Choices ....

A long time ago in San Francisco, I worked with a man who was born in Indonesia and went to sea at an early age. He worked his way up from able bodied seaman to the next higher position and then the next. Finally, through hard work, education and eons sailing into the kind of ports Joseph Conrad wrote about, he reached a point where his next berth would have been ship’s master, or captain.

At that point, he met a woman ashore, fell in love, and married. Not long thereafter, his sweetheart informed him that he could have her or the sea, but not both. He chose, and when I knew him, he worked as a draftsman in a building in the Mission District of “The City.” I occupied the desk next to his.

When a ship would sound its mournful horn as it steamed through the bay toward the Golden Gate, he would stop his work and stare out the window toward the sound. Then we would all, for the briefest second, smell the salt air, feel the sting of spray against our faces, and feel the deck roll under our feet, sensing in our beings the chance of a sudden squall, rogue wave, or some other vagary of the vast ocean. Sometimes, on a morning like this, I still do.

Morning Thoughts

Someone posted a query on-line the other day as to whether listening to an audio version of a book constituted “reading” it. I have to submit my opinion as “yes.” Having chosen a profession that involves heavy travel, I’ve “read” many a work that way, first on tape, then on CD, and now downloaded onto my cell phone. A sample of the works I’ve read include Darwin’s Origin of the Species, the condensed version of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a number of Bill Bryson’s works, Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters, and most of the published books of the late Stephen Jay Gould. Some read better than others. Some carry more impact. For example, I found myself pulling into parking lots and delaying my arrival home in order to hear more of Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea.

Fiction can prove tricky, for it becomes more and more obvious the extent to which modern writers violate the last of Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing.” It recommends, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” It was easy to skip over superfluous jibber-jabber with tapes. One only had to punch the “forward” button as many times as necessary. With CDs, one had to skip tracks. Now, with downloaded audio, one loses entire chapters. It’s easier to tolerate the junk.

Worst, in modern fiction, are the ubiquitous and gratuitous sex-scenes. Dear me, in today’s America, anyone over the age of six is perfectly aware of what happens when two people succumb to the uncontrollable urges that the Apostle Paul warned about in First Corinthians. They occurred, he said, sometimes as a result of drinking the communion wine, but more often as a simple weakness to be avoided at all costs until the end of time, which was right around corner, a few months at most. Any righteous soul should be able to keep it zipped up that long and avoid the indecencies involved in the act, not to mention the eternal consequencies.

Oops, I’ve gotten off-track.

Facts are, there just isn’t much we can add in describing the act by now that isn’t portrayed nightly on TV. But we still try. I once had to endure a mystery novel’s sex scene that lasted from downtown Jonesboro, AR to well past Walnut Ridge, even with constant fast-forwarding past the most unseemly actions. Trust me, the description covered it all, and left one both exhausted and laboring under the strong belief that the two folks involved were each in desperate need of a hobby, one that didn’t involve a member of the opposite sex.

These days, I’m afraid, at least one sex scene looms as essential in a modern novel as the 58-minute car chase looms in modern movies. It wasn’t always that way. Consider the masters, the ones we really should be reading anyway. Here’s how Joseph Conrad described what we might call “The Grand Finale:”

“He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side. Before she could make a movement, or even turn her head his way, he took her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another appeal to his tenderness—a new seduction. The girl glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone —a command which Heyst did not obey.”

That’s from “Victory,” and no, I don’t think the scene spawned the name of the book.

But wasn’t it sublime? I don’t believe that even the Apostle himself would have begrudged that little bit of hanky-panky.

How this could lead to some of the
 scenes I've read is the true mystery.

Damnation

There are things one has read dozens of times that suddenly pierce like lightning on a late evening reading. From the ending of “Heart of Darkness,” Marlow lies to Kurtz’s lover about the details of Kurtz's death:

"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!'

"'His last word—to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!'

"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

"'The last word he pronounced was—your name.'

"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it—I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether. . . "

 It dawned on me to compare that passage to the immortal one from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” in which Huck makes the (soul-damning) decision not to send a letter turning the slave Jim in, as he is legally and, by the code of the times, morally, bound to do.

“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

 So, one wonders, how would Conrad and Twain feel about tormenting young immigrant children? Would it free our soul from damnation or, would we find comfort in believing that, “The heavens do not fall for such a trifle?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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