January 2013

Elizabeth Bachner

features

The End of the Affair: Reading “Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life”

“I'm going back to New York/ I won’t be back to stay. /If you see my old friends/Won't you tell them I'm still away.” I have a recurring feeling, not a feeling but an image, of a small, warmly-lit bakery on a winter street. The white holiday lights outside glitter. All of the people inside are beautiful, rosy, and happy. Everyone is talking and laughing. There are pink-iced cakes fresh from the oven, and for some reason I’m not allowed in. I have my nose pressed up against the window, I’m standing out in the snow, there’s nothing so horrible about my life outside the bakery. I have twelve dollars, I have arms and legs and a winter coat, I’m not un-beautiful or un-rosy, why don’t I just move on to a different bakery?

I have a memory, not just an image but a real memory, of sitting inside a warm bakery at night. I can’t remember whether I was in Budapest or Paris. There was a man standing outside, rich-looking, handsome, fortyish, sober. He was wearing a good trench coat. He was standing by a garbage can, and suddenly he started sobbing. Big heaving sobs. His legs buckled. I didn’t know whether to go outside and try to comfort him, or whether that would be worse, a violation of his privacy. Weirdly, I can’t remember what I did. It’s a faded memory, from years ago, I haven’t been to Paris or to Budapest in years.

I’m in New York, back from a trip to far away. It’s nine in the morning. I’m listening to the song Young Blood Blues. “I was crying for you/ Wherever you may be/ I was crying for you/ Because you once were me.” I don’t want to be back here. I don’t want to not be back here. I’ve been doing New York things that you can’t do in Kathmandu -- buying lingerie marked 90% off at sample sales, having double shots of open-bar bourbon at parties filled with now-geriatric B-list celebrities, brushing my teeth with tap water. At the library, I get piles of books that I’ve put on hold -- Lonely Planet India, The Best American Travel Writing 2012, Discover Australia. I want to read Graham Greene books but somehow I didn’t order any Graham Greene books, somehow I can’t find any Graham Greene books in the stacks or on my shelves at home. I read Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. It’s good but then it’s over.

I’m always more excited to choose my piles of library books than to actually read them. I like planning things. I like planning trips, but then when I actually leave I don’t do anything I planned, at all. Lonely Planet India is huge and daunting. I think about an American man I met in Boudhnath who told me that he would rather have both of his kidneys removed than live in New York City -- I said, “Really, both?” But he’s the kind of man who welds and hunts and builds houses and flies planes, he’s fought in wars, he meant it about the kidneys. I e-mail him a photo of strawberries that cost $12.99 and ask him how things are in India. He writes, “India is, well, India.”

I start reading Adam Phillips's Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. “[Literature] is escapist,” he writes, “whatever else it is, in its incessant descriptions of people trying to release themselves from something or other. It is not just, as Sartre said… that ‘genius’ is the word we use for people who get themselves out of impossible situations; but that literary geniuses, as well as people not so talented, write about people getting themselves out of impossible situations. If all novels, as Tony Tanner once suggested, are about adultery, then they are all about people getting out of something that has become unbearable... The triangle of main characters in The End of the Affair are all saying, ‘get me out of here,’ and ‘here’ is their ineluctable human nature.” I haven’t read The End of the Affair in years, I want to read it again right now, why don’t I have it? I remember its first line: “A story has no beginning or end.”

I’m escapist, whatever else I am, but I’m not bad at getting myself out of things. I just can’t seem to get myself into something -- the book and the trip and the bed and the life that I want. Adam Phillips writes about that, too. About not getting it -- all the ways we stay clueless, frustrated, deprived, outside the window. “It can be humiliating not to get it,” he writes, “indeed, I want to suggest that humiliation is always a form of not getting it, and that humiliation sheds a unique and horrifying light on what not getting it might be about.”

