So Much for Freedom
In search of personal Edens
The indoctrination into selfhood starts early. In Disney films or on Sesame Street, young people are frequently told that it is important to “believe in oneself” no matter what. In the film Frozen, after an angry outburst exposes her previously secret magical powers to a room of mostly strangers, Queen Elsa escapes to the top of a mountain to be all by herself. There, she sings, “the fears that once controlled me can't get to me at all.” To really drive the point home, she adds: “No right, no wrong, no rules for me... I'm free.” Elsa’s song encapsulates a lot of contemporary thinking about identity—that our authentic self is who we really are when we are free. It might take some time to uncover that secret self, like peeling the layers of an onion, but it’s there. The sooner one starts to honour this essential core identity, the better off one will be.
In the latter stages of his Parkinson’s, my father had to go to the hospital at Poitiers for a battery of tests. This required him to stay overnight, which caused him no end of confusion. The hospital was affiliated with the local university. My father believed he was staying in this campus-like setting because he had received an invitation to be a visiting scholar. He expected that in the morning he would be asked to give a guest lecture and to gather with other scholars to discuss important academic matters. Not for a second did he suspect that he was there for the final examination of his life, a series of tasks that would test his cognitive skills and capacity for executive functioning. He failed this examination and was classed as a “dependent.” To this day, I cannot really say how much of my father’s selfhood was tied up with being an academic. I do know this: if he had not been an academic, he wouldn’t have been who he was, and once most of the attributes of an academic had been taken away, he became someone else. Peel away the layers of the onion and there isn’t an authentic self waiting; there is a different person, there is, in some cases, a diminished person.
The privilege of youth is that, given the right conditions, it is possible to imagine oneself growing up to become pretty much anything—a pilot, a musician, a successful entrepreneur—and I think it’s the duty of parents and of the society they live in to stretch out that period of possibility as far as it will go and, in so doing, create optimal conditions for freedom. This is why we continue to say a country like Canada is more free than, say, Iran, because a young woman living here has greater freedom to imagine all sorts of futures for herself. I like this freedom in Canada, no matter how imperfectly it has been enacted. I like the freedom of the West generally, and given the long rap sheet against us, it’s good to remember that it’s exactly this kind of freedom that’s worth protecting and cherishing.
My father was born with the maximum amount of freedom that an individual can enjoy. He had the means to explore three possible futures for himself: entomologist, musician, and finally, professor. Not to mention the fact that he married twice and was able to buy houses when they were affordable and to sit by as each one appreciated in value significantly. I don’t think I have enjoyed any less freedom, although by the time I was completing my bachelor’s, the career of professor had lost some of its allure, and a decade of drifting laterally in my career in Montreal, careless about money, knocked me back a few rungs on the rapidly accelerating property market, but I have no cause for complaint.
It was only at the age of forty-five—middle age, in other words—that I started to take stock of where I was and realized that my freedom had shrunk. This knowledge did not come with a sense of grievance. It was accompanied by feelings of urgency: what can I do next, given the resources I have, given that my greatest resource, time, is dwindling? That feeling has only been compounded by subsequent events. The other day, I was reading the essay “Verisimilitude,” a comprehensive review of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, in which Melinda Harvey, the writer, expresses a good number of ideas about middle age just as well as Cusk herself, using many of the same techniques. The essay takes the form of a lengthy summarization of conversations between the author and various interlocutors. Where I truly sat up and took notice was when Angela, a friend of a friend of the author’s—all three of these women having just gone to see an adaptation of Medea by Cusk at the Almeida theatre in London—says, “there isn’t a person over forty years of age alive today who has escaped the feeling that some kind of Eden, whether known in the past or only ever imagined, has been barred to them.”
If this is what freedom is—the pursuit of Eden—it is clear why the search can only end up in failure. Acceptance of this failure is arguably a hallmark of maturity. To go on looking is foolish. It’s the middle aged man with the Porsche on the sidewalk and the hair plugs that aren’t fooling anyone, ogling the beautiful twenty-nine-year-old barista at the fancy cafe, thinking he might get a smile and conversation.
