable way of understanding the world. In the book by Douglas Adams Called The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a great computer called Deep Thought is programmed to answer the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. That was what I wanted: the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. I read religious books, philosophical books, historical books, and quite a lot of science fiction.

I even read some of the ancients, including Socrates whose wisdom was famous. Socrates was a lot easier to understand than Hegel, but he offered no short cut, either forwards to the ideal Hegelian future or backwards to those super-intelligent ancestors. For Socrates wisdom was a virtue won by hard work, experience, error, intuition, detachment, and (very important) critical thinking. Wisdom as S described it was dynamite – unsentimental, unconventional, unbelieving, counter intuitive. It meant questioning everything, and then questioning the answers. This can get you in a lot of trouble, as Socrates found out.

This was discouraging. Hard work and unconventional opinions are out of fashion. I wanted wisdom to be a very calm, almost spiritual state, not a perpetual graduate seminar with a cup of hemlock at the end of it. All the books were disappointing, including T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which I seized eagerly. But it is excessively long and has no wisdom in it, and precious little common sense. The only useful information I found in it was that it is not a good idea to upset Turkish soldiers. When I was in the British army in Cyprus I found that this was completely true.

Books, as I say, were a disappointment. But a couple of months ago I read a review in The New York Times of a new book by Stephen S. Hall called Wisdom, and I thought: “I’m saved – this will give me the background I need to talk to all these intelligent people about wisdom.” But this turned out to be just a repetition of my old mistake: looking for wisdom in books. Hall’s explanations left me none the wiser. He defines wisdom as knowing how to make the best possible decisions and maximize the good, which leaves the definitions of “best” and “good” hanging in thin air, not to mention Hegel’s suggestion that wisdom always comes too late to be useful anyway. There seems no way to talk about wisdom without falling into this sort of philosophical ambush. That’s why modern philosophers prefer not to talk about it.

When I became a graduate student, rather late in life, I hoped that wisdom would come with the PhD certificate, but no. When I was a young (or young’ish) faculty person I thought it might come with tenure. But tenure came, and all I got was more committee assignments. I looked for wisdom in my senior faculty colleagues, many of whom were extremely talented. But it was clear that wisdom was an optional extra at that particular British university. There must be wise people out there, probably here in this room, but they move in different circles and I never meet them.

For a dozen years I looked for enlightenment in the Enlightenment, because the foundation course we taught at the University of Essex in those days was all about 18th century history, philosophy, art and literature. We (the teachers) were trying to give students a rational progressive foundation for their lives, a project that still has a long way to go on both sides of the Atlantic. Not all the 18th cent philosophes fitted into our grand scheme. Some like Rousseau, were simply crazy. But I thought the Scottish philosopher David Hume sounded very like a wise man. He said: “To a philosopher and historian the madness and imbecility of mankind ought to appear as ordinary events,” which is a useful statement. And Voltaire delivered wisdom with a sledgehammer. “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. “ Students remembered that one.

But the grand theories of the Enlightenment were unsatisfying. The trouble with rationalism, as David Hume spotted, is that it doesn’t work very well if we are all slightly mad. The 18th century theories that changed the world were not the rational ones but the demented ones that picked up on the mad side of human nature – Rousseau again.

So I gave up on wisdom for a long time, which was a great relief, and only in the last week or two when this event was on my horizon did I come back to it. This time I was determined to start with the smallest and most modest forms of wisdom. I speculated that we might (as it were) creep up on wisdom, as it appears in its most condensed, easily available form – the proverbs or proverbial wisdoms that sum up many lifetimes of bitter experience and dumb mistakes distilled to a single pungent single phrase for the benefit of posterity.

Proverbs are thought by many to contain the irreducible essence of wisdom. For example, I found this in a book of wisdom from foreign lands. This is from Africa: “Never talk to a rhinoceros unless there is a tree close by.” You can guess that they didn’t learn this by going to the library and checking the references. This was the product of thousands of years of conversations with rhinoceroses that went wrong. This is real life Wisdom, much more dependable than the wisdom of the ancients.

Now we have all been victims of proverbial wisdom, particularly when we were young. A large part of the job of parenting is to bombard one’s offspring with warnings and advice in the form of easily remembered clichés posing as absolute truths. They come from everywhere although, in this country, a lot of them are the work of Ben Franklin and Dale Carnegie, and have an economic flavor: “Early to bed, early to rise; A penny saved is a penny earned; Nothing succeeds like success; Do the hard jobs first.” These are not so much wisdoms as weapons, and nobody wants to hear them.

