I wanna laugh along / I wanna belong to the living
— Joni Mitchell, ‘All I Want’

I want to be a person like somebody else was once.
— Peter Handke, Kaspar

Have you ever enjoyed a book (or film, etc.) so much, thought it encapsulated your feelings so well, that you became desperate to share it with friends, only to encounter the worry that, since your friends are different people, they will experience it differently to you and will not take from it the exact feelings that you did—the worry, in other words, that what you took from the book (or film, etc.) is only what you’d already put into it, and that exactly what you put into it is ambiguous and uncertain enough that, as much as you’d like to, you couldn’t possibly communicate it directly to a friend, and so can only hope to rely on the book (or film, etc.) somehow, no matter how misleading of a messenger it might be? (Is that the worry that you can’t share your feelings at all? Is it a worry of being lonely?)

This feeling often makes me want to write about fiction. Though not to ‘review’ it, per se, as if to translate the fiction into a judgment on its value; only to talk to you about it, as if to try to translate to you the way it translated my own feelings back to me.

Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, which I read about a month ago, is in multiple ways a book about translation. Adam Gordon, the protagonist, is an American on a fellowship in Spain, writing poetry and having it translated by his friend Teresa. He expresses the strangeness, maybe a kind of stinginess, of letting someone else translate one’s work, as if to do so is to renounce ownership of the work in some way. (The same stinginess can be felt even just by letting someone read one’s writing, let alone letting them translate it. I think there is a kind of writer whose desire is fixed in the awkward, impossible place between being completely private and completely opened up.)

Less literally, there is the kind of translation that takes experience and makes it legible to others. The struggle Adam feels for so much of the book is that this kind of translation might simply be impossible—at least for him. Throughout the book, indeed from its first sentence, Adam refers to his ‘project’ or his ‘research’, and I have a sense that with these words he is referring to this impossible task. Not to some set of poems he hopes to write in Spain, but to poetry in general. This is the poetry (as Lerner himself says in The Hatred of Poetry) that all of us are said to have somewhere within us, at least when we’re children and can spend our time on such indulgent things, and yet that is not just hard but impossible. (‘Thus the poet is a tragic figure.’) In Adam’s case, the struggle arises in those moments which are distinct only in their indistinctness:

These periods of rain or periods between rains in which I was smoking and reading Tolstoy would be, I knew, impossible to narrate, and that impossibility entered the experience: the particular texture of my loneliness derived in part from my sense that I could only share it, could only describe it, as pure transition, a slow dissolve between scenes, as boredom, my project’s uneventful third phase, possessed of no intrinsic content.

Those tedious commas following the colon, when the sentence itself becomes ‘pure transition’, seem to reflect something about experience—something like what Walter Benjamin, in his essay on ‘The Storyteller’, called the poverty or the ‘bottomlessness’ of modern experience. There are moments when time just shrugs by, indifferent and intangible, and isn’t punctuated by anything sharp enough to demand expression. Well, there are moments when we are ‘in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion’, but to Adam these moments are ‘ready-made’: ‘the ease with which they could be represented entered and cancelled the experience’. The difficulty is that boredom and transition and texturelessness are life, real life: if life was constant kisses or concussions, those too would lose their texture. That is what makes the poet or storyteller a tragic figure: that if experience doesn’t impress upon me, I cannot possibly express it, and yet, when it does impress, I feel it as an exception, an interruption.

Have you ever been in an art museum or gallery and felt so confused, perhaps by the very idea of art, perhaps by what is really the arbitrariness of those pictures hung on those walls, and confused enough to feel suspicious of, or intimidated or even angered by the people around you, who, for all you know, are experts in their own right, looking so concentratedly, or perhaps (God forbid) even looking sad or moved or inspired—and sensed this feeling amounting within you to a nervousness before art, as if each painting is a symbol of your inability or unwillingness to understand it, as if every other spectator is a witness to your emotional illiteracy? (Is it sometimes even the worry that they’re all ‘in on it’, and you’re not? Is it, then, a worry of being lonely?)

