Books for Living Page 5

  In the meantime, however, I started to glimpse a great truth: history was long and I was short. Caesar accomplished more than I ever possibly could; had written about it in timeless works; and would be read as long as people read. There was no chance I would possibly leave a mark on the world that measured up to Caesar’s.

  When I went to high school, at a boarding school, I decided to continue with Latin. And I decided to add ancient Greek. I had no good reason for this, just the belief that ancient Greek was truly hard core. If Latin was the Navy, ancient Greek was the Navy SEALs. And, besides, that meant that I would enter the orbit of another charismatic teacher: George Tracy.

  Mr. Tracy was highly theatrical—he had been a Shakespearean actor in Canada, the land of his birth. And he was notoriously tough. He didn’t treat us as children; he treated us as adults who had simply neglected, as of yet, to learn all they were supposed to have learned. But when one of his students did show that she or he had learned something—well, then that student was bathed in light.

  Traditionally, Greek is taught backward—or, rather, starting at the middle with Plato and moving back. Even though Homer came before Plato, schools would first teach you the kind of Greek Plato wrote and only later the Greek of Homer, more different from the Greek of Plato than Shakespeare’s English is from ours.

  Mr. Tracy taught differently. He started with Homer and then moved his students chronologically forward, through Plato, through the dramatists, and finally, in proper order, up to the (much easier) Greek of the New Testament.

  This meant a few things. First, it meant that there was only one textbook available: A Reading Course in Homeric Greek. Every other book took the traditional approach of beginning with Plato. Written by Jesuits, this textbook had, as I recall, extremely odd practice sentences: “Had Jesus and Homer met, how well they would have gotten along!” (I remember taking a different view. I also remember wondering if Jesus might have cured Homer’s blindness, whereupon Homer might have chosen a different profession altogether, and then we would never have had access to the great stories he left us.)

  Second, it meant that we actually got to start our education with Homer: within months of beginning ancient Greek, I was translating bits of The Iliad into English. It was thrilling.

  Granted, my translations were not ones for the ages.

  What ho! Eternal Aegis-bearing Zeus’s child,

  The Greeks spring forth towards their native land,

  To head for home o’er watery paths now wild,

  Leaving Helen to Priam and the Trojan’s Hands.

  Where Mr. Gill might have gently suggested I go back to my vocabulary cards, Mr. Tracy scowled fiercely. He told me that there was no particular call for a modern translation of The Iliad that attempted to ape the style of Alexander Pope. I’m sure he added that modern English would do just fine and asked me to please, please stop rhyming and instead focus on the meaning of the words I was translating.

  But I was hooked. If I was looking for the secret that would connect me to others around the world and across the ages, The Iliad and The Odyssey were it. Thrilling. This was a whole world I had no idea existed—a world of honor and hubris, lust and war, fidelity and betrayal. This was a deeply adult world, too, a world of violence, sex, and drugs.

  First in my affections was Odysseus. Here was a real hero. He is wily, able to outsmart the Cyclops. He is strong, a leader of men. He perseveres. And he is deeply fallible, making a whole lot of flawed choices due to lust, pride, and bad judgment.

  I was also quite taken with the idea of the land of the Lotus-eaters, where Odysseus stops and where he almost loses a portion of his crew. The land of the Lotus-eaters is a seeming paradise where time passes effortlessly; the visitor, happily drugged, forgets all thoughts of what he needs to do in life and abandons all plans to return home. Growing up in the shadow of the 1960s, I felt I understood the appeal of this land: I had met plenty of people just a few years older than I who had found themselves there and who hadn’t been able to leave. Odysseus underscored the point that, though you can visit the land of the Lotus-eaters, the time will come when you definitely need to leave it. Of course, that’s not always easy to do. But if you overstay that time, you may never be able to leave. Ever.

  As Mr. Tracy guided us through The Odyssey, he had us keep one word foremost in our minds: “nostalgia.” This was not the kind of nostalgia we speak of today, where you squeal with delight and only the slightest pang of longing when a song you slow-danced to in the 1970s—“Blame It on the Sun” by Stevie Wonder, perhaps, or “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac—comes on the radio. Actually, even radios are cause for nostalgia today. No, this was nostalgia in the true meaning of the word: home pain. A longing that is so intense you experience it as you would the most severe malady. The child who sobs inconsolably on a night spent with strangers far from home, not knowing if she will ever return to the place where she grew up and the people who raised her, experiences the nostalgia of Odysseus. It’s a homesickness that is so profound it causes almost unbearable pain.

  How long can you stay in the land of the Lotus-eaters? How do you handle the pain when you don’t know if you can ever get home or when your home is gone? I was starting to realize that reading Greek and Latin wasn’t going to give me any single piece of knowledge that would astound me or one secret that would change my life; it was giving me instead something more valuable: a lifetime of questions.

