Lives Other Than My Own

Finished reading Emmanuel Carrère's Lives Other Than My Own tonight. Impressed by his careful portraits of loss, a child to the tsunami at Sri Lanka, and a wife and mother to cancer. The writing is not just empathetic but keenly aware of the limits of empathy. He is hard on himself, particularly on his writerly egotism, especially in the earlier chapters. One wishes that either he complicates that simple self-criticism or amplifies it with detail and illustration, but perhaps the latter choice would have tipped the delicate balance of the book. As it is, the two sections are not equal and only tenuously linked by his presence in both situations, but the tenuousness of life is also what the book explores.

 “The truth is we don’t know what goes on at the last minute; there must be lives that only seem to be failures, that find their meaning in extremis or whose value we have simply missed. There must also be lives that seem a success but are living hells, perhaps even at the end, although that’s horrible to imagine." (68)

"Pierre Cazenave is not a theoretician, he speaks only from experience, his own and that of his patients, to whom he is bound by "unconditional solidarity with what the human condition holds of unfathomable distress." (That is the formula with which he defines his art, and I would like to be worthy of claiming it for my own.)" As would I.

This morning wrote the first part of the long and final poem for PYR.  Tomorrow, will try for the second, much longer part. At school today, the alums returned for a visit. Ava Sinha, whom I taught in Grade XI two years ago, told me that her friend (course-mate?) at St. Andrew's has written a paper on my poetry, under the supervision of a lecturer who is studying my work. Did I hear her correctly that the study comes under the heading of Neo-Erotics. Love the idea! I was absurdly pleased by the thought of someone studying my work, but quickly changed the subject to talk about her new life in Scotland.