The Universe is talking to me
Jun 22nd, 2009 by Ashley
I think the universe is talking to me.
Maybe it has always been, but I just recently learned its language.
A month ago, our book club chose A.S. Byatt’s Possession as our second book, and turned out the density intimidated us. None (as I know of) finished the book, and I didn’t even start. And as I was reading Guardian’s Book section the other day, I came across an article saying the book of the month for their online book club had been picked. Guess what? They picked Possession. I felt laughed at. As I was trying to act as if nothing had happened (that I didn’t give up at our second attempt), Guardian has to pick it up. I’ll call it divine intervention, or… a bad joke.
The other thing was…
I’m taking Brit Lit: Victorian + Modern writers this quarter and I came to adore Auden’s work. I ended up choosing Auden as my final paper subject. Today, I picked up a book which was recommended by NPR earlier, You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr, and guess what I read on the first page? Auden.
… I ask, who has the life he wants?
He says nothing.
I say, Wystan Auden did.
Turned out that the protagonist of the book, Anne, had chosen Auden’s Collected Poems for her book club.
Fascinating.
One Response to “The Universe is talking to me”
Hi, Ashley. I wrote You or Someone Like You, and if Auden speaks to you, I hope you’ll read my novel. Auden is the moral and intellectual center of my fictional Anne Rosenbaum’s world– and he guides her as she sets out to win back her husband Howard after he begins a tortured return to religious orthodoxy. Howard, violently struck by realizing what it means that his son is not Jewish, feels he is no longer at home. Anne tells her book club how she herself defines home. From page 89:
….Auden’s view [of home], I said to [my book club], is a bit different from Frost’s. And I myself hear Auden’s voice more clearly because it involves choice and emptiness without faith. Which is to say, it would be emptiness but for faith—or (much better) “trust,” Auden’s word. Auden, Nick observed, had gone from one mental place to another and discovered in going there that he had arrived nowhere in particular. That he had shed everything and constructed something nameless.
When I read this to Howard, I said that I didn’t know if there
was any better synonym for “New Yorker” than Nameless. Free, if
you prefer. Liberated from the old ologies. Howard disputed it, but
he didn’t understand what Auden meant. He meant you shed the
old names and assume new ones, and the new names mean what
you want them to. In 1942, just three years after he arrived in his
new home, Auden wrote that home is—the meter alone makes me
weep—
A sort of honour, not a building site,
Wherever we are, when, if we chose, we might
Be somewhere else, yet trust that we have chosen right.
Auden remarked to Benjamin Britten that New York was one
“grand hotel in a world so destabilized that everyone had become a
traveler.” I am a traveler, and that my son does not share my accent bothers me in the end not at all. I was and am that thing Auden described, feared, and in the end loved more than anything. I was—I am—nameless….
best,
Chandler