I find the same feeling conveyed in Leaving the Atocha Station, when in the first chapter Adam watches someone crying before a painting by Rogier van der Weyden:

Was he, I wondered, just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he’d brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art? I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change.

I recently finished my Masters thesis, which in part was about the difficulty of having artistic experiences, the difficulty of allowing art to touch us. In Atocha Station, Adam not only experiences this difficulty with paintings and poems (arguably even his own poems); he also sees these artworks as concentrated instances of the more general difficulty of having an experience at all. The closest he has ever come to a ‘profound experience of art’, he thinks, is the experience of his distance from art, of ‘the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf.’ (The same distance and remoteness appears throughout Benjamin’s essay, too.) The experience of art, or the experience of a lack of experience of art, eventually points its finger back at us: after all, why should it be a case of us simply ‘allowing art to touch us’, as I put it, as if there is nothing we ourselves have to put in? The sentiment that Rilke found in aesthetic experience was that ‘you must change your life’—not that an artwork will do it for you.

What I mean to say is that Adam’s confusion about poetry or art takes the form of a confusion about himself (or perhaps about the innate poetry somewhere within himself, as I alluded to a moment ago). That our incapability of having profound experiences should so quickly turn into suspicion or intimidation about others says to me that art awakens in us something about who we do or do not belong with, something about what it means to have a human life along with everyone else. Why, after all, should it feel that my life is most alive in the moments when I feel cause to change it? Why this sneaking feeling that my numbness after reading a poem must be from a lack about myself, and never about the poem?

Indeed, Adam is constantly self-conscious about his own identity and inadequacy. It’s a self-consciousness that can push us towards dishonesty and aloofness. At one point, he is messaging his friend Cyrus, who tells the story of him and his girlfriend failing to save a woman who drowned while swimming outdoors. What unnerves Cyrus is how his girlfriend seemed almost excited about it—‘like we had had a “real” experience.’ ‘I had this sense—this sense that the whole point of the trip for her—to Mexico—was for something like this, something this “real” to happen. I don’t really believe that, but I felt it, and I said something about how she had got some good material for her novel.’

The trouble with having a desperation for profound experience, of an experience that not only warrants but demands itself to be expressed and shared, is that it can put us at a degree’s remove from life. Adam himself filters his experience of a bombing at the Atocha station through the news on TV and the internet, and he rehearses ready-made Spanish phrases to sound smarter in conversation. (Adam frequently feels incapable of expressing himself subtly in Spanish, his second language, despite in fact being fluent. Sometimes I feel this way about English, my first language.) The hope that experience can be rehearsed or narrated in our minds, so that it might become more real, also mutes the reality of experience in its own way. There we find ourselves back at Selin’s problem in Elif Batuman’s Either/Or: how do I finally get out of writing and thinking and start really living? And what would that be, anyway? — ‘really living’?

Is it important to have a sense of who you ought to be, or even just who you want to be? (It’s strange, at least, since just by existing you already are a person of some sort; but still somehow you can ‘want to be someone’ without ‘wanting to be someone else’, which would be a different thing.) Is this kind of want only for young people? Should I have grown out of it by now or do I have, say, two or three years before I have to just accept it and admit: this person that I am, this is who I have decided to be, whether I like it or not? Does wanting to be a particular kind of person imply that you are ashamed or embarrassed of every aspect of your current self that doesn’t match that particular kind? If not, what is the right attitude towards all those aspects that don’t feel essential to my identity? Are they part of something I’m temporarily going through until I can finally realise the person I’m ‘supposed’ to be? That is, the person I want to be?

If you are not (yet) the person that you want to be, is your life yours? — Well, who else could it belong to? — You can be a foreigner in another country. Can a body be foreign to its inhabitant, or a soul to its possessor?

And what kind of person is it who worries about this kind of thing, anyway? Doesn’t everyone else seem to get on mostly okay?