I spent New Years Eve on a rooftop watching fireworks explode, in panorama, along the city’s skyline. I was so absorbed in the spectacle of fireworks, in the stimulation of new and old friends, in the fact of caviar and champagne, that the crucial moment of ringing in the new year was past before I knew it. The next day, I stayed home, trying not to regret things I had said and hadn’t.
I finished The Sea, The Sea recently on the recommendation of a new friend. It was, he said, perhaps his favorite book. The book follows Charles Arrowby, an older theater star, who retires to a dilapidated house on a remote and rugged sea coast. Over the course of the book, a parade of friends from Arrowby's London theater life visit him while the protagonist ruminates on the lost loves of his life. In particular, he focuses on his first love, Mary Hartley, who, he discovers, has just moved to his village! Arrowby's power to self-delude in the name of love sets off a chain of events, including the premature death of a young man and imprisonment of an old woman.
The chilling thing about Charles is that he is inviolate. By book's end, tragedies are cleaned up and put away, making room for more pleasant preoccupations. Friends move in and out of orbit, under the inescapable, undying, pull of Charles’ charms. Even we, as readers, are seduced, by Charles’ dogged and perverted reasonableness. We sit at the table with him, ready to eat up the pleasurable little feasts he lays out. We, like his friends, try to ignore the cries for help coming from doors he keeps closed.
Say The Sea, The Sea is about the powers of self delusion, the power of story telling to obscure objective truth, and the exclusion of self regard from moral good. The persistent goodwill that the world imparts on Charles, despite the evils he acts out, seems to convey an unbearably cool message. And all the time, the sea rages on the background -- even cooler! Perhaps Murdoch’s book isn’t the most auspicious way to begin the blog in 2012? Or perhaps it is. It’s a puzzle, this book. What else does the plotline show? I’m certain that I’ll keep thinking on it. In life, too, I wonder why my friend liked it so much and why he thought I’d like it the same way.
Meanwhile, January 1st then 2nd go the way of 2011. To memory, to reconstruction and a story line that changes and shifts, builds community and crushes it. And hopefully in the spirit of this kind of living well: "looking back with reasonable happiness..., enjoying the activity of one's present, and go[ing] fearlessly on into the future." (Epstein). On January 1st, we did the predictable things -- avoided the celebration we swear we'll see every year (Mummers at 2 St), stayed home where there was cannellini bean soup with rosemary, tiny macaroni and smoked turkey’s leg steaming in the pot. There were calls put in to friends and family. C made a good joke. I laughed like hell. And I finished a book I instantly liked – the Marriage Plot. But more on that some other time....
Meanwhile, January 1st then 2nd go the way of 2011. To memory, to reconstruction and a story line that changes and shifts, builds community and crushes it. And hopefully in the spirit of this kind of living well: "looking back with reasonable happiness..., enjoying the activity of one's present, and go[ing] fearlessly on into the future." (Epstein). On January 1st, we did the predictable things -- avoided the celebration we swear we'll see every year (Mummers at 2 St), stayed home where there was cannellini bean soup with rosemary, tiny macaroni and smoked turkey’s leg steaming in the pot. There were calls put in to friends and family. C made a good joke. I laughed like hell. And I finished a book I instantly liked – the Marriage Plot. But more on that some other time....
2012, 2012! Happy New Year!
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