Other proverbs are demonstrably nonsense. “Faint heart never won fair lady; Good fences make good neighbors; What goes up must come down.” But here commonsense has gone out the window, let alone wisdom. Faint heart quite often wins fair ladies, they like a modest approach, and neighbors fight over fences like street gangs defending their turf. Now we have a space program it’s no longer even guaranteed that what goes up must come down.

The final degeneration of proverbial wisdom comes in the most abbreviated twitter-like form of bumper stickers. These have become the medium for the display of our least profound insights.

“One Day at a Time” is a message often seen on the rear end of SUVs. Yet the steady rotation of the earth guarantees that we will get one day at a time, and not three or twelve together. Anyone who tries to live according to any other principle is likely to become seriously confused. “What goes around comes around” is clearly true for operators of carousels, but not necessarily for anyone else. “You’re never too old” is another piece of bumper sticker wisdom, along with “It’s never too late,” and “You never know what you can do until you try.” But a very small amount of wisdom reveals that we are often too old, it’s frequently too late, and there are many things we are absolutely certain we can’t do, no matter how hard we try.

These untrue truisms are always delivered with a great air of certainty. My mother is fond of saying things like: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” I invariably reply that I have never imagined, even in my wildest dreams, that Rome was built in a day. If I were to speculate, I would guess that the project took much longer, depending on which construction company was employed, who bribed the building inspectors, and whether any trade unions were involved.

Every Sunday for the past twelve years I’ve traveled on the Port Jefferson ferry to Bridgeport to work at the radio station. On these trips I became friendly with the barman, Bob Sciasa. And here was a man with an interesting approach to wisdom. He laid out on the bar a couple of plain notebooks with this message in large letters on the covers: THIS IS WHAT I KNOW TO BE TRUE. Everyone was invited to make an intellectual contribution to this project, and many did. Bob had a heap of these books behind the bar, full of thoughts from travelers of all ages and types. Now I thought this might be a treasure trove, if only we could dig out the treasure. So we started working through the books, choosing the best things people had said that they knew to be true.

I wish I could tell you that a great deal of individual silliness added up to collective wisdom, but I can’t. In the end we published a little book of some selected gems of wisdom, called Ferry Tales, and you can still buy it on the ferry. But don’t throw away your copy of Hegel.

“I must have been here for a while; the whole bar is moving. Those who say: God doesn’t give you more than you can handle have never lived with a teenage girl. Trust your husband, adore your husband, and get as much as you can in your own name.” And one traveler, summing up the whole enterprise, wrote: “Those who seek wisdom from the drunken thoughts of ferry boat passengers deserve their fate”

But proverbs and conventional wisdoms, silly or not, at least have the merit of being short, and perhaps they sometimes do give us a flash of wisdom in the small things of life, just because we can take them in one bite. William James said that wisdom is knowing what to leave out. In this he was unlike his novelist brother Henry, who never left anything out.

But so many proverbs are tired, worn out, or wrong that we have to dig deep for the good stuff — which brings me to the aphorism . An aphorism is a clever, original thought that stops you in your tracks and makes you think. It’s not the sort of thing your mother is likely to say.

“To be ignorant of the past is to be always a child.” Cicero

“Truths are the illusions that we have misunderstood.” Nietzsche

“Everything is translation, and we are all lost in it.” (author unknown)

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. “ Benjamin Franklin

“Self-knowledge is always bad news.” John Barth

Or, on the brighter side from Mae West, “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”

“Trying is the first step towards failure.” (Homer Simpson)

Some of these gems of wisdom are better than a hundred self-help books. I like the Rev Sidney Smith’s final word on how to avoid worrying: “Take a short view of life, no further than dinner or tea.” It works, my friends, it works.

What all this led up to – and I’m sure you’re dying to know – was the not-very-original thought that wisdom comes, if at all, in small slices and with a small “W”. I’ll take as an example: Montaigne the great French essayist of the 16th century. Not Montaigne as a wise man or guru, but Montaigne as a man who had the right idea about wisdom – that it comes from small personal observations rigorously examined.

His device for doing this was the essay, a form which he invented and gave a name (the French essai, meaning to try). The essay is appealing because of its splendid brevity and self-limitation. Many of you have been involved in studies or research projects lasting for years or decades. The essay is soon over – start at breakfast, finish in time for lunch. You don’t get lost in the details. An essay has no great theory of the meaning of life, no story line, and possibly no objective facts. It simply examines a slice of ordinary life and delivers the result personally straight from the writer to the reader: “Here it is.” Montaigne believed that wisdom was a totally personal thing that we must find ourselves, through continuous self-examination. His essays are not so much a GPS for finding wisdom, but a treasure map where X doesn’t always mark the spot.

