Darker Dreams

At night he dreamed of unceasing discovery and of a flowing and continuous existence that embraced everything and allowed him to study and appreciate but also to build. For it is in building that we transcend, he believed, and it must be true. There is nothing worse than emerging from the long and grotesque embrace of consumption.The eating up of things and places and ideas and the sick realization grows deep in your stomach and eventually takes over your head, and you cannot deny the truth anymore: the universe is not an infinite space. Or, maybe it is, but our bodies and our consciousness are limited in such a way that space becomes finite. If we seek to understand objective truths, we cannot hope to begin to do so without first understanding and mastering the instruments of our own sensory aggregations. We cannot explore, we cannot build with these weights attached to the ends of our arms, to the ends of our memories. So, in this journey to understand everything, and in an effort to fight back the feelings of distrust and disinterest, however temporary, we must practice periodic self-annihilation. An annihilation of thought, of emotion. An annihilation of memory, of bias, and of belief.

Here is a photograph I took a year ago of a day very much like today:

True Love

Book 4/50: The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

This book has been the hardest for me to read so far. There was something frustratingly inaccessible about it, something which made it hard for me to enjoy. Perhaps it was the lack of traditional dialogue formatting. There was no indenting or quotations marks, for example, just words. This made it difficult because I would, on occasion, have to reread a passage to understand if what was written was being spoken or being thought. I will say that the first half of the book was much more challenging than the second half. Maybe I got used to the style. 

The more I think about the style, the more I realize that the distinction between spoken words and thought was made intentionally blurry, in order to reinforce or emphasize one of the themes of the novel (perhaps the only theme), which is the ceaseless continuity that connects seemingly opposing concepts: life/death and love/hate being the two most frequently considered. I suppose that good/evil is as well, but in more of an ancillary role. Much of the book is spent looking through the eyes of various characters as they struggle to recognize, and subsequently live with, the profound falsity of these dichotomies. 

The main character, in my opinion, is only the main character because the author chose to spend the most amount of time exploring his story. His mental and emotional journey is not unique but only a single aspect of a shared experience. This makes the book very wide-feeling, very inclusive, with all of the characters dipping into a thematic pool that is communal. I suppose this is not clear at first, and the exploration of these shared themes does not really carry any weight until you get to know the characters better. These are two reasons why I think I might have enjoyed the second half so much more.

At its core, this book is an exploration of human suffering, and the discovery of traits and virtues that inevitably accompanies such discovery. It's a love story, but unlike Submergence, which was a novel about two characters finding love for each other in a large, horrific, and fantastically complex world, this story is about love providing a portal into that larger and more complex world. So, I guess it sort of operates in reverse. And make no mistake, the world of this novel has more than its fair share of horror. 

As I finished the book, I was struck by one thing in particular. The tone of the writing as the character ages changes and becomes more melodramatic, more reflective, and adopts more of a stream of consciousness aspect. The character remains lucid in his old age and infirmities, but the memories of his life flicker back and play across his mind, and indeed across the mind of the reading audience. in broken fragments, mostly. So the audience is keyed into the character as they both work together to search for truths in the mish-mash of images, memories, and experiences. 

This is, perhaps, what I liked best about this book. I enjoy a story in which an old dying man looks back at his life for meaning. I appreciated it also in one of my favorite books of all time: The Untouchable by John Banville. I think I appreciate this in both books because I realize that one day I will be occupying a similar role. One day I will by dying, and searching for meaning in my life. I can only hope that I live a long enough and rich enough life to draw on such a wildly diverse and stimulating arrangement of memories, as the one painted here, in this book, in such beautiful and terribly stimulating detail.