Books for Living

  But when I look over at my copy of Song of Solomon (which sits on a proper shelf, not on the floor), I remember what it feels like to read something truly great, which often inspires me to search for books that can hold a place beside it.

  A Little Life

  Hugging

  I READ Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life in three days. It’s a long novel, but I was so involved in the lives of the characters, I felt for them so keenly, that I didn’t want to stop reading. I barely ate; I didn’t answer the phone; I didn’t check my emails. People often talk about reading a book feverishly. This was that—I was not quite myself when reading it, a little delirious. When I got close to the end, I called in sick to work so I could finish. When I was finally done, I wanted—I needed—to talk to others who had read it. One friend told me that all she wanted after finishing was a hug. I didn’t want a hug; I wanted to talk. But that’s because I’m not a hugger.

  The world is filled now with huggers. Maybe that’s because we live in such a technological age that people crave human touch. Men and women whom you barely know hug you hello and goodbye. Kids in school hug each other. Even in business meetings, people will give you a hug if they’ve sat with you in meetings a few times before (though not if they work at the same company). I really don’t like being hugged by anyone other than my husband. People regard this as a character flaw. One friend even devoted an hour of time with his analyst to discussing why I didn’t like to hug. I gather he takes it personally.

  Whenever I see reports about the autism spectrum, one of the symptoms frequently mentioned is aversion to touch. And I can see how, if taken to an extreme, this aversion could be hugely problematic. But it’s also natural that some people like less contact than others. And we shouldn’t be forced to embrace when we don’t want to. Or be judged hostile or cold. You can be a warm abstainer from hugging just as you can be a chilly hugger.

  Lin Yutang wasn’t a hugger, either. He wasn’t even a handshaker. In a chapter called “Some Curious Western Customs,” he rails against shaking hands. “Of all the ridiculous Western customs, I think that of shaking hands is one of the worst…I object to this custom for hygienic and many other reasons.” He starts with the hygiene—the consumptive coughing of a stranger into his own hand and then that person stretching it out to grasp yours—and continues on to the whole question of how you are supposed to divine the character of your new acquaintance by the way she or he shakes your hand. “Some novelists profess that you can tell a man’s character from his type of handshake, distinguishing between the assertive, the retiring, the dishonest and the weak and clammy hands which instinctively repel one. I wish to be spared the trouble of analyzing a person’s moral character every time I have to meet him, or reading from the degree of his pressure the increase or decrease of his affection towards me.”

  I never thought about hugging much until I read Edward T. Hall’s The Hidden Dimension. Hall was a cultural anthropologist who worked both in universities and for the state department, advising diplomats who were about to be posted abroad. One of Hall’s great insights was that attitudes toward personal space are both personal and cultural. In Italy, for example, he observed that people stand very close to one another when they talk. In America, or in pre-hugging America, they tend to keep more distance in similar situations. He describes an Italian and an American at a cocktail party with the Italian essentially chasing the American around the room as the American tries to keep a certain distance between them and the Italian seeks to close the gap.

  Hall also points out other areas where cultures differ when it comes to how we feel about the space we inhabit. For example, he notes that Germans tend to work with their office doors closed. An open office door in Germany means you aren’t working. Americans, on the other hand, work with them open. A closed door means something sensitive or secret is being discussed—or that people are conspiring. So when Germans and Americans work together—in a traditional workplace with separate offices—the Americans think the Germans are conspiring against them, and the Germans think the Americans are goofing off.

  Hall had earlier described how animals naturally space themselves with precision—for example, birds in flight. He described how if you crowd animals even slightly it causes them to become vicious and to turn on one another. And how something as simple as the placement of furniture in a room or public space changes what happens in it. Hall contrasts the lack of conversation in “spaces such as railway waiting rooms in which the seating provisions are formally arranged in fixed rows” with the way that the “tables in a European sidewalk cafe tend to bring people together.”

  In a chapter near the middle of this book, Hall turns toward the language of space—and then the literature of space. He writes, “Writers, like painters, are often concerned with space. Their success in communicating perception depends upon the use of visual and other clues to convey different degrees of closeness. In light of all that had been done with language, it seemed possible, therefore, that a study of literature might produce data on space perception against which I could check information obtained from other sources.” He goes on to present passages from King Lear, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, from Mark Twain, Saint-Exupéry, Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, and Franz Kafka.

  Here is the passage he quotes from Walden:

  One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, was the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. Also our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them…In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear….If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each other’s breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully we want to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate.

  Hall cites this as confirmation of points he’s made earlier, writing of Thoreau, “His sensitivity to the need to stay outside the olfactory and thermal zones (the zones within which one can smell breath and feel the heat from another’s body), and his pushing against the wall to get more space in which to voice the big thought, point up some of the unconscious distance-sensing and distance-setting mechanisms.”

