This is a two-part question, first "deep" then shallow. Does anyone know anything about Lawrence Durrell? I'm asking because I have this quotation from him on my little bulletin board, and I've been thinking about it lately. I can't decide if it's really inspiring or sort of obnoxious in a self-help kind of way. Here it is:
"Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough."
It's from Durrell's book Justine, which is part of a four-book series called The Alexandria Quartet. I have never read these books. Maybe a character who's a real jerk says this statement, or maybe it's meant sarcastically. I know it as the epigraph from one of my favorite collections of poems: Order, or Disorder by Amy Newman.
I like the quotation, I think, because it is something I want very much to believe. I dislike it a little because it's so instructional: be more loving! You are not patient enough! These are concerns I have already, so I don't need Mr. Durrell to let me know how my lack of patience means not only that I'll never be a good kindergarten teacher, but also that I'll never surprise the order of experience.
If you've read Durrell, should I tackle this four-book series? Is he worth it? And what do you think about this order & coherence idea? Isn't it what really good writing does--brings a little order to the chaos?
The shallow: does anyone tape The West Wing? Because I really want to watch last week's episode where Josh and Donna FINALLY made out.
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7 comments:
for now, i will address only the "shallow" aspect of your question because, as is well-documented on the blog and elsewhere, i love shallow. i missed the big kiss as well, but you can see it
here
Starrykick, we read Prospero's Cell (Durrell's memoir of his years on the island of Corfu) in N.D.'s Travel Writing class, and I and one other person LOVED it -- everyone else did not (not that they hated it, but they did not have the drunken awe for it that we did). The other person went on to read The Alexandria Quartet and loved that too, but I have not, because I can't imagine committing myself to FOUR books -- what, me, read? I can't even finish one book, let alone four, but I did think that Durrell's style in Prospero's Cell was lovely, and according to N.D. there was a time when anyone who really read read him (though of course he loved to say this, in his plummiest, most fedora-ed voice, about anyone most people in our class had not read).
(O happy hepatitis! I've never known sickness--or sorrow, or disaster, for that matter--not to unfold, eventually, like a flower or a good memo. We're required only to keep looking. Seymour once said, on the air, when he was eleven, that the thing he loved best in the Bible was the word WATCH!)
"That was the worst. What happened was, I got the idea in my head--and I could not get it out--that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean, treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping--and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge--when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway--is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly." Nervously, and without any real need whatsoever, Franny pushed back her hair with one hand. "I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while--just once in a while--there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word 'wisdom' mentioned!"
That first one was from Seymour, the second from Zooey. Both by Salinger. And I have to say, both saved me from myself, or from life, or from two different versions of myself in life.
Short point? Goddam, what is literature if not instructional? I don't know about you guys, but I did not come into this world a fully formed mammal, a wise man who happened to be crawling on all fours for the moment; my idiotic, ga-ga-ing, pot-smoking, mother-disdaining ass needed instruction, and more often than not that instruction came from literature, from real authors--living or dead--who wrote sentences and paragaphs that resonated, for godsake, shit that pointed in The Right Direction.
Fucking Lawrence Durrell, keep it coming.
JD Salinger, you too (even though you've been clearly crazy for three decades now).
Because--and if you thought my first paragraph was insufferable then you better not even glance at this one--what's the point of reading or writing if we don't have Things to Learn and Things to Tell? I became who I am strictly through Virginia Woolf, Kurt Vonnegut, JD Salinger and Dostoyevsky, and I sanded down all my points with Denis Johnson, Thomas Pynchon, and TS Eliot. I'm not afraid to admit this. And I want more.
Please, writers of every ilk, tell me what you think of life. If I think you're full of shit I'll tell you plainly. If I think you're right I'll sing your beautiful succulent words to the heavens. All I ask is that you tell me.
Please, please.
Author's Note:
'No recollection what--so--ever of that penultimate paragraph.
Barkeep! One more round!'
well, if anyone's still interested in Durrell, there's some cool stuff about him on the Paris Review web site which has a sort of amazing/intimidating feature called "The DNA of Literature". I mean, like, wow. I have a lot of reading to do. maybe I'll start with Durrell. I'll keep you posted.
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