Lit Up Page 14

  Silence.

  “For many of us it comes down to love, to being touched by love. You’re in the position of seeing Mom and Dad every day. You don’t realize how lucky you are to see them. You forget that as you go through life, they are getting old.”

  How many high school teachers spoke this way? Mr. Leon preached no doctrine, but it was clear by now that he had intense spiritual and moral preoccupations—responsibility to others, a love of family, the search for some purpose, a desire to take off into adventure, and what seems inescapably a part of adventure, the active life linked to disgust for the digital morass he saw the students falling into. After a pause, he said, “What does it mean to be present in the moment?” So much for Coelho’s talk of goals, dreams, and personal destiny. What of the present moment?

  “When you read,” Mr. Leon said, “be there.”

  * * *

  Born in Germany, in 1877, Herman Hesse, after some early success as a novelist and poet, traveled to the East just before the First World War. He studied Eastern philosophy and religion and then returned to Europe, living for most of the rest of his life in Switzerland. Siddhartha, published in 1922, distilled his understanding of Buddhism—and also his partial resistance to it. The novel (for some reason) was not translated into English until 1951, but it quickly became famous, reaching a pinnacle of popularity in the sixties, when it was one of the books carried by undergraduates on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and many other campuses. I should know, I was there—not at Berkeley, except as a visitor, but very close by, at Stanford, in Palo Alto, where I drank Jack Daniels and read the New York Review of Books as a way of fighting off the fumes of pot and Eastern philosophy that settled over parties and conversations. I had never read Siddhartha, and I can’t say that I was now looking forward to it.

  Hesse set his novel at the time of the Gautama Buddha—the Buddha—which places the story around 520 BCE (the Buddha’s dates are in dispute). He doesn’t give dates; he ignores geography, pays scant attention to money, property, food, the ordinary material life. The book is a swift-moving fable of discovery. Siddhartha, a handsome, well-born young man, a Brahmin dissatisfied with the spiritual exercises that his father teaches him, leaves home (without ever saying good-bye to his parents). He makes common cause with a friend, Govinda, loyal but not too smart, and the two of them join the Samana, the ascetics who pray, fast, sleep outdoors, and go from village to village begging for food. They lead a life of extreme simplicity and forbidding austerity. “Siddhartha had one single goal—to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow—to let the Self die.”

  He actually meets the Buddha. He admires the leader’s beauty, his serenity, and his wisdom. But it’s contrary to his nature to become a follower:

  If I were one of your followers, I fear that it would only be on the surface, that I would deceive myself that I was at peace and had attained salvation, while in truth the Self would continue to live and grow, for it would have been transformed into your teachings, into my allegiance and love for you and for the community of the monks.

  After this rather haughty remark, Siddhartha takes himself off, leaving Govinda among the Buddha’s cohort. He travels about, and, after additional years of self-denial, falls into the hands of “the beautiful Kamala,” a courtesan who, among other things, teaches him that

  one cannot have pleasure without giving it, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every single part of the body has its secret which can give pleasure to one who can understand. She taught him that lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arrives nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.

  Which, all in all, is a lot of advice to hear from anyone. The students never talked about sex in class, but this was no doubt good stuff for fifteen-year-old American boys to absorb.

  Siddhartha, happy with Kamala, and restored to his youthful good looks, goes to work for a successful merchant, and soon masters every element of the merchant’s business without caring about any of it. He becomes rich and takes up gambling—and becomes the greatest of gamblers, making and losing fortunes. By this time, the reader begins to wonder if Hesse, whose style is both swift and solemn (an unusual combination, I admit), could possibly be unaware of a comic element in his book—namely that Siddhartha, who talks of losing the self, is incomparably the best at whatever he does. He’s the most distinguished faster, the best ascetic, the most arrogant of nondisciples, the best lover, the best businessman, the most dissipated of gamblers. To our eyes, he’s a consummate egotist, and his journey to empty the self has been nothing greater than search for ego gratification.

  Just when we’re about to get exasperated, Siddhartha realizes this, too. So this had been Hesse’s plan all along: to pull the rug out from under a narcissist. Nauseated, Siddhartha gives up his past life—his past lives—and almost throws himself into a river to make an end of it. At the last minute, he holds back, and falls into a long sleep. When he wakes up, refreshed, and listening to the river, he is ready to begin a new life.

  For Mr. Leon’s students, the question, as before, was this: Was life conceived as a journey even possible? They feared the constraints of “society” yet had trouble thinking of leaving it. Society, however, is what’s missing from Siddhartha, just as it’s missing from the placid pages of The Alchemist. It’s as if Siddhartha passed through a nearly empty corridor in which his body and soul were the only elements that mattered. I wondered if these “journey” books didn’t border on nonsense. Nothing in ancient India—no village, no trade, no family, no young, marriageable woman—pulls at Siddhartha, hampers him, limits him. Nothing ennobles him, either, or makes him care about someone else. Is the journey purely a literary idea—a fantasy that could exist precisely because it detaches itself from the splendid and miserable world that everyone lives in?