  We all have these mechanisms—and they are deeply programmed by culture and nature and nurture. We move differently through space. Some of us swagger—like frat-boy athletes leaping up against each other to bump chests—and carry on through the day with the same bold conviction that we have the right to take up not just the area we occupy but the air all around us. On the subway, in airplanes, in parks, I’m always amazed at the way that some people, usually but not always men, command the area around them: with spread legs or splayed elbows or outstretched feet. Others shrink back into themselves, always finding their way to the edge of the room, the last row, avoiding concerts and ball games and places where they are certain to bump up against others.

  Hall also includes an extraordinary passage from Samuel Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh, in which a mother uses proximity to extract a confession from her son. By sitting close to him, “taking hold of his hand and placing it within her own,” she has him just where she wants him and needs him to be. As she strokes his hair, he becomes guilt-ridden and anxious—and he winces, something his mother sees right away. Proximity is love and danger. As Hall has earlier pointed out, the lion mounts a stool simply because it is in his path as he is stalking a trainer who has invaded the lion’s personal space. This per
sonal space can be measured in centimeters—Hall calls it “critical distance.” One step closer and the lion would leap for the trainer’s throat. One step back, and the lion stays on the stool.

  In A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara writes about four friends, following them from right after college until well into middle age. The two most extreme characters are at the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to touch and space. One, JB, an artist, is an ebullient space-taker; the other, Jude, a lawyer, is a man who can’t bear to be touched. Over the course of the novel, Jude at times allows people close and at other times withdraws. Jude’s dearest friend is Willem, an actor. The author writes of one time when Willem saw Jude and “reached over and hugged him very close, which he knew Jude didn’t like but which he had already decided he would start doing anyway.” And later, again about Jude, that “he was more skittish than ever about being touched, especially…by [his mentor] Harold; a month ago, when Harold had visited, Jude had practically danced out of the way to keep Harold from hugging him.” Harold and Willem recognize that Jude can’t help this. In the latter scene, Willem feels so bad for Harold when Harold’s hug is rejected by Jude that Willem walks over and gives Harold a hug.

  A Little Life is one of the most engrossing books I’ve ever read, and also one of the most upsetting. Over the course of the novel you learn about the horrific physical and sexual abuse Jude endured as a child, abuse that has so scarred him that he feels compelled to continue to scar himself. In fact, Jude is covered with scars—from his childhood and from his own mutilations. He’s also broken inside—convinced that he’s repulsive in every way. The reader, however, knows that he’s beautiful. And that he’s strong. The reader learns his story long before any of his three best friends do. Much of the suspense comes from waiting to see if he can ever open up and share with them something of his life. There’s also a defining incident from his childhood that is shared with the reader only at the very end.

  It’s a novel that asks very big questions about our ability to escape our pasts. But as much as it tells a tale of incredible pain and suffering, it’s also a story of the transformative and sustaining power of friendship. There is an adoption that had me sobbing—happily. And then there’s an accident that wrecked me completely.

  When we say a work of art has an emotional effect on us, we frequently say it touched us. Or it moved us. That is, it invaded our space or caused us to change our space.

  Ultimately, one of the things that I found most moving in A Little Life was the way Jude’s friends wrestled with his desire not to be touched and tolerated for decades his determination, healthy or not, to keep his story to himself. When should we interfere in the lives of our friends? What are the privileges of pain? When is withdrawal self-preservation and when is it emotional blackmail? These are just some of the questions the novel raises.

  We all need space. Some of us need it more than others. For some, like Jude, there’s a powerful reason. For others, like me, it’s simply the way we’re wired, part of who we are.

  Edward T. Hall doesn’t make value judgments. He just observes. In the animal kingdom, he writes, “Some species huddle together and require physical contact with each other. Others completely avoid touching. No apparent logic governs the category into which a species falls. Contact creatures include the walrus, the hippopotamus, the pig, the brown bat, the parakeet, and the hedgehog among many other species. The horse, the dog, the cat, the rat, the muskrat, the hawk, and the blackheaded gull are non-contact species. Curiously enough, closely related animals may belong to different categories. The great Emperor penguin is a contact species…The smaller Adelie penguin is a non-contact species.”

  Admittedly, I am a non-contact creature, and yet books have shown me time and again that you don’t need corporality to touch someone. If you go to give me a hug, I might react somewhat like Jude—for no better reason than Lin Yutang cited when explaining his aversion to handshaking. But if you tell me a heartfelt story, in person or in print, you can touch me.

