Departure(s)
When it comes to the snooze button (which, have you noticed, is ginormous on the most updated iPhone OS?), here is my philosophy, at least with my own snooze button activity: The point is not so much to get more sleep; the point is to have an awareness that I am getting more sleep. I think that fundamentally, humans want to actively know that they are receiving or experiencing a benefit. Is being granted a bit of extra sleep without being alerted to it the same as actively choosing to get that extra time? I don’t think so. (Stay tuned for my exhilarating dispatches on my philosophy of laundry.)
It’s weird, but this is what I was thinking about while reading Departure(s), the self-declared final book from Julian Barnes. I’m not super well-versed in Barnes, although I’ve got a couple of his novels waiting in the wings. But after reading and writing long-form about both The Sense of an Ending and The Only Story, I think I have a good idea of some of his favored motifs and themes. He likes to explore Westerners’ obsession with “redemption,” he is intrigued by long-lost loves, and — yes — Julian Barnes writes a lot about death and grief. (His wife died in 2008 about a month after being diagnosed with a brain tumor.) Departure(s) is billed as a novel, but it’s some sort of blend of autofiction, memoir, and a nonfiction investigation of memory and how people relate to and engage with it. It tells the story of Barnes’ (real) diagnosis of a manageable, but incurable, rare blood cancer (see: death/grief) and the story of two university friends who get back together in their 60s after a brief fling during their student days (see: long-lost loves). This notion of “redemption” — and whether or not that is a feasible way of looking at life — ties it together.
I’ve had a longstanding opinion that many readers don’t care all that much about the ins and outs of a writer’s life + thought process. I even wrote about this for Literary Boston back in the day. I take it back — a bit — after reading Departure(s). Maybe, like a snooze button, understanding an author’s take on big issues is the active knowledge that tells you, “Yes, this is a good thing I’m enjoying.”
originally published on instagram