No Reading Aloud
Two Bookshelves, a Fig Tree and the Crushing Silence of the Saddest Building in the World
Commentary by Peter Babiak
“Hey. Look around and take it all in,” she says from the top of the front steps, steps that earlier that summer I rebuilt because the rain had rotted the old planks through to the stringers. It was the last meaningful chore I did at my old house before moving across town to the saddest one-bedroom in the world near Granville Island in a building filled with widows, Russians and inexpressive consultant types. It wasn’t the kind of place where you’d need a rake or wire cutters but I brought most of my tools, even the big ones. “Because you’ll never forget this moment for the rest of your life,” she said, and I remember a wistful fatality in her voice, as if she always knew our marriage had to end, was okay with it, but was still taken aback when it finally happened. I know I was. It was the middle of September, five years ago. I was loading the second of two large shelving units—she kept the two nice ones with the glass doors—into my truck. Half an hour earlier she was helping me carry the first down the steps, but she lost her grip at the bottom near where the root of the Japanese maple buckled the concrete walk, swore and dropped her end. There’s still a scuff on the top right of the frame. Frustrated or injured, maybe both, she said some unpleasant things and went back up the stairs, and closed the door, which is why I slid the second one down the stairs alone, lift-dragged it down the walk, across the sidewalk and onto the road, tilted and pushed it into the truck alone.
I was securing the two shelves with a bungee cord when she said it. I hadn’t noticed she had come back out and was standing at the top of the stairs. In 1911 when they laid the foundations in this part of East Van they positioned the doors just a spit or two away from the streets, so I’m sure other people heard her say it. It was slightly awkward, yes, but distressingly poetic, too, like a soliloquy of cosmological solemnity announcing itself in a domestic plot twist unfolding on a pleasant late summer afternoon. Imagine Jean-Paul Sartre suddenly breaking out with his “existence precedes essence” exhortation in the middle of a Don Cherry segment on a Saturday afternoon game in December.
When you’re standing on the street, emotionally drained from deleting stuff from your house and sweaty from lugging it all into your vehicle so you can start settling in at your new place, and you’re aware that the neighbours must be gossiping about what exactly you did to bring about this narrative arc dramatized before their eyes, you don’t consider the referential function of all the words that come your way. But if ever a sentence was burdened with traumatic denotation, that was it. I was leaving not only her—as bad as it sounds, that was the easy part, because no marriage will withstand revision to neutered daily rapport—but the house with its distant echoes of the history that preceded us and the myths that we made with all the trips to the hardware store, the big chair at the front window where I read, the view of the mountains from the upstairs window and the evening migration of crows. Also, those steps that I rebuilt and that she was now standing on, the dogs, my daughter and all those unhurried conversations over breakfast and dinner at the round table, the garage with my hammers, saws and gardening tools and bags of mortar that I would never relinquish to make way for a laneway house, the pond with the bridge made from the back fence I ripped down the first spring there to gain an extra metre of backyard from the alley, my banana plants and fig trees. All of it.
Just not the shelves and my books, and there had to be some consolation in that, I thought to myself as I stepped onto the running board to wave a faint “bye” over the truck while trying my best to invoke the nonchalant coolness of Jack Kerouac, who wrote so brashly about “how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt.” But Kerouac was wrong. Or half wrong. Leaving felt wretched. I drove up the street, turned right and pulled over under the second chestnut tree at the alley and choked up more than I have at any funeral or break-up or even when the vet gives Owen Wilson a few minutes with his dying dog in Marley and Me, but I did it discreetly because I know the guy who lives in the corner house. He’s a longshoreman with an F-150. I looked out the passenger window over the three backyards down to the fourth, where both my dogs were probably sitting in the sun, and I saw the bright green split figs through the tall bamboos. When we bought the place I spent a magnificently dirty weekend digging up the skeletal roots of the bamboos next to the house because they looked like they’d crack the foundation. My foundation.
Heidegger has this odd essay where he contrasts a “building,” a place you can “inhabit,” from a “dwelling,” a place you can “take shelter in.” A building always has a dwelling “as its goal.” He’s talking about something like a sense of “home,” that mantle of names and words, memories and stories we cling to, like a mobile library of the imperative self we lug around with us wherever we go because that’s who we really need to be in life and that’s how, literally, we make any building we may find ourselves in into a dwelling.