  Bird by Bird

  Feeling Sensitive

  I WAS ONCE spending time with a friend who suddenly announced, “I’m bored and I’m angry.” I asked her why she’d blurted that out. She told me that she was bored sitting around with me and angry because she’d wanted to go for a walk and no one had wanted to go with her. I thought her honesty was terrific. At that moment, I was reminded of a college friend who had taken a life course called Direct Centering, which soon proved to be a scary cult. She proudly announced that, thanks to this program, she could now tell people exactly how she felt about them. If she was angry, she could tell them so; if she felt a sexual attraction, she could also say that. Luckily, I was off the hook on both counts: she was neither attracted to me nor angry with me.

  I wanted to ask her what she would do if she was both angry with and sexually attracted to the same person at the same time. What would she say? I also was curious as to whether there were any emotions other than rage and lust that were permissible; there didn’t seem to be.

  When I compared my two friends I had a realization: It’s always useful to know what others are feeling, but sometimes it’s not a bad idea to keep your feelings to yourself.

  Much of life is spent trying to divine the emotions of those around us. I texted someone an hour ago and I haven’t heard back. Does that mean she’s mad at me? I thought her phone message was a bit abrupt, and I always “like” her posts on Facebook and she never “likes” mine back. Did I do something wrong? They didn’t invite me over and they invited everyone else. Do we have a problem? Was she giving me the stink-eye? Why does he now sign his emails “Best” when it used to be “Warmest”?

  And we spend much of life quietly simmering; we want to share but we don’t, for fear of sounding peevish or petty or just because we prefer to sulk in silence. We’ve also all probably been burned at one time or another when we have expressed our feelings. (Hollywood loves to make a certain kind of movie where a character suddenly can only tell the truth. Chaos ensues. Just watch Liar Liar, a 1997 Jim Carrey movie about a lawyer who suddenly finds himself unable to lie, for one example of this genre.)

  We communicate with one another far more frequently than we ever have before, giving occasion for hundreds more daily interactions, each ripe for misinterpretation.

  So what to do? How to walk the line between boorish indifference to others and living in a state of constant anxiety about whether we have or haven’t offended, between letting others know how we are feeling and burdening them with information they don’t need or want?

  When it comes to these kinds of questions, I often turn to Anne Lamott for guidance. I’ve gained more practical wisdom from her nine nonfiction books than I have from any other living writer. In her nonfiction she blends memoir and advice, chronicling the evolution of her own Christian faith, her journey through addiction and sobriety, and how she came to create community and family along the way—and she tells readers frankly what she’s been taught and what she had to learn. She’s written books about the death of her father from cancer, her son’s first year, and being a grandmother to her son’s son. She’s told stories about her friends’ lives with cancer and ALS. And she tells you exactly how she feels.

  Lamott’s book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is one of the few books I read once every few years. It has lots of advice that’s seemingly aimed at writers: about writing shitty (pardon the French, as my grandmother used to say) first drafts (just to get something down on paper); about the danger of perfectionism; about how you are going to be jealous of more successful authors, and you just have to deal with that. But, as promised in the subtitle, just about all of the advice applies not only to writing but also to life.

  One of the most useful bits of wisdom comes in the story Lamott tells to explain why she gave this book its odd title:

  Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’
d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

  So whenever I’m thinking that a task is too big to tackle, or that I’ve procrastinated so much that it’s no longer possible, I think of Anne and her older brother and their father—and then I start to work on it bird by bird. Clean our apartment (which often resembles a frat house, boxer shorts and dirty mugs strewn everywhere) because there are guests coming in an hour? How to get that done? Bird by bird. Or, rather: boxer by boxer.

  Anne Lamott walks readers through moral and spiritual and practical dilemmas in her life and the lives of others, mostly people she knows but also people she’s read about in books and seen on the news. As she explores her life and theirs, she gives me a map for walking through my own. When my mother was dying of cancer, we both found ourselves turning to Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith, which we’d first read when it came out in 1999. Lamott writes that the two best prayers are quite simple: “Help me, help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I used both again and again during my mother’s last months, though I also wasn’t above asking for more specific blessings, like a few more months with my mother.

  In a more recent book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, she added a third prayer: the “Wow” that is the last word of the title. This is the prayer that helps you acknowledge all the wonder and blessings around: petals in spring; a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in a museum; a dance by Fred Astaire or Pina Bausch. There are “lowercase wows”—like “clean sheets after a hard day.” And “uppercase Wows. Yosemite. Fireworks.” Whether something is upper- or lowercase or a wow at all depends on us. I try to be aware of the “Wow” prayer at least once a day but usually forget. It’s much easier to remember to pray when life is going badly, or we’ve just been given a gift, than simply to stop from time to time to acknowledge how much awesomeness is often around us.