While it is likely any book with "enigma" in the title would attract my interest, re-reading V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival has been an energizing experience; not least of all it has energized me as regards my blog, this blog, which has been languishing for many months following an eighteen month focus on our visit to China in January 2013. Thus, I hope to re-imagine the blog as well as revive it along lines that will gradually become clear. The Enigma of Arrival, a book about many things, is especially about how literature, and our ideas about literature, shape our understanding and appreciation for where and who we are.
Nearly a year after our trip to China, on Christmas Day 2013, in the evening, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gathered in the day room of my mother's nursing home in Leesburg, Virginia, to sing Christmas carols. A woman of dignity, grace, and unfailing good will even in her present confusion, my mother directed our singing from her wheel chair. She was not entirely sure of who we all were, but she energetically connected with music she has known for better than 90 years.We sang each carol until we ran out of word to finish out the familiar tunes.
This experience was, I suppose we could say, enigmatic, embracing as it did the bewildering landscape of my mother's mental state and the hope and sadness we all felt keenly. It was one of those occasions where the past and future, and a world of colliding emotions, are compressed into a single moment.
An hour later we were back at my brother's house, catching up with nieces and nephews, cousins, assorted family. My nephew Jameson, an English teacher himself with children in high school, asked me whether I found life in Houghton, my village in western New York, boring now that I have become a world traveler. He had lived in Houghton himself during college, so he had some notion that life there might seem tame after months lived in Korea and in England and for shorter periods in China.
I was prepared for other questions. Had Jameson asked, as others have, whether it is sad to see my mother, his grandmother, in a nursing home, I would have answered, "Yes, of course, it is sad to see my mother this way." That is the only possible quick answer.
On the other hand, a more complex, considered answer would pass over the "yes" quickly into the landscape of aging. Despite being saddened, I am also happy and relieved that she is content and well-tended. It is not her present confinement I lament so much, her displacement from her home of many years, but the loss of her mind to Alzheimers.
Thus, the question about boredom is both easy and complicated. For those of us with freedom and choices, boredom is a condition of the mind more often than a consequence of physical circumstances. Both boredom and restlessness, boredom's frequent companion, can be enemies of contentment, a most rare though enviable state of mind.
That said, now that my wife and I have had opportunities to travel to China and other opportunities to live for extended periods in Busan, Korea, and in London, I must confess to a strong desire to do it again, to see more, to live where the environment is unfamiliar, where I am called upon to figure out the landscape. I feel restlessness, yes; but I hope it is a restlessness of curiosity -- a wholly different animal from boredom-produced restlessness.
I want to travel more now that I have lived, however briefly, in Europe and in Asia because travel has given a specific shape to my curiosity. Like education generally, a little knowledge of elsewhere spurs greater curiosity. We might call our time in London and Busan and southern China threshold experiences. I have had just enough of an introduction to Asian cultures to learn how much I don't know, just enough to want more.
I understand the assumptions people naturally make about small towns, rural villages, tiny communities surrounded by cows and corn fields.But it would simply be incorrect to imagine that my desire to travel is somehow related to where I live, to the small town where "nothing happens" and where the real world is held at bay.The truth is more like this: places are not necessarily boring, nor are other cultures necessarily better than our own. The capacity for curiosity, like the capacity for boredom, resides in the individual.
Naipaul spends 350 pages exploring this complex relationship between people and place. An immigrant to England, he examines his new rural home at first with "new" eyes. As months and seasons and years pass, as his new eyes gain the longer, deeper vision of the permanent resident, he understands in new ways both landscape and its human occupants.
He describes it this way: "I had slowly learned the names of shrubs and trees. That knowledge, helping me visually to disentangle one plant from another in a mass of vegetation, quickly becoming more than a knowledge of names, had added to my appreciation. It was like learning a language, after living among its sounds." This does not sound like boredom to me. This learning to distinguish is what living anywhere -- geographically or chronologically -- is all about. A little later Naipaul continues, "Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories."
And in her lucid moments, she has chosen contentment. It is not my landscape yet, but I recognize the journey. I have read about it.