And so a few hours later I was laying out my imperative self to try and make my one-bedroom into a home. Having maneuvered the shelves against the wall by the window, I drank and, in a disoriented state of spatial melancholy, put my books into place, the sacred novels and books—Purdy, Richler, Baudelaire—on the top shelves of both, literature on the left and theory on the right, and everything on the remaining four beneath. Not only the arrangement of books, but where the shelves were against the wall, to the left of the window which looked out onto some willow treetops and two adjacent buildings, was an uncanny duplication of the way they were at the house. Italo Calvino says in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler that your home, “being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life.” Whether they keep the outside world out or just offer you a place to “sink as if into a drug,” for example.
With my old Mission rocking chair diagonally facing the theory shelves, a potted Turkish fig tree—which wasn’t really a tree but two cuttings I snipped from the root of the mother tree in the backyard earlier that week—at the left arm, and a side table with a low-reading light at the right, Calvino might conclude that my books signified a purely defensive verbal strategy. It was a hiding place, something temporary that smacked of worthlessness and the general embarrassment of being a middle-aged guy who’s devolved from the respectable civic state of home ownership where he had abundant shelves and a garden and a garage full of tools and a variety of domestic guy widgetry to a rootless condition of renting near False Creek. “Oh yes,” I could hear Baudelaire saying to me from a hundred and fifty years ago, “this hovel, this home to eternal ennui, is indeed my own.” But at least he had the Left Bank in Paris; I was next door to an evangelical seniors’ residence on the concrete banks next to Granville Island.
That first night I ate a falafel and rocked and read, no doubt thinking that by some mystic combination of rocking and reading in a patch that resembled my old house, glass of vodka by my side, I could make it feel less like the saddest building in the world. I don’t remember what I read but I remember at some point feeling melodramatically sorry for myself and pulling a Czeslaw Milosz from the top shelf—because nobody does self-pity and nostalgic suffering like the Slavs—and finding an index card on which years ago I’d written “Language is my homeland.” I must have liked the line when I read it as a student still charmed by poststructuralism and attached to that adolescent idea that a guy should always be able to pack his stuff—his imperative self—into plastic milk crates that could always double as shelving units. Always be ready to move because wherever you go, as that cryptic mindfulness mantra says, that’s where you are. And so on.
But if I wanted to adjust to life in the saddest building ever I would have to commit to routines and rituals. “Same as you did at your house,” Dr. Cheryl told me in her Burrard Street office not long after I moved. “Do repetitive practices, rituals, like every evening at the same time read in the same chair with the same tea.” Until then I hadn’t really thought of sitting down as a ritual, but only because there was nothing else to do in my little place. There was no place I could use my hammer or saw, and the rake and shovel I brought became museum pieces leaning unusable in a corner of the concrete balcony. I needed an outside to make my inside feel like home. Even with its books and two shelves, the “treehouse” (as my daughter started calling my one-bedroom, perhaps because that sounded less distant and absolute), just didn’t do it. No grass needed cutting and there was no dog shit to clean up, so for months after I pulled out of my old house I went back just to mow and rake the lawn, take out the garbage, cut and hammer things. One evening after I took her to a movie called Crazy, Stupid Love, my daughter pointed out that I reminded her of the Steve Carell character. In one scene Cal drives back to his ex’s house in the middle of the night to tend to the yard just because it needed tending. I understood that. My sense of self was entirely bound up with that yard, more so than it’s ever been with books.
Then again, even if I had a yard to take care of at the saddest place, there wasn’t anybody to talk to about it, to tell just how fast the grass was growing or how gross it was when your finger poked a hole in that little bag and you got dog shit on your fingers. A home “filled with nothing but yourself,” like Margaret Atwood says in one of those lines that make me thankful that at least literature can mollify the aching desolation of life: “It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.”
For a time I started to read out loud to fill that emptiness. I’d read to myself. To myself, out loud, which is psychotic or at the very least childish. The rocking chair sounded like muted barbarism on that white carpet. The walls were thick, the windows double paned and didn’t open—except for the sliding glass door to that sunless balcony where I wasn’t allowed to hang planters or have a barbecue—and I heard nothing outside. Nothing. No trucks or sirens, no dogs, no conversations, not even in the hallway, only the irregular vibration of my transplanted bookcases against the wall whenever the garbage chute would slam in the alcove a few feet from my front door. So just my own voice reading Palahniuk or Buday or, when I was well vodka’d up and on the tearful edge of some broody abyss, Shevchenko or Nietzsche. But this ritual of verbal onanism wasn’t working. I was making myself into a distraught protagonist in a syrupy Bildungsroman. Libraries are such perfect places but a library where you’re the only person reading—out loud— is an aberration. Or an insane asylum. Homes, like libraries, need books and people because they provide the possibility of dialogue.
