Horizontal Thinking

“The only thing I am certain of is that starting to write at this stage of my life seems presumptuous. It appears that we old folk, as the hour to pack our bags fast approaches, feel almost without exception that we have something important to say.”

--From The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson, by Paola Kaufmann, 2003.

So that’s what this writing is all about? Or maybe not, since I didn’t just start writing at this (late) stage in my life. Reading is more what it’s about than writing, I think. And reading seems to take on a different quality when you get to that aforementioned late stage of life. Maybe it’s only true of English majors (maybe it’s only true of me, how would I know?), but there seems a strange compulsion to re-read all the books that I once read and remember liking. It’s not so much that I remember the books themselves, and maybe that’s why one turns to reading them again: to see if one still likes them.

After I moved up here, I reread all of Dickens, Thackeray, George Moore, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and some of Trollope (the other 40 Trollope novels I read for the first time). I reread some Dostoyevsky, some Tolstoy, all of The Jewel in the Crown series, and who knows what else. I just finished reading Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, which I last read in 1960, just before I read Italo Svevo’s Confession’s of Zeno, thus linking the two books in my mind forever. Zeno is a man who can’t quit smoking no matter how hard he tries (as I recall), and Oblomov is a man who can’t bring himself to get out of bed, no matter how hard he tries, indeed, no matter how hard his friends try.

Fortunately, I quit smoking 30 years ago, so I probably can pass on re-reading Zeno, but I now find myself somewhat in the position of Oblomov, so the re-read may have been helpful. Oblomov is a world class chooser to do nothing because it’s all too much effort for the paltry rewards the world has to offer. He cannot see the point of all that striving. He may be like a man who retired very early. He may be like the Buddha.

Both Ed and I have noted that not having to be someplace in the morning tends to result in one staying in bed quite a lot longer. At first, we attributed this to the darkness of winter: why get up when it’s still dark? But then spring would come and we were still abed in the light, even if not necessarily asleep. Like Oblomov, I find I can do a world of thinking while horizontally positioned. Indeed, I can plan the entire remainder of the day, should I get up to actually have such a day. It comforts me to think that I don’t spend all this time in bed asleep. I am sure it comforted Ilya Oblomov, as well.

The thing about the book is that I remember it as only about Oblomov staying in bed, but that is not all there is to it. It’s not that he gets up eventually and becomes an industrious and productive human being, but that he finds a way of life that supports his staying in bed. And though he dies early of a stroke, his days up until that time are absolutely satisfying to him and to those around him. His friends have gone off to have another kind of life and they too are satisfied with their busy-ness. So, it seems that the book is more about ‘everybody has to find his own way,’ than it is about ‘everybody ought to stay busy to be happy.”

This morning, when I wandered out into the living room around 9:30 a.m. (90 minutes after the goal for arising), I said to Ed, ‘Ah, what is going to become of me? I considered just waiting and getting up tomorrow at 8 o’clock.” His reply: “I believe we are people who know the importance of a goal, how to set one, and how to decide when a goal might best be at least temporarily overridden." I think Oblomov would have drunk to that.