Random
Reading as a Comfort
The suicides and untimely deaths of friends and family have been piling up the last ten years. I had a close friend when I lived in Florida who was a city utilities worker. He was into kung fu movies and karate and beach volleyball and very unlucky with women. He met a woman after he was diagnosed with leukemia, and they married, but it must have been hard to be married to a terminally ill person, and she left him in the end, but before the end. It seemed unexcusable to me that she left him before the end, but then she was the one who was changing the bedsheets and holding his head over the toilet and watching him turn skeletal and lose teeth.
When he was close to the end, somebody called to tell me. I had moved away, and drove the two and a half hours to his hospital bed. There was some kind of magnetic resistance pushing at me from the direction of that hospital. I drove around it several times and didn’t park. I went into a movie theater to watch Sunshine State, a John Sayles movie. It was a comfort to be in the movie, but not the kind of comfort that is comfortable. Watching a film in a darkened theater when you are full of darkness is a weird uncomfortable stasis. It’s dream-like, but not a pleasurable dream. My attention drifted from my dying friend, but also from the movie, into a vagueness. Someone cleared their throat in the front row, and someone near me reeked of popcorn oil. I remember a scene with two people paddling a canoe, and I remember learning later that Sayles had blown up a portion of the print because a boom mic had got into the top of the shot, and so that part of the movie was somehow grainier. But I don’t remember thinking it was grainier at the time I was watching the movie. I only remember being comforted when Edie Falco was on the screen, some kind of weird motherly feeling I had when she was on the screen.
I went to see my friend in the hospital bed after the movie was over. I coughed, and he was angry with me, because leukemia destroys your immune system. My cough could have killed him. I remember my friend had shit on himself, and I crawled briefly into the bed with him and got a little of the shit on my pants. Later, at the funeral, I was asked to speak, and I got emotional, and one of the officiants told me later that in time I wouldn’t get so emotional about people dying. I said it depended upon the person.
For awhile I was watching television, but television was a lot like being in the movie. It was hard to sleep for awhile, and some nights I didn’t sleep. The days afterward might be eight hours removed from what would have been the previous day, but instead it felt like weeks had passed. Colors became briefly associated with smells, but only pungent smells, like onion or garlic, or softly bitter and unidentifiable smells, like when you stick your nose near the spice rack.
Somebody had recently turned me on to Kurt Vonnegut books. At this time in my life, I hadn’t read very much literature at all. I had read Faulkner and Hemingway in high school, and Hawthorne and George Eliot, one novel each by all of them, but I wasn’t ready to know how good they were, because I hadn’t read enough yet. But something about Kurt Vonnegut lit my head on fire. I read all the books, one after the other, in whatever order I could get my hands on them.
If you think about what those books are about — suicide, genocide, American imperialism, religious control, Nazis, the ruthlessness of natural selection, etc. — you’d think it’s weird that these books were a comfort. But for two or three months, I lost myself in them. What a strange comfort — it was something like oblivion, just complete lostness.
This lostness is really what saved me, I think, from a deep despair, and not just about the suicides and the deaths, but over the idea of death, and the world of atrocities, and a fundamental feeling of differentness or aloneness or separation from other people.
Writing doesn’t offer the same kind of lostness. Writing requires a giving that is harder-earned the more of it you do, except maybe the occasional, once- or twice-a-year gift of flight that leaves you not long after it seizes you. But reading, good reading, reliably welds you to the most fluent, able part of another human being’s interior life, and if they’ve done they’re job, you’re pleasantly enslaved to it for as long as it takes you to finish the thing you’ve started.
I know a man, an engineering professor, who says his life’s work is reading Proust. I asked him why. He said because the end of it is never in sight, and he fears he’s not strong enough to be a person who lives in the world the way other people live in the world once he’s come to the end of it. The it he fears coming to the end of, I think, is the lostness. His great despair would be the loss of the lostness, which would require the gaining of the present knowledge of the greater lostnesses that end with the greatest loss.
The contemplation of death is for some people this great terror, and the best reading is often full of the contemplation of death, and so they stave off the contemplation of death by choosing the lostness of a contemplation of the contemplation of death.
