I decided to dig out the Hojoki when
I got home; I was
in that kind of mood. Autumn coming in, sense of change and things fading,
all that. An Account of my Hut. The
title was poignant of course, especially
in that translation and I thought about
the conversation I
had with my mother about my dad’s desire to withdraw from the world.
Perhaps he would have finally read all
those great works he
never quite got round to, he was going to do it
all when he retired of course, tackle the great edifice of
World Though but somehow there had always been something else to
keep him busy, cleaning
guttering, endless meal preparations, going into town, keeping up
with the news, getting enough sleep.
What changes and
what can
be changed? I suppose
this what the
book asks and the answer is
nothing, or perhaps yourself, to some degree. I sat at
the table and
my faint melancholy deepened suddenly into a sense
of futility. Even though
it felt like we were
winning there was a
kind of tumbling dry laughter echoing through the world,
no doubt the distant mockery of time and the vanity of struggling against the
inevitable ways life
and the world were patterned and
ordered in cycles, ad infinitum. Perhaps it
was right that at midlife a man should
withdraw from the world and spend his
time in contemplation, perhaps if that
tradition still existed the
world would be a less angry, less harrowed place as
generations fought to hold onto what they had gained or supplant each other,
people growing bitter by the long, enforced slog of engaging
in life. My thoughts drifted, perhaps that
was the way things would tend now, less work more time for
contemplation,
for quiet reflection, each person
contented in their silo,
gazing out rather than all the brawling and
battling of trying to win and maintain status.
And then my pessimistic mood passed, mercifully
brief, and I reflected instead on
the remarkable
things that were
happening. Everyone’s favourite word at
that point
was transformative. It was overused
certainly but still it did feel that over a few years the terrain beneath our feet had shifted dramatically. Possibilities, that's what we live for, that's why we stay in the world. And there were, or seemed to be at that point, all manner of possible directions things might take.
And so, stay in the world
a little longer, then a
little longer
still. Sail on, sail on... I went into my room to get the book
but couldn’t find it, went back into the kitchen to
see if it
was in the pile under the table where
Chris was bedding down. Ridiculous really, thinking
back, how we lived
then when we still had other options. Chris was always
preparing himself for
disaster, for
some terrible cataclysm after which he would
have to survive in
the woods on a handful of berries, familiarity with hardship and discomfort was
something he
had cultivated out of paranoia and dread; he
would be able to meet the end of things head on and survive. And yet of course all that preparation didn’t
save him in the end.
Not in the
kitchen. I went up into Jay’s rom to see if it was there for some reason.
I had never been in before, strangely, had seen in through the doorway as I went to the loo. It was spare, clean almost cell-like,
perhaps he had been drilled into
keeping it that way in whatever
homes or halfway houses
he had lived in before we met, in that period of
his life we never talked about. What
a bunch of misfits we
were. I half laughed,
but there was something pitying
in it too. I thought about
my mum; what’s so bad
about just being normal? There was a single book next
to the single mattress down
on floor. I could tell even
from the
distance of the
doorway that it wasn’t the Hojoki but
intrigued I tiptoed in to see what it was. Chris’s
anthology of American poetry. That was
where it had gone.
For some reason, I
was
in a sentimental mood that evening, no
doubt, tears sprang up in
my eyes. People were
unexpected, what on earth was he doing with that? Reading it I suppose. I thought I might try and engage him
on the subject of poetry, see if he wanted to talk about it
but anticipated if I did he would probably just clam up. Well, I
wasn’t going
to take it back, Chris already had too many
books anyway. And then
I remembered that I myself had hidden the book under my own mattress on the floor
downstairs precisely to keep it
out of Chris’s hands.
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