This week I reached the isolation zone. At some point I realized that besides my two hours a day of conversation with Nick everyday, I could go an entire day without REALLY talking to anyone. A “konichiwa” here, a “sumimasen” there, yes, but that hardly counts as real interaction. Writing is solitary work. Living alone in a foreign country only compounds the loneliness of a writing life.
They say few people are true extroverts, but if anyone ever filled that category, it would be me. This makes my desire to read things and write words that tease out an idea very much at odds with the me that wants to pose questions and see what strange paths I’m taken on in in conversation with another. Sure, every time I write something I’m engaging in what I hope is a reciprocal act of thinking. But what truly sets me aflame is the real-time exchange of minds. For me nothing can replace the joy that comes from from thinking in concert with others. I miss teaching. Yet I also miss random discussions about totally unplanned things with friends and co-workers. I also miss the gestures and emotions, those unconscious forms of thinking, that comes from a meaningful human interaction.
Enter Virgina Woolf. In thinking about my blog post for this week, I randomly thought of Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own.” I decided to re-read it. I haven’t read the essay since college, and much of the details I did not remember, still it was like getting reacquainted with a part of myself that has silently been at the wheel ever since I was old enough to wonder what my contribution to this world might be. In her essay, written to a group of young college women on the topic of “Women and Fiction” she explores why it is that there have been so few women writers and thinkers. For Woolf the answer is that they’ve never had “a room of one’s own,” by which she means that women have lived in a world that makes of them a servant class. At the time she wrote the essay (1928), she believes history may be changing course, that it may be possible for women to have money of their own with which they can free their labor, and thus also their minds to enter the world of ideas as more than characters and rhetorical figures in the imagination of men. We’ll put aside some of the problems with her argument (namely, that for both men and women, freeing oneself from the dictates of servitude is a difficult proposition, one she only accomplished because an aunt died and left her an inheritance–but what about those of us without wealthy, dead patrons?), and focus instead on the more inspirational aspects:
“For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.”
Here I am in Hiroshima, all by my lonesome, but also with time to write and think about some of the pressures, fears, and joys of living in a framework that is world-historical in perspective. I have a room of my own, and I have nearly complete intellectual freedom. I’d be disappointing Virginia Woolf if I spent too much time pitying my condition. More importantly, I’d disappoint myself. And so I think I’ll make peace with my isolation for now.
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I’m going to move quickly to less serious topics. Seen in Japan:
1) I tweeted about this one, but it’s worth repeating: A teenage boy getting off his bike to pick up a piece of trash that fell out of his pocket. This place is different in so many little ways.
2) An old woman walking next to me reached the stop light where we were waiting to cross, and she simply dropped down and rested in a squatting position. Whoa. She was flexible.
3) A lap dog with its ear hair/fur in ponytails, wearing a Christmas jacket and several twinkling Christmas lights. This whetted my appetite for all the ridiculous Christmas transpositions on their way. Think Christmas without any of the more serious content behind it, only the spectacle. That’s how I imagine Christmas in Japan.
4) A Japanese bagpipe player at local celebrations of the 250th birthday of Guinness. (picture)
5) Groups of old men playing the game “Go” in the park. I don’t know why, but I find groups of men like this kind of intimidating. I gathered my courage and dove in for a look at the action. (picture)
6) A makeshift ash can fastened on a park bench. Clearly, someone in the neighborhood thought their nice afternoon smoke would be much more civilized with a proper place to deposit their refuse. Love it. (picture)
7) Graffiti-art featuring a giant and beautiful phoenix, my personal emblem. Awesome. (picture)