I walk past a restaurant with my friend. It’s twilight or maybe nighttime, and the sidewalk is decorated with arches of white Christmas lights. They’re so beautiful, it makes the restaurant seem like it would be magic -- like it would be a portal to another time and place, a time and place where everything is inexpensive and charming and good, where there’s a little jazz band and the wine is unlabeled and you don’t have to order anything, they just bring it all to the table -- piles of cheeses and olives, the delicious chilled wine. My friend takes two pictures of the lit-up sidewalk, but he doesn’t go into the restaurant with me. Later I look up the menu. It’s true there are olives, wines, cheeses. It’s in the West Village, it’s probably filled with people who go out to restaurants in the West Village. I’ll probably never go there. It probably isn’t magic, at all.

“We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be,” writes Phillips. “It is less obvious though what these compelling fantasy lives -- lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction -- are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not -- or not necessarily -- alternatives to, or refuges from, these real lives but an essential part of them… There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unlived life. (Each member of a couple, for example, is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with their partner’s unlived lives, their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves.) So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.”

I open Lonely Planet India again. There’s an inset describing something called the Pin-Parvati valley trek, a “strenuous but rewarding” six to nine day trek that crosses a snowbound pass and ends in the Pin Valley in Spiti. I’ve never heard of the Pin Valley or Spiti -- I don’t know where in India these places might be. I don’t recognize the other place names on the page -- Kasol, Manikaran. This sounds promising. But then I see the other inset, headed, “Warning: Deadly Vacations.” Apparently tourists who go to the Kullu or Parvati valleys are always disappearing. Some of them get all tangled up in the local drug trade and make the wrong people angry. Others just get lost or fatally injured in the rugged, confusing mountain terrain. You have to go with a guide, says Lonely Planet. But I like to go without a guide. According to some sources, tomorrow is the end of the world. And then all these sources talk about how of course it isn’t really the end of the world, how it’s all metaphor and energy-waves, how things will “shift,” but we’ll still all be here anyway. Walking down the street and buying unaffordable fruits, starving and stealing and crying. I start thinking, what if the world really ends tomorrow? And then this would be the last day of my life, of any of my lives, of the lives that never happen and the lives that keep happening.

I’m reading the last lines of the poems in Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile. He would write a poem almost every day between 1948 and 1950, in the camps where he was incarcerated for his involvement in the Greek resistance. He would play the mandolin for the other prisoners. Every last line is a perfect last line, a right last line to end everything. December 4: “The door is open. I can’t leave.” Some of the poems are one line, both a last line and a first line and then a last line again, living or ending together in the same trapped, or freed, moment. January 23. “At last/the mirror shows you/your severed hands/though you have no hands to applaud/your victory.” January 24. “I rested my mouth on your memory/I sat a vigil for pain and pleasure/ between the four candles/of snuffed lines.” The poems get darker in the third diary, or am I just reading them better? More forced marches, more exile, more death -- suffering, bread thrown in the ocean.

It’s not only that I forget about war and starvation and forced exile. In my fury with my nose pressed up against the bakery window like that, I forget about my friends. I forget that they have nightmares, or stomach ailments from stress, or unprocessed issues about loved ones who’ve died. They’ve fought in wars, even, or been violated in dark places until they have fears that won’t go away. They need comfort, too. I don’t have anywhere to rest my mouth. It’s just me alone on the winter sidewalk, staring at all those cakes that I want. I wonder if I’m too busy wanting pink icing to love anyone. I want so much to reread The End of the Affair -- why don’t I have it? There’s something comforting about the thought that this is the end of the world, the final day. What would I do? I would reread the novel that Graham Greene published a decade after his London home was bombed during the Blitz. I would decide again where its story started or ended. I would think about its version of God. I would go out to that restaurant in the West Village with the arced lights, not with my friend but with some other friend, or not with my friend but alone. Maybe inside it would suddenly be 1951 again, here in New York, and inside it would be cozier than anywhere I’ve ever been before, and there would be good wine and good food and a jazz band, and everyone would love each other. Outside there wouldn’t be anyone weeping on the street. Just those lights.

