Yesterday was a day when it all fell apart. I had written a post, gone to Walmart to buy cardstock and ice cream, and then come home. A wave of fatigue hit, and I slept for an hour. Then the fatigue turned to weakness and exhaustion, which was especially bad when I stood. It was annoying, because I was also peeing like crazy.
It was time for the alcoholic discount, which basically means I can do anything I like (barring illegal activity) as long as I go to bed sober. I can waste a day; I can’t waste a life.
So I spent the afternoon rereading Travels with Charley and discovered that though I had read the book several times thirty or forty years ago, I still knew whole passages virtually verbatim. I knew about the drunk / hungover vet that Steinbeck took Charley to see, but had forgotten that it was in Spokane. I remember about the young man living with his father—the kid wanted to be a hair stylist (this was North Dakota, perhaps), the father was scornful. Steinbeck was in the middle, as we all were, in a sense. Without saying a word to suggest it, the picture of a young, confused, homosexual-but-doesn’t-know-it-yet (or does he?) boy who wants the intimacy of women emerged plainly. For me, at least, now. Back then, did I pick that up?
I’ve probably watched Downton Abbey as much as I’ve read Travels, but really, I remember nothing of the series. Is it that I was drunk at the time? That I was older?
I have another theory, that conveniently excuses the fact that I’m an old drunk. There’s surprisingly little research on this topic, but neurologically, it seems that reading books activates different parts of your brain than reading the same text on screen. That, at least, is what I remembered from when I was anguishing over the fact that I couldn’t proofread a book I had written on the computer. I had to go off and print the damn thing, filled with grammatical / syntactical errors and all. Why couldn’t I just do it at the computer?
I can’t find the article, of course, but I have lived the experience, and yesterday was no exception. Except for the fact that I was trotting off every ten minutes to stand fainting and breathless over the toilet, it was a delightful afternoon. Here I am, sober, and back in the fight. And here’s what I did find, that backs up (sort of) my conclusion:
“There’s not much [neuroscientific research] on the reading of actual texts,” Mangen says. However, existing research does offer some clues. In a 2009 study, the marketing research company Millward Brown found the brain processes physical and digital materials differently. Participants viewed advertisements on a screen and on a printed card while undergoing an fMRI scan. Print materials were more likely to activate the the medial prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, both involved in processing emotions. Reading print also generated more activity in the parietal cortex, which processes visual and spatial cues.
Reading a book, of course, is utterly different from reading at a computer. But what about reading on my iPad? I can take it, open the Kindle application, sprawl on the couch, drink some coffee—and the experience would be just the same as if it were a book, not some electronic device Steve Jobs dreamed that we all needed. They’re basically the same size—if anything, the iPad is lighter and easier to manipulate.
Not so, and if I have the patience to do anything—like sit down at regular times during my week to scramble / unscramble my thoughts onto a screen that may someday be a book—it’s probably because of reading books. They slowed me down, and they allowed me to do that most wonderful thing—mull.
To mull (the word, by the way, comes from the Latin verb “to chew,” and cropped up for the first time in the 19th century) is just another word for woolgathering (another wonderful word). I learned it from my mother, who taught it to me over breakfast at her house in the woods. She and I needed to titrate the level of caffeine to nutrients before any speech was possible—and so I watched her, as I drank my coffee and she ate her yogurt and granola. She would peer into the middle distance of her woods, and enter a meditative state that even I could feel, groggy and often hungover. The French would call it une rêverie, but it was a working dream, if that’s possible. It made the rest of her day possible, and on those rare occasions when the rêverie was impossible, we all felt it.
I do it still, for twenty minutes or so, after the cat has been taken care of and some minimal grooming gets done. Then I go off to my meeting, and I can face the day. Are any kids woolgathering, these days? Or are they too busy with their phones?
I learned a couple of new words that Steinbeck obviously assumed I knew—“tarn,” which is a small mountain lake, and “sough,” the sound of wind through trees. I remembered a different time, that we imagined would never end. I thought of how unconnected we were, and how hard and wonderful it was, at various times.
Steinbeck was lonely, which is part of the journey. He couldn’t call, of course, because calls and telegrams at that time meant that someone had died (telegram) or that somebody was near death in the hospital (that was a call). Phone calls cost FIVE DOLLARS to call New York for three minutes. A local call was a dime. (Hamburgers were 50 cents at Mc
Donalds...)
So Steinbeck wrote letters to his friends and his wife , as he said, to spread the loneliness around. He had been bored, but he may have been something else, as he parked his van by the side of a tarn (we all know that word, don’t we?) and her the sough through the trees.
In fact, the sough by the tarn must have been especially (brace yourself) “impactful*” because it was surely in the dark, alone, in nature. He was probably out walking Charley, whose bladder is just as bad as mine. How many people have spent the night alone, in a cabin or tent, in the woods? How many people know that deer, when they are moving slowly, calmly, often pause and snort? It was a primeval sound, I thought, when I first heard it. And even though the sound may be exactly the same, emerging from my cell phone under fluorescent lights, the experience wouldn’t.
Very few people know what darkness is, nowadays.
Very few people have heard true silence.
And very few of us, still, have had the experience so familiar to our ancestors—being alone, unprotected, in total darkness while hearing… an animal?
A MAN?
A MAN WITH A GUN????
For many more millennia than cell phones have been around, men and women have cowered in the darkness, assailed (hopefully) by nothing more terrible than their imaginations (and that was quite enough). They lived with fear as much as boredom. They learned courage, perhaps, from the terror, and the relief of seeing it drain away into the dawn.
I should be courageous, too—since I have passed the night and entered the day alive. I’ll also know fear, of course, and might well feel it if I were in Los Angeles. There, 300 National Guard soldiers remain from their early deployment in June (it’s now September), during which time the legal system has been grinding ever so slowly. But now we have a decision from a judge who happens to be the younger brother of a Supreme Court justice, now retired.
The judge, Charles Breyer, swatted Trump down in the first two paragraphs of the 52-page ruling. He said that Trump was trying to create a police state, and that the whole damn thing was illegal. It was a wonderful, wonderful victory indeed for all of us who would read, comprehend, and obey a court order.
Will Trump?
If he’s smart, he will, I think, but who am I to say? No one—and I can tell you that because I now know a lot about The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli. I’ve never read the book, but it’s clear that I have to. The very fact that I am uncomfortable with power, and am horrified by the apparently clinical and value-free appraisal of what it is, how to get it, and how to keep it…well, I should read it. I could join quite a diverse company: Tony Blair (no surprise) and a rap singer called 50 Cent. 50 Cent attributed his phenomenal success to Machiavelli, since the world of rap music is apparently even more fraught than 16th century Florence.
Who knew?
So now I have a book to bind, and a music clip to listen to that is not Palestrina, something that would be utterly familiar and pleasing to Machiavelli’s ears . (And the Missa Papae Marcelli is glorious.) And I will probably know the answer to the question: can Trump be Trump and still hang on to power? Does he have the cunning wit and the self-discipline, to make a strategic retreat? Or will he send even MORE troops in, just because?
Whatever—I may never know. I was terrified when I heard the abrupt snort of deer ripping the silence in the pitch-dark woods. I didn’t know what it was.
Today, I know it’s Trump, and I’m just as scared.
Far more, actually.
(*The word "impact" is a noun, not a verb or an adjective.)
