What this essay is about: intimate moments with an eloquent dead gay Frenchman, JD Salinger, the kinds of books that are appropriate to read in different spaces, sharing public spaces, books as fashion accessories, public transit, racism.
Picture this: you are on a train full of people and you arrive at a busy stop where many people need to change vehicles to get where they are going. You are standing right in front of the doors; when they open the sea of people standing there parts and you walk through a tunnel of humans, their strange, impatient faces turned towards you. This is not normal.
I read Proust almost exclusively in the bathtub. I like reading long books; long, dry late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century stuff like The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, and so forth. I take some sort of twisted satisfaction in hacking away at these novels a hundred pages at time, like I was engaged in some sort of classic literature pissing contest. In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s meandering six volume tome, is pretty much the holy grail of the literary pissing contest; not only is it goddamn long, it is also lacking in plot and momentum, containing long wandering passages that describe obscure impressions in minute detail, mutant run-on sentences that lead the reader far astray - it can be quite frustrating.
I tried reading Proust on the train, when I was traveling in Europe; I thought it would be romantic. It was terrible. I couldn’t focus and the lack of an engaging narrative left me re-reading passages again and again as the blurry terrain whizzed by outside. Any serious reader knows this awful feeling, the feeling of a lost explorer recognizing familiar terrain. “Wait”, he says, “I’ve seen this before.” I opted, instead to read the copy of Essential X-Men Vol. 2 that I had brought. It wasn’t very sophisticated or European, but damned if it didn’t pass the time.
What I realized, about reading Proust, is that there’s a time and place for it. For me that place is the bathtub, and the time is evening. In Search of Lost Time is like mood music, it’s ambient literature, and accordingly, when I read Proust, I light some candles, put on some instrumental music (perhaps Brian Eno or Do Make Say Think) at a low volume and get in the tub. I find that with very dry classic literature, you need to focus while reading it, really concentrate and actively process the writing. With Proust it’s almost the exact opposite, his prose is dripping! True, you still need to pay attention, but it’s also important to let the words wash over you in order to experience the full effects. Here, to illustrate the intoxicating nature of Proust’s prose, is the famous ‘Madeleines’ passage from Swann’s Way:
… I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory- this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.
I find that moments such as this are the pinnacles of In Search of Lost Time, supported by a slow moving, transient plot in between. There is a certain intimacy in these moments that I share with Marcel Proust, the long dead homosexual asthmatic writer, as I wrestle with his words in the bathtub. If I were to read Proust in public, this intimacy would be lost, or at least spoiled a bit, and that just wouldn’t do.
A lot of people read in public, right out in front of everyone else. Sometimes, when a book is extremely popular, you see it everywhere for awhile, varying faces buried between the same pages of text. Reading Life of Pi in public was a big literary trend for awhile. The summer that Angels and Demons came out, you couldn’t get on a subway car without seeing at least three people reading it. People read on the subway, they eat, watch videos on their smart phones, listen to podcasts. The one thing that people on the subway rarely do is acknowledge one another, a symptom of big city living. There’s a sociological German word, Gesselschaft (as opposed to the more community based Gemeinschaft), which applies to what I’m talking about here. I first found out about Gesselschaft in high school philosophy class. To memorize the word, I conjured the image of a bunch of gazelles hurtling down an elevator shaft. Gesselschaft seemed inherently wrong, and the falling gazelles were meant to represent humans, I guess, losing their sense of community, tumbling hopelessly in a modern industrial setting (the elevator shaft).
The other day, on the crowded Spadina streetcar coming up from Chinatown, the other passengers and I were crammed in so tight that I was pushed up behind a young lady so that the scent of her freshly washed hair (you know this smell, gentlemen, a Proustian trigger of love) overcame my olfactories. Call me a creep if you will, but you know it’s just as likely that I may have been crammed up against a homeless man with garbage dreadlocks. Any red-blooded heterosexual male is going to take some pleasure in accidentally smelling freshly washed cute girl hair… what was I supposed to do, hold my breath? So I happened to smell this girl’s hair and we got off the streetcar and I never saw her again. Gazelle fucking shaft, it’s Chinatown.
Living in a big city like Toronto, it is taken as a fact of life that you will come into close physical contact with strangers everyday. If you walk through Chinatown, you may notice that the physical space between you and other humans diminishes. Chinese people, in accordance with their urban heritage, so it seems, are more comfortable than North Americans in crowded public spaces, importing the population density of Shanghai to North America with them when they immigrate. Torontonians may feel uncomfortable shopping at Yonge and Bloor or the Eaton Center on holidays when it is busy, department store bags bumping up against all kinds of riff raff, but compared to other cultures (and this is perhaps an idea that applies to Canada on a macrocosmic level as well) we have a pretty good standard of personal space that is often taken for granted. In Japan, there are people who are paid to forcibly cram passengers into overcrowded subway trains during peak hours (I imagined that they performed this task in riot gear with plexiglass shields, but I just watched a video and its all done by hand). In Mumbai (second in population density only to Shanghai), subway trains are usually packed with more than three times their intended passengers and as a result there have been something in the range of twenty thousand deaths over the past five years from crushing and suffocation, not to mention the hundreds of pedestrians per-year that are run down by speeding buses and other vehicles in the crowded streets of that same chaotic city.
