Help Needed

Thanks to the shoddy service of my DSL provider, I haven't been able to post new reports for you. This is sad because I have many great books to tell you all about. But now it is too late since I am off to Europe this afternoon and I have far too much to do before I leave. If the facilities are adequate and I have the time, I will try to update from Europe. If not, please check back in two weeks when I will pick up right where I left off. Bye bye everyone!

  Recently two people who wouldn’t seem to have much in common—my 26-year-old  brother and my one-year-old son—have both had me thinking about wonder and fear, and how their experiences of those two things are similar to each other’s, and different from my own. My brother Ryan is traveling right now, halfway through a backpacking trip that will last through to the early summer.  Before he left, he took a Saturday morning bus down to Philadelphia to say goodbye.  I waited for him on the front stoop of my apartment building, with my son James perched on my hip.  We spotted him when he was still a block away and even at a distance I could tell Ryan was grinning; as the youngest sibling in our family, he had always been the one left behind, but now it was his turn to skip away. Each morning I wake early to the sound of James crying down the hall.  Like my brother abroad, the world is a strange place to him and he’s often scared.  I bring him into the bed where he nurses with my wife; then it’s up for breakfast and the official start of the day.  I’ve lately become an expert with our toaster; the bread always comes out just right.  I eat my cereal while James munches on his diced banana, sometimes smearing the fruit across the table, sometimes putting it into his mouth. Over the last few weeks James has learned to "cruise," that is to walk side-shuffle by holding onto the edge of a couch or by pressing himself against a wall.  It was while watching him try to bridge the short gap between our bureau and our bed that I first thought about how his days are like my brother’s.  The previous evening Ryan had sent an email about a harrowing bus ride he’d just taken into the Himalayan foothills north of Delhi.  He said that when he’d looked out his window, there was a sheer thousand foot drop where the road was supposed to have been.  I imagine James, if he had the words, would describe his days in much the same way. In the afternoon James and I take a long walk.  When I first moved to Philadelphia four years ago, I was running a lot and I liked the idea of trying never to follow the same route twice.  Now James and I trace the same path everyday: 20 blocks east to the river on Pine, 20 blocks back west on Spruce.  I like being able to anticipate the topography of the sidewalk, to steer the stroller around the same loose patch of bricks that I avoided yesterday, and to know by the cloud cover whether the children at the nursery school we pass along the way will be playing indoors or out. Even amid such routine, I still have moments of wanderlust.  Every now and again a whiff of burning trash will awaken the physical memory of being alone in La Paz when I was twenty.  Or something about the way a woman pokes her head out of a third floor window will remind me of what it felt like to watch the sun go down in Darjeeling.  I feel myself drawn towards the airport in such moments, but not in a serious way.  There’s James to take care of, and my wife who’d be surprised if I didn’t come home.  But more than that, I know that the exhilaration I felt when I woke up in Delhi for the first time isn’t open to me anymore.  This is something that I think James, who no longer pays attention to a blue plastic flower he couldn’t get enough of a month ago, understands too. Of the many misconceptions I had about what it would be like to grow older, two stand out above the rest. The first concerns freedom which I thought about in the same way I thought about candy: I couldn’t imagine how in both cases more was not always better.  It would have been impossible to convince myself ten years ago that the small orbit of my current days would feel as satisfying as it does.  This I think is the kind of knowledge that is hardest to communicate across generational lines, that in the future you won’t desire the same things you desire right now. The second misconception is about fear.  Watching James, and thinking about how we interact, it’s easy to see why as a child I assumed that the world would becomes less scary as I grew older.  He is terrified of being left alone in his crib and I come take him out; a siren sounds outside, and he clings to my leg.  His days are filled with at least equal parts wonder and fear, and from that perspective, it must seem as though I command the world. But I don’t of course.  Though my fears are less broadly distributed than they used to be, they are perhaps more deeply felt.  I can go days and sometimes even whole weeks without feeling afraid of anything, but then in a moment at night I’ll understand that my wife and I are not promised to fall asleep beside each other forever, and that James, who cruises around the living room each morning, will have to learn the most important things in life on his own. [Image credit: Abnel Gonzalez]

After some email discussion, it appears that the consensus is that Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is the lone book by a young writer from the past few years that will have the staying power to last generations. [Embarrassing author's note: due to an unhealthy aversion to hype and a disproportionate dislike of Franzen because of his self-involved non-fiction, I have until now held out against reading this book. Now chastened, I will begin reading it by Monday] Meanwhile a couple of folks followed my lead to add some names to the slightly older than 50 category. Garth suggests Salman Rushdie (age 56), who is undoubtedly a highly skilled writer, but one who I think may be better remembered for his role as a pawn in the Ayatollah's dalliance with contemporary literature, and less for any of the particular novels he has written. He does have an incredibly attractive wife though. Brian meanwhile suggested that the late W. G. Sebald (dead at age 57) is sure to be considered an indispensible, classic author one day. As is often the case, his already stellar reputation as a writer jumped up a notch as eulogizers strained to deliver Sebald the praise that he surely would have recieved, parcelled out over the remainder of his years, had he not died. As so often happens, Sebald's untimely death may boost him towards immortality in the eyes of readers. His reputation aside, he is undoubtedly worth reading: both Austerlitz and The Emigrants are highly recommended.