The paperback of my last book, On Trying to Keep Still, is about to come out. Published by Virago, and available here since you ask. Make my publisher's day - at any rate, surprise them - and buy a copy. This is the Introduction to the book:
Something about the idea of being a travel writer distresses me.
So this is not a travel book, though it contains some journeys. It
is a book on travelling and keeping still. Primarily, it is about the
wish to keep still. Something about the distinction between being
a fiction and a non-fiction writer distresses me, too. So I think of
myself as a writer. Period. I suppose that curiosity, the need to
know, is at the heart of it – at the heart of us. Writers (and others)
might qualify as that dreadful child frozen in time who repeatedly
asks ‘why’ in response to every answer to every previous question.
That’s curiosity, but it’s also the good sense a child has that she is
being lied to. Mostly the answers to her questions are wrong, or
at least insufficient, sometimes because of ignorance, sometimes
laziness, but often because the question was impossible to answer.
The problem about not knowing is that the question which is
supposed to elicit enlightenment is difficult to frame precisely,
because you don’t know. Perhaps the point of asking questions is
not to receive an answer but to reiterate and refine the question
itself. I’m inclined to think that there is, essentially, only one
question. It is ‘What is the point?’ and in some form or another
it is asked over and over again by those of us who have failed to
mature enough to stop asking it.
Another question is: what is it like when something or nothing
happens? Something or nothing happens all the time. The same
question has been asked – more or less consciously, with more or
less precision – by many others; let’s say just about everyone, but
notably for me by Michel de Montaigne in his Essais, along with
Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, St. Augustine in The Confessions,
Nietzsche in his Notebooks.
In 2000 I made a millennial move from London (where I was
born, brought up and always lived) to Cambridge, for no other
reason than that someone I loved – the Poet – lived there. Not
quite travelling, not quite keeping still. But it can’t be said that
now I am alone most of the time. It troubles me no end – I worry
about it while delighting in the company I chose, and choose. In
the past year I have spent periods alone – in various ways, but
usually deliberately – in New Zealand, in a farm cottage in
Somerset, in Lapland. You are never alone with a mind, of
course. I am, therefore I think – remember, wonder, obsess. You’re
never alone with a world. No man is an island – if only. The past
and the present state of the world and of my regular life press in,
no matter how I would wish my private space impenetrable.
Levi-Strauss declared of totemic systems that animals are good to
think with. Irritants and interruptions are also, much as I dislike
them, good to think with. Anyway they are there, in and outside
my head – memories, inconsequentialities, and the doings of the
world.
Much worse, more alarming than anything else, there is also in
solitude emptiness: a mind devoid of thoughts, or rushing away
from them, which is more shocking than outside interruption. No
peaceful blankness, but a mad, skittering nothingness. The perfect
image of aloneness collapses into trivia and pointlessness.
Boredom, perhaps, but I don’t think so. It is more like a flat
refusal to think. A compulsion to subvert the circumstances I
have provided myself with. Not stillness, but a fretful pacing in
my cage. This may be an altogether more authentic will to oblivion.
A sorry truth that shines a light on my narcissistic notion of
blankness and turns it inside out. Take travelling and keeping
still, fiction and non-fiction with a pinch of salt.
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