As Time Goes By

The Cuckoo's Nest has this to say about the difficulties of going out in the world and coming home again. I love it, and not JUST because my charming friend leads with a story about me, rather because she perfectly captures what I've been feeling these last weeks, and does so with humor and grace.

It's true. I do hate clichés. It's also true that I won't watch Casablanca because of this (peculiar?) aversion. I tried to watch once, but I just couldn't take it seriously. I mean, "Here's looking at you, kid." Honestly, who says that?!?

I felt a similar incredulity when I returned from Jordan. The top news stories in the U.S. were whether Donald Trump would fire Miss USA and whether rescuers would find three missing climbers on Mt. Hood. Meanwhile in the Middle East (where I had been less than 24 hours before), Gaza seemed on the brink of civil war in a bloody clash that still continues. Really? I thought. Seriously?

It's ironic that all the things we love about home - the safety, the security, the familiarity - seem offensive after a long trip abroad. The sameness is jarring, as if all of it - the traveling, the learning, the growing - had never happened at all, as if you'd never left home.

But, I did, and I've tried to incorporate part of my journey into my life here. I tried smoking both of the arigilleh I brought home (one for my dad and one for me), I bought a Turkish coffee pot and tried to brew three tiny cups of the sludgy beverage, I spoke Arabic to an Indian clerk at an international grocery store...That all of my efforts have failed miserably feels poetic. As LD said, "It's hard to hold on to your journey."

So. How DO you hold on to what you know matters and not get swept away in the vast selection of soaps at the supermarket, for instance?

I haven't figured that out yet.

Recognizing the ways that home is the same is, of course, only possible by the act of going away and coming back again. They stand out in relief only because you have seen something else, just as I am only annoyed by the clichés in Casablanca because I've heard them all before. I know I should just appreciate the movie for what it was in it's own time, but it's easier said than done.

A famous Italian novelist disagrees with me (as do hundreds of thousands - I refuse to acknowledge there might be millions - of Casablanca fans, no doubt) . He says:

Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

There's something to that, I'm sure of it. Anyway, who am I to argue with Umberto Eco?

2006 Reading List

Here's my annual list of books read this year. I'm a little late with this, but I've been out of town. Also, I moved three times in 2006, and I just found the list I started in Chicago last January. I may have left some off, but it's as accurate as possible. Like I said, it's been a hectic year.

Books I read in 2006:
1. All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer
2. Brown's Chicken Massacre by Maurice Possley
3. Horseplayers by Ted McClelland
4. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
5. Feast of Love by Charles Baxter
6. When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
7. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
8. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
9. The Zahir by Paulo Coehlo
10. The Red Tent by Anita Diamont

Books I started but didn't finish:
1. A Kiss from Maddalena by Christopher Castellani
2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
3. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
4. The Washingtonienne by Jessica Cutler
5. Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz

I won't be making predictions this year, because you can see how well that went last year. I didn't read any of the books I thought I would. Who knows where this year will take me - on the literary front and otherwise? Anything is possible.