reading for my life

A friend asked me recently who my lifestyle heroes were. I was at a loss, stupefied, scrambling to think of any single person’s life that I wanted for my own. Of course there are people whose lives I admire, aspire to in pieces, but I hadn’t ever given any thought to where to source pieces of an ideal life from. And that seemed a bad thing; failing to decode what my personal brand of success looks like and how it’s paid for by the hour. I've always tried to fit pieces of what I love into existing jobs, no matter that the value of the whole seems to degrade under the weight of a single clock, ticking. Anyways. My friend’s question was a Pandora’s box about living a unified life; and much later I sent a feeble text message listing various writers whose writing habits I admire. Not a great answer to a question that bugs me, still.

I was in Hudson, NY recently. If reading Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life hadn’t killed my appetite for disappearing into the country, with my aspirations packed for relocation, then the visit did. John Leonard wrote of popular culture (but he could have been talking about Hudson supplanting Brooklyn) as, “where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd…The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after awhile, the repetition is a bummer.” The bummer hit me fully after entering a bookstore and perusing the shelves only to find a perfect collection, not a stray book present, and know that our escape to the region was (long long ago) found.

Maybe it’s the addictive nature of how we pick and choose from a variety of pre-existing options to create a daily uniform that’s necessarily recognizable and thus key to success. Andrew O’Hagan writes of self-invention in the extreme when reviewing the new movie, The Bling Ring (LRB):

“If real fame is a mask that eats into the face, then pseudo-fame, the current kind, might be a decoy that eats into the brain. You often meet those people in California, people who have forgotten that you are real, that you watch the news, that you know who they really are, that you know where the money is coming from. They begin to lie to journalists and themselves with the same grim hope: if I say this and no one contradicts me it might be true. A sense of entitlement stands in for personal values. They don’t mind if they’re fooling you and fooling themselves, so long as they can keep the show on the road.”

What’s more frightening than the delusion described, is the realization that most professional successes are variations on a theme. It reminds me of what another friend complained of recently, that the myth of professional success as the only success continues to dominate and shouldn’t. The question about lifestyle seems an appropriate counter then, though remains discomfiting as lifestyle and professional life seem to mean the same thing, as seen in the extremes of emulation described in Bling Ring. In other words, it’s the repetition in creative culture that chills the heart a little.

Thank goodness then for John Leonard’s aptly titled reading for my life, in which Leonard finds an antidote to a shrinking world in, where else, books. He quotes Kafka as describing a book as ‘an ax for the frozen sea in us.” “Books,” Leonard writes, “are where we go to complicate ourselves.”

Read: A Charmed Life, Mary McCarthy; The Country Girl Trilogy and Epilogue, Edna O’Brien