The concerns that spur this reflection today are less than the concerns of death, but they are the concerns of the sustenance of life that rise from fear and upheaval in the workplace. Mine is particularly scary lately, full of uncertainty, with lawsuits and threats of recrimination buzzing from office to office as one group tries to wrest power from another. I’m not actively involved in any of it, as a target or an actor — I am, indeed, a person without a place in any of the competing power systems — but the uncertainty and the atmosphere of fear is difficult some days to escape.
This morning I turned again to some books I’ve been reading or rereading in fitful starts and stops — Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Kafka’s The Trial, John Wray’s Lowboy — and I was transported to some Germanic rehearsal space, or to a nineteenth-century opium haze, or to the house of detainment, or to the New York City subway, and — there is no way to gild these abstractions — it was a comfort, and I knew it was would be a comfort, because it is reliably the comfort when there isn’t another comfort. I take refuge in the trouble of others rendered in twenty-six characters arranged in meaningful orders and transformed by my synaptic storm into something that briefly becomes more real to me than the woman who delivers my mail, the first person I saw this morning after rising from the deep place into which I had dropped myself with aid of the books.
There is an asterisk in the accounting of every serious worry or grief I’ve borne subsequent to my friend’s death from leukemia. I can remember the book, and I can remember the bathroom or bedroom or Fazoli’s restaurant or cloth-upholstered bucket seat to which I withdrew in the middle of something for which I should have been more present. I will probably never be able to enjoy Harry Crews’s A Feast of Snakes again because it was in my pocket graveside three days after the suicide of my seventeen-year-old nephew. It’s sitting here beside me on my office desk. There is a face on the cover of indeterminate sex. The left side of the face is green, and the right side of the face is orange. It was overcast at the graveside, in Lexington, and before the end of the service it started to rain. Some people fled for their cars, and others stood in the rain, as though it meant something, but it meant nothing at all, except that two varieties of air and moisture met in some meteorologically describable way, and water fell from the sky. If we’d been on a different planet, it might have been mercury or methane that fell from the sky. Or maybe instead of falling, it would hover. There is something in my training that wants to strain for a metaphor and make some meaning and make you feel something, but there’s not a metaphor here or anyplace else in the world that is useful to describe the horror of that afternoon. Thinking about it, I can’t wait until lunchtime, so I can replace my darknesses with someone else’s for an hour or so, while I eat my roast beef and drink my Coke.
Life is all about moments and what we take from them. Looks as though you’ve taken a lot. Great post.
hope you find comfort and more, kyle. really nice work here.
These kinds of losses are like walking through fire. You’re burned, singed and stinging. It’s the only way to bare what you now know to be true. It’s agony. It gives honor to what you’ve experienced. You wouldn’t have it any other way.
It will pass, but never entirely. You’d not want that any other way, either. You’ll remember, and it will change you. You’ll always keep them close; sometimes closer than when they were here.
Love and Light on your journey. <3
Thank you for this. I’m happy you’re writing here.
thank you kyle.
[…] stuff from Kyle Minor over at HTMLGIANT: There is an asterisk in the accounting of every serious worry or grief I’ve borne subsequent to […]
This is a moving post, Kyle. Thanks for writing it.
Throughout my whole life, through death and tragedy and general crappiness, books have been a constant source of comfort for me. They even saved my life once and maybe twice. I don’t have to write, but if I couldn’t read I wouldn’t be here today.
“his lostness is really what saved me, I think, from a deep despair, and not just about the suicides and the deaths, but over the idea of death, and the world of atrocities, and a fundamental feeling of differentness or aloneness or separation from other people.”
this was a moving and insightful post, kyle. comfort, strong fort, the shelter we climb into, climbing into contemplation away from ourselves, even higher into our own heads when it’s too sad to stay in a body.
[…] Conversation with Andrew Ervin, author of Extraordinary Renditions Reading as a Comfort What Do You Mean When You Say “Brooklyn”? A Conversation on Literary Translation with […]
Thank you, Kyle. This is extraordinary.