“My best friend in this whole world/is a man who’s dead and gone./Now I’m bound to wander/with nothing but his song./And he walked out of this world/As lonely as he came/You can rest assured you won’t see my man again./I’ve got the young blood blues/They’re following me/ I’ve got the young blood blues/They just won’t let me be.”

That man I met in Boudhnath told me there’s a place you can go at the end of the world. If you’re there, up there, the rest of the world will fall away but then you’ll still be there. I can’t remember where the place was -- Shangri-la, Mt. Kailish, somewhere in India, Arizona, Chichen Itza, Macchu Pichu? Maybe it would work to just be up on one of the forgotten floors of the Flatiron building. Maybe you could be on the rooftop of the Met, or dancing in the Rainbow Room. What if I’m standing there on the sidewalk and the warm forbidden bakery disappears, but nothing changes for me, I’m still just standing there with my anger and my overcoat and my twelve dollars, and there isn’t any world anymore?

I don’t want to be back here. I don’t want to not be back here. I don’t have any Graham Greene books, so I start reading Narcopolis, by Jeet Thayil, a black and dazzling and hallucinatory novel about a man who leaves New York and goes back to Bombay. If the world ends tomorrow, which it won’t, I’ll never go to India. I’ll never reread The End of the Affair. I’ll never go back to the Boudhnath stupa in Kathmandu, with its white dome and Buddha eyes and its golden stairway leading up into nowhere or into infinity, depending on what you believe. At Boudhnath I was trying to study the Tibetan Book of the Dead with some lamas at a monastery. To keep studying, everyone had to take refuge, to become a Buddhist, and I’m not a Buddhist, I just really like studying, I really like old books, I love reading guidebooks but ultimately when I go to some strange place, some Pin or Parvati Valley, some world of mine or some other world, I like being guideless, maybe I even like being lost.

On the Boudhnath stupa there’s a golden sign that says, among other things, “Whoever sees or hears about this wish-fulfilling gem stupa will be ensured an ultimate liberation is guaranteed and finally one's dream or wish comes true... whoever worships or prays in front of this stupa will definitely closes the doors of three lower realms according to (terma) the hidden treasure... thank you very much for your kind cooperation.” I’m not sure whether I made a wish on the stupa or told it my dreams. I was aware of the alien feeling of not needing or wanting anything, like the vertiginous hungers of New York were somewhere so deep inside me that they didn’t exist. When I sat on the wooden meditation boards, I didn’t prostrate myself because I’m not a Buddhist. Sometimes one of the stray temple dogs would curl beside me while I meditated. She was beautiful and crippled, dirty but not too hungry, you could tell from her belly that she’d just given birth, this week or last week or some recent week. I couldn’t accept that I was some higher life form than she was, that enlightenment was nearer for me. She was better at meditating than I was, not that meditation is something to be good at. I’m sure, not that I should be sure of anything, that she isn’t going to die. That she’s already had her ultimate liberation, and maybe I have too, maybe all of us have. She’ll be curled there after the world falls away, I know she will, beside the space where I used to put my happy, mala-clad body.

New York is, well, New York. I’m reading about Buddhist hells and lower realms. I’m reading about the hungry ghost realm, where the throat is as skinny as a needle and the belly is as vast as the sky. “In the distance,” writes Khandro Rinpoche in This Precious Life: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on the Path to Enlightenment, “we see a lake filled with water and many different kinds of fruit and food, but we’re unable to move toward them. Nevertheless, we make an intense effort, struggling with all our might for hundreds of years. When we finally reach that body of water and wonderful food, the lake dries up and the food turns to dust.” I’m reading about the animal realm, “an existence of great ignorance, fear, and pain,” and I’m thinking about myself and the smiling dog at the stupa and the ways I’d forgotten that terrible bakery-window feeling, the feeling of “if I were more adorable wouldn’t he love me, if I were better wouldn’t I get a piece of pink-iced cake, wouldn’t I be happy, wouldn’t I be inside?” At the stupa there was a wizened old lady with thick braids who would bring out a rusty bucket of water to share with the temple dogs. In a cold meditation room nearby, I got what was probably amoebic dysentery, even though I avoided all the water. The toilets -- Eastern and Western -- weren’t designed right. I never knew which end everything was going to come out of, or when, and I took a blanket and moved into the freezing bathroom and hunched on the floor as close to the toilet as I could stay. I thought I might die. The thought of food was unbearable, but somehow I craved out-of-season strawberries, the kind you can buy in my home city even late at night, even when it’s snowing. Within a few days, I was well.