  Siddhartha falls in with the ferryman at the river, who tells him to listen to the river and he will hear what he needs to know there. And he does; he hears all the voices of humanity in the river. And, for the first time, he suffers failure and loss: he tries to raise the son that he and Kamala had together, and the boy, refusing to acknowledge him, and nasty as well, runs away. Siddhartha’s grief over the boy is his finest moment, certainly his most humanly appealing moment, and it suggests that Hesse and Kafka, two of the giants of German-language literature in the twentieth century, were in agreement after all: to run away from suffering was to lessen oneself. After a while, Siddhartha is at peace: he surrenders to “the unity of all things.” He reunites with clueless Govinda, still a follower of Buddha, and sets him straight on life:

  The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potentially old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people—eternal life.… Everything is necessary, everything needs only my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.

  Which certainly helps all of us a great deal. I nearly gagged when I read it. No doubt about it: I would always be an unenlightened Westerner. My kind of meditation is called anxiety.

  “Can we connect as city kids to what the river has to teach?” Mr. Leon asked, and several students said that the river was nothing less than Siddhartha’s past, and that’s why he heard things in it, which was certainly a very shrewd observation. Listening to the river, Siddhartha arrives at an understanding that he had to go through everything in life—asceticism, sensuality, greed, self-disgust—to arrive at the moment of tranquility, and the class broke into a debate over this approach to experience. “Is it important to experience everything yourself?” Mr. Leon asked.

  The self-assured Nino said, “I live like that. It can be dangerous, but good can come out of it,” and Latisha in
sisted “I believe it myself. I know if I’m told it’s bad, I’ll want to do it,” and several students agreed that Siddhartha should not look with disgust at any aspect of his past. The idea of a single “goal” or “destiny,” unifying all the appetites and ambitions and ends of life—that idea, never strong among these students, had faded. The “journey” conceived as a long arc was fading, too. “You have to learn not just from the past or the future,” said Ike, “but from the present if you want to know yourself,” which put the entire idea of “a journey” in a different light. A journey was not some grand quest but the experience of each moment joined together. Other students agreed. And then, with Mr. Leon’s encouragement, the students raised their hands one after another and enumerated special times when they had felt the happiness of the present moment—with friends, or while dancing, or just doing what they love. “I guess it’s impossible to jump into a plane and go home to Louisiana,” Mr. Leon said, “so I would say that I’d rather be here than anywhere.”

  “There is no special key,” said Jared Bennett, who spoke rarely but was suddenly excited. “You learn from everything. It’s a matter of living life and experiencing all of life.”

  Coelho’s and Hesse’s notion of the long arc was now officially dissolved: Jared Bennett had said so. As he spoke and others agreed, I realized why Mr. Leon had begun talking about suffering and then “the present moment.” He was trying to tell them that yes, the totality of their experience did matter, and that the only way to achieve that totality was to be fully engaged, all the time, in pain and happiness. That was the journey, the long arc—the wholeness of experience that constituted the soul, as D. H. Lawrence put it. For students enveloped by the media, Mr. Leon implied, the unlived life was a constant temptation. No, they had to be there. No lapsing out, no avoidance. Especially when reading a book for his class. High school reading had a new mission: Be there.

  But was he right in his exhortations? Was he right as a prescription for living all the time? As the class talked about Siddhartha hearing truth in the gurgling water, I wondered what Mr. Leon would say to Huck Finn lolling by his river. Snap out of it? No, you couldn’t say that to Huck Finn, and I thought, Do I really want to be there every instant of the day or night? I don’t think such a life would be sufferable. A life without daydreaming, without lapsing out now and then, wandering, dreaming, just letting thought arrive and depart? Better to drift on the river once in a while. Mr. Leon woke students up from sloth, and he woke me up from sloth, too. But I saw some virtue in fading out, now and then.

  At the end of the Hesse classes, John spoke up—John, the student whose wingspan was all of eternity, and whose fingernail on his fourth finger was the life of Mr. Leon’s students. John had a reputation for being disruptive in other classes—but there was no sign of it in English 10G. He now pointed to one of Siddhartha’s lessons for Govinda. In Siddhartha’s words: “When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with the goal.” This was a good moment for Herman Hesse and thunderously relevant in the twenty-first century. Among other things, Siddhartha’s remark is a shrewd rebuke of fanaticism, especially religious fanaticism. Seeking a single goal was madness. And other students seized on this passage, too. As Jared Bennett had said, there was no single key to life. They would seek many things. Whether or not they wanted Mr. Leon’s never-ending alertness and engagement, they had no use for fanaticism, no use for it at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BEACON, FEBRUARY: VONNEGUT

  Vocab

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  Who Goes Off to War?

  Serenity

  A Moment of Memory

  Film Running Backward

  Comedy and Tragedy Together

  As we walked into class, the following words were on the board:

  sordid

  tepid

  encroach

  conspicuous

  obstinacy

  It was a vocab exercise. “Use each word in a separate sentence,” Sean Leon said.

