Dry Bones

Tonight I pulled two books off my shelf to read while I was getting ready for bed (I wasn't sure at first which one I wanted) : Possession, by A.S. Byatt, and The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. The Last Samurai. (The latter is nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie.)



I didn't notice it right away, but both these books have rather similar characters: people hungry for knowledge, thirsty for meaning, who find the scholarly life dusty and meaningless, and very much unlike what they had hoped for. They frighten me, because they are so like me -- or what I might have been or might still become.

In particular, I am afraid of Sibylla, the mother of Ludo, the boy-genius hero of The Last Samurai. I want to be Ludo, but I'm afraid I'm much more like Sibylla, who loves beauty and knowledge but is depressingly weak and ineffectual. She is ordinary in a bad way -- trapped in the ordinary, and denying it, and so missing any beauty or purpose her ordinary life might be hiding.

In the following passage, Sibylla has come from small-town America to Oxford on a scholarship she earned by faking her grades and recommendations and lying about her own knowledge. I didn't lie to get my semester at Oxford, but this is unsettlingly like some of my experiences there. I was fascinated and thrilled to be reading in the actual Bodleian Library (not an easy privilege to get), and I drank in every detail of life in England; and yet my work seemed meaningless. The view Sybilla sees is exactly the view I saw; and I wasted time in the Covered Market just as she does, although I preferred buying massive cookies (the size of your liver, and sold by weight) to eschewing sweaters.

Roemer, anyway, was too obscure to be on the open shelves of the Lower Reading Room with more frequently consulted classical texts. Year after year the book gathered dust in the dark, far below ground. Since it had to be called up from the stacks it could be sent to any reading room in the Bodleian, and I had had it sent to Reserve in the Upper Reading Room of the Radcliffe Camera, a library in a dome of stone in the centre of a square. I could read unobserved.

I sat in the gallery looking out across a bell of air, or at the curving walls crammed with extraordinarily interesting-looking books on non-classical subjects, or out the window at the pale stone of All Souls, or, of course, at Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik (Leipzig, 1912). There was not a classicist in sight.

I formed the impression that the sentence meant: It is truly a fallow and new field which the author has trod and ploughed through in handling this subject, so especially might this statement sound in the first moment.

This did not really seem worth the trouble it had taken to work it out, but I had to go on so I went on, or rather I was about to go on when I glanced up and I happened to see, on a shelf to my left, a book on the Thirty Years War which looked extraordinarily interesting. I took it down and it really was extraordinarily interesting and I looked up presently and it was time for lunch.

I went to the Covered Market and spent an hour looking at sweaters.

There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.

There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.

I saw several interesting sweaters in the Market but they seemed to be rather expensive.

(from pp. 18-19 of The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt)

I don't agree with Sibylla at all when she implies that boredom is a fate worse than death, but I very much agree with her on the dust and the dark. Books should live. A library should be a nature preserve, not a mausoleum with the bones stacked up dry and delicate. And minds should be alive in the same way.

But since I am so much like Sibylla in some ways, I worry that I cannot or will not avoid becoming like her in other ways. She complains about stupid people and the way the world is, but she cannot get a job more fulfilling than computer-archiving old paper issues of obscure hobby magazines, and she never, never finishes what she starts. The only thing she produces, at least in the course of this novel, is her son, Ludo; and somewhere between the ages of four and six he seems to become entirely responsible for producing and polishing himself. Maybe there is meaning to Sibylla's life after all -- in her motherhood, perhaps, though it is hardly better than the rest of her work -- and maybe I am not old enough yet to understand it. Or maybe Sibylla is a bad fictional rendition of what a person rather like me could be like. Or maybe she is simply not me.

I hope one of those things is true.