Why Novelists Must Be Unhappy

Echosquirrel and I were sitting around talking yesterday, reminiscing really, when I asked her where she thought she'd be right now if she had never met me.

She somewhat gruffly replied that she didn't waste her time thinking about such things. I didn't ask her why — I think I know why — it has to do with her desire to stay centered and live in the present.

I did say that I thought it was at least interesting to explore counterfactuals.

"Counterwhats?"

"'Factuals.' You know, ask 'What if so-and-so had done X instead of Y?' Or 'What if such-and-such had happened to A instead of what actually did? How would history have been different? (Would history have been different?)"

What if, for example, Darwin had contracted tuberculosis before his voyage on the Beagle? Could he still have produced his theory of evolution by natural selection? Would we now be talking about Wallacian, not Darwinian evolution? Would the thrust of history have remained the same, with just some of the details having changed?

Counterfactuals are not solely the realm of historians however. Novelists employ them as well, though when conjecture and imagination come into play we call the resulting fiction Alternate History (AH).

I guess Nabokov's Anti-Terra spinning somewhere outside the space and time of Terra in Ada is the best example I know: a delusion of Van's, a love song to what could never have been, a parallel world with its own distinctive morals and science, standing what we think we know on its head.

So what do counterfactuals and alternate histories have to do with novelists being unhappy? Well, if we equate happiness with enlightenment, or at least the striving for such a state, we see that being grounded in the present — not obsessing about the past or projecting too much into the future — is one of the conditions for achieving that state.

I remember once watching a Tibetan Buddhist mandala being created and destroyed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. I wondered if any poet or novelist would do such a thing to their "work of art."

Novelist in particular (at least the ones I'm interested in) are past miners and future fellaters — our own past or future or our characters' or some weird hybrid of the two. We're always busy rewriting the past, and our selves into it, a past imperfect or a future dystopia, the present sliding forward into something we'd really rather not say.

I guess what this admittedly ragged blog post wants to propose is that in our attempt at creating or recreating a world, we are striving for a permanence that simply cannot be. We speak to our own generation, at best maybe a few generations removed.

After that, or sooner, impermanence. Get used to it. Maybe made into a movie. Coming soon to a theater near you.

Near-miss, Nabokov, and the Face of an Old Lady with a Sandwich

Japanese has borrowed heaps of words from English, just as English has pilfered French, Latin, Greek, you name it.

Sometimes these borrowings throw me off though, for the simple reason that they make me question my grasp of English.

Near-miss (ニアミス) is one of these phrases. Synonymous with close call, it means that the aircraft or boat you were traveling in or on has nearly struck another. (In the case of airplanes, it could mean that the other craft was about a kilometer and a half away.)

But it seems it could also be the case that a near-miss happens when you actually do achieve something, like jumping on the ferry or train at the last second with the doors bumping shut behind you. Is that a near miss? or just a close-call? We say "I nearly missed that train," but do we also say, in that case, "that was a near-miss" or do we only use "close call?"

Vladimir Nabokov, one of my all-time favorite writers, has a short story called "A Matter of Chance" where the lead character, a waiter on a long-distance sleeper train, kills himself, not knowing that his wife, whom he has been separated from for five years because of the war, is sitting cozily in her cabin a couple of cars down, making her way to Paris to find him.

"The station was dark and deserted. Some distance away a lamp shone like a humid star through a gray cloud of smoke. The torrent of rails glistened slightly. He could not understand why the face of the old lady with the sandwich had disturbed him so deeply. Everything else was clear, only this one blind spot remained."

Luzhin, the waiter-husband, fueled by cocaine, jumps down in front of an oncoming train. A near miss and not a near miss nearly simultaneously.