Living it out, The Lost and interviewing
I mentioned in my brief review of The Wanting Seed this week that it's a bleak book.
I live in Central New York, which is about the bleakest of places – not for the economic troubles, which I realize a lot of mid-sized cities are stuck with, but for the weather. We have positively lovely summers. Two months of sunshine spattered with a couple of thunderstorms.
The thing is, this area gets something on the order of 66 days of sunshine a year. And if two months of them come during the summer, well, that leaves six days of sunshine, give or take, during the other 10 months of the year.
We're in one of those stretches now, when everything is the same color. The dirty snow sits gray on the side of the road. The formerly black road pavement is rendered gray by salt. The sky is rendered gray by clouds. And the air is rendered gray by snow blowing around but never really hitting the ground.
Bleak.
It's why the thinking gets serious this time of year.
Because I don't have my copy of The Wanting Seed handy, I'm going to paraphrase from the book. The scene is two soldiers who are to head off to battle in the morning to fight an unknown enemy. "Life," says one to the other, "is about postponing death until you get to die in the manner and at the time of your choosing."
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I've been reading The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn a little at a time, because for me, it's a very heavy book. Very heavy. I've been sprinkling in light fiction, and reading it much more quickly. Here are some previous posts about the book.
The people Mendelsohn is searching for, well, they tried to postpone death, but it didn't work. Sometime between 1942 and 1944, they were dead, and no one's exactly sure what happened – if they were there, as survivors note, they would have been dead, too.
People who don't interview others routinely think that the hardest part is coming up with questions. Depending on the interview, what's difficult varies, but unless you're talking to someone with a 15-word vocabulary, coming up with questions is pretty much never an issue.
The hardest parts of interviewing tend to be (a) getting your subject to stick to the topic you're interested in, and (b) getting your subject to trust you.
Story Corps works well – now that we have easy-to-use technology – because the interviewer and subject tend to know each other well and have an idea of what they want to talk about. In fact, they've probably practiced.
Actually, (a) tends to be most difficult when the subject has some sort of agenda – if it's a political candidate, say.
But if you walk into a stranger's house, or shake a stranger's hand across a café table, and you know you have a limited amount of time with this person, you go in expecting to have a very intense conversation about something very personal, write something you hope does the story justice, and nine times out of 10, you'll never talk to the subject again.
Mendelsohn isn't doing exactly that. He follows up with his subjects, keeps in touch with them. But here he is, sitting in a living room in Israel, listening (through a translator) to a woman talk about someone she knew 70 years ago. Listening to this woman talk about the moment she told her friend – Mendelsohn's long lost cousin he was born 30 years to late to have ever known – you better kiss me goodbye now, because God knows when we'll see each other again.
Because this woman whose living room he has invaded, this woman never told her good friend that she was going into hiding and where, because the fewer people who knew about your plans, the better chance you had of surviving, of postponing death.
Everybody has secrets, and I'm sure everybody has secrets they keep from them closest to them. But secrets that you keep because maybe those closest to you will die but you won't? If we're ever in that situation, friend, kiss me goodbye, don't tell me where you're going, and I won't tell you where I'm going.
I live in Central New York, which is about the bleakest of places – not for the economic troubles, which I realize a lot of mid-sized cities are stuck with, but for the weather. We have positively lovely summers. Two months of sunshine spattered with a couple of thunderstorms.
The thing is, this area gets something on the order of 66 days of sunshine a year. And if two months of them come during the summer, well, that leaves six days of sunshine, give or take, during the other 10 months of the year.
We're in one of those stretches now, when everything is the same color. The dirty snow sits gray on the side of the road. The formerly black road pavement is rendered gray by salt. The sky is rendered gray by clouds. And the air is rendered gray by snow blowing around but never really hitting the ground.
Bleak.
It's why the thinking gets serious this time of year.
Because I don't have my copy of The Wanting Seed handy, I'm going to paraphrase from the book. The scene is two soldiers who are to head off to battle in the morning to fight an unknown enemy. "Life," says one to the other, "is about postponing death until you get to die in the manner and at the time of your choosing."
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I've been reading The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn a little at a time, because for me, it's a very heavy book. Very heavy. I've been sprinkling in light fiction, and reading it much more quickly. Here are some previous posts about the book.
The people Mendelsohn is searching for, well, they tried to postpone death, but it didn't work. Sometime between 1942 and 1944, they were dead, and no one's exactly sure what happened – if they were there, as survivors note, they would have been dead, too.
People who don't interview others routinely think that the hardest part is coming up with questions. Depending on the interview, what's difficult varies, but unless you're talking to someone with a 15-word vocabulary, coming up with questions is pretty much never an issue.
The hardest parts of interviewing tend to be (a) getting your subject to stick to the topic you're interested in, and (b) getting your subject to trust you.
Story Corps works well – now that we have easy-to-use technology – because the interviewer and subject tend to know each other well and have an idea of what they want to talk about. In fact, they've probably practiced.
Actually, (a) tends to be most difficult when the subject has some sort of agenda – if it's a political candidate, say.
But if you walk into a stranger's house, or shake a stranger's hand across a café table, and you know you have a limited amount of time with this person, you go in expecting to have a very intense conversation about something very personal, write something you hope does the story justice, and nine times out of 10, you'll never talk to the subject again.
Mendelsohn isn't doing exactly that. He follows up with his subjects, keeps in touch with them. But here he is, sitting in a living room in Israel, listening (through a translator) to a woman talk about someone she knew 70 years ago. Listening to this woman talk about the moment she told her friend – Mendelsohn's long lost cousin he was born 30 years to late to have ever known – you better kiss me goodbye now, because God knows when we'll see each other again.
Because this woman whose living room he has invaded, this woman never told her good friend that she was going into hiding and where, because the fewer people who knew about your plans, the better chance you had of surviving, of postponing death.
Everybody has secrets, and I'm sure everybody has secrets they keep from them closest to them. But secrets that you keep because maybe those closest to you will die but you won't? If we're ever in that situation, friend, kiss me goodbye, don't tell me where you're going, and I won't tell you where I'm going.
Labels: anthony burgess, books, daniel mendelsohn, death, the lost, wanting seed
posted by Josh at
15:14
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