In this installment, I'm going to depart from my usual thematic essays to write a little about my experience so far at the American Academy in Rome, where I've been for the past three weeks.
Here's the basic set-up. For one year, I'm one of 30 fellows who've been awarded a place to live as well as an office in which to work, two meals a day six days a week, and money for basic expenses. We live together in a historic villa where there's a constant round of lectures and organized trips, as well as support for the research most of us are engaged in. The other fellows come from a range of backgrounds. They're art historians, architects, museum directors, landscape architects, painters, and more. Everyone is brilliant, which is not an overstatement, everyone pursuing provocative individual projects involving questions like the role of the family in the development of organized religion or the history of madness.
And during the course of this year I'm expected to... basically, to do whatever I want. A free year in which to read, write, wander, anything, in a beautiful romantic historic city--you're probably hating me by now.
So far it's too soon for me to speak conclusively about my impressions of Rome, but what the hell, I'll give a few anyway. I've been most surprised by this city's small town feel. It's more like a collection of small villages shoelaced together than a single city with a pulsing, unifying center. Also, there's a strange way in which it feels strangely like a backwater town. Milan is the capital of business, Turin and Naples centers of contemporary culture, Florence, the capital of the Renaissance, Venice the capital of romance. Rome is a bit like Washington DC, the political and symbolic historic capital of the country, a beautiful city constantly inundated with tourists, and yet it's strangely calm and quiet.
People fall in love with this city, its slow pace, its historic alleys, its comfortable cosmpolitan atmosphere. I haven't fallen in love quite yet, but I think that's primarily because I've found that the English language, my primary tool for ordering the world, doesn't work here. The buzz of news, gossip, print, advertising, and TV I've become so used to surrounding myself with in New York is suddenly gone. And in its place is a babel of sounds that occasionally and entirely without warning come jarringly in and our of focus. "hand" "table" "Don't be ridiculous!" "Let's go inside this way" "By yourself." Words and phrases popping in and out, but to connect them, nothing. Sometimes I'll get a run of sentences that seem tantalizingly within my grasp, and then an unknown word creeps in and I'm lost again.
This is good for me. But not easy.
The other thing I find most difficult here is feeling at peace with my own solitude. Rome is not a city of solo acts. Everyone I pass seems to be walking with someone else, especially the tourists, but also the locals walking hand in hand with their lovers or children or even their friends. It's become shocking to me to see someone walking by him or herself. But then I catch a glimpse of myself, alone, in a shop window, and that lone wolf is me. And it makes me wonder, so who am I?
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Monday, September 12, 2005
No End to Howards End
It's almost a week that I've been in Rome, and I'll have more to say about the experience once I've been here longer. One of the wonderful gifts about being here is having the time to reread books I love, which is probably the most important thing for a writer to do.
Having just finished Howards End by E. M. Forster for possibly the fifth time, I'm firmly convinced that it's possible to learn everything you need to know about writing from studying this magnificent work of art. It would also serve as an excellent guide on how to think, and more than passable as a blueprint for how to live.
At first glance, the plot seems to amble aimiably, almost carelessly from minor crisis to minor crisis, introducing us to charming characters who get into sticky, though hardly life-threatening, situations. What a miracle it is when the pieces "connect"--the book's epigraph is "Only Connect..."--so beautifully in the powerful finale, like a sleeping giant who's been hidden under a blanket of earth, grass, trees, and rocks until he wakes with a jolt, and we realize that nothing short of the meaning of life is at stake here.
An oversimplified way to present this book is as a struggle of competing values between two English families who meet by chance while on vacation, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegals. Yet Forster's presentation of this schematic conflict is much more highly-nuanced, and with Forster (much like it is with John Kerry) nuance is all.
Yes, the Schlegals, particularly the heroically sensible Margaret and her passionate but shortsighted younger sister Margaret, represent sensitivity, art, culture, liberal humanitarian values. Yet among their camp is the utterly banal Mrs. Munt, who appreciates culture in the most mundane way possible. On the opposite extreme is the youngest Schlegal, Tibby, a careless aesthete (most likely spoiled by his older sisters) whose selfish devotion to the realm of ideas blinds him to the troubles of the living. Even when his own sister cries desperately to him for help, Tibby's more interested in leafing through a text on learning Chinese or checking on his dessert so that it doesn't get cold.
The Wilcoxes seem a much more disciplined, uniform camp at first, embodying the coldness of order, efficiency, what Forster lumps together under a category called "the seen." Yet they too have their degrees. The eldest son Charles is the worst of their lot. Forster tries valiantly but ultimately cannot bring himself to conceal his dislike for Charles's stubborn, cold heart, even in the hour of Charles's mother's death. Next is Charles's younger brother Paul, who's mostly a plot device to develop other characters, and remains shunted offstage until the end of the book so he can appear as a stand-in for Charles when he can no longer be physically present. However, then there's Evie, the only daughter, seems like a brat, good at sports, breeding puppies, and spending her father's money on a needlessly elaborate wedding, but she shows surprising tenderness for her father at the end of the book. She is actually capable of sentiment. Henry, the Wilcox patriarch, is the best of them. Somehow (Forster never explains satisfactorily how), Margaret sees his inner potential for feeling, which comes through at the book's end, though with one glaring deficiency. (Mrs. Wilcox, Henry's first wife, is actually a Howard, and of an entirely different order.)