  Over the next few years, I continued to study classics: with Mr. Tracy; with an impassioned and engaging young colleague of his whom we called Doc Marshall (as though he were a character in a Western and not a Ph.D. in classics); and then with a series of eccentric professors all the way through college (one of whom was forbidden by his doctor from reading Thucydides because it made his heart race). But as much as I learned from the books I read and from these teachers over so many years, and as many great questions as I added to my repertoire, one of the most important things I learned came in my first few weeks with Mr. Tracy. And it was a lesson in learning.

  The assignment was simple—a paper on some classical topic about which little is known or can be learned. But I’d worked hard (or, at least, many hours) on it and was convinced I had created a work of brilliance. As a result, I was excited to get the graded paper back a few days later—and then bitterly disappointed to discover that Mr. Tracy had given me a C.

  I asked to see Mr. Tracy after class.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said, somewhat tentatively. “But I really think I deserved a B.”

  Mr. Tracy looked at me with no discernible emotion; then he pulled out a big red felt-tip marker. He carefully crossed out the C. And then he wrote a big B and gave it back to me, but not before he paused and asked a key question: “Are you sure you don’t want an A?”

  Since I had not been prepared for a quick victory, and had a whole speech at the ready, I didn’t know what to say. But then I realized where this was going.

  Mr. Tracy waited a moment and then said, “It’s a C paper. No matter what grade I put on it, it’s still a C paper. But I’m happy to give it a B or even an A. In fact, why don’t you just tell me what grade you want when you hand in each paper for the rest of the term and save me the trouble of grading them.”

  Then Mr. Tracy really went for it. “In fact, why don’t you just tell me what grade you want for the whole course so you don’t have to show up at all.”

  I had to beg Mr. Tracy to give me my C back. Eventually I got it.

  What I thought I learned that afternoon was not to grade grub.

  But on reflection, I now realize that what Mr. Tracy taught me that day was to recognize my mediocrity. And that, in fact, the essence of learning is to do just that.

  A C means you’ve done average work. There’s nothing shameful about being average. You didn’t fail. You didn’t even come close. You did what you were supposed to do. Cheerfully accepting the C means that you recognize there’s such a thing as a B and an A and that you know y
ou fell short of both; you can take pride in your place in the middle of the pack but still appreciate that there’s room to grow.

  Mediocrity isn’t crass or shoddy or vulgar. It’s, well, mediocre. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not bad. When you embrace mediocrity, you embrace humility—you learn to see that no matter how good you are at something, the world probably has people who are more talented at it than you. You can strive to learn from people who do things better, or you can at least appreciate them—even if you don’t want to be them. By definition, most of us are mediocre, and everyone is mediocre at something.

  It’s often just a matter of perspective. The best pitcher on your local Little League team wouldn’t last long on the mound in the major leagues. Great teachers help us see ourselves in the broadest perspective possible. Mr. Tracy may have wanted to teach me a lesson about my own arrogance, but he certainly wasn’t trying to discourage me: He was trying to get me to see things as they really are. Encouragement comes in many forms, but excessive or unwarranted praise isn’t encouragement.

  The British essayist G. K. Chesterton, in his 1910 treatise What’s Wrong with the World, wrote, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Sure, it may be worth more done well, but if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing no matter how well or badly you do it. It’s just plain worth doing. When we denigrate mediocrity, we discourage ourselves and others from trying new things. It would be great to be a great painter, but it’s also great just to paint. Or sing or throw pots or knit scarves or play chess.

  That doesn’t mean, though, we should lower our standards. In fact, it’s partly this unwarranted horror of mediocrity that causes us to call things great that are merely good or fine. There are plenty of good slices of pizza to be had in Greenwich Village that are neither the best nor the worst slices in New York City. We don’t have to pretend they are something more than tasty and filling to enjoy them. We might even want to try to make our own mediocre pizza from time to time.

  And as for Odysseus, even he would have to admit that he didn’t do a great job of getting home. Sure, he was a clever fellow but an arrogant one, too, a boaster and troublemaker. Others managed to come right home after the war chronicled in The Iliad; it took Odysseus ten years. He was held captive; he dawdled; he got lost. He was caught in storms. And he almost gave up his quest—to live with Circe, an enchantress who also happened to be an excellent cook.

  But he does eventually make it back (with help from some gods) to Ithaca, where life is in massive disarray. The return is a solid C-level performance—far from an A, sure, but by no means a failure.

