Travel Clarifies Memory: A Shandyist Lesson of Life

A final note about my recent reading of Tristram Shandy before I move on to other works I've read.

If you read the Wikipedia article on the novel, or any description of it for that matter, you'll learn that although it purports to be a story of the narrator's life, the narrator spends very little of the hundreds of pages in discussing his own trajectory through time and space. Mostly he talks about other people's experiences in a very nonlinear, almost chaotic, fashion.

The exception, as these articles points on, comes near the end of the book when the narrator spends a series of about a dozen chapters discussing his travels in France. Here the book takes on an almost conventional form, as we follow him across the English Channel, through Picardy to Paris, down to Lyon and then cutting across Gascony.

We are treated in scrumptious linear detail to the narrator's difficulties in trying to arrange transportation down the Rhone from Lyon, and later to his joy in fantasizing about living among the peasants and taking a local wife in a small rural town.  Then, in the midst of this immersion, his narrative eventually drops off in southern France and at some point later he is back in England without any mention of how he got back.

Besides the fact that his aforementioned travel difficulties seemed so very familiar to me from my own experiences vagabonding around Europe and Asia with a backpack, even two centuries, later, there arose a deeper familiarity with these chapters that comes from the fact that their linearity and clarity of narrative stands so much in stark opposition to the rest of the book.

It struck me that it is an example of how travel experiences clarify memory. There are times of my life when I was living in one place, doing nearly the same thing for months and even years on end. My memory of those times is indeed very nonlinear. I can't tell you what I did at any given time during that stretch. I have a jumbled bag of memories in no particular order, attached to people and places.

But during my travels, ah that is very different. Even three decades later, I can tell you what I did almost every day during the three months I spend in Europe in the summer of 1985, from the Isle of Skye to Izmir. I can tell you where I stayed, and the people I met. It's all burned into my brain still, and in sequential order. Give me a date during the summer of 1985, or 1990, or 1992*, and I can tell you exactly where I was, and what I was doing. For certain other years I might not being to do the same even to save my life.

Even the fact that Shandy's narrative of his travels in France seems to end right in the midst of the most intense part of his voyage, dancing with the young woman in the village, felt very familiar.

Among my stored possessions are several travel journals I recorded during my first set of travels to Europe in the Eighties and early Nineties. In looking through them (something I have not done since I wrote them) one would find that they are kept rather meticulously for the first phases of the trip, but that at some point, typically after a couple months, the writing drops off to become less frequent, and with shorter entries written in hasty hand, until at last the narrative ends altogether before the end of the voyage is recorded, as if leaving me in some faraway place from which I never returned.

This used to bother me, the fact that I did not complete these journals in the way I started them, but at some point I came to peace with it and realized it was the way things had to be. If your travels are truly vibrant, then at some point, when you are long past that initial chaotic phase of amusing adversity in arranging tickets and finding lodging, one finds oneself so deeply embedded in the moment, so far outside one's realm of ordinary experience, that putting it all down in words, at least in that moment, becomes nearly impossible. All the time one would spend writing that down at the end of the day feels like cheating oneself out of precious moments that could be used to absorb one's surrounding, and the fellowship of one's companions at that instant. The discipline to do so becomes impossible because it feels counterproductive.

In other words, the drop off is a sign of success.

*These are by no means the only times of intense travel memory, but they are the times I kept the kind of travel journal I mentioned. This blog is an example of doing the same thing in online form. I have often neglected it during the times it might be most useful to follow, for example during the fall of 2014 during our trip through Europe that started in Iceland. In the end, online composition cannot be compared to the paper-and-ink version in any case.

The Day of the Spunky Detective

These are the kinds of days that I got TCM for. A whole slate of Torchy Blane mystery comedies to play on the iPad while I work from my home office. Fortunately I can pick up the West Coast TCM feed that lets me view three hours behind the broadcast times in schedule, so I don't even have to miss the early morning ones before I get up. As I write this, this one is playing:

Newspaper reporter Torchy Blane is handed a telegram, which she reads before realizing it actually was sent to Theresa Gray, the woman sitting next to her on the train. Torchy's telegram, when she gets it, is from policeman Steve McBride, announcing that he will have a minister waiting to marry them when her train arrives. Worried that her marriage to Steve will put Torchy ahead in covering the police beat, several reporters decide to play a practical joke on her and postpone her wedding at the same time. The reporters hire an actor to play dead and phone Steve with the news. They hope that Torchy will report the death and that a second paper owned by publisher Mortimer Gray will embarrass her by printing the truth. Then, Harvey Hammond, the actor, is actually murdered, and Torchy beats the other reporters to the story as usual.

