sullivanwords

When Memory Meets Imagination

Timothy Sullivan — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 02:25:02 +0000

    The excellent new film Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska in the title role, is one of more than a dozen cinematic versions of the classic novel by Charlotte Bronte. That’s a lot of visual interpretation, and the great Gothic romance has been the subject of much more literary criticism. But perhaps no treatment of the old story has shone as much light on its origins as has another novel, Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane Eyre.
     The joy of reading Becoming Jane Eyre runs much deeper than the simple game of discovering to what degree the novel’s events and characters are thinly disguised recreations from Charlotte’s brief life. Rather, Kohler’s genius lies in the illuminating way in which she imagines Charlotte using her considerable skills to make art out of her many disappointments. Tim O’Brien has written that stories come from the place where memory and imagination converge. Kohler vividly depicts Charlotte discovering that place, and in so doing she puts the creative process at the center of the action.
     Charlotte herself states the central theme of Kohler’s book, late in the story, when Jane Eyre has become an instant bestseller and its author the toast of London literary society. “People want to find out who she really is,” thinks Charlotte. “What they really want to know is whether she has written her own story into her novel; how much of it is true? How could she answer such a question? She doesn’t know the answer herself.”

At Robson Glacier

Timothy Sullivan — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:02:51 +0000

I was camping with a friend in the Canadian Rockies, back in 1995, beside Berg Lake, at the foot of Mount Robson. One day, we decided to hike from base camp up to the spot where Robson Glacier reaches it lowest point and melts into the snow field. As we walked up the valley toward the foot of the glacier, the rock walls on either side of us seemed to become more and more imposing, growing higher, looming bigger and bigger, the subtle color in the rock coming into sharper focus, the quiet becoming ever more quiet with every step we took. We could hear the hum of the glacier moving all the time, maybe we even felt the rumbling through the soles of our boots, and there was the constant, though intermittent, thunder of avalanches on the higher slopes of Mount Robson. It was a generally clear day, with blue sky and strong sun, although big fluffy white clouds were floating through the sky, but with enough space between them so as not to obscure the sunshine for more than several moments at a time.
We were probably within 500 yards of the glacier when I had to stop and sit down beside the trail. My friend kept on, his goal being to reach the top of the narrow valley and touch the glacier itself, as though it was a trophy to be collected upon completing the hike. I simply could not continue. I was in awe, in shock, actually. My senses, indeed, my soul, could not take in any more of such beauty. I felt that I might burst if I continued to collect any more of this wild landscape without taking the time to absorb it, to respect it, really. I sat there on the rock, shaking, nearly in tears, knowing that I was seeing god and understanding, not intellectually but viscerally, what wilderness is. I knew, not in a metaphoric way but with certainty, that this place was real, and that the city, and the life, I'd left behind were not.

Backstage at Heathrow

Timothy Sullivan — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 22:00:26 +0000

   When the Blizzard of 2010 shut down London’s Heathrow Airport during the Christmas rush, the resulting criticism caused the executive who runs the place to forego his annual bonus. But that storm has passed, and for frequent fliers who want to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes at Terminal 5, one of Europe’s biggest passenger terminals, a recent paperback from Vintage Books is just the ticket.
   The arrival any book by Alain de Botton is welcome in my library, so I was pleased to find A Week at the Airport shortly after the holidays. De Botton, the bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Architecture of Happiness, was an inspired choice as Heathrow's writer-in-residence. He’s an elegant stylist and an original thinker, with a particular knack for interpreting the mundane predicaments of modern life in ways that illuminate their underlying meanings and their importance to the individual. One suspects, in fact, that he’s describing his own works when he tells a bookseller at the airport, “I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”
   A Week at the Airport is illustrated with a series of subtle, yet revealing, color photos by Richard Baker. Together, the writer and photographer expose both the public face of T5, which cost $7.6 billion and took nearly six years to build, and it’s backstage geography.

Six Decades after Fahrenheit 451

Timothy Sullivan — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 20:37:35 +0000

   Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 nearly sixty years ago, but it is as eerily relevant today as the day it came off the press. The dystopian America of Bradbury’s breakthrough novel is a place where floor-to-ceiling televisions blare fake reality shows, where the minimum speed limit is 55 mph, and teenagers get their kicks killing each other. This America is a police state that is forever at war or on the brink of war, including nuclear conflict. It is also, famously, a society in which books have been outlawed, and the job of firemen is to burn not only books but also the houses that conceal them and, sometimes, the inhabitants.
   The plot is well known: a fireman, Guy Montag, is shocked by his wife’s attempted suicide into wondering why a society so preoccupied with instant gratification produces so many murderous, suicidal, and lonely people. He begins to read the few books he has been secretly collecting, stolen from the scenes of the fires he’s started during his ten-year career. He finds an old professor of English, who tries to explain why books are both valuable and dangerous. “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget,” says Professor Faber. “There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
   In a wonderful bit of thematic juxtaposition, the professor tells Montag the same thing his commanding officer, Captain Beatty, tells him: the effort to ban the printed word didn’t originate with a repressive government; it was bottom up, stemming from the public’s desire to ignore difficult information. “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord,” explains Faber. “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And then the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters.”