He offers us, for example: How to deal with failure; How to make the most of every minute of your life; How to read hard books; How to talk to your dog when you disagree with him. These are not dumped on the reader like chapters in an advice book, as the truth. They are simply the voice of experience coming to us from almost half a millennium ago, the totally human voice of a man trying to figure out his life. Often he makes the disarming comment: Que sais-je? – What do I know? It may be as close to wisdom as we can get.

His essays are full of useful aphorisms:

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.”

“Whoever saw old age that did not applaud the past and condemn the present?”

“Prejudice is a great labor saving device. It allows you to have an opinion without needing to discover the facts.”

Montaigne is one among hundreds of essayists who offer these kinds of pleasures. You could equally well read Hazlitt, Doctor Johnson, Mark Twain, H.L.Mencken, Eudora Welty, Joan Didion. It’s not that they were or are extraordinarily wise, but that the essay form pushes them in a direction that seems favorable to wisdom, that is to say the close examination of small things.

Since I gave up being a serious academic person I’ve written about a thousand essays for newspapers, magazines and radio. About one time in fifty, if that, I’ve come up with something that Montaigne might have recognized as an essay, though I don’t think any of them rose to the level of wisdom. But, as with fishing, the pleasure is in casting the line and sitting by the water. Catching something would be a bonus, and maybe a problem.

The other thing I’ve learned is that, when it comes to stalking these small slices of wisdom, humor is essential, a sense of the ridiculous is essential. As Montaigne said: “You must play the fool a little if you are not to be thought foolish.” It wasn’t always so with him. As a young man he was gloomy and oppressed with thoughts of death. But in his fifties he was, as he said, “Liberated into lightheartedness.” He had realized the ridiculousness of the human situation, and how funny it is. This is where “the ancients” fail us again – the prophets had no sense of humor (with the possible exception of Buddha) The answers to life’s most profound questions may not be in four-hundred page books of philosophy. They may be right in front of us, in the form of proverbs, idiosyncratic essays, aphorisms, and bad jokes that jolt the brain towards the place where wisdom may be lurking. Remember Mr. Edwards, the friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said to the great man: “I have tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness was always breaking in.” He had it backwards, of course. We are never less wise than when we take ourselves seriously, so I’ll leave you with this quote from the famous American philosopher Woody Allen.

“More than at any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us hope that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Copyright: David Bouchier 2010

Over the next few weeks, while other things are taking up all my time, this spot will be filled with selected chapters from my 2005 book Writer at Work. If you somehow failed to read this masterpiece, here’s your chance.

“Work expands in order to fill the time available
for its completion.”
C. Northcote Parkinson

Every writer should have Parkinson’s Law displayed in a prominent place on his or her desk. It applies to writers with special force because our work is open-ended and unlimited and, unless we are working to regular deadlines, there are no time limits. Any piece of writing, however short, can take forever.

Time has always been my enemy, and I’ve always envied the writers who grasp it and use it with effortless efficiency. Anthony Trollope, who worked all his life for the post office and wrote on the train, produced forty-six novels and an autobiography. Shakespeare was a busy actor/producer, but found time to knock out a few plays and sonnets, and Julius Caesar wrote the massive Gallic Wars while holding down a full-time job in the Roman government. One modern writer of successful thrillers, Martin Clark, is a busy circuit court judge, and writes his bestsellers from 5.30 to 6.30 every morning. People like this are very annoying to the rest of us.

Virginia Woolf once famously wrote that: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” A room of one’s own is certainly useful for a writer, but no more useful by itself than a blank sheet of paper by itself. Money is useful too, and so is the urgent need to earn money. But what a writer really needs is time – a commodity that the wealthy Virginia had in such abundance that she didn’t even think it worth mentioning.

Time, that’s the precious, infinitely scarce resource: time for thought, time for careful writing, time for re-reading and rewriting. Nothing can be achieved without time.

Most of us, I believe, waste a lot of our precious time. It’s tempting, and self-serving, to say that no time wasting is ever wasted, just as no writing is ever wasted. This allows us to count everything in our lives as “material,” no matter how effortless or trivial it may be. But wasted time usually turns out to be just that. The Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, of which Virginia Woolf was a part, wasted enormous amounts of time just expressing their emotions and falling in love with each other, and with themselves.

