Blogs are the molehills of literature. A mole plays havoc with a lawn by leaving little piles of soil as evidence of its nocturnal tunnelling. Nothing infuriates a gardener more. But a child is fascinated; none more so than the child who takes words at face value. Many times I would exploit a grazed knee to gain maximum attention. Then an adult would say, “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.” At once a prohibition and an enticement: for here was a hint that molehills could be made into mountains, just as a grazed knee could be turned into melodrama.If the purpose of life is to find your niche and stay there, then let me stay in the lowest foothills. “I would climb the highest mountain”, say the songs—as if an unresponsive sweetheart could be wooed by such means. George Mallory was more honest: “My love, I must bid you farewell, for I am to climb the tallest peak.” “Why, darling, why?” “Because it’s there”. He died in1924, but his mortal remains were not discovered till 1999, not far from the summit of Mount Everest. Why?—because they were there. That was his niche. He found it, and stayed there.
“Small is beautiful”. I recall the moment when I found the book of that name, by EF Schumacher. It takes me back to Goodge Street in 1976, near a place called Nice Irma’s which sold big cushions of rich Indian fabrics, braided and sequined. Entering that shop (next to the bookstore), you were wafted into psychedelic heaven on a fluffy cloud. (Why do I recall that particular detail? It was a small moment, a molehill in the bleak plain of my life at that time. It’s context which adds savour to an experience, or washes all savour away.) Anyhow, I did read it. No mountain was then too high for my ambition—I wished I’d taken the trouble to get in first and write the book myself. This overlooked one obvious fact, that it was all economics, which bores me. Still, if I could have stifled the yawns, I might have written a paragraph like this:
. . . Since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. . . . The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity.
This was not literature. But now I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills and contemplate something which is. I’ve started to read Martin Amis’ novel Money: it soars among the highest in aim and achievement. But I’ll pick something from its low foothills. (If you want a proper review of the book, you could start with this one .) But I just want to extract one thought for closer analysis: the relationship between writer and reader. If you disapprove of Money, or Martin Amis, you’ll sneer at his subject-matter, and the “terrible compulsive vividness in his style … that constant demonstrating of his command of English” (from a Guardian article, via Wikipedia). But a book doesn’t get listed in Time’s 100 best novels since 1922 just for that. A writer doesn’t win the heart of a reader by being clever, but by achieving a mutual embrace with the reader. You and I, if I’m not wasting my time here, are locked in a dance, you in your space-time, I in mine. Through some chemistry of language, we enjoy a prolonged session of intimacy, a coitus of the mind. If the writer touches no ecstasy, what hope for the reader? “No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said the irascible and melancholic Dr Johnson. His attitude explains why no one reads his voluminous literary output today. He ground out his verse-dramas to make a living, but his best fun lay in throwing out opinionated apophthegms at dinner-parties, coffee-houses and taverns. And Boswell had the best times of his life, apart from what was then unmentionable in literature, at Johnson’s side, scribbling notes to be written up later. Centuries afterwards, we ignore Johnson’s writings, but, through Boswell, revere the man.
For me, I can only write when the Muse induces a state of ecstasy: and then I can never convey the feeling. I admire Fernando Pessoa for his Book of Disquiet, whose topics include every mood, every state of boredom, exhaustion, insomnia or alienation. By some verbal alchemy, recklessly stretching the capabilities of language, exploring the furthest reaches of his own singularity, he takes us to a climax of recognition, time and again. How can he do that?
I admire Amis for somewhat similar reasons. As a man, he doesn’t come across as the lovable type—more the moody spoilt genius. His hero in Money is John Self, which you could easily take as a hint that his novel is autobiographical. But no. Martin Amis, novelist, is also a character in the novel, a fictional presentation of its author. Of course, a novelist can split himself into any number of parts, and often does. John Self is a fat ugly cantankerous sick drunken woman-hitting brawling chain-smoking fast-food-guzzling pornography addict. His long “suicide note” is eloquent with verbal dexterity of a kind completely incompatible with the philistine narrator who confesses he never reads books. So we are to imagine Money as the paraphrase of a stream of consciousness which Self feels but cannot put into language. I embrace with glee my chance to live in John Self’s skin with no lasting damage to my own health. I don’t get the hangovers and blackouts, but aspire to a similar eloquence about my own life.
