The Way We Live Now

Sometimes I shock myself. I do wonder if human beings really deserve the name - if to be labelled 'human' is to imply being humane. I know from observation that my attitude to other people is generally on the right side of the dividing line between concern and indifference, and yet...

An example. I lent a DVD box set to a colleague at work. This woman suffers from ill-health, and disappeared from work for a few weeks without explanation. And it was perfectly plain to me that I was far more concerned about whether I would see my DVDs again than...you get the picture. Of course if someone had offered me the straight choice of the importance of any person's life versus a DVD set, I'd say, 'the person' and yet...

And yet...

I make the opposite choice every day. It was worth nearly £90 to me to have the Beckett on Film set a few years back - how many of those little anti-diarrhea packets(at a cost then of about 3p) is that? Every one a life potentially saved. Three thousand people 'dead' so I can watch some plays.

Of course it's not quite that simple. The link is not that direct, and even if it was...I could give that money away - but there are all sorts of complexities involving what charities actually do with their money, to do with patronising attitudes and self-conscious self-righteousness and guilt. And yet...

History is written by the 'winners'. What history are we writing now (assuming 'we' win in the battle against climate change)? Among my immediate circle on facebook far more people seemed concerned about the Xmas No. 1 than about any of the issues surrounding the Copenhagen Summit. No, scratch that - no one seemed concerned about Copenhagen until I brought it up on my page. This is not to trumpet my own dedication to the cause; since then I've read Climate Progress ( http://climateprogress.org/ ) posts with dutiful semi-attention, told myself this is the month I must go to the local FOE meeting - and done, in fact, fuck all.

This blog has been a continually difficult prospect for me because I am not an ordered thinker. Everything that comes into my mind brings up too many associated ideas, too many possibilities. Maybe it's a symptom of the times; the world we live in now is impossibly complex. For every opinion there are five alternative views. So I can only speak for myself, for what I know to be true from my own inner sense of how things are/how they should be. Of course there is immense value, immense aesthetic and even spiritual value in Fiction Books or great films, and even the question of what is to be the Xmas No. 1 is bound up with questions of whether we respond to the easy and superficial or the more challlenging. It is better to care about something than about nothing.

And yet...

I began today by saying that I shock myself. But the real problem is that I do not shock myself. I am so immersed in a certain lifestyle that I have no easy way of tapping into the reality of much that happens in the world, and most of the time I hardly give that insensitivity a thought. I bought four books from Oxfam yesterday, but not to support charity - and without a thought in my mind about the money involved other than that I shouldn't be spending it when I have 1000 unread books already at home. Fuck your starving families, I have books in my kitchen cupboards instead of food, and some of my friends think that's really weird. If only, if only that was the weirdest fucking thing about the way I live.

Make it count

Writing is a luxury. Reading is a luxury. Curious things for a writer to say? Stories may go back to the Palaeolithic campfires, but when they were told then the day’s work was done; any crisis was past. That is no longer the case. A tragedy or a triumph, if it is of sufficient magnitude, is all around the world in minutes. Famine, disease, crime, war: we know, we can see, that these things afflict real living people every moment of every day. And this is without even mentioning that the ecosystem is in a state of potentially disastrous flux. Everywhere there is suffering, every week brings a new crisis.

And we sit and write, we lounge and read. Is there anything we can say to ourselves that justifies such self-indulgence, such apparently wilful negligence of real problems?

I don’t know the answer to that. I have 1700 books in one room, more than I can ever read in the time I have left to live—if I want to actually live as well. Averaging out their value, every single one of those books could provide money to save a human life, somewhere in the world. (Let’s not even go near the DVD box sets…) How can I even hesitate, if I can pick up a collected volume of comics and know that it’s worth four or five human lives?

Stories are part of our human makeup, it could be retorted; literature is a treasury of the human spirit, a repository of inspirational dreams and salutary nightmares. We require myths, ancient and modern, in order to better understand the world and ourselves. We need fiction: even the lightest, most superficial works provide relief from the harpies and furies of the world, giving our hearts and minds essential rest before we plunge back in. And writers need to nourish their work; we need the stories of others to stoke the fires of our own inspiration. Fiction Books

Perhaps this is the crux. I look around at the books I have collected and know that at the time each one seemed essential, served a purpose, if only for some tangential aspect of research. If I am to justify these acquisitions, it must be through the work that they support. In an age when people starve almost literally in front of my eyes, if I can break away from my desk to get a biscuit, I had better be fucking certain that what I write when I come back to that desk (too busy usually to even attend properly to the taste of the food) is worth the effort. Dig deep, mine the very depths of your experience and your imagination, write true, make it good—make it count.

Raymond Chandler said we’re competing for beer money, so we have a duty to make our work gripping, entertaining. If we write with our eye on everything the world is, everything about it that demands our attention, we have a duty to do much, much more.

Fiction Books