Efficiency is not my greatest gift. My writing timetable is never fully under control, although I try. I waste far too much time standing in line at the supermarket behind irritating people with the wrong coupons, or trying to use the always-broken copiers at Office Max. I waste more time at the post office, at the bird feeder, and at the coffee shop. An efficiency expert would reorganize my entire life, and make me twice as productive. The catch is that I would have to earn enough to pay a good efficiency expert ($175 an hour), which I can’t do until I become more efficient.

Most writers work alone, without staffs or secretaries to do all the trivial stuff. I look back with some nostalgia on my days as a professor, when I could just hand a big photocopying or filing job to a secretary, and forget about it. On the other hand I think I would be fooling myself to pretend that I was any more productive back then. I just had more time to waste. Office workers can while away idle hours in useless meetings. They have water coolers to stand around, and office politics to discuss. With luck, an office worker can get through the day without doing any work at all, yet feeling quite exhausted. A solitary writer has no such excuses. When s/he hasn’t done anything, due to laziness or incompetence, the fact is obvious.

E-mail is the greatest time-waster since the invention of knitting, and perhaps the biggest block to writing ever created. Computers made writing easier, and then e-mail made it almost impossible. Right now, as I type, I’m conscious that lurking under this page on my screen is another page with about fifty unanswered e-mails. I only have to click the little minus symbol, and there they will be – easy and relaxing, mindless and enjoyable, friendly and engaging. Here’s another “message waiting” and a harmonious chime. Perhaps it’s my agent, it could be important. Relief from the agony of writing is only a click away…

Click.

Sorry about that. I’m back. It wasn’t important..

People at writers’ conferences sometimes ask: “So what does a full-time writer actually do every day.” This is impossible to answer because every writer’s schedule is different, depending on their commitments and deadlines. But we can be sure about two things.

First, there’s no such thing as a literally full-time writer. Nobody can write creatively eight hours a day, five days a week, as if it were a routine office job. Most writers actually write in short bursts, and do other things in between. Also, the vast majority of writers actually have another job, very often teaching.

Second, there are plenty of other things to be done. I call these “The bureaucracy of everyday life.” A working writer will have a horrendous load of correspondence and e-mail, plus filing and accounting chores, planning new work and speaking events, publicity, research, and reading. On a very good day s/he may even find some time to think.

This multitasking can take over your life, and the routine jobs (relatively easy) can very easily squeeze the time spent on the main creative task (much harder).

Those of us who work at home also have to cope with the near-impossibility of separating our domestic lives from our work lives. Spouses, children and pets (especially cats) demand attention, urgent jobs around the house seem to come up every day, and the routines of cooking, shopping and cleaning infiltrate themselves insidiously into our “work” time. Time, unlike love, is a limited resource. Every moment you give to one activity is subtracted from another.

We want to be nice, we want to be sociable, but it all takes time. Even a little celebrity is a dangerous thing. As a local “mini-celebrity” I get asked to give lectures and dinner speeches, and attend all kinds of unlikely events. I can’t image what it must be like to be a real celebrity: no wonder they go into hiding.

There is such a thing as creative time wasting. I walk alone for at least an hour every day, and that’s when I get all my ideas. Without those walks my mind would be entirely empty, so I feel I can legitimately count those hours as work time.

Many famous writers were ruthless about guarding their writing time. The poet W.H.Auden would leave the dinner table at 9.30, even when he had guests, and go upstairs to write. This was “his time.” When Edith Wharton had a house full of visitors she would simply ignore them until noon every day, while she stayed in her room writing. Of course it helps to have servants. Vladimir Nabokov’s wife protected his every creative moment, leaving him no everyday tasks or worries. But nowadays few women are willing to sacrifice themselves on the alter of a male ego – and when it comes to men sacrificing for women, forget it!

All this seems to lead to the unpalatable conclusion that we all need to develop the art of selfishness, or we will never get anything done. But no, it’s not that bad. The critical phase in Parkinson’s Law is: “…the time available.” The time available is, in theory, limitless, which is exactly why we fill it extravagantly with other activities. The question, then, is not how to make time for writing but how and whether to limit the time.

Every working writer I know uses one or both of the following two simple techniques, either consciously or unconsciously.

The first technique is to define writing projects in a definite order and with a definite timeline – in other words to create deadlines. Real deadlines from magazine or newspaper editors are even better, of course. But personal deadlines, perhaps with a personal reward attached, can be almost as powerful. If you believe deeply, profoundly, passionately in your writing you should at least be able to take your timetable seriously.

The second technique is to reserve certain definite times for writing, and make those times as sacred as you can. They can be quite short, like an hour a day. But that period must be totally dedicated to your current project – no E-mail, no domestic chores, no dreaming, no excuses. It seems incredible, but you will find that a limited writing time, strictly observed, will be more productive than a disorganized effort to “fit some writing in somewhere” during the day.

