Murakami's egg

Because, as you know from prior post, I've been a little bit obsessed with The Murakami lately and been reading about him, immersing myself and preparing to read 1Q84, I wanted to re-post this bit from a speech he gave in Jerusalem in February 2009, where he'd travelled to accept a prize as part of the Jerusalem International Book Fair.

Probably what I love about this piece, about his analogy, is that it loops me back to Dostoevsky.  It puts me right back into my undergraduate and graduate studies of Russian literature, to missing bus stops because I was so gone, fathoms under the surface in the very deep end of the great Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov.  There's great pleasure in being inside this referential loop, feeding back upon itself, hearing the echoes bouncing back and forward again.

The specific Dostoevsky quote I'm thinking of has to do with his own faith, with suffering, with truth, with Jesus actually.  No matter my own opinions about religion, this has always resonated so powerfully for me.

I will tell you that I am a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt. I will remain so until the grave. How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me and costs me even now which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I can find against it. And yet God sends me sometimes instants when I am completely calm. At those instants I love and feel loved by others and it is at those instants that I have shaped for myself a Credo where everything is clear and sacred to me. This credo is very simple. Here it is: To believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, manly, and perfect than Christ. And I tell myself with a jealous love that not only is there nothing more but there can be nothing more. Even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.

What I found moving about this, and still find moving, is this notion of having a sense of what is right and true and precious that cannot be shaken by any external definition of what is right and true and precious.  For Dostoevsky, it's Jesus. If loving him is wrong, he doesn't want to be right.

For Murakami, it's the egg.

Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message.

It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this: "Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg." Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
 What is the meaning of this metaphor?

In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is "the System." The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others — coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I like this idea of being on the side of the egg, of being the egg (the incredible, edible egg).  It's so much more palatable (ha ha ha), so much more current, naturally, than Dostoevsky's Jesus, although I really do think they're saying exactly the same thing.

And with all of this Occupying that's taking place right now, the egg and the wall are part of our daily awareness, part of our daily dialogue.

Some people can be with Jesus.  Me, I'm with Murakami and his egg.  You?

Passion #2: portable works of art

For a while I've been considering whether an e-reader is in my future. Converted friends who are big readers swear by them, but I've been unwilling to let go of the sensory experience of the book -- the feel of the pages, the look of the type, the design of the book itself.  Right now, for example, I'm reading Amitav Ghosh's latest, River of Smoke, in hardback, and every time I turn a page, I am moved by the softness and smoothness of the paper Farrar, Straus and Giroux chose for this edition.  Each page is a sensuous delight, sliding liquid under my fingers, a river of its own.

I have been feeling suspicious that perhaps books are just something I'm used to, a habit.  Probably there are people who kept all of their LPs and swear that that experience is vastly superior to loading all of your music from a CD onto an MP3 player, or downloading it from iTunes.  They may be right, but I made that switch from records to CDs to MP3 long ago and have never looked back, delighted to free up the shelf space, to carry it all in some tiny device that fits in my pockets.  Books, though, are harder for me to imagine living without.  I grew up in a big house that had books, shelves and stacks and piles of them, in every single room.  I have loved and carried books around with me everywhere for years, collected them even as a child, returning to treasured copies, pages I'd handled dozens of times.  But maybe that's a generational thing, I ask myself, an antiquated abuse of trees that needs to end.

So, I've been feeling myself tipping and tipping over into the e-reader camp, reading about the new Kindle Fire but leaning mostly toward an iPad.  Oh, my converted friends tell me, so much easier just to carry the e-reader around in your bag.  Anytime you have a few moments, your book is there with you, so light.  You get used to the fact that you are X% done with a book, rather than knowing what page you're on. You get used to it always being in the same typeface. And so much easier to travel with.  With an e-reader, they tell me, you can take so many titles on the road with you, download more wherever you have wifi, bam, have reading in your hands wherever you are, whenever you want it.  No waiting. The travel and instant grat argument really work for me, since while traveling I generally run out of books.  But the truth is that I don't  travel all that much lately so that's a less compelling argument than it might once have been when I was on a plane roughly every two to three weeks, with 2 books in my carry-on, 4-6 in my checked luggage.

But here's what I remembered yesterday and this morning, the reason I keep hesitating on the e-reader issue: I LOVE books.  Not just the stories and wisdom they contain, but their very physical selves, their delightful little paper bodies.

Once, when I mentioned to my crafty husband that I was running out of book shelves, could he please make me some more, he said, "Or, think about this, you could just get rid of some books."  I looked at him sidelong like he was joking.  He wasn't, but honestly, that's not a possibility that's on the table. The only books I ever get rid of are books that are such a disappointment that I can't finish them (last year's Booker Prize winner, for examp, sorry, couldn't read it, freecycled it just to get it out of my sight, Emma Donoghue's Room should have won) or books that piss me off (like the Charles Bukowski that Margot and I famously stuffed down the trash chute in Paris).  

Truly, I love books.  When I go to a new house, it's one of the things I notice -- what books people have, how they store them, how integral a part of their lives books are.

After months of build-up, Haruki Murakami's latest novel, 1Q84, arrived in my mailbox yesterday.  [If you haven't read Murakami, do yourself a big favor and do so.  Read more about him in this profile in the New York Times magazine.]  I've had 1Q84 on pre-order for ages and been checking the mailbox compulsively ever since I received the email on Tuesday, hallelujah, that it had finally shipped.  Murakami is one of my most favorites, ever since a dear friend gave me The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and I fell in love completely, unable to put it down even when one scene was making me so ill on the ferry on the way to work that I broke out into a sweat and eventually had to slither my way to the little cubicle-toilet, put my head down and recover.  When you're in that Murakami world, nothing else matters. As soon as I was back in my seat, composed, back in I went, hungry for more.

When I saw the Amazon package yesterday afternoon, I tore it open.  It'd been a long day on a work retreat, and I was tired.  A friend was over, talking bikes with the husband, but I stood there only half-listening, undoing the cardboard package in my excitement, unable to wait til he was done talking or gone.  A little bit Charlie looking for the Golden Ticket, careful with the wrapping, but undoing it just the same. 

Whoever said, "Don't judge a book by its cover," is a straight-up fool or never beheld this particular book.  1Q84 is absolutely GORGEOUS, so thoughtfully constructed: the vellum cover, the spine, the frontispiece, the font.  

I haven't even yet fallen under the spell of what's inside its pages, but I am already profoundly in love with this complete work of art that I can hold in my hands.

And that, my friends, is why I can't go the e-reader route.  A book is more than just letters that make words that make sentences that make paragraphs that flow by uninterrupted on a backlit screen.  A book, 1Q84 reminds me, is, should be, a total work of art, not only the particular story that it tells but the WAY in which that story is told, the way particular words sit on a physical piece of paper, the choice of font, the look of the chapter headings, all of it.

It is a profoundly human artistic experience both to produce a book like this and to read a book like this, taking in all of these exquisite details, each one of them building a supreme experience of the imagination, a celebration of all that is absolutely the very best about us.  When we do that on a little screen, I am convinced we lose most of that precious experience.

I'm just thrilled to start reading 1Q84 as soon as I polish off the last 90 pages of River of Smoke.  I know I will be transported, as always, by Murakami's prose.  And I will have the supreme joy of touching, seeing, smelling the story, holding the book in my hands, that total and most portable of works of art, truly my first love, my unending love.


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For more visuals, watch this piece by the book designer, Chip Kidd.  Good work, man!