I’m reading Yannis Ritsos again, February 19. Reading the poem is like being wherever he is, wherever he was: “Frozen sun. It gives no warmth./Ten days of storm./The sick have no appetite./Everyone is sick./We throw a lot of bread into the sea./At least the gulls eat it./Talk stops quickly./We’re left outside our voice./We hear and don’t hear the waves./Under every word/is a dead person.”

I’m reading about The End of the Affair, since I don’t have The End of the Affair itself to read. I’m reading the online menu of that glittering restaurant. I’m reading about India even though I might never go to India -- thinking about that traveler’s acronym (I’ll Never Do It Again), thinking about tertons and terma and about what books are used for and about hungry ghosts and refugees and refuges, thinking about the end of the world, thinking about stories that start and die. Adam Phillips quotes a section from The End of the Affair where Bendix goes to the cremation of his ex-lover, Sarah, with a young girl, Sylvia:

Hate lay like boredom over the evening ahead. I had committed myself: without love I would have to go through the gestures of love. I felt the guilt before I had committed the crime, the crime of drawing the innocent into my own maze. The act of sex may be nothing, but when you reach my age you learn that at any time it may prove to be everything. I was safe, but who could tell to what neurosis in this child I might appeal? At the end of the evening I would make love clumsily, and my very clumsiness, even my impotence if I proved impotent, might do the trick, or I would make love expertly, and my experience too might involve her. I implored Sarah, Get me out of this, get me out of it, for her sake, not mine… I don’t want to begin it all again and injure her. I’m incapable of love. Except of you, except of you…

Bendrix, says Phillips, “is convinced that he knows…the range of possibilities of what might happen. In his account Sylvia is a cipher; having met her once, a short time ago that day, he seems to know a great deal about her; or rather, generically about women and sexuality. And interestingly his omniscience here is all about his own omnipotence; if he makes love clumsily it might do the trick and if he makes love expertly ‘that too might involve her.’ There is no suggestion that she might change his plans, that who she happens to be might impinge upon the certainties of his fantasy.”

I’m feeling more like Sylvia today than like Sarah or Bendrix. I haven’t made any pact with any gods, I’m not burning to death, but no one in that bakery wants me to come inside. Or, I don’t know what they want. Maybe they haven’t seen me or noticed me yet. Maybe I’m not really here, but just a fantasy of someone who is not-me. In some ways, my unlived life is plotless -- not a story at all. Do I go inside the bakery, and get hugged by the rosy-cheeked revelers? Do I get a mug of mulled wine and a round, iced cake? Do I get turned away again, and weep in my good coat by the garbage can, my knees buckling? Some girl inside sees me and she wants to help me, to take my arm and say in some broken version of my language, Are you alright?, but maybe she doesn’t want to shame me, maybe she thinks I need privacy to cry about whatever I’m crying about, maybe she thinks that we both came here lonely and we’re both going to leave here lonely, too. Maybe I take my good legs and I find a different warm bakery, where the pastries taste like strawberries, and don’t remember the other times in other nighttimes cities, times when I was sad or angry, times when I was locked outside, times when the door was open but I couldn’t come in, or the door was open and I couldn’t leave. Maybe I’ll be sick, sick like everyone, and I won’t have any appetite for the bakery -- I’ll just read a novel and not eat. I’ll read a novel that, like all novels, is about adultery. I can’t remember what happens that night of the cremation, between Bendrix and Sylvia, because I don’t have the book for some reason, even though I’ve had it before, even though I might have it again.