MAY 2023
2 MAY TUESDAY
- Why did you write your books? Samuel Beckett: I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest of the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began to write down the things I feel. (from an interview)
22 May Monday
Tomorrow Javier Marías's final book shows up on the kindle. Can't wait. I so enjoyed Berta Isla that I expect to love this final book about her husband, Tomas Nevinson. Which surely must be "never-son" in Marías's Spanglish.
The tale of the husband who was tricked into being a spy for MI6 seemed just excellent for my private purposes, resonances. The whole Spanish-English divide works so well and then the way Thomas's life is highjacked without his realizing it until half a lifetime later also seems perfect. Ed is reading about existentialism and I think this layering of divided selves feels like perfect depiction of existentialist anxieties. We are hybrids. We are spies with hidden lives against our wills. Just today Phil Jones asks me if I ever thought to study architecture. Is his memory not slipping?
"Recently, I read an article that mentioned some innovative architecture and that made me remember how much you liked architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright when we were teens. So I got to wondering: Did you ever consider majoring in architecture in college or grad school? Possibly attending RISD or some other architecture school? "
How to even bother answering? I've told him about this before. Now I could say I did plan to attend Carnegie Mellon but then MI6 offered me a way out of a murder charge and I took it. Years later I found out they had set up the murder charge as a way of getting me to sign up with them. Sort of like the "invitation" to join Opus Dei when I was in Hyde Park.
Any way, the overarching entity that pulls you into it does not have to be specified—-it is what happens to everyone in one way or another. Teaching at a state college in new hampshire versus teaching at a poshy lib arts college in, say, Santa Fe. That would have been as claustrophobic and cut-off as anywhere else. The way life goes without your having planned it, then you wake up, or look back, and wonder where it went and how you got to the place you now seem to be.
A few years ago I gave up on finishing one of M's novels. It was when we were living in Barb and Ed's townhouse in Abq!! Now I think I might reread all of M's works. Perhaps he is our Proust, as good as Musil, better than anyone else I can think of to dive into. Or should I read more of Martin Amis, now that he also is gone? Marias interests me more, always has. Amis is good for sure but Marías has the whole Madrid gestalt behind him.
K & C visited. So good to talk with them. David from furniture came to measure the window for new Hunter Douglas shades. That company must have the monopoly on the market.
“He looked up at the big station clock. He had two minutes, three at most, otherwise he would miss the train. There was a calmness about that place, about that whole monotonous, dull, sleepy existence, which he hadn’t known anywhere else. And it’s a pleasant feeling having no responsibilities, or only those everyone else has. When something comes to an end, even the something you most want to end, you suddenly regret that ending and begin to miss it. He thought: “What we leave behind us seems inoffensive, because we’ve successfully come through it, that is, we’ve emerged alive and unscathed. We’d like to go back to yesterday because yesterday is over; we know how it ended and we’d like to repeat that day. ‘What was to be the value of the long-looked-forward-to, long-hoped-for calm, the autumnal serenity and the wisdom of age?” I’ve been safe here, I’ve led a tranquil, orderly life. Boring, really, but I’ll miss that boredom.
— Berta Isla: A novel by Javier Marías
24 May
From the doctor: Naproxen and raise leg with heat compress. Four weeks, then check-in.
