Books for Living
Reading Nafisi prompted me to search out other modern Iranian authors, leading me to Shahrnush Parsipur and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, to name just two. They opened up new worlds to me, as Nafisi had done for her students. She also inspired me to read more Nabokov.
A book doesn’t need to be thick enough to stop bullets. It doesn’t need to lower your cholesterol. It doesn’t even need to be a force for social good, though it’s tremendous when it is. It just needs to be “an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance.” It just needs to be the book you need when you need it.
“More More More,” Said the Baby
Staying Satisfied
THERE’S A PICTURE BOOK by the beloved children’s book author Vera B. Williams called “More More More,” Said the Baby. It features three young children of different ages and shows how we can never get enough or give enough love. After Little Guy’s father throws him into the air and catches him and kisses his belly button, Little Guy says, “More. More. More.” And after Little Pumpkin’s grandmother tastes each of her grandchild’s toes, Little Pumpkin laughs and says, “More. More. More.” And after Little Bird’s mother gives her a kiss on each of her sleepy eyes, all Little Bird can utter is, “Mmm. Mmmm. Mmmm,” as she falls asleep. In each pair, adult and child, the adult praises the child in word or song and holds the child close. It’s a book overflowing with love, as represented by the words and the pictures, which are painted in vibrant colors: blues and purples and oranges and magenta. And as with all the great children’s books—Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak or Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold—this book delights children but also has uncanny resonance for adults.
Almost daily, the phrase “ ‘More, more, more’ said the baby,” pops into my head—though it’s taken on a different meaning for me. That same quality in children that is so human and adorable becomes something of a horror in adults. In Vera B. Williams’s wonderful world, adults give love and get it back multiplied many times over in the happiness of the children in their lives. But not all babies stop behaving like babies. The world is filled with people for whom enough attention, enough celebrity, enough wealth, enough power, enough adulation, is never enough. “ ‘More, more, more’ said the baby.” And when that baby is an adult, it’s not at all cute.
When you read of global business leaders, with decades of achievement, being tripped up by an expense account run amok; or of politicians setting aside their principles to get an internship for a child or a sinecure for a spouse; or of beloved entertainers humiliating themselves on reality shows to stay in the limelight a few months more—then “ ‘More, more, more’ said the baby” is the phrase that comes to mind.
But the examples don’t need to be this extreme. There’s the boss who again and again just has to take credit for an idea that is 95 percent due to the inspiration of one of her team members and 5 percent improved by her own tweak of it. (Buddhist business book author Marshall Goldsmith is withering when he writes about this managerial flaw in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.) Or the employee who dies a little every time a colleague is praised. Or the friend who “had a horrible morning,” solely because the person in front of him at Starbucks took a crazy long time to place her order.
This is not the justifiable rage of the dispossessed; this is the peevishness of those for whom enough is not enough.
Of course, it’s plenty easy to decry this tendency in others. It’s a little more painful and difficult to accept that the baby crying “More, more, more” is sometimes me.
I sometimes lie awake at night with alternating worries: Did I push too forcefully ahead at work, steamrolling someone else? Or did I let myself off the hook too easily, content to sit in the back when maybe I had something to say or add? And I expect that others might see my choices differently—charging me far more frequently with the crime of pushing too forcefully rather than neglecting to make myself heard.
The desire for more is certainly one of the things that moves mankind forward. Marie Curie didn’t say after her first Nobel Prize, “Gee, I guess I can call it a day.” In fact, she and her husband were so committed to their research that they didn’t even go to fetch the Nobel. She continued soldiering away in her labs, discovering radium and polonium, among other things, and earning herself a second Nobel—becoming the first person ever to win two of them.
And Steve Jobs certainly could have relaxed (with money and reputation to spare) long before launching the iPhone and changing forever the world and what we do with our hands all day.
So how do we distinguish between the kind of “More, more, more” that drives the world forward, and the kind that causes us to lose our way? And how do we know when it’s time to press on—to demand, to insist, to persevere—and when it’s time to ease up?
The answer is that we usually don’t. History has very few elegant exits.
The most famous example from classical times of a person who was happy to relinquish the stage is the dictator Cincinnatus. According to the Roman historian Livy, Cincinnatus spent a mere two weeks and two days as absolute ruler of the Roman Republic. This allowed him enough time to make the changes that he thought needed to be made to protect the city of Rome and its patrician/republican system. He then voluntarily relinquished his absolute authority and retired to the countryside. George Washington was a big fan of Cincinnatus. There was actually nothing in the United States Constitution during Washington’s time to keep him from continuing to run for office term after term after term; following the example of his idol, he voluntarily stepped aside after two.