It makes a lot of sense then that so many people immigrate to Canada, a land of abundant personal space, from places like China and India where personal space is a rare luxury. Having lived in the Canadian cities of Toronto and Halifax most of my life and having not spent too much time abroad, I’ve become accustomed to this personal space that we take for granted in our little gazelle shaft here, and have developed (amongst a plethora long list) an anxiety concerning personal boundaries. When you feel crammed in amongst so many people, exposed to their sometimes ignorant, cruel and indifferent behaviour, you start to lose your faith in humanity. A friend of mine jokingly confessed to me the other day that he thought he might need to take a test to find out if he was racist. Despite the fact that he is a thoroughly intelligent, forward-thinking young man, he felt that their was some hatred for other humans inadvertently growing inside him like a tumour as a result of spending so much time on public transit. To do a quick backpedal on behalf of my friend, I think the term "racist" in the context that he used it denoted a general feeling of malice towards people outside of himself. It just so happens that we live in a city where more than half the people are of a different race, religion or cultural background than myself and my friend. This is the pitfall of the gazelle shaft; the malice you feel for other gazelles may increase proportionally to the density of gazelles you are exposed to and the time for which you are exposed to them.
With the above in mind, riding the TTC on a daily basis between rush hours with enough space to read and bob my head to a beat-heavy playlist I’ve concocted on my iPhone is a pretty luxurious experience. If you want to break down the personal barriers of the gazelle shaft, one of the few ways you can do it without outright breaching social convention is to comment on some piece of fashion that is particular to a fellow gazelle. For example ‘I like your boots’ or ‘that jacket really is a lovely shade of blue.’ Even better, however, is if the gazelle you wish to address is reading a book that you also have read. This gives you an immediate topic of conversation to work with. For this reason I have cursed myself on several occasions for not having read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book that is ubiquitously read by cute girls on public transit. At this level the book becomes a fashion accessory, something of an intellectual peacock feather. Case in point, here is a message I lifted off of the missed connections section of craigslist Toronto titled ‘Catch 22’:
"I was just stepping away from the door, you were passing me towards it.
you said to me it was a great book, i couldn't help but get caught up in your smile, and ended up beside myself in the chaos of commuting.
at a loss for words in that brief time, i said nothing of interest, but really i would have liked to tell you how beautiful you are."
Missed connections postings in Toronto, more often than anything else (with the exception perhaps of M for M encounters at the YMCA of greater Toronto), make reference to brief, or missed encounters on the subway. Why are people so hesitant to talk to each other in public? I’m certainly guilty of this awkward hesitancy to address a fellow passenger, but why?
I can see the edition of Catch 22 in question now: blue, with a cutout image in red of a WWII fighter pilot clicking his heels in mid air. This is the paperback edition that I owned in high school, that I probably leant to an ex-girlfriend somewhere along the way, which I never got back and you better believe it never got read. It’s a pretty sexy edition, eye catching, alluring. The novel as fashion accessory is an undeniable part of our culture, and perhaps one of the keys to breaking the spell of the gazelle shaft.
When I found out that JD Salinger died a few weeks ago (via the city pulse 24 news crawl on the subway), I decided to re-read The Catcher In the Rye. My understanding of Catcher In the Rye was that as the ultimate dissatisfied teenager novel, it was only so good when I was 14 because I was 14. I have extremely vivid memories of reading Catcher In the Rye on the bus, literally hiding behind it as an awkward teen. What I don’t remember is the book being so damn good. For the past few weeks I have been reading it on the subway in honour of my youthful habits, in short bursts, saving it exclusively for commuting. So far it’s been one of the greatest singular novel reading experiences of my life; I’m prematurely nostalgic to finish re-reading a novel I first read when I was 14.
The edition I own, also a relic of high school, is simple; the classic white ‘Little, Brown Books’ version with diagonal rainbow stripes in the top left corner… classically understated with quaint sophistication. I like reading Catcher In the Rye on the TTC so much because the language is simple, it’s easy to follow and, best of all, it’s about a confused young man trying to make sense of big city life and calling out all the phonies around him, creating a sort of literary vortex that mirrors they way I feel a lot of the time when I’m out in public. I’m going to miss hearing Holden Caulfield’s voice in my head when I ride the subway after I’m finished, but strangely enough, I’ll also miss the simple act of carrying around the sleek little edition I own as well; my favourite new fashion accessory. I think all of JD salinger’s works are available in these basic editions though, FYI, sort of like the universally recognizable Kurt Vonnegut editions with the big V shapes on the covers.
A couple weeks ago, I got off work and walked to the bus stop that sits across the street from my friends’ apartment. They saw me from the window, we exchanged gestures, and then the old Junction 40 rolled along and picked me up. I got a text message from my friend who had recently criticized my inability to wear simply coloured outfits (I’m a sucker for flare), congratulating me on my all grey and black attire: “Finally” it read “All Black, Simple.” Settling in on the bus, I was approached by an old acquaintance, a friend’s ex-girlfriend who I hadn’t seen in a while,.“How are you doing you-“ then, spotting my copy of Catcher In the Rye, “Catcher in the Rye reader, wow… could you be any more hipster?”
Whether she was alluding to my H&M girl jeans, navy blue galoshes bearing a lavender stripe, grey vintage pea coat (purchased at value village for $15) or rainbow striped novel, I do not know. But I will tell you one thing; if reading Catcher In the Rye on public transportation is “hipster,” you can call me (popular indie electro DJ) Steve Aioki.
Perhaps one day I will meet a gazelle on the subway who shares the same literary tastes as me, who constantly carries the sweet fragrance of freshly washed hair. Until then I am but a lone gazelle, reading Proust in the bathtub and Salinger on the bus, tumbling helplessly down an endless elevator shaft.