Then one evening, a few months in, I happened to get a glimpse of a partially clothed woman walking to her table in one of the adjacent buildings perpendicular to my library wall next to the window that looked out over the willows. For many nights afterwards when I’d do my drinking and reading in the Mission rocker at 9:00 or 10:00 with my “tea” to fulfill that ritual that wasn’t working, I’d walk over to the curtain, draw it, and most times I’d see her sitting there. Her profile became a touchstone, though all she ever did was sit there in that all-too-familiar posture of postmodern sociability, hunched over her laptop, face emblued by her screen, drink by her left hand, often a bowl of something on her lap, looking pretty much alone even when she smiled, like she did when she’d get up for another drink, thinking, I guessed, of what to type to the guy she was talking to when she got back to her table and slipped into that residual thrum of excitement happening elsewhere in the world.
I imagined her life as a sentence, figuratively and literally, a reflection of my own incarceration at that place, and that sort of became my routine, though I’m sure she didn’t have the same malingering night terrors I had grown accustomed to that year. She did little but stare her evenings away into her—no doubt—very good bandwidth and spent hours looking at Facebook, blogs, porn, or emailing those who flitted around her world with no lawns to mow or shrubs to trim. I’m sure she was quite lovely in person, but in my voyeur’s mind she was a sentence out of Hemingway. Clean, crisp and paratactic in its sublime emotionlessness. No mess, no fuss, just the pure impact of fingers typing words that were more like statements than invitations to dialogue and audible conversation.
And it was then—somewhere between thinking her robe might just come open on her next trip to the kitchen and speculating about what she really must signify in my life in that solipsism that sometimes opens up when I read and drink alone and shamefully hallucinate that I’m some voice crying out from the wilderness—that it occurred to me that it wasn’t just a sense of having made the right decision in my own life, it was also the sensation that I wasn’t alone. A dwelling, a home, has to be hypotactic, a compound sentence at least, or, better yet, a dialogue where words are spoken in such a way that they require and elicit a response from another person. A discourse, in other words, not just one-directional statements that are lost in the emptiness of the space in your apartment. Even in the solitary moments, there has to be a voice out there that talks, doesn’t just echo back but exists to be talked to and listened to. Even when they’re confrontational or argumentative, relationships are, like cutting a fig or building stairs, work. Books help us, and solitude can sure be a salve, but people save us, and doing things for or with them—a chore after work, Saturday morning hardware store runs for hinges and bags of mushroom manure, Sunday evening talks during the tv commercials, the purposeful banality of trips to retailers who specialize in faucets or furniture—is what makes us. A dwelling, in the Heideggerian meaning, is the feeling of having been there in a dialogue you retain and continue with the one who will be there in the morning and evening, preferably in person, and who wants to talk to you and listen to you because what you both say intersects in a palpable way.
I lived in the sad building for fourteen months and fifteen days, and at no time was it ever home. No matter how much I rearranged the books, no matter what ritual I performed or what I read—either to myself or out loud. It was quite the opposite. I took to working sixteen-hour days, saying yes to anything anybody asked me to do for them, especially when it meant leaving the “treehouse” and being outside. Eventually, I moved into a garden suite that is, finally, more like a dwelling, maybe because I have the same bookshelves positioned in the same way, and figs, though these ones are out in the sun and rain now, and maybe because I can use my shovel and rakes and hammer if I want to; but mostly because there are people around to talk to in the evenings and in the mornings and I don’t need to read out loud here. It’s staggering, really, the joy of being aware of other people and having other people be aware of you, isn’t it? There’s this mysterious character in Hermann Hesse’s 1919 novel Demian, Frau Eva, who tells a besotted young man who is happy to have finally met her because she will be, in his fragile mind, the source of validation that will tell him what his life is, “One never reaches home,” it’s just that “where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.” It could be true, in some ontological sense, that we never reach home, but those paths, for a time, can intersect. Perhaps only for a time, and perhaps then we need to read out loud, to ourselves, alone. »