Can it be? Eight
years writing this blog. That’s the
amount of time I spent in grammar school. Those eight years in PS 90 seem to be
light years in the distant past, but at the time they were an eternity. And four years in high school were equally
drawn out, anticipating adulthood, the point at which I could leave the turmoil
of my parent’s home. Time accelerated in
college, came on full speed during my career and raising a family, and now it’s
a year in a blink.
I think I’ve been true to my “mission statement” in this
space -- essentially an eclectic, kaleidoscopic diary. There have been 480
entries thus far, enough to fill at least five printed volumes. Content has morphed into more about theatre,
literature and still some politics and economics, but less about family
history. I’ve pretty much covered that,
and the older I get the more I’d like to move on.
Nonetheless, I still write about things which are fairly
personal, always hesitating about what I “put out there.” As this blog has evolved, so has the digital
world, data mining for all sorts of nefarious reasons. And the digital world has moved way beyond
blogs to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, social networks where a
momentary impulse can be just thrown out as a developed thought. Not here.
Traffic building has not been my
intent. According to Google, in eight
years there have been 86,021 page views. Some web sites do that in a minute.
Most land here via searches (not for me, but topics I write about) and
frequently those are image searches as I’ve incorporated countless photographs
in this space
The most viewed entry is one in February 2011 about the Maiden Voyage of Oceania’s ship ‘Marina.’ Not far behind in fifth place is the one I wrote on my open heart surgery, only two months later
Without going into details of the latter, it is truly a
twist of fate that I made it through that voyage without ending up in the
freezer with the flowers (a favorite repository for those who die on
cruises). Of course I didn’t realize
that I was so vulnerable at the time (although we’re all vulnerable all the
time). I suppose that is another reason I write this blog: it is a record and it allows me to reflect on
my life and matters of living, to have a documented trail. I go to it when memory fails.
This is a natural segue into a book I recently read, Light Years by James Slater. We’re
talking about elegant masterpiece writing here -- an author I should have read long
ago, known as a “writer’s writer” by many, a prose stylist. Perhaps I failed to come to his writing as his
earlier work was based on his years as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. His novel The
Hunters was made into a movie starring one of my favorite film noir actors,
Robert Mitchum. Little did I know when I
saw the film, it was based on James Salter’s novel of the same title. It is so
incongruous that the same person wrote both novels.
Salter died only recently, having just turned 90, in Sag
Harbor, where I spent part of the summers of my childhood. The New Yorker published an elegant eulogistic essay on his passing.
So I am very late to discovering Salter, although his Light Years is closely related to other
authors I have admired, ones who have written
about marital implosion (the subject of Salter’s great work), Updike,
Cheever, Yates, Ford, to name but a few.
Lapidary, ethereal, poetic prose fills the pages of Light Years. The plot almost exists out of time and place
– although it’s set in the 70s, mostly in the northern suburbs of New York. The dissolution of a marriage is presented as
a case of everyday entropy, but in stunning language and descriptions. Think Hemingway’s short, rhythmic sentences
and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lyricism. . It’s unlike anything else I’ve read.
It is the story of Viri Berland, a moderately successful
architect, and Nedra his beautiful free-spirited wife. Mind you, this was written in the nascent
days of feminism. Much of the novel is
viewed from Nedra’s viewpoint. They live
in the Hudson Valley, with their children.
Days pass, light into darkness, darkness becomes new days, years. Light years.
(The light imagery is omnipresent.) They have a social life, parties,
each have dalliances, quiet ones, not the kind which lead to nasty marital
confrontations. Time passes until they find they are empty nesters and now
what?
Nedra is the one who makes the break but it is Viri, confounded
by the change in his life who moves on to another marriage, one he
regrets. To indulge in more detail about
the plot, though, is senseless as it is the feeling that one derives from
reading Light Years which is the
point. We’re all just brief flickers of
light in the annals of time, eternity of nothingness before we are born and a
similar eternity when we are gone. We believe
in endless tomorrows while living out our younger years, the sum of countless
moments, most not remembered later, but near the end, the hour-glass so one
sided, we look back and wonder where it all went.
Salter tells his story in lush language. Of those parties in their early years of
marriage: “Country dinners, the table
dense with glasses, flowers, all the food one can eat, dinners ending in
tobacco smoke, a feeling of ease.
Leisurely dinners. The
conversation never lapses. Their life is special, devout, they prefer to spend
time with their children, they have only a few friends.”
Or, when Nedra goes to the city to shop: “Life
is weather, Life is meals. Lunches on a
blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled.
The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow
apples, wood-handled knives. It is trips
to the city, daily trips. She is like a
farm woman who goes to the market. She
drove to the city for everything, its streets excited her, winter streets
leaking smoke. She drove along Broadway.
The sidewalks were white with stains.
There were only certain places where she bought food; she was loyal to
them, demanding. She parked her car
wherever it was convenient, in bus stops, prohibited zones; the urgency of her
errands protected her.”
In his prime, Viri thinks about his career as an
architect: “I must make one building, even if it’s small, that everyone will
notice. Then a bigger one. I must ascend by steps….He wanted one thing,
the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family,
what else is there to long for, to hope?
Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was
coming. He had nothing. He had only the carefully laid out luggage of
bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate
hands. And the knowledge; yes, he had
knowledge….But knowledge does not protect one.
Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms,
to wait outside. Passion, energy, likes:
these are what life admires. Still,
anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flower to the sun….There is
no complete life. There are only
fragments. We are born to have nothing,
to have it pour through our hands. And
yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams …one must be
unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be
resolute, blind. For whatever we do,
even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the
paradox. So that life is a matter of
choices, each on final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the
sea.”
Viri’s and Nedra’s time with their children is precious: “Children
are our crop, our fields, our earth.
They are the birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which
may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step
further, they will see the summit. We
believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not
see. Children must live, must
triumph. Children must die; that is an
idea we cannot accept….There is no happiness like this happiness: quiet
mornings, light from the river, the weekend ahead. They lived a Russian life, a rich life,
interwoven, in which the misfortune of one, a failure, illness, would stagger
them all. It was like a garment, this
life. Its beauty was outside, its warmth
within.”
After one of their parties, later in their marriage,
Salter writes: “Nights of marriage, conjugal nights, the house still at last, the
cushions indented where people had sat, the ashes warm. Nights that ended at two o’clock, the snow
falling, the last guest gone. The dinner
plates were left unwashed, the bed icy cold…They lay in the dark like two
victims. They had nothing to give to one
another, they were bound by a pure, inexplicable love….He was asleep, she could
tell without looking. He slept like a
child, soundlessly, deep. His thinning
hair was disheveled; his hand lay extended and soft. If they had been another couple she would
have been attracted to them; she would have loved them, even – they were so
miserable.”
When Nedra begins to hint at leaving, Viri is stunned,
especially now that he was approaching late middle age: “He was
reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly
more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof
and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain. The world was opening itself, as if to allow,
now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been
withheld would finally be given.”
And when she is gone, he is left in the house: “Dead flies on the sills of sunny windows,
weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty.
The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid
the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist’s wax, the
organ has been gutted. Viri did not have
the spirit to do anything about it. He
lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older.”
“...alone in this
city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of
days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like
a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he
thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important,
and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they
fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there
is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe.
Who we know does not exist.”
As one might imagine from the last quote alone, the novel
comes to a profoundly sad ending, disturbing in so many ways. And I’ll let it go at that.
