May 23 - Outside The Self and Graduation

For the last two days I've been lazing around New Haven with Mara and her family. I've been treated to wonderful meals at Zinc, Bar and Miya's. It's been great. Not too much to tell besides that, besides the fact that College Nationals are happening right now and I'm following them fairly closely.

I finished 'An Imaginary Life' yesterday. Despite beginning as a book dominated by Ovid's internal monologue and concerned with the interior workings of a mind, the novel moved beyond these constraints by the end. As I implied in my title of my last post, there's a certain connection between an internal life and imprisonment. This is not a necessary association, but for certain characters (especially Coetzee's protagonist in 'Youth') the interior life with its ambitions, neuroses and obsessions trumps any other forms of existence and locks one within their own mind. Malouf's Ovid is necessarily trapped because he cannot speak the language of his hosts. Later in the story, Malouf introduces a feral child whom Ovid decides to take under his wing. The child has no self in our sense, he IS the world. There are no boundaries to his consciousness, he inhabits all things. This type of selflessness is an interesting contrast to the sort of self that is evident in 'Youth.' There is much more freedom, but much less constancy or sureness. Another interesting point is the fact that while John in 'Youth' is miserable, Ovid, especially when he is interacting with the child (with whom he has an incredible connection) is very happy. Anyway, I thought i'd end with a sentence from Malouf that I particularly liked:
"What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become, except in dreams that blow in from out there bearing the fragrance of islands we have not yet sighted in our waking hours, as in voyaging sometimes the first blossoming branches of our next landfall come bumping against the keel, even in the dark, whole days before the real land rises to meet us." (135-6).