Tempted To Disappear

Timothy Sullivan — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 14:45:38 +0000

   Have you ever wanted to disappear; to just walk away from work, family and financial obligations, without a word to anybody, without leaving a hint as to where you might be going? Disappearance, or escape, is a common enough fantasy, perhaps tempting middle-aged men more frequently than anybody else. Such a man succumbs to that temptation in Monsieur Monde Vanishes, a short novel by the prolific Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903-1989).
   Monde’s escape is a simple matter of boarding a train, leaving behind his orderly life in Paris, to push through a long, dark night to the seedy, dangerous port of Marseilles. I’ve long been a fan of Simenon’s sparse but vivid prose. He’s known for his ability to set a scene, to create an atmosphere, and to draw credible characters with a minimum of exposition. His descriptive skills are impressive. “The rhythm of the train took possession of him. It was like some music with a regular beat, the words for which were provided by scraps of phrases, memories, the passing images that met his eyes, a lonely cottage in the countryside where a stout woman was washing clothes, a stationmaster waving his red flag in a toy station, people passing ceaselessly by him on their way to the toilet, a child crying in the next compartment and one of the soldiers asleep in his corner, his mouth wide open in a ray of sunlight.”
   Simenon is best known for the 70-some-odd mysteries in the Inspector Maigret series, which are entertaining, certainly, but also formulaic. More significant are his noir crime stories, which he called “hard novels.” Monsieur Monde is one of these, full of foreboding, set in a nocturnal Riviera that tourists only see in nightmares, peopled with whores, thieves and junkies. Monde learns to navigate this world, in which nobody can be trusted, as adeptly as he navigated the Paris of a wealthy executive, husband and father. He becomes first the protector and then the companion of Julie, a loose woman with a shady past, and he settles comfortably into a job as assistant manager of the seedy nightclub where she works as a hostess.

Shot in the Dark

Timothy Sullivan — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 02:57:59 +0000

In the north of Scotland in June there is enough light to play golf until 10:30 at night. One evening at about that time I was walking off the course at Forres Golf Club with two good friends, looking for the path through the woods that would take us back to Newbold House, when I noticed a ball on the edge of the fairway. “Wait a minute,” I said, “let me hit this ball.” I teed it up and pulled out my driver. Now driving, as my friends know well, is my nemesis, the glaring weakness in an otherwise respectable game. But I took a free swing at the ball and it shot off the clubface like a rocket, rising gradually into the gathering darkness, holding an impossibly straight line before disappearing over a hilltop about 230 yards away. Here I had been playing with Vin and Jerry every night for a week and they’d never seen me hit a driver remotely as well. I heard one of them say “Wow,” and I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of the driver finally working now that our week was over.
“Let me hit one,” said Vin, as he bent to put a tee into the turf. Vin’s a good player, so it was no surprise to see him hit a good shot, but it stunned the three of us to watch his ball follow precisely the same flight pattern as mine. Now Jerry had to hit a ball, not due to any macho, competitive impulse, but to satisfy our shared curiosity, unspoken yet unmistakable, as to where his ball might go. Moments later, as we watched Jerry’s ball somehow mimic the exact direction, trajectory and distance of those Vin and I had hit, the three of us exchanged high-fives and shared a deep laugh. It was a moment of pure joy, of reveling in the beauty of a perfect golf shot executed in triplicate, and of wonder at the mystery of coincidence.
Mystery is, in fact, what brought the three of us to Scotland, and it’s what keeps bringing me back. I have known players who think the magic of golf is external, to be found hidden somewhere on the links, like a leprechaun under a rock. But I learned at Fairway To Heaven that the magic is internal. A player with an open mind and an open heart will gain innumerable insights into his true nature through golf, and in that way he is given the opportunity to change. That is the magic, the mystery, and the beauty of the game.

