Everything I do

The fact that we lived and were the kind of people we were

Yesterday, I had a visit from a fellow Substacker. He took me for lunch at our local chippie and stayed on for the entire afternoon, leaving just after six.

Even now, a full 24 hours later, I can remember what we talked about. We talked about To Kill A Mockingbird, about what it was about: race; a trial; and the child’s viewpoint. We talked about Gregory Peck’s watch, and the pearls he’d promised to Scout. We talked about Tibor’s father, about how he had collected watches, about how my buddy had collected watches, and about his relationship to watches, and I told him I’d written about time (here).

The most profound statement I ever saw about the subject of time was from the feminist Vera Brittain, and she didn’t even mention the notion of time. It’s about being who we are, and being who we are is the essence of time. The Tron Lightcycle attraction at Disney World in Florida, USA, costs a small fortune to experience and is over in a couple of minutes, if that. It’s not about the time, it’s about what you do with it, Walt would’ve said.

“I don’t think victory over death ... is anything so superficial as a person fulfilling their normal span of life. It can be twofold: a victory over death by the man who faces it for himself without fear, and a victory by those who, loving him, know that death is but a little thing compared with the fact that he lived and was the kind of person he was.” I wrote about it here.

Tibor and I discussed time, watches, burn-out, medical manipulations for profit, we hung a shutter or two and drank coffee, for the first time this year outside in the garden. Tibor asked me a question that I didn’t want to answer. “Would you carry on writing if you knew nobody read what you wrote?”

I hesitated. I felt like Jesus Christ dragging his cross through the streets of Jerusalem being asked, “Would you be just as happy to be martyred if you knew there was no God?” I’d hesitated enough, so I gave an answer. “I had blog posts at the start of my Substack experience that nobody read. Literally nobody. The first post was this one. No one read it, but I put up another post, nevertheless. I still wrote another one.”

On that same day in 2022, I put up another nine posts, so excited I was at this new mode of expression. I was like on the day I learned to ride a bike: I didn’t just want to ride up and down the driveway, I wanted to ride around the whole district, and I didn’t care whether anyone saw me. I wanted to explore my world, turn my pedals and see what was out there, beyond the end of the driveway. And my father, who had held me tight until I was ready for him to let go smiled and waved as I headed down the road. I miss my father.

Someone I’d known for years wrote to me that day and told me not to post so much at once. It annoys people, she said. I wrote back to her that I was writing for me, not for her. She unsubscribed and hasn’t spoken to me since. Yes, I care. I miss her too.

Tibor’s question is impossible to answer. An immigration officer at Los Angeles Airport once asked me, “What do you do for a living?” and, when I told Mr Ramirez what I did, he countered with, “Why do people need stuff translated? Why can’t they go and do something else?” I told him that sometimes people write things in one language that someone wants to read in another language. An old schoolfriend to whom I related this conversation said to me, “You should’ve told him at least it keeps you from having to become a dumb immigration officer,” although I’m not sure whether that response would’ve accorded me a smooth passage into the United States. The moral of the story being that, if people don’t need what you do, why don’t you go and do something else?

I suppose I could start up another blog and tell no one about it and see whether, with no one reading it, I have any desire to carry on with it. Maybe I could fill it with my most intimate thoughts and then release it in volume form, like Cecily says to Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest:

“It is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.”

At least that way I would know for sure whether I would carry on writing if no one ever read it. Not ever, ever. But then, what I wrote would be unlikely to ever, ever, ever appear in volume form. If I place myself in the shoes of Vera Brittain, does it constitute a waste of time, an abrogation of my very existence, to write things I know that no one will read?

The earnest importance placed on the cave paintings in Lascaux comes from the cave paintings in Lascaux being very unusual, one of very few remnants that we have from 17,000 years ago. That means that they date from a time that is as long ago as the time that has elapsed since the crucifixion of Christ to now plus seven-and-a-half times that timespan. They were discovered during the war and, until 1963, could be viewed. But the humidity and carbon dioxide from the crowd of visitors in just 23 years led to some of them deteriorating beyond salvation. The caves needed to be closed to the public. The discovery of some of the most remarkable evidence of artistry by ancient man. Even the Egyptian pyramids date from only 3000 BC.

I doubt very much whether the discovery in 17,000 years of what I write today will be regarded as astounding to the extent of the discovery of Lascaux. Only if it’s the sole thing that survives that time span, perhaps. Maybe the caves at Lascaux are crap compared with what other contemporaries were painting at the time. We don’t know. They’re some of the few such paintings that we have.

Point is, the people who painted these caves had no notion, no conception that their artwork would be admired 17,000 years later. I have no conceptions as to how my own writing will be assessed 17,000 years from now, not even how it is being assessed as you read this (assuming that anyone is). Those who like it always have the option of hitting the little heart at the foot, but few do and everyone has their own reason for clapping or not clapping at a concert. Sometimes they don’t clap because they thought the performance was rubbish; sometimes they clap simply because everyone else does: you rarely get a standing ovation from just a single person.

Tibor said something else that made me stop to think: he admires a person who has only one watch. We never got very far in exploring why that is, but whoever such a person is, he certainly isn’t: I gave him a watch, right there, on the spot. I had no reason to give it to him, except that I wanted him to know that I knew it was going to a good home, where it would be appreciated better than in my own. Will I ever give him another one? Maybe.

Y’know money isn’t the goal of anything I’ve ever done in this life, even if I initially might have thought it was. Appreciation is always a nice to have and there is more to the dismissal It was really nothing than strikes the eye. Everything is really nothing. Everything we do, we do it for us. If we do it for appreciation, then we don’t do it for those who appreciate, we do it also for ourselves.

The rock singer Meatloaf once complained at a concert I attended that the audience was not enthusiastic enough in its appreciation of him. So they cheered louder, although my own hands froze mid air, and fell to my lap, where they remained for the rest of his performance. I didn’t dislike his music. But, like my initial blog articles, it was all a little too much me, me, me all at once. Take me as I am.