I have to confess that I’m only an eighth of the way through. That’s when I usually feel like writing a review, while it’s fresh and not a blurry memory; when I have just reached base camp and aim to stay there till my reflective self has had time to catch up. I’m open to every impression, not yet parti pris. This is how I like to be, ready to see the universe in a grain of sand. Small is beautiful. I’m not just reading a novel, I’m reaching beyond myself to walk in the shoes of someone I’ll never be, and discover that we are closer in brotherhood than I ever imagined. With a book’s help, I make the discovery, in Walt Whitman’s words, that “I am large, I contain multitudes”. He continues: “I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.” Yeah, me too, on a good day. Here at base-camp, my book is nigh, I can sit on my own threshold, lay my book down on the door-slab whilst I converse with you, my dear.
Who is my neighbour? You: and Amis’s anti-hero who recklessly insults New York cabbies; at any rate one who dreams of getting “a hundred guys” with whom he could “take out all the niggers and PRs [Puerto Ricans] in this fuckin town”. (The cabbie too is my neighbour.) After a brief discussion of the feasibility of this undertaking, our hero asks,
“Why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”
“Uh?”
“Kill all the niggers and PRs?”
“They think, you know, you drive a yellow cab,” he said, and raised one limp splayed hand from the wheel, “you must be some kind of a scumbag.”
I sighed and leaned forward. “You know something?” I asked him. “You really are a scumbag. I thought it was just a swearword until you came along. You’re the first real one I’ve met.”
My reader, fellow-blogger, mon semblable—mon frère! I owe you. Thanks for the inspiration. Writing is love. Reading is love. We are large, we contain multitudes. We are molehills, more alive and changeable than those huge old mountains.
Thanks especially to Steve Holmes who, in his list of “the most overrated of all time”, had this to say about Martin Amis:
I forgot Martin Amis. He’s certainly worse than mediocre; he’s macabre. To me that’s the greatest perversion there is.
— and to Rebb who responded to my mention of the novel thus:
Interesting that you find the book you are currently reading uplifting! It might just depress me.
a wayfarer’s notes 
'From my village I can see the universe, for I´m the size of what I see, and not the size of my height'
Pessoa,as Alberto Caieiro,knew a lot about being a molehill. He also said 'the mystery of things; where is it?; the mystery of things are things themselves, for being things they know not about being a mystery'
Right now, the molehill of my life, worth a thousand high mountains, is a 700gr kitty by the name of Perseus, who knows nothing about the mystery of things.
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Great essay Vincent. Writers and mystics realize the deep treasure in boredom. Zhuangzi: “In the empty room the brightness is born”.
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“A writer doesn’t win the heart of a reader by being clever, but by achieving a mutual embrace with the reader”
Very true Vincent.I am delighted by reading this post, and thanks for putting your PICTURE on profile.You are ditto to my imagination.
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I'm mesmerized by your essay, Vincent. There is so much here and as usual, your magic touch is weaved throughout. I feel the energy of this particular blog.
“Relationship between writer and reader”–yes…”achieving a mutual embrace”–Lovely thoughts–truths. “Chemistry of language.” The way you've described this makes so much sense and I feel it. And when we do enter this space, it does feel like being “locked in a dance.”
“Writing is love. Reading is love.” Yes!
An inner/outer observation. What I admire about you also, Vincent, is your confidence. When I post blogs, I still feel insecure sometimes. I may feel secure and then I hit submit and there goes another piece of me. I don't know if that makes any sense? Before blogging, I kept myself contained, but once I started opening up, I felt very much like a “caged bird” that let herself out, so sometimes I feel clunky and too “loud,” sometimes quiet, excited, etc. I sure relate to moods–they certainly can color writing.
Thank you for your inspiration, Vincent–and for your encouragement–even though I remember a comment from the past. Challenge, rather than encouragement is what I recall you saying, but I certainly have felt the encouragement—thank you for that! 🙂
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Rebb, you and I have something in common. As for the confidence, it's a thing given ad hoc. I never own it. When it wells up from inside, I call it the Muse – at any rate in relation to creativity. When encouraged by outside prompting, I call it angelic intervention, and consider it a double blessing – (a) that it happens, (b) that it's aimed intentionally, not just random. Your earlier encouragement on this pace brought me back to it for a great deal of further editing.