If you have the right temperament you can save a lot of time by organizing your physical workspace. There’s no mystery about this, but it may be hard to do. Chaos is romantic, and also addictive. Separating projects into properly labeled files, keeping a clear desk, shelving reference books neatly, and so on, will make any writer more efficient. But can we do it? Looking around at my exploding office and I have to admit: not this writer.

If these techniques sound artificial and mechanical, it’s because they are. But, when it comes to managing time, most of us need artificial aids.

I have discovered over the years that there is a catch to organizing your time in a rigorous and logical way. The catch is that deadlines, real or artificial, always take precedence. After a lifetime of writing to (real) deadlines I’ve learned that the deadlined piece always pushes in ahead of anything else I want to do. If the deadlines fall regularly, you never get to write anything else. There’s no time. Deadlines are a stimulant, but they can also act like a guillotine on the imagination.

There is another way, which is not to worry about time at all. Marcel Proust spent a dozen years writing In Search of Lost Time, which is all about trying to take control of time and life. Some people just work much more slowly than others. Simenon could turn out a novel in a couple of weeks. But Thomas Pynchon wrote V in 1963, followed by Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. He then took twenty four years to produce his next novel, Mason and Dixon (1997). Pynchon denies any suggestion that he had writer’s block. His attitude is that a piece of writing takes as long as it takes.

Some of us would lose our way in such great stretches of time. But it may be that true wisdom is to understand your own tempo and temperament and ignore all other advice. In other words, to take your time.

Copyright: David Bouchier 2005

Read the rest of this entry »

I see I haven’t posted anything here for a couple of weeks, but that’s ok. There are periods in life (sometimes they last for decades) when nothing much happens, in your head or anywhere else. This is one of those times. I must say I admire those folks who can find something to blog or tweet about every day, or even several times a day. Their lives must be so rich. I read about someone who tweets the news of all her shopping trips, and another who posts details of all his meals. I suppose I could try that. Yesterday I had healthy cereal for breakfast, a flatbread pizza with mushrooms for lunch, and chicken Marsala and fettuccine for dinner, with a red wine from Languedoc. How interesting is that?

The only real even in the past couple of weeks was a non event. A concert and reception I had been organizing on behalf of the local literacy volunteers had to be cancelled because so few tickets were sold. This was depressing, because it seemed to show that some people are using the recession as a reason or excuse to cut down on their support for charities and non profits, just when these organizations need their support most. Gloom all around.

A corner of my mind has been occupied with a more optimistic task: collecting and organizing about a hundred and fifty essays I’ve written over the past three years into the semblance of a book. The texts were scattered over three computers and five zip drives, so simply collecting them was a chore. Now I have to come up with some principle of organization. Any collection of essays begins with two big questions. Should I collect them at all? And how on earth am I going to present all these different essays in a way that makes sense?

Having got over the first hurdle I am stuck on the second. In the past I’ve used various cute structures: Life; Liberty; The Pursuit of Happiness for example, or Spring; Summer; Autumn; Winter. This time I have no cute idea, yet. Watch this space.

My few remaining brain cells have been cautiously circling around the subject of wisdom. I have rashly agreed to give a talk to the emeriti (retired faculty) of the local university on May 7, and wisdom is my chosen subject. This may be an early sign of dementia. Eventually the talk will be posted here, so you can judge for yourself.

It’s not much to blog about, but such as it is there it is.

“Reading Between the Lines” may be a lost art. It happens in university Departments of Literature, of course, where writers’ prose is bent apart by metaphorical crowbars so that the proper academic meanings can be inserted into it. Conspiracy theorists can find hidden meanings in a shopping list. But most of us, including me, just read. We don’t expect to find a subtext, and we don’t.

Mark Twain was acutely aware of the dark meanings between the lines of his own entertaining works. A letter from him to a perceptive reader was quoted in Harper’s Magazine, December 2009 (pages 21-22).

“Dear Sir,
You have read me between the lines. What I have tried to do, and what I still try to do, is to allow only a little to leak out between the lines. This has been a strain on me for thirty years.”

Twain goes on to explain that this rigorous self-control has been a device to protect his wife and his family from his own dark side. We can all understand this. We all hesitate and delete from time to time, leaving our real meaning hidden between the lines.

You might expect that, after a certain age, we would find it easier to write honestly about the most dangerous things: love, fear, failure and all the rest. But a lifetime habit is hard to break. Most of it stays in that narrow space between the lines. That is where you will find almost everything I ought to have said in this posting.