Yes, you’ve made it plain, when there aren’t answers, when metaphors are air. I’ve known writers who were taken out by grief for years at a time, when what was once so important day after day became meaningless. Thanks for putting this out there.
I’ll echo someone else’s comment from earlier in the week: the sense I get from your posts is that you’re a fierce, dedicated reader, Kyle. It’s honestly heartening to know you’re out there. Great post.
[…] Reading as a Comfort | HTMLGIANT […]
Great stuff, Kyle. Very moving in its truth telling and insight.
I loved this post and love your writing. I’m going to look you up so I can read more, and more, and hopefully more…
Kyle, your article quite literally made my year.
Deeply moving, Kyle. I’m with you re: the comfort/power/sustenance we derive from book connection. I do often think, though, on how such lostness separates us, rather than brings us closer, to presence in the living breathing world in all its ugly-beauty. And if we’re intentionally less present, then are we intentionally less alive?
That coming to know lostness – without the succor of foundness or even of destination – can “save” one from despair is a meaning and function of tragedy.
There are other things – real and important – : hilarity. Joy is real.
But often it seems that, whether one is attentive to this perspective or not, there is only actually to choose between grief and nothing.
That coming to know lostness – without the succor of foundness or even of destination – can “save” one from despair is a meaning and function of tragedy.
There are other things – real and important – : hilarity. Joy is real.
But often it seems that, whether one is attentive to this perspective or not, there is only actually to choose between grief and nothing.
This was amazing, Kyle. You’re absolutely right–reading is an incredible comfort. Thank you for this.
This was excellent, something I know I’ll come back to and re-read. After my father died I read around 80 novels in five months.
This post was comfort for me, today, on a day when the sky is the white of bones and out the window the weather doesn’t have the decency to do just one thing, snow and rain at once, cold misery, and then, this. Thank you.
This post was comfort for me, today, on a day when the sky is the white of bones and out the window the weather doesn’t have the decency to do just one thing, snow and rain at once, cold misery, and then, this. Thank you.
this is the only reading i do cause my life fucking sucks, this post made me stop taking everything else seriously for a long time (like 5 or 6 minutes)
1999 my husband of 23 yrs,announced on our anniversary, he wanted a new life.Christmas day he told our 13 y/o daughter and left.June our home was destroyed by fire, ex had let our insurance lapse.In july our 21y/o son died in an auto accident headed to California to break into the music business.Reading saved my sanity & life.
To make a more or less pointless observation, people really seem to love Vonnegut on this site.
There is something in me which reads not for comfort, but understanding, sometimes finding the former in the latter, but mostly just understanding.
[…] 3) Casey Kasem might curse at me for following a funny bit with a sad one, but Reading as Comfort. […]
[…] Reading as a Comfort | HTMLGIANT I had read Faulkner and Hemingway in high school, and Hawthorne and George Eliot one novel each by all of them, but I wasn't ready to know how good they were, because I hadn't read enough yet. But something about Kurt Vonnegut . I can remember the book, and I can remember the bathroom or bedroom or Fazoli's restaurant or cloth-upholstered bucket seat to which I withdrew in the middle of something for which I should have been more present. I will probably never be able . […]
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I know what you mean about getting lost in books, but how do you not get lost in writing? Being able to channel everything through a pen or keyboard and running with it. Most of my work comes from when I’m overwhelmed, I get to write everything I can’t say and cover it under another character and pretend it’s not me. All the skeletons can be viewed and yet I’m protected because it isn’t me, at least not really. I tend to get lost more effectively in those few hours of flurried writing then I do in the time spent in another’s misery. Of course for me, the problems haunt me from the past, so writing is a way of dealing with them… sort of. Great post.
[…] HTML Giant, gift-to-our-species Kyle Minor (see “Reading as a Comfort“) writes about Joyelle McSweeney’s chapbook, Necropastoral (Spork Press, 2011), and […]
[…] HTML Giant, gift-to-our-species Kyle Minor (see “Reading as a Comfort“) writes about Joyelle McSweeney’s chapbook, Necropastoral (Spork Press, 2011), and […]
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