A Brief Update

I've recently finished reading 1493 by Charles Mann, another of my men's book club selections. It was interesting and informative and provocative in some very thoughtful ways about the interactions of human cultures with ourselves and our environment, what we sometimes call our ecosystems. In many respects, as Mann observes, there has been no going back once Columbus made contact with what was then the new world. (That part reminded me of my own earlier research on the idea of discovery in the early modern period.) Almost immediately we humans began sharing and spreading our habits and diseases and tastes in food and consumer culture. The then emergent world economy which thrived on sugar, silver, tobacco, and slaves, has come to dominate our existence and overwhelm the earth we continue to cling to with an ever weakening grasp of understanding.

Once I put 1493 aside, I picked up a copy of Nabokov's Speak, Memory, the next book on our reading list, but in the meantime I'd also started reading Christopher Isherwood's Diaries: The Sixties, a copy of which I'd come across while browsing in a local used book store. (Yes, we still have a few, even in Texas.) Once I began with Isherwood, I was hooked. His style is so genuine and casual. In fact, I'm often struck by how similar reading his diary entries is to re-reading my own, except that I have no similar social adventures to report, nor do I know and spend time visiting with the likes of Aldous Huxley, Stephen Spender, Wystan Auden, Morgan Forster, John Osborne, Tony Richardson, Charles Laughton, Glenn Ford, Hope Lange, Tennesee Williams, Julie Harris, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Parker, and quite literally scores if not hundreds of only slightly less well known people contributing to arts and culture in England and the U.S. In one entry I just read, sometime in late 1961, Isherwood mentions that an amusing young man named Andy Warhol wanted to draw a portrait of his feet.

I'm not usually interested in gossip concerning the rich and famous, but there is something so familiar and mundane in Isherwood's tone, and his eye for the telling detail and ear for the memorable quotation are so well calibrated, that I am fascinated and charmed even by his hypochondria and endless analysis of his relationship with the young artist, Don Bachardy. It's probably still too soon to know whether I'll keep up with this, but I did order a copy of the earlier volume that covers the period of his life from 1939 to 1960. And that volume may even prove to be more interesting to me with respect to my ongoing project of reading the works of British authors who came of age between the two world wars. Isherwood was very much a part of that generation, and as I have already said, knew many of the key figures I'm interested in. Reading his diaries from the 1960s has made me realize that many of those writers lived into the 1960s and even later. Isherwood himself lived into the 1980s, and died in 1986 at the age of 81.

Reading these diaries, and also Nabokov's Speak, Memory, has served another purpose as well. It has made me regain my interest in keeping my own little journal up to date with all the rather mundane activities of my life, primarily as a record for myself. I've already derived a great deal of pleasure and amusement from re-reading my journals that I began keeping when I first went to work at the Endowment. And more recently I was very entertained by the record I'd kept of my retirement and preparations for our move back to Texas. Someone once said that the faintest writing is better than the best memory, or something like that, and certainly as I age I'm convinced that it's true. But in any case, I enjoy personal writing, and I'm now more than ever interested in telling my own story, so all of this is part of my continuing fascination with genres such as essays, journals, diaries, and memoirs.

I suppose even this blog I've been keeping falls into that same category. Certainly, it's not like most other blogs I've seen, nor has it ever been intended to be. My inspiration has been Montaigne, and these are my essays, my sallies of the mind. Since I added the feature of recently popular posts on the left, I've been amused and often mystified by the things that appear there. I wonder how and why some of them turn up. But I also get a sort of kick out of seeing them and going back and looking at the older posts, trying to understand why some of them might have suddenly reappeared. Is it just random searches? Is anyone actually reading these things? I guess I don't really know, nor do I care very much. But it is interesting, and as Roland Barthes once observed, we write in order to read ourselves, so that's okay too.