In the Difficulty, there Is Beauty

Timothy Sullivan — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:46:50 +0000

   No matter how much I improve, golf just doesn’t get any easier. The 2009 season was one of my best, as I finished the year with a handicap index of 10. But getting there was hell.
   I battled the yips for the first three months of the season. The yips is a condition in which you find yourself unable to make short putts; very short putts. It’s a dreadful spiral that starts with a fear of missing putts, causing you to putt defensively until soon, without knowing it, you’re turning your head at impact to watch the ball roll toward the hole. This head movement inevitably causes the ball to veer off your intended line and miss the target, thus compounding the original problem.
   The good news is that when the Club Championship came around in August, I had overcome the yips and was playing some of the best golf of my life. The details of how I did it don't really matter. Suffice it to say I had accepted the fact that I was going to miss a lot of putts as I worked through the yips, yet I resolved to putt with confidence anyway. Confidence is such a critical element of good putting that even false confidence can be useful.

Fear of Falling

Timothy Sullivan — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:11:04 +0000

    I was about halfway up the cliff when the fear stopped me cold. I had been doing just fine until I reached this overhang. My right foot was on the edge of a wide crack in the rock; my left foot was lower, resting on a tiny nodule of stone; my hands were flat against the granite wall. Up to this point handholds and footholds had been plentiful and I’d been climbing fairly quickly, thinking fast, letting momentum take me from one move into the next. But now, about 50 feet up from the base of the cliff, I was stuck. I stood there looking for my next move and saw nothing within reach.
     Craig, the Outward Bound instructor down there on the ground, couldn’t know precisely what I was seeing; he couldn’t know on which small bumps in the rock my eyes fell, but he was familiar with the shelf that was blocking my path and the routes across it. He also knew something I didn’t: he knew the nature of the decision I was going to have to make to finish this climb.
     The shelf was several feet above my head; it stuck out of the rock like a skewed mantelpiece, wider on the left, protruding further from the cliff-face on that side. I’d have to cover less distance to get over the top if I chose the right side, but I saw nothing above the shelf except smooth rock, nothing to grab hold of, nothing to keep me up there. I might be able to push myself over the right side from where I stood, but then I’d be scratching frantically for handholds before falling backward into space. (I could see myself falling when I looked up there.) If I went to the left, the initial effort would have to be greater, but I could see potential handholds above the shelf on that side; if I could get onto the top of it, I might be able to stand there for a moment and grab something.

The Ghost at the Foot of the Bed

Timothy Sullivan — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:00:23 +0000

So there really are ghosts, spirits of the dead I mean, that haunt the living, forcing us to live with an unbearable memory, or reminding us that our lives once intersected with those of others, some of whom won’t be left entirely behind. I never understood the nature of ghosts, nor was I even convinced of their existence, until I heard the story, long after my father’s death, of the ghost that haunted him as he lay dying in a hospital bed in suburban New York.
   One morning his younger brother came to visit and was surprised to find Dad agitated and confused. “What’s wrong?” asked my uncle.
   “He was just standing there,” said Dad, “at the foot of the bed, in his uniform. The German. He was just standing there looking at me. He was right there, in his uniform. He was there until you walked in, Willy, staring at me.”
   It took my uncle a little while to calm Dad down and get him to tell the whole story. The young German my father saw that morning was a soldier he had killed in 1944. Dad was a first sergeant with the Ninth U.S. Infantry Division and fought in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. In addition to a Bronze Star with two oak leaf clusters and a Purple Heart, he earned eight battle stars. His unit, the 47th Regiment, landed at Utah Beach on June 10, four days after D-Day. He apparently ran into this particular German shortly thereafter.

Saramago's Curious Style

Timothy Sullivan — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:49:45 +0000

    While on Christmas vacation I read The Stone Raft, my first encounter with the unusual style of Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. The stone raft of the title refers to the Iberian peninsula, which is set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean after the Pyrenees mountains split down the middle. The novel focuses on a journey across Iberia taken by five people, all of whom have had experiences that, like the sudden crackup of the Pyrenees, defy the laws of the physical universe.
    More intriguing to me, however, than this fantastic plot is the style in which Saramago writes. He pays little heed to the conventions of usage and punctuation, and the run-on sentence structure he employs takes some getting used to. But his ideas, imagery, and affection for his characters were all very attractive to me. Here's just one example of his style, a sentence I particularly like ("Deux Chevaux" is the Citroen car in which the characters travel):
   "And what I'd like to know is what moves inside us and where does it go, no, I'm not talking about worms, microbes, bacteria, those living creatures that inhabit us, I'm referring to something else, something that moves and perhaps moves us at the same time, just as constellation, galaxy, solar system, sun, earth, sea, peninsula, and Deux Chevaux move and move us with them, what is the name, finally, of the thing that moves all the rest, from one end of the chain to the other, or perhaps there is no chain and the universe is a ring at once so thin that apparently only we and what is inside us fit into it and so thick that it can accommodate the maximum dimension of the universe, which is the ring itself, what is the name of what follows after us."
   Wow.