Over the last month, I was moved by a chain of disparate works: Alberto Moravia’s Contempt (1954); Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shosha (1974); selected journalism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); and Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing (2022). Reflections commenced when, on commutes hemming East London’s Windrush Line to a publishing company accompanied by a raft of anonymous faces going nowhere, I started thinking about myself too deeply and too often.

I had recently graduated from university and felt alienated in these “adult” embarkations: graduation’s pomp, the pageantry of framing a one-sided sepia certificate in polished mahogany, exposed both university’s bare skeleton and the emptiness of my efforts. I felt strong existential dread in early confrontations with what I perceived, initially, as worthlessness. I was in a heightened emotional state and related to the texts I read in this mode, ascribing my life’s own meaning to dog-eared pages. My fellow travellers were young, affluent, corporate while reading Brontë or Camus. Glaze-eyed, slinging wired headphones and boutique sunglasses between pinkie and thumb, their differences flattened. Or rather, so to me, in my arrogance.

My work actively gratified an [learnt] instinct to resist “corporate” which had become a monolith in my mind’s eye. I yearned for long hours and low pay in “singular artistic endeavour”, masochistically inching towards briefs for books which might never see print. I did a lot of masquerading in August, performing embodiment so much that whatever belay it lost meaning and trapped me in tautology.

People don’t live well when obsessed with the process of living. People don’t sing well, or play the viola well, if bowstrings and tongue-cast vowels are their preoccupations. You become a pretender, attaching symbols of making art to our identities: metaphorically smoking while making art; being shirtless while making art. The “making” is sidelined. The invisible ideal to which you aspire is never realised, because you can’t hear it beneath technical chattering. I felt so certain in my desired complexion that I forgot, as Montaigne wrote, we are all “shackled and constrained to what is desired by someone else’s ideas,” so entirely “captive” to “[their] leading-reins that we take no free steps on our own.”[1]

Today, what Montaigne might have called a renovated “bookishness” infects culture. The softened aesthetics of self-care triumph over vitality; self-valorising capital forces a hierarchisation of “productivity” which places material certainties above intangible, spiritual vigour. Montaigne’s quoting of Diogenes–

 “You prefer real figs to painted ones, so why not true and natural deeds to written ones?”[2]

– remains prescient. Recognition is centred in this spiral. Does your work have substance if you are not seen, by others, to live as though it does?

Moravia and Singer imply a critique of their self-obsessed protagonists by detailing the literary ecosystems Molenti and Greidinger occupy. Both men remain painfully relatable. The latter is an insignificant player in and later mocked by the Yiddish theatre establishment, forced to write for American audiences. Likewise, film critic Greidinger is fiscally squeezed into screenwriting, bonded to contractual obligations which exhaust his talents and deprive him of agency. Both are cruel to the women with whom they are romantically involved. Enacting violent creative freedom onto their wives, they possess in Emilia and Shosha the imaginative possibilities for escape. Articulating their personal aspirations through their partnerships, sex is not simply a mechanism for pleasure: its distractive faculties bleed into artistic creation, as both men sculpt their partners to fit mangled moulds.

Shosha and Contempt share in discussions of fate and agency: if time is brutal to everyone, what does this mean for the author? Does the licence which art bestows on people have a discernible ethical value if it degrades others and exists in hallucinations bounded by the mind? Removed from Greidinger’s and Molenti’s acted vanities, both authors convey that time make mistakes. “Time” as actor produces cyclical irony in both texts. Firstly, Greidinger and Molenti are professionally paralysed, despite their talents and fervour for the creation of novel cultural products. Their aspirations are shaped both by a sense of time running out and by the arbitrariness of success their less talented colleagues appear to enjoy. This blocks them from contented living, thus preventing their art from being reflexive and successful. Moravia and Singer underscore the licence Molenti and Greidinger have in love to underline their impotence in the real. Towards the close of the Shosha–

She listened to everything with the same sense of curiosity – children’s stories I had heard from my mother when I was five or six; sexual fantasies no Yiddish writer would have allowed himself to publish; my own hypotheses or dreams about God, world creation, immortality of the soul, the future of mankind, as well as reveries of triumph over Hitler and Stalin. I had constructed an airplane of a material whose atoms were do densely compressed, one square centimetre weighed thousands of tons. It flew at a speed of a million miles a minute. It could pierce mountains, bore through the earth, reach to the farthest planets.[3]

Shosha askes Greidinger, “And where would Mommy be?”

“I would give Mommy twenty million zlotys and she would live in a palace.”

How could this be?

I elaborated to Shosha the theory that world history was a book man could read only forward. He could never turn the pages of the book backward. But everything that had ever been still existed. Yppe lived somewhere. The hens, geese, and sucks the butchers in Yanash’s Court slaughtered each day still lived, clucked, quacked, and crowed on the other pages of the world book – the right-hand pages, since the world book was written in Yiddish, which reads from right to left.

