collegial hour

Queasy and out of sorts, starving and can't stomach anything, not even sure how to spell stomach(e), that's the caliber of the day. Boss cordially insists that he will treat the lab to happy hour at 5:45pm and the thought of sitting on one of those tiny metal chairs on that barren concrete wasteland of a quad sipping a tepid beer with some of the more passive-aggressive and burned-out of my workmates is making me repeat the word rage, calmly and coolly, under my breath, over and over. All I want to do is go to the fifth floor balcony and hash out some Friday night feelings, or go to my flat and have an ice cream with my FM, but some sort of weird social decency scale, some level OF HUMAN BONDAGE, is sucking me into that limbo of a concrete quad for an anti-purgatory of a happy hour, and I can't do anything about it, because all my efforts to point out that if we felt like spending time with each other outside of work then happy hour wouldn't have to be mandated are somehow gently deflected or squashily consumed like shooting arrows into a poolful of pudding. I'm left feeling sick and hoarse and dazed and small.

Why are things being demanded of me? They're lucky I'm even here.

oh, hello august. didn't see you there.

oh, you're leaving? bye bye then.

of human bondage

I can't remember the last time I read a book that left me with such an ache for more. I feel like I lost someone close, now that Philip Carey is no longer a part of my day-to-day, and I can't believe that my time with him is over. It fits, it's designed that way; this sense of loss, which turns to meaninglessness if you think too long on it, assaults Philip throughout the book, and Maugham's last hurrah seems to be to inject his pain into your heart. But I'll take it. For me, the reason this book was worth reading is the reason life is worth living: To see a life, like a pattern in a persian rug, and to be happier for having known it. Happier as defined by you and you alone.

I'm in slack-jawed awe of anyone who write a book for the purpose of following one life. Of Human Bondage is added to the ranks of David Copperfield and The Adventures of Augie March in this regard. To be able to take someone from basic infancy through to settled, top-of-the-hill adulthood, and to do that justice without a hint of tedium, wow! Maybe I tend to like this genre because the Davids and the Augies and the Philips go through everything I've known so far and then get just a little farther, and even though none of these endings are endings at all, there at least seems to be some sort of contentment reached that signifies the end of the struggling period I've found myself stewing in for the last five years. Or maybe it's just the best writers that are able to tackle these epic life works, so reading them necessarily means reading the best books you've read in a while.

I want more of this but I have to stumble into it. I didn't seek any of these out. OHB sat on my desk for four months before Ian's recommendation made me read the first chapter during lunch one day. Now I want more more more Maugham but I don't want Philip to fade into the background. Now I'm in book limbo where the first page of everything I pick up will be scrutinized against the memory of the last page I just read, and nothing could possibly measure up. Sure sure recommendations are welcome but if you say anything by Michael Pollan it's over yeah?

So you feel the need to write.

Yes, yes I do.

Why?

Why do I feel the need to write, or why do I write?

Those are the same thing, don't waste my time.

Fine, ok. Because I see things and I think of them in terms of how they would sound written down, and I tolerate things much better when I narrate them in my head. If I can't put words to it then I can't grasp it and I feel the need to grasp things, more now than ever.

But you can't finish anything.

Don't you think I know?

You write out little scenes and then you give up.

Yes.

Because those are the only things you can grasp.

Hm. Yes.

Do you write for other people to read?

I told you, I put things down in writing to give them the gravity they deserve in my own head. That's all I can do, I'm not going to fake an understanding of things that are out of my reach for the benefit of other people.

But you read what other people write, you respect that, you respect it above all else.

Only when they're writing what they understand.

But you don't understand it.

I'm not trying to, I just like the way the words stack when someone knows what they're talking about.

Sometimes you understand it.

Yes, sometimes I do.

What's that?

Heaven.

Do you think your life would be a failure if no one ever understood you that way?

A bit, yes.

Do you think your life will be a failure?

A bit, yes.

private lives

A Wednesday that feels like a Friday and I'm hun n n n gry.

Many roads I wish I had never started down.

Did I want to have my teenaged ideal squashed like the moldy orange that he apparently is all over my once-twinkling eyes today? I'm sure you're as swell a person as I am but who can possibly look appealing under the harsh glare of the all-revealing limelight? It's not desinged to make you look nice it's designed to make you look filleted. I remember sitting in the van eating chocolate ice cream with peanut butter in it. Can I have that memory back please? Can I put that one on top? Can I make that memory your profile picture and leave the rest hidden? Let's be de-friends so I can only see that ice cream. Please.

I'm out of control of everything. Do other people feel this out of control? Control is a tough nut.

Do you know the story of Cybelline? There were nine books that contained all the history of the world, and he wanted to buy them. She named the price, and it was too high, so he wouldn't pay. So she destroyed half the books and doubled the price, and he still wouldn't pay. This kept going on until there was just one book left, and he realized he'd better buy it or else there would be nothing left. So he paid a lot more than he originally would have.

Do you understand the point I'm making here?

Seriously? No.

Right, well, look it up on the internet or something.

People grow on me, almost invariably; my first impression is negative, you're too loud, you're too pretty, you walk like you left the hanger in, you're a HIPSTER, you probably talk about Japan a lot, you should stop being such a fucking weirdo. Give it time, stew with me a little, send me a Christmas card, use the word impresario when I'm not expecting it, grow on me, let me grow on you, don't give it up for free right away, don't think about it, don't force it, if you don't have the time then I don't want your condensed soup just let's pick it up later ok?

Talk to me about the right book when I thought all you knew was parasites and pipettes and you'll grow on me a little faster, but you don't know what the right book is, and you could have picked any one of those books, but you picked that one, so well done you.

When you know someone's read a book you know 300-700 pages of what is in their head. You know that no matter what they think of Larry, they've spent time with him, they know him like you do, or as well as you do in their own way, you have a Mutual Friend. You may be on opposite sides of the office and your lives may be heading in opposite directions but you've both spent a week in 1944 and you care to reminisce.

Surprise me won't you?

Words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

The whole world ought to pass by this bed and say: "That is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old, he doesn't want to die. Let him not die!"

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had befun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

Their pale turnip faces, their pitiful clenched hands, the fine courage of these poor devils, the desperate charges and attacks made by the poor brave wretches, who are so terrified that they dare not cry out loudly, but with battered chests, with torn bellies, arms and legs only whimper softly for their mothers and cease as soon as one looks at them.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

Just as we turn into animals when we go up to the line, because that is the only thing which brings us through safely, so we turn into wags and loafers when we are resting. We can do nothing else, it is a sheer necessity. We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peacetime, would be out of place here. Kemmerich is dead, Haie Westhus is dying, they will have a job with Hans Kramer's body at the Judgment Day, piecing it together after a direct hit; Martens has no legs anymore, Meyer is dead, Max is dead, Beyer is dead, Hammerling is dead, there are a hundred and twenty wounded men lying somewhere or other; it is a damnable business, but what has it to do with us now - we live. If it were possible for us to save them, then it would be seen how much we cared - we would have a shot at it though we went under ourselves; for we can be damned quixotic when we like; fear we do not know much about - terror of death, yes; but that is a different matter, that is physical.

I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?

They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend. I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes, that is it - they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean.

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world's condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim. But who can draw sucha distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and and apostles' beards. Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free.

At once a new warmth flows through me. These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades. I am no longer a shuddering spec of existence, alone in the darkness; - I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.

"Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up - take more, for I do now know what I can even attempt to do with it now."

So long as I do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture. But his name, it is a nail that will be hammered into me and never come out again. It has the power to recall this for ever, it will always come back and stand before me.

A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes in its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness. We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out. They the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.