How We Live Our Yoga by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

English novelist Laurence Sterne, writing some years earlier, lampooned the whole notion of penning one’s life in another faux autobiography, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. In fact, in the course of this windy two-volume work, the narrator never advances beyond the physical circumstances of his own birth. This struck me as hilarious, but it also struck a chord. I discovered about this time why I had always had trouble reading: I couldn’t stick with any linear narrative. I subjected each assertion a writer made to an exhaustive internal debate, which then led me to pursue various tangents that carried me far from the instigating text. To paraphrase another modern writer, the center would not hold.

Character seems to drain out of many literary protagonists in the modern period, propelling early-twentieth-century novelist Robert Musil to title one of his novels A Man without Qualities. The chain of fiction’s characterless characters culminates in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, which traces the dissolution of any coherent narrator. The Unnamable can’t muster even the illusion of coherence: “It has not yet been our good fortune to establish with any degree of accuracy what I am, where I am, whether I am words among words, or silence in the midst of silence, to recall only two of the hypotheses launched in this connection.”

This radical collapse of certainty, this spiral into infinite questioning, represents more than the breakdown of “whole” characters in fiction. It signals an ontological/epistemological crisis. Who are we? Where did we come from? How can we ever know? Ask away, in a godless modern world, as these authors do—no reassuring answers emerge. And this inability to define the self, to know the self, broadens to the more profound inability to “know” anything. This doubt permeated my being, and I took cold comfort from sharing the authors’ thinly veiled anxiety.

Moreover, as I read these authors, my life was coming to resemble that of the narrators. By day I sat in my armchair, lost in the imaginary creations of Stendhal or Sterne or Beckett. I perceived the campus life around me as through a sheet of cellophane, observing changes in seasons, undergraduates coming and going with each class hour, each semester, each school year. A series of housemates enrolled in shorter programs came, studied, graduated, and moved on. Everyone else seemed to be pursuing specific paths, consciously shaping their lives through actions programmed into their internal hard drives. My actions in the world, including my interactions with others, on the other hand, always seemed somehow misguided, or at best ineffectual. All I knew how to do was think.

And so the days, and months, passed. But it is the nights I remember most vividly. For as long as I sat in the library, I could distract myself with the pantheon of writers arrayed on various syllabi. There was always something to be read. At night I was left to myself, to the endless perambulations of my own mind. The quieter my external life became, the more limited my contact with others, the more agitated my thoughts.

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