  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

  Napping

  THE JAPANESE NOVELIST Haruki Murakami’s intensely engrossing novels and stories are almost always dreamlike and often include fantastical ingredients: a man possessed by sheep, a glowing unicorn skull, alternate universes. They also often feature characters who have dropped out of society for one reason or another. After the international success of his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, which was published in 1982 when he was thirty-three years old, Murakami went on to publish ten more novels to date, all international bestsellers, including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84. Murakami has won just about every literary prize you can win short of the Nobel Prize for Literature, for which he is most bookies’ favorite. He also writes short stories; translates other writers’ books from English into Japanese; travels often; collects vinyl records; and sometimes teaches.

  Murakami is a runner. He runs every day. And he runs marathons. In the introduction to his memoir of running and writing, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami writes that running is “both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

  And Murakami is also a napper. As he writes later in this book, “One other way I keep healthy is by taking a nap. I really nap a lot. Usually I get sleepy right after lunch, plop down on the sofa, and doze off. Thirty minutes later I come wide-awake. As soon as I wake up, my body isn’t sluggish and my mind is totally clear. This is what they call in southern Europe a siesta. I think I learned this custom when I lived in Italy, but maybe I’m misremembering, since I’ve always loved taking naps.”

  It’s an anomalous passage in a book filled with descriptions of feats of physical strength and endurance. Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel) chronicles a lifetime of running and writing, leading up to the New York marathon of 2006. It’s a very personal work—not a self-help book as such, but one in which Murakami lets us see inside his head as he trains for marathons and runs in them, and as he writes. He shares the music he listens to when he’s running (occasionally jazz, but more often rock, including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beck, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones), his weight, what he drinks and eats (Sam Adams and Dunkin’ Donuts while living and running in Boston), and the running shoes he wears (Mizuno).

  More deeply, Murakami tackles the need for solitude, but also its corrosive dangers. He writes about anger, and how he handles it (he runs a little longer). He tells us something of his life, and the moment he chose to become a novelist—at a baseball game at 1:30 p.m. on April 1, 1978, right after a young American player named Dave Hilton hit a double. He writes, “And it was at that exact moment that a thought struck me: You know what? I could try writing a novel. I can still remember the wide open sky, the feel of the new grass, the satisfying crack of the bat. Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and whatever it was, I accepted it.”

  That was when Murakami was twenty-nine. He didn’t start running until he was thirty-three: “The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life.”

  In a particularly vivid section early in the book, Murakami recounts running between Athens and Marathon, the original marathon, the twenty-six-mile route a Greek messenger is said to have run in 490 BCE to let the government in Athens know about the victory over the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. Murakami runs it in reverse, ending where the messenger began. It’s the first time he’s run that length, and it’s a grueling three-and-a-half-hour slog on a “dreary” commuter road with rush-hour cars and trucks speeding past. Murakami keeps track of the roadkill he encounters: a depressing total of three dogs and eleven cats. As he runs, he struggles with the heat, the wind, his thirst, and his own hatred of everyone and everything, including the sheep by the side of the road. But he finishes.

  When we leave Murakami at the end of the book, he’s run many more marathons, and even competed in his first triathlon. And of course he’s still writing. And, one presumes, napping.

  But all the descriptions of running and writing and training are both story and metaphor and, as Murakami somewhat sheepishly admits, the book “does contain a certain amount of what might be dubbed life lessons.”

  I read Murakami’s book on running while I was lying fully clothed on my bed on top of my covers one hot summer day, preparing to take a nap. But the book was too fascinating to allow me to sleep, and I underlined furiously. The book is indeed full of life lessons. One has to do with knowing when to end a day’s work: In running and writing, Murakami realizes, there is a real benefit to stopping before, and not after, you find yourself depleted. “Do that,” he writes, “and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects.” I underlined the next sentence: “Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.”

  A fe
w pages later, I underscored the observation, “I don’t know why, but the older you get, the busier you become.” Later Murakami writes about the need, as you get older, to prioritize your life. When he was young, he had endless time for everyone—he and his wife owned and ran a small bar back then. Now, though, he needs to ration whom he sees and what he does.

  Still, he’s careful to mention that even when he owned the bar, he never worried about pleasing everyone. If ten people came and nine of them didn’t care for his bar, that didn’t matter at all. He just needed one in ten to like it—well, to love it, to come back and be a regular. In order to make sure of that, he explains, “I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what.”

  So it was with his books. Some readers may not have liked his first two novels, but he stuck with writing until the explosive success of A Wild Sheep Chase. He had to build an audience of people who loved what he did, to cultivate “devoted readers, the one-in-ten repeaters.”

  While reading this book in bed, I found myself thinking about Murakami’s “life lessons,” but I kept returning to the bit about napping. It’s ironic, I know, to read a whole book about running, and to come away thinking mostly about one paragraph on sleep. But the more time I spent lying in bed pondering Murakami’s book, the more I came to see the parallels between the two.