Pragmatik

I am finishing up Bruce Chatwin’s Anatomy of Restlessness. Being jobless and stuck in my apartment most days while Mrs. P is at work, I found this book both thrilling and depressing. I am a big Chatwin fan, but I especially enjoyed this posthumous publication because of the honesty of a few of the pieces, such as “I Always Wanted To Go To Patagonia” and a letter wherein he spells out the plan for his great book on nomadism/restlessness that never got written. I mean, Chatwin was a little…pretentious at times, such as when, in The Songlines, he spelled out how awesome his black notebooks were in such detail that an Italian company was able to reproduce them ten years later. I mean, I confess an addiction of sorts to those little treasures, so I think this is a good thing. But in an interview, maybe. In the main text? Pretentious? Or maybe brave? A little soul-baring? Chatwin says that the man he was talking to looked at him, when Chatwin told him about his precious notebooks, as if he had never heard anything more pretentious. Did that happen, or did old Bruce imagine that in some kind of self-consciousness?

Maybe even when he is fictionalizing his “stories” he was still honest to some degree, more so than one would believe when I started writing this post. Maybe he was a complete liar. I don’t know. Either way, you should still definitely check out this book. Or anything else by Chatwin you can get your hands on. I found this book, first edition, sitting on a stack when I walked into Normals one day this fall, after looking for that book for a long time. I exclaimed out-loud, “I’ve been looking for this! It’s like it was here just for me.”

But now I am restless. Very. When I read the first essay last week, I went shopping when I was pretty sick (and got sicker) because I could not stand the idea of staying home all day after reading something like that. Is that sad? I have finally gotten around to filling in a travel journal from our research trips in fall 2006. They were a bit of a pain at the time, when I was trying to get a dissertation written. But now I wish I could go back to New Haven for another chilly Friday morning wishing I brought something other than sandals. Or to New York for a thunderstorm on Broadway, ducking into the largest Barnes and Noble I have ever seen. Or to Boston, within a mile of where I lived for two years, remembering all things I loved and hated about that place. Hours at my favorite cafe’ there.

For now, I have to settle for books and other people’s experiences. And, of course, remembering my own.

[Larger images here.]