This passage reminded me of an earlier moment in which Singer writes into Greidinger a fascination with Shosha’s “spiritual disorder,” which implies the multitudinous plumped worlds which co-exist in his metaphysics–

I had asked the confectioner for his best candy. The box was black with little gold stars. The chocolate lay in fluted paper cups, each of a different size and in its own niche.[4]

Shosha struggles to between the selection strikes me as a metaphor for Greidinger’s bind, caught between his own stars. Suspended before the future, he is paralysed by fixations (not least with Shosha). Materiality stands in for this conundrum; Greidinger’s gift to his fiancé rationalises the otherwise chaotic impulses driving his affections.[5] The choice to marry Shosha, as she holds his face in tiny hands, marriage stuns in its uncompromising logic. It serves to give his life meaning, once his inadequacy in “being a writer” fails to match his intellectual prowess and thus presses him to explore metrics of success more innovatively, through intimacy and child-like wonder. Marriage constitutes, for Greidinger, divorce from a cultural and personal milieu which rates its own cynicism and contradictions. His leap of faith reminds me of a sentiment of Horace invoked by both Montaigne and Francis Bacon in their treatise on knowledge and reality–

Dare to be wise […] time flows and will flow for ever, as an ever-rolling stream.[6]

It strikes me that those things which float to the bottom are often the most transcendental and least tangible, such as idealised love and care.

In this vein, the human menagerie of Marquez’s Hundred Years is unperturbed in their pursuit of intimacy even when knowledge of prophecy inked on Melquíades’ canvas enters public discourse. The grinding brutality of love after death after love in Macondo, where characters love so much for their care not to matter at all, allegorises life outside the sweltering town. The book convulses towards its conclusion, towards a divination spelled out under century-old sediment of human sorrow–

it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity upon earth.

Marquez’s prose strikes a fine balance of reportage and impressionism. His more journalistic prose for Momento and other publications offers a lens to his magical bent. In Ghosts of the Road, a 1981 piece written for El País, Marquez concedes the possibility of supernatural influence on the road. In his Sleeping Beauty on the Airplane (Proceso, 1982), Marquez fixes on a woman in a moment of indulgent fantasy–

I contemplated her many times inch by inch, and the only signs of life I could detect were the shadows of her dreams that passed across her forehead like clouds over water.

The projection of desire is a means to escape the reality of Marquez’s business trip; the sensuousness of his writing embodies the essence of feeling first. He secrets intimacy in circuitous syntax, teasing gems of tenderness in wonderous technicolour within paragraphs which span pages. One such late exposition of Aurieliano Segundo and Petra Cotes, where Marquez’s writing is at its most winding, elucidates living through love as something which happens between the lines:

… he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because trying to make her live him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lived to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people, they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

In Contempt, Molenti’s closing fantasy over Emilia demonstrates his most potent literary poise, highlighting the tension between true embodiment and its articulation in art. Within the Red Grotto–

Emilia was sitting quite still now, looking at me and following my movements with her eyes, in an attitude of sensual but patient docility, like a woman who is ready to give herself and is only awaiting the signal.

He paints onto her fantasies which has been years in germination. The revelation that he is in fact alone, or perhaps in the “company of a ghost,” is gilded. Denying their estrangement in a dazzling mirage, one that he may never have again for its unmatched brilliance. I borrow here from Emily Ogden in her recent On Not Knowing. In her essay “how to have a breakthrough”, Ogden questions the endurance of tradition once human hands have overlaid their original contexts through reverence. She describes a visit to the cave on Patmos in which John wrote the Book of Revelation, today gilded with “apotropaic” gold which, like a tinfoil hat, prohibits any future revelations in the hallowed space. In many ways, I think this notion is comparable to my initial address on institution and graduation; the trappings of historically inflected prestige deny that promise of potent realisation. Ogden aptly quotes from Revelation 2.3-4:

I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.

Ogden’s object is romantic breakthrough; I believe the same principle can be applied in our relationships to purpose or artistic commitment. The products we desire to make, like Greidinger’s plays and Molenti’s film criticism, become chimeras we chase in place of singular artistic effort, regardless of where this might instead lead. She writes that “Locking horns in contest, or patting heads and kissing cheeks with a nuzzling intimacy this is what we do between breakthroughs.” Although “Our aggression towards those we love might seem like a failure”, Ogden labels this behaviour differently:

They are where we land when the urgency departs from those words, we should do this all the time. The urgency has to depart. I do not what, all the time, to do this all the time. I have other work. I can’t just keep bleeding. The scab has to crust over. Taking love to be a contest, and taking it to be a refuge: these are the crusts that let us live with shattering things.

Perhaps I should be easier on myself. Growth happens between the lines, between the books I read and connections I draft. Whatever I write has little intrinsic value; it is particularly superficial if it only exists to be read.

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[1] Montaigne, On the education of children.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Shosha, 212.

[4] Shosha, 84.

[5] As a 1978 review of the novel in the New York Times.

[6] Montaigne On Education and also in Bacon’s Novum Organum, “Time like a river has brought down to us the light things that float on the surface, and has sunk what is weighty and solid.”