But given that Cincinnatus was, at heart, a principled and honorable fellow, I find his example less startling than other, less celebrated ones. In Lives, Plutarch’s dual biographies of celebrated Greeks and Romans, the author (who was writing in first century Greece) chronicled a few. Perhaps his oddest and most extreme case of a person deciding to step away from the public stage is the later Roman dictator Sulla. He took part in one of the ancient world’s great civil wars and triumphed in it, marching an army into Rome to seize control in 82 BCE. He slaughtered his enemies and gave himself full powers as dictator. But then he used those powers to strengthen the constitutional government and stepped aside. Plutarch (as translated by Aubrey Stewart and George Long) wrote of him:
Sulla indeed trusted so far to his good fortune rather than to his acts, that, though he had put many persons to death, and had made so many innovations and changes in the state, he laid down the dictatorship, and allowed the people to have the full control of the consular elections, without going near them, and all the while walking about in the Forum, and exposing himself to any one who might choose to call him to account, just like a private person.
Having relinquished all power, Sulla was able to spend time with his wife, his actor-boyfriend, and a louche assortment of dancers and lute players. He also set about writing his memoirs. Sulla was not a widely beloved fellow during his lifetime. Or after. But what makes his retirement so dramatic was that his ambition was so epic. He was someone who sought ever more until one day he decided simply to stop. One of the mysteries that has endured is what made him do that; what made him decide that the time had come to go from being the most powerful person in his world to a regular citizen.
It’s far easier to give up something you never really wanted, as Cincinnatus did, than to relinquish something you’ve fought and campaigned for all your life. For me, Sulla may not be the more inspiring figure, but he’s the more relevant one.
And for me, Plutarch’s Lives will remain a book that helps me untangle the thorniest issues of our times: finding the line between more and enough.
But that’s not the only reason to read it. There is no better soap opera in the history of history or literature. All of the television serials of our times from Dallas and Dynasty, with their wealthy oil clans, to Empire (note the title), chronicling the lives of a ruling family in the music industry, to Game of Thrones, with its
weird warring kingdoms—all of these are heirs to Plutarch’s Lives. You don’t know infighting and betrayal until you’ve read the way that Plutarch chronicles the shenanigans behind the warriors and politicians who ruled ancient Rome and Greece. Plutarch tells stories in pairs—alternating Greeks and Romans, and pausing periodically to sum up the main similarities and differences he is trying to highlight. He is interested in telling and showing his readers who was perfidious and who was brave, who behaved with honor and who carried on in the opposite way. For the most part, though, the people who behaved badly are vastly more entertaining to read about than the noble ones. Plutarch was at his best chronicling the worst.
There are some things of which you can never have too much or give too much—like love. That’s why I keep Vera B. Williams’s “More More More,” Said the Baby close at hand. But for most everything else, more can easily become too much. And that’s why I keep Plutarch’s Lives next to it.
A Journey Around My Room
Traveling
LIN YUTANG WAS a constant traveler. In The Importance of Living, he bemoaned the fact that traveling had once been a pleasure but now had become an industry. The problem was that people didn’t really travel anymore. What they did was “false” travel.
According to Lin, there are three types of false travel. The first is to journey abroad with the idea of traveling to improve one’s mind; Lin was of the belief that it’s actually quite difficult to improve your mind. He ripped into “the institution of tourist guides, the most intolerable chattering kind of interfering busybodies” he could imagine. He wasn’t particularly interested in who did what when, and couldn’t understand why adults would subject themselves to being herded about and lectured at like schoolchildren. He was also dubious about the quality of information that most guides provide.
For Lin, the second type of false travel is to travel “for conversation.” That is, taking a trip so that you can bore your friends with stories of it afterward. The American humorist Robert Benchley, who wrote for The New Yorker from the mid-1920s until the 1940s, was also irked by this habit and had a great method for disarming it, based on the assumption that “very few travelers know anything more about the places they have visited than the names of one hotel, two points of interest, and perhaps one street. You can bluff them into insensibility by making up a name and asking them if they saw that when they were in Florence.” He employs this method when “confronted by Mrs. Reetaly who has just returned from a frantic tour of Spain, southern France, and the Ritz Hotel, Paris.” She brings up Toledo; he asks her if she “pushed on to Mastilejo,” a town whose name he has made up on the spot. When she admits she didn’t, he tells her Mastilejo is “Toledo multiplied by a hundred. Such mountains! Such coloring!” Soon they are onto the real town of Carcassonne. Benchley continues his strong offensive, inventing sights right and left, quizzing her as to whether she saw “the hole in the wall where Louis the Neurotic escaped from the Saracens” or “the stream where they found the sword and buckler of the Man with the Iron Abdomen.” Before he can continue much longer, Mrs. Reetaly is beating a quick retreat, and that’s the last Benchley needs to hear of her vacation.
Lin’s rant against travel merely for conversation included his disapproving feelings on the topic of picture-taking. Lest we think it’s a new thing to bemoan the fact that no one today can eat a meal before photographing it from every angle, Lin wrote about how he had seen “visitors at Hup’ao of Hangchow, a place famous for its tea and spring water, having their picture taken in the act of lifting tea cups to their lips. To be sure, it is a highly poetic sentiment to show friends a picture of themselves drinking tea at Hup’ao. The danger is that one spends less thought on the actual taste of the tea than on the photograph itself.” He went on to note that “this sort of thing can become an obsession” and decried tourists so “busy with their cameras that have no time to look at the places themselves.”