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Jitu, have you had this experience that when you see the film version of a book, you instantly recognise the characters whose appearance you had only imagined before, as if you had imagined precisely that, all the time? It has happened to me often.
However when it is a real person, that I have only heard on the radio, or (for example) a work colleague of my wife, who I'm very accustomed to hearing about, I tend to get a shock when I see them in real life – so different from imagination.
It shows the difference between art and real life, I suppose. A blog is art, not real life.
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Ah Raymond, you have helped point me to a new theme: waiting, doing nothing, having no agenda.
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Perseus is a perfect name, Luciana, for the cat species are great adventurers and killers, and some domestic cats are Persian.
Thinking of what Pessoa and Amis have in common, I come up with a tentative idea. They are adventurers in human experience who sacrifice bourgeois comfort to glean narratives from the margins, the edge of civilisation where extremes can be explored.
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Vincent, your picture has resemblance with my late friend Mr.Sengupta who taught me English writing and aroused my interest to read world literature.I feel like I re-meet him.
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Vincent,
Yes, we are molehills, alive, and changeable. About molehills and mountains, in the Japanese language, we call both yama. This is true. But we haven't had any major problem in communicating about molehills though.
On your photo, you look like English Socrates. I thought about Hamlet and other English tradition. To me, they are all there. I also looked at your profile and saw the word, “Idler.” That seems more like a Japanese person, I thought. Those are my thoughts today.
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I was going to comment on the photo before and I forgot.
Keiko, I can see a Hamlet and a Prospero, but I´d like to see Falstaff, too, for I know it´s there. 🙂
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Vincent, I mean it in a good way. I think Falstaff simply represents all our contradictions as human beings in a more relaxed and accepting sort of way. He´s no evil, he´s simply human.
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Wow, so many Shakespearean possibilities. However, I cannot act. All my energies are used up in trying to be me, and not always succeeding. I still like the Centaur icon, though. A reminder that a human being is also an animal.
Thanks all.
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Oy, ain't easy saying hello [across equATORS] AND planets.. but yer, gidday. the marvels of modern technology .. heh.
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.. odd really, if one begins to think of only 200 years ago ..
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molehills. I was instructed in their proper treatment and hatred here. One must, first thing in spring, stamp them down hard. Rolling the lawn is best, to produce an evenly compacted subsurface. Poison seems to be the treatment of preference for the animal causing so disreputable an upheaval.
But. They don't eat the roots of sod or other plants – instead their worst habit is eating earthworms, their best – eating 'pest' larvae. I'm not fussy about my lawn, and welcome their aerating tunnels that permit life to slip ever deeper.
Yet I'm not Lilliputian enough to consider them mountains.
An organic farmer of my acquaintance has simple advice. Cut the lawn higher, and overseed it with low flowering herbs. The molehills disappear like magic.
Perhaps that is the secret behind molehills becoming mountains. One must first shear away everything else so it's petite glory is magnified beyond proportion.
my mind wanders…
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Thanks Hayden, glad you don't want to kill everything (or indeed anything!) in sight.
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Davo, it's odd even in your lifetime and mine. Once there was a ritual of letter-writing. Find the paper, find an envelope, stamp, pen, ink, blotting-paper; remember to post the letter etc …
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Hoping you are well…. just busy….
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Hayden, thanks for dropping by. Indeed I am well. Busy? No. Just unable to publish anything at present. The Muse doesn't allow me! Soon I hope.
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Vincent, this is the first time that I noticed your face on your blog——very distinguished, professorial, intimidating even!
I wonder if you recall Pessoa's reaction when he saw his own face in a group portrait of his co-workers? He was struck by how characterless he appeared, as opposed to everyone else—(even the office boy) who all looked like men of great substance!
Love your quote: “…glean narratives from the margins, the edge of civilisation where extremes can be explored.”
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Oh, and I've ordered “Money” from the library, upon your recommendation.
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I like the photo in a way because it makes me look intimidating! I've gone down narrow alleys & been punched just because my forbidding look was so intimidating, well once, anyhow, and he was too hopelessly drunk to cause me pain. But that's the face with which I look into the mirror. It's far too bland when I look at a loved one, as in a photo from April '07.
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