Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

Author:Yiyun Li
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

Amongst Characters

I called my mother the other day and she reported that she was reading an old journal of mine. At that very moment. I changed the subject only to be guided back. She wanted to start keeping a journal and, looking for a suitable notebook, found one nearly unused, with only a few entries at the beginning. Written right after you left the army, she said. No, you don’t have to read it to me, I said when she described the first entry. The paranoia I felt then is the same fear that has always been with me. Anyone reading one’s words is able to take something from one. Had I been more disciplined I would have written nothing and lost nothing.

Philip Larkin, on his deathbed, asked that his diaries be destroyed. His request was carried out by Monica Jones—his longtime friend, intermittent lover, and later companion. Other private papers she allowed to be made public, a controversial outcome from a debatable will. At our first meeting William Trevor talked about one’s wishes being misinterpreted, giving Larkin as an example. On that day I was aware that my understanding of Trevor’s concern was hypothetical. I was thirty-four and he was seventy-nine; I had published one book, he, more than thirty. That one’s words would be misinterpreted seemed to me as inevitable as death itself. What I did not know yet was that a young person’s fatalism was only bravado.

When that bravado failed, fatalism became fatal. Or, to make a more honest statement: unless shut away in a journal that will be safely and timely burned, one’s words will always be read, by design or by accident. Hiding behind those words is like entrusting one’s self to a straw house—there is the wind, there is the wolf, and above all, there is one’s urge to destroy the house before it is destroyed by an external force.

Between the two hospital stays, I was in London for a few days by myself. The hotel, a narrow house on a quiet street, had a strip of a garden guarded by high walls, and I spent much of the time there reading Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks. When it rained I moved to the sitting room, which was hidden from the hotel entrance. Other guests appeared, but they were either too busy or too idle, and none of them seemed to be able to sit still for long. There were sights to see, and business to conduct. There was also time to kill. A woman picked up and put down a magazine without opening it; a son in his thirties walked into the garden once and again, bringing the same news of rain to his mother; a man studied the marble fireplace before his wife and daughters joined him.

To appear as the most idle person in the hotel—to not have to venture out for business or sightseeing—and to be able to sit still for hours: only in retrospect do I understand this extrication as a dangerous sign.

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