  They put their heads down. Silence, except for the vague noises I always heard from somewhere within the building: a locker slamming, a laughing fit that trailed off, someone shouting “All right! ALL RIGHT!” For the students, using unfamiliar—or half-familiar—words in a sentence wasn’t all that easy. Some of the students just stared at the paper in front of them. I spent some time staring at the words myself. What else was there to do? I was in school, for God’s sake.

  Tepid, I decided, was a good word. Sordid, too. A large part of life was either tepid or sordid. But what about encroach? Encroach? I liked the sound of it—the second syllable was emphatic and crunchy. But was “encroach,” I wondered, a word that fifteen-year-olds needed to know—I mean, needed to know more than any other semiobscure word? I tried to remember if I had ever used it in a sentence. In the room, the silence continued, and my mind, like the mind of Kurt Vonnegut’s hero Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, began to shred. I had to stay in focus.

  How about this: How about using all the words in a single sentence? A single sentence! In my notebook, with some effort and many crossings-out, I wrote the following:

  The apartment, with its sordid furnishings, its tepid water from the tap, encroached on Herbert’s sense of well-being, but his conspicuous obstinacy kept him from despair.

  Which has to be one of the worst sentences I have ever written. The students were still silent, heads bent over papers. A second try:

  Obstinacy as a personality trait is conspicuous among the people of Switzerland, a country in which sordid—or even tepid—reality never encroaches upon the enjoyment of natural splendor.

  Lousy, and meaningless. Natural splendor is just as much “reality”—no more, no less—as Herbert’s sordid flat. And what do I know about the Swiss, anyway? They may spend all their time looking at mountains and contemplating sordid reality. Give it up.

  By now, the students were finishing, for better or worse, and I looked at my own two contributions without satisfaction. But I also thanked God for something. Words were like integers; you could move them into almost any pattern you wanted. My tepid little adventure made me feel free, even if the sentences were terrible. Waiting for the conversation to begin, I thought that this freedom to move things around, to invent, to reshuffle the elements of life (dream and experience), and most of all to be silly while being tragical—that was what Slaughterhouse-Five was all about. The book, published in 1969, was widely read, but after more than forty years it still feels strange and fresh—both madly playful and grief-struck, a fantasia devoted to the absurd contingency of life.

  The full title of the novel is Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death. People are always dying in this book—in accidents, in all manner of freak occurrences, in plane crashes, and in the massacre of German citizens and soldiers in the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden, in early February 1945. Vonnegut, a captured American soldier, survived the bombing while being guarded by German soldiers in the basement locker of a swine abattoir. “So it goes,” Vonnegut comments after each tiny or grand bit of mayhem. So it goes? Was he making a protest against meaningless fatality? Or telling us, “Get used to it. This is the way life is—full of crazy insult and death”? Or both? It’s a very funny book, and the comedy comes out of the general havoc, but the point of view is elusive.

  The winter break had come and gone, and Sean Leon, suffering through family problems—his older brother in Louisiana was gravely ill—had missed five classes at the beginning of the spring term. (When he was away, I stayed away, too.) A substitute had filled in, and now that Mr. Leon was back, the students said they were unhappy with their classes so far on Slaughterhouse-Five. “We spent a lot of time on characterization,” several said. They’d figured out that talking about characters was an inadequate way of dealing with Vonnegut’s novel. His hero,
Billy Pilgrim, flimsy, weightless, hapless, with wispy blond hair and spectacles—Billy exists less as a person than as a medium on which dreams and fantasies play. Billy was a touching figure, but if you tried to assign any substance to him, he would dissolve in your fingers, which was Vonnegut’s intention. Most of the people in this novel are caught up in enormous events. “One of the main effects of war, after all,” he tells us, “is that people are discouraged from being characters.”

  “I don’t know what it’s about,” said Maud, which was candid; and mild, round-faced Ike said, “It’s not linear. It’s about everything,” which is almost true. They were all a little dismayed. The book’s fragmented structure left them unmoored, and Vonnegut’s seemingly casual way with death hurt and puzzled them.

  “How many of you are confused?” Mr. Leon asked, and I remembered that on opening day he had virtually promised them they would have trouble with Vonnegut. Almost all of them raised their hands. “Okay, that’s good,” he said.

  * * *

  As Vonnegut says in his first chapter, Slaughterhouse-Five is the book he couldn’t write for years—the unachievable book about his experiences in the Dresden bombing. “There’s nothing intelligent to say about a massacre,” he insists, a sentiment that caused him to throw out thousands of pages. Or so he says: You can never tell when Vonnegut is being straight with you, which is part of the puzzle and fun of reading him. Does he mean it? The judgment that nothing intelligent can be said about a massacre can’t be true. Dozens of good nonfiction books have been written about such things. But it’s believably true for a novelist. The scale of the carnage deadens emotion and renders ordinary representation trivial, individual character immaterial—literally bodiless in Dresden, in which the burned corpses had shrunk to the size of tiny mummies. A fictional narrative built around the death of thousands might seem pathetically beside the point, an attempt to lend aesthetic order to slaughter.