The third type of travel he despaired of and considered false is any trip undertaken by anyone who is interested in traveling according to any kind of schedule. “Bound by the clock and run by the calendar as he is at home, he is still bound by the clock and run by the calendar while abroad.”
Lin proposed a true type of travel, the goal of which is to become “lost and unknown.” In his eyes, the true traveler “is always a vagabond, with the joys, temptations, and sense of adventure of the vagabond.” He writes, “The essence of travel is to have no duties, no fixed hours, no mail, no inquisitive neighbors, no receiving delegations, and no destination. A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.”
It’s often just when I think Lin is being his most flip that he surprises me. What he goes on to say is that the true traveler has no attachments, and therefore must have compassion for everyone. He quotes a Chinese nun: “Not to care for anybody in particular is to care for mankind in general.” He argues for travel to strange cities and also for nature travel, urging his readers to “travel to see nothing and to see nobody, but the squirrels and muskrats and woodchucks and clouds and trees.” He tells the story of an American woman taken by Chinese friends up a misty mountain. There is so much mist, nothing can be seen, and yet her friends make her climb ever higher. When they get to the peak, the only thing they can make out is “the outline of distant hills barely visible on the horizon.” The American woman protests, “But there’s nothing to see here.” And her Chinese friends reply, “That’s exactly the point. We come up here to see nothing.”
In Lin’s view, you must possess the capacity to open yourself to seeing what’s in front of and around you all the time, not just when you are on a special trip. He gives us a sizable translation from a Chinese philosopher who expands on this, explaining that seeing the beauty and grace in the most majestic mountains means nothing if you can’t see beauty and grace in “a little patch of water, a village, a bridge, a tree, a hedge, or a dog….”
A travel book that takes this philosophy as far as it can go and then further is that remarkable little book beloved by both Machado de Assis and Lin Yutang: A Journey Around My Room. (I read it in a translation by Andrew Brown.) As I mentioned earlier, this book was written in 1790 by a young French officer named Xavier de Maistre, who had found himself in some trouble over a duel (illegal) and was sentenced to house arrest. In the centuries before ankle-monitoring bracelets and the like, the authorities relied on the honor of young noblemen to fulfill their sentences after they had misbehaved. De Maistre, then twenty-seven, was a man of honor and did, indeed, stay inside his Turin room for the full forty-two days the court had ordered. With nothing else to do, he wrote a guidebook to his room, visiting over the course of those weeks various bits of furniture, paintings, his bookshelf, letters he’d kept, and his own memory of a charming and slightly rakish life—albeit one studded with war and loss as well.
De Maistre makes a case for traveling around his room as the truest kind of travel—and also the most democratic type of travel that has or will ever exist.
“The pleasure you find in traveling around your room is safe from the restless jealousy of men; it is independent of the fickleness of fortune. After all, is there any person so unhappy, so abandoned, that he doesn’t have a little den into which he can withdraw and hide away from everyone? Nothing more elaborate is needed for the journey.”
His journey costs him nothing. He exclaims that this kind of travel will be “lauded and feted” by those who have modest amounts of wealth, but will be even more popular among the rich. He tells the reader why he thinks this is so: precisely because it doesn’t cost anything. The rich are rich because they like to save money. He also points out that room travel is a great way for the sick to journey, just as it is for those who are scared of robbers, precipices, and quagmires.
Like all good travel writers, de Maistre begins his book by giving us the lay of the land and the route he intends to take:
My room is situated
on the forty-fifth degree of latitude, according to the measurement of Father Beccaria; it stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, thirty-six paces in circumference, if you hug the wall. My journey will, however, measure much more than this, as I will be crossing it frequently lengthwise, or else diagonally, without any rule or method. I will even follow a zigzag path, and I will trace out every possible geometrical trajectory if need be. I don’t like people who have their itineraries and ideas so clearly sorted out that they say, “Today I’ll make three visits, I’ll write four letters, and I’ll finish that book I started.” My soul is so open to every kind of idea, taste and sentiment; it so avidly receives everything that presents itself!…And why would it turn down the pleasures that are scattered along life’s difficult path?
This is just the kind of travel beloved by Lin Yutang.
De Maistre is a charming storyteller, and he also employs a small cast of characters to break the boredom—his manservant and his dog appear from time to time. And he has theories, lots of theories, including an odd riff on Plato: While Plato theorized that we are all comprised of our self and another, de Maistre believes we contain a soul and a beast, and that the two often work at cross-purposes.
At the same time, de Maistre is nothing if not indolent. Sometimes he can barely be bothered to leave one piece of furniture for another. Sometimes he travels around the room by sitting in an armchair, leaning back so that the front legs come a few inches off the floor, and then shimmying side to side so that the chair creeps forward. He’s like a bored six-year-old.
But just when you think the book is nothing but a charming divertissement (such as when he urges his readers to decorate their beds with calming pink and white linens), or a parody of the great travel books of his age—works written by soldiers who had returned from years in Egypt, for example—there comes a surprise.