The question this book poses, still useful today, is which is better, to be sensitive or to make the trains run on time? Supreme in his feeling for nuance, Forster answers, you need some of both, but if you're going to err, choose sensitivity. And yet, as Forster shows, even then the balance is imperfect. We're stuck with events that are out of our control, illness, war, forces of nature, and petty cruelty. There is no answer to the dilemma of being alive.
We can find some hope, however, here and there in various corners of this tragic novel, which feels oddly sunny despite a sour note at the end. I'm especially moved when in Chapter 4, Charles Wilcox tries to explain to Helen Schlegal that it's no use being polite to servants, since they don't understand it. Forster explains to us that the "Schlegal retort" to such cant is: "If they don't understand it, I do." That strikes me as exactly on target. The good we try to do may not always be appreciated by others, but then we don't try to live in the right way for other people. We do it for ourselves.
Having just finished Howards End by E. M. Forster for possibly the fifth time, I'm firmly convinced that it's possible to learn everything you need to know about writing from studying this magnificent work of art. It would also serve as an excellent guide on how to think, and more than passable as a blueprint for how to live.
At first glance, the plot seems to amble aimiably, almost carelessly from minor crisis to minor crisis, introducing us to charming characters who get into sticky, though hardly life-threatening, situations. What a miracle it is when the pieces "connect"--the book's epigraph is "Only Connect..."--so beautifully in the powerful finale, like a sleeping giant who's been hidden under a blanket of earth, grass, trees, and rocks until he wakes with a jolt, and we realize that nothing short of the meaning of life is at stake here.
An oversimplified way to present this book is as a struggle of competing values between two English families who meet by chance while on vacation, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegals. Yet Forster's presentation of this schematic conflict is much more highly-nuanced, and with Forster (much like it is with John Kerry) nuance is all.
Yes, the Schlegals, particularly the heroically sensible Margaret and her passionate but shortsighted younger sister Margaret, represent sensitivity, art, culture, liberal humanitarian values. Yet among their camp is the utterly banal Mrs. Munt, who appreciates culture in the most mundane way possible. On the opposite extreme is the youngest Schlegal, Tibby, a careless aesthete (most likely spoiled by his older sisters) whose selfish devotion to the realm of ideas blinds him to the troubles of the living. Even when his own sister cries desperately to him for help, Tibby's more interested in leafing through a text on learning Chinese or checking on his dessert so that it doesn't get cold.
The Wilcoxes seem a much more disciplined, uniform camp at first, embodying the coldness of order, efficiency, what Forster lumps together under a category called "the seen." Yet they too have their degrees. The eldest son Charles is the worst of their lot. Forster tries valiantly but ultimately cannot bring himself to conceal his dislike for Charles's stubborn, cold heart, even in the hour of Charles's mother's death. Next is Charles's younger brother Paul, who's mostly a plot device to develop other characters, and remains shunted offstage until the end of the book so he can appear as a stand-in for Charles when he can no longer be physically present. However, then there's Evie, the only daughter, seems like a brat, good at sports, breeding puppies, and spending her father's money on a needlessly elaborate wedding, but she shows surprising tenderness for her father at the end of the book. She is actually capable of sentiment. Henry, the Wilcox patriarch, is the best of them. Somehow (Forster never explains satisfactorily how), Margaret sees his inner potential for feeling, which comes through at the book's end, though with one glaring deficiency. (Mrs. Wilcox, Henry's first wife, is actually a Howard, and of an entirely different order.)
The question this book poses, still useful today, is which is better, to be sensitive or to make the trains run on time? Supreme in his feeling for nuance, Forster answers, you need some of both, but if you're going to err, choose sensitivity. And yet, as Forster shows, even then the balance is imperfect. We're stuck with events that are out of our control, illness, war, forces of nature, and petty cruelty. There is no answer to the dilemma of being alive.
We can find some hope, however, here and there in various corners of this tragic novel, which feels oddly sunny despite a sour note at the end. I'm especially moved when in Chapter 4, Charles Wilcox tries to explain to Helen Schlegal that it's no use being polite to servants, since they don't understand it. Forster explains to us that the "Schlegal retort" to such cant is: "If they don't understand it, I do." That strikes me as exactly on target. The good we try to do may not always be appreciated by others, but then we don't try to live in the right way for other people. We do it for ourselves.
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