“I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”
-William Faulkner
There was a point in time where I sincerely wanted to read Faulkner; in fact, I felt as though I was morally obligated to do so. I promptly went to the two-dollar bookstore in Claremont and picked up a copy of As I Lay Dying, which, as so many of my colleagues for whom I have much respect were quick to point out, held the promise of being a life-changing read. However, I couldn’t muster the fortitude to press through the third or fourth page.
Faulkner, to me, is exhausting. He’s – again, to me – as dense as Joyce or Conrad, and I had no desire to finish what I had started. So, I put him down, and to this day he is collecting dust next to my copy of Ulysses and Heart of Darkness.
Strangely enough, though, Faulkner has made a point to come into my life at random moments. Okay, that sounds a bit romantic, I know, but there have been a couple of times where Faulkner has been, more or less, thrown at me. The first time he made his resurgence in my life was during the summer of 2011. I found myself in an English speaking bookstore in Beijing. At this time, I was on a month-long assignment to teach English Oral Proficiency with a team of six, and we happened to be on one of our tours of the city.
The streets were humming with the buzzing and rattling of the cicadas, and the streets smelled of stinky tofu and xiao lon bao, mixed with the faintest smelled of the Chinese version of McDonalds (there is no escaping that good ol’ Amurican smell, no matter where you are). As always, the heavy air was close to the temperature of the sun and I just wanted to get off of the street. My friend Eric spotted a bookstore that actually said “bookstore” in English letters, so, being the bibliophiles we are, we entered the bookstore. Of course, we were met with the cool blast of artificial, recycled air, but, more importantly, we were hit with the sweet smell of freshly cut pages – figuratively speaking, of course; people, sadly, don’t have to cut their pages anymore.
We ventured into the section labeled American Classics, where I was happy to see Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and genuinely confused upon spotting Camus. I picked up a copy of Gatsby to show to Eric, who, surprisingly, had never read it. I was informing him that this (holding up Gatsby with two hands) was the best book ever written. Eric, however, was quick to reject my claim. Without looking, he thrust his hand towards the bookshelf and seized a copy of a Faulkner novel and retrieved what happened to be The Sound and the Fury. To this day I have not read The Sound and the Fury, nor do I see myself doing so in the future; however, I still remember to this day, and more than likely always will, remember what happened next.
Eric opened to a random page – though, admittedly, he could have turned to the first page; I wasn’t really paying attention to which page he was reading from – and read the passage that serves as this article’s epigraph. I thought it was a bit much, and Eric read from it a bit ostentatiously, but I had to admit it was the work of a word-smith. The word-smith’s work just wasn’t for me. After this brief literary exchange, we made our purchases and then proceeded back into the thickness of the Beijing afternoon.
After that experience, I sort of forgot about Faulkner. When I think about it now, I sort of forgot about the whole exchange – the layout of the bookstore, the smell of the Beijing air, the oration of The Sound and the Fury. But maybe it’s not fair to say that, though. Perhaps I just put the memory in a box and threw it up in the attic of my mind, so to speak.
Coming around full circle, Faulkner showed up again, as you might have guessed by now. Yesterday, I was watching The Walking Dead with my girlfriend, and during one of the scenes a character recited the same exact passage from The Sound and the Fury that Eric had. At first, I think I must have wrinkled my nose as some do when they smell something they can’t quite put their finger on. I was physically uncomfortable, knowing that the quotation was sitting somewhere in my memory, but then it all hit me, and instantaneously I was transported back to Beijing. I sort of remembered the clothes I was wearing. I remembered almost getting mugged in a phony art exhibit we were taken to. All of these minute details came flooding back, all because of the damn Faulkner quotation.
So why is this important or even interesting? I’m sure you don’t care about my personal life, nor should you, really – it’s pretty boring. What is interesting, though, is that literature, even the stuff you hate, the stuff you loathe, is worth something sometimes. Sure, you might hate Chaucer with all of your heart – if you do, I think there’s something seriously wrong with you, but that’s just me – but sometimes we all wake up in a cold sweat, chanting the general prologue, and if we find ourselves thousands of miles away, engrossed in a country completely foreign to us, these words we love (and, perhaps, love to hate) provide us a way back home, if only for a moment.
So please, go ahead and share a story like this, if you have one. I’d like to hear your experiences with literary transportation.
Until next time,
J
Steve was riiiiiiiiiight!
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