Note the dates of the movies in the schedule. All of the above features were made over a three year span, with all but one featuring the Glenda Farrell in the Torchy role. That seems amazing, but not really, when you think that the running time was typically 70-75 minutes, a series like this was the equivalent of a television show of later era.

Meditations in Mid-Air Over Cold Water

That was the temperature of the backyard pool today. It's almost in the range for typical leisure swimming.

That doesn't mean I haven't been using the pool, however. As it happens I've been taking dips throughout most of the winter. This is because last fall Red wanted to watch the Tony Robbins documentary on Netflix, I Am Not Your Guru.

Red really liked the documentary. I found it less engaging than her (even I'm a big Tony fan from way back in his early informercial days in 1991). One of my favorite parts of the documentary was learning that at his new Florida home, he has a cold-water plunge pool, kept at exactly 57 degrees, in which he submerges himself every morning.

I used this as inspiration to declare that I was going to take cold water plunges in the backyard pool, no matter what the temperature.

As October rolled into November, I quickly learned than anything below 70 feels mighty cold. As the temperature gets colder than that, it really doesn't change much, except that it makes you want to stay in the water less.

Soon the only way I could keep this habit up was by resolving to do so at a given moment, then marching immediately out to the pool as quickly as possible and jumping into the deep end. There is a moment when you are suspended in the air, when you know you can't go back, when you anticipate the coldness to the highest degree. The actual cold water is actually less of a shock.

I very much looked forward to getting down to the Tony's temperature of 57 degrees. It turns out we had a cold rainy winter, and even though I was out of town over the holidays, I still got to experience temperatures down to 52 degrees. In that range, it becomes hard to breathe evenly when submerged, even during the short period of wading to the stairs. I head learned to keep the thick terry cloth robe handy, that Red got me as a Christmas gift.

As the warm weather has approached, the temperature of the water has increased. I've noticed how nonlinear this is. The temperature seems to jump by five degrees and then stay there for a week on end.

This last week has been tantalizingly close to normal swimming. In the meantime I've fallen out of the habit of the plunges. Fifty-two degrees was a nice experiment, but I'm ready for summer.

Moving to Scottsdale?

Red is convinced that she is going to win the contest for the HGTV Smart Home 2017, which is currently being constructed down in Scottsdale. We're watching the promo on the building of it right now. Among other things it answered my questions on how they move around saguaros here when doing construction. Also our future house is going to have lots of robots.

Tristram Shandy is a Work of Genius

I finally finished reading Tristram Shandy a couple weeks back. When I was done, I still was haunted by the question what the heck did I just read? 

Moreover, was it any good? Throughout most of the novel, I kept the consistent opinion that most people I know would hate it, and perhaps among everyone I know, that I alone, with my proclivity for insisting to myself that classics are classics for a reason, and that I should suspend judgment and make it my mission to understand why a particular lauded work is a product of genius, could have read the novel and come away glad that I had done so.

I was sure that most people I know would hate it, and would pooh-pooh it away. Yet in the last few pages, I found myself wishing the story would go on. I was disappointed that it stopped. I wanted more.

The story is chaotic, almost unfollowable at times. Yet the characters seem come alive as they had in few novels I had read. I felt I knew everyone in the story, including the narrator of the title, who purports to tell his life story yet tells almost nothing of it.

I wonder how many people walking the earth right now have actually read Tristram Shandy and agree with me (and Schopenhauer) that it is indeed one of the great products of literary genius of the English language? The number must be very small, yet I feel that if were ever to run across anyone who has read it and loved the experience, that we could talk about it for hours and perhaps days, that we would belong to some secret fraternity of Shandy lovers.

How many books can one say that about?