Later on in “Verisimilitude,” the author is on board a plane, and her neighbour is “a small woman in a black tent-like garment whose frizzy grey hair was piled on top of her head with the help of a gold butterfly clip,” and the pair strike up a conversation (exactly the kind of premise that Cusk employs at the very beginning of Outline and again in Kudos). This small woman notices a book in the seat pocket in front of the author. It’s Coventry, by Rachel Cusk. The small woman has read the Outline trilogy and this becomes the point of connection between the two women. The small woman notes that the character of Paola in Kudos likes to walk everywhere because, as she overtakes people stuck in cars in traffic, she enjoys a pleasurable feeling of freedom. That, says the small woman on the plane, is freedom in a nutshell: “you find yourself trapped by all the things you’ve chosen in demonstrating your liberty: cars, houses, careers, marriages, children. And worse than that, you lose faith in your ability to actualise the future you can imagine for yourself.”
The pursuit of Eden has become in these times almost exclusively an individual undertaking. We can’t agree on what’s good and so the resulting consensus is that a free country like Canada should probably provide as many Edens as possible. With the benefit of hindsight, I realize I’ve been chasing quite conventional Edens. In my twenties I had three major pursuits: finding a good place to live, establishing a good life relationship, and doing meaningful work. In some respects, I’ve been given exactly what I wanted. Naturally, it’s not enough. Literature differs quite significantly from children’s programming or from mainstream television and film in that it provides insight into what actually happens when you’re free to go get what you want. You are not rewarded with a happy ending.
It’s literature, then, that has provided the greatest consolation for me in middle age. I don’t have everything I want—I don’t even have the time to go get what I want—and that is exactly as it should be. For example, during my early days in Montreal, I thought perhaps my beloved second city would be a stepping stone on to another even more exciting city, maybe New York. Now I can say with near certainty that, even though I’d dearly love to live in New York, it’s not going to happen.
Sometimes, however, in the search for a personal Eden, the big city is exactly what it’s cracked up to be. Which brings me to a very different book. In A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis, the fact that the author and his mother eventually end up living happily in Paris is a rebuke to French society, not a vindication of it. The author, Louis, writing in the form of the memoir, looks for the joy and curiosity imprinted on his mother’s face in a photo that was taken of her in her early twenties. That joy and curiosity was almost completely stamped out of her through two miserable and abusive marriages and the struggle of raising several children, including young Édouard, with little to no help from anyone. The antagonists in this book are primarily misogynistic men. Édouard, with his awareness from a young age of being gay, and hence not like these antagonists, is squarely on the side of his mother and decidedly against the men who abuse her. But the greater antagonist is the dreary northern French village they inhabit. When Édouard’s mother is called a “fat cow” by her husband in front of a small crowd beside the mairie, everyone laughs. The village is full of cruel people. Neither Édouard nor his mother can ever truly be happy there. Édouard is the first to escape, thanks to his postsecondary education. Once he is ensconced in Paris, it opens up a lifeline to his mother, who, in turn, goes on her own journey of emancipation.
Is this the achievement of Eden? It is the closest glimpse of it in all the books I’ve read in many years. But Paris as Eden is highly contingent and impermanent. Édouard and his mother share a hard-won recognition that their Eden has very specific boundaries and that their happiness is not guaranteed; rather than an ultimate paradise, it’s a refuge from a wider world that mostly despises them.
No work of literature problematizes the idea of freedom for me quite like Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. The two central characters, Lila and Lenù, grow up and become women during an era of unprecedented rising prosperity and opportunity. Yet as anyone who has read all four books will know, it's an incredibly arduous journey for them both, perhaps for Lenù even more than Lila, because even though she leaves the tough, working class neighbourhood of Naples where she grew up, gets an education, and becomes a respected author, the fruits of these successes are very bitter indeed—just a series of new problems. I am not here attempting to pour cold water on Lenù's emancipation. Her ongoing troubles makes it clear that individual freedom for a woman of her generation came with considerable cost, not the least of which was the harsh judgment of the society she lived in. Lenù is constantly criticized by both her mother and her mother-in-law. She's a bad wife. A bad mother. It is impossible to brush off these words and go on undeterred.
When book four of the Neapolitan Quartet (The Story of the Lost Child) opens, Lenù has left her husband, Pietro, and embarked on a new relationship with Nino, with whom Lila also had an affair many years earlier. As soon as Lila finds out about this relationship, she calls Lenù an idiot. “Think of the harm you’re doing to your daughters,” she says. These words fill Lenù with doubt and self-loathing. See, the author Elena Ferrante seems to be saying: you can’t truly be free, you can’t define freedom for yourself, you have to live around other people and they will never let you be free, such a thing is impossible, every major life-choice has a shadow side. A couple of pages later, Lenù, ostensibly the narrator, admits to the most remarkable feeling. Perhaps she is not even entirely free to tell her own story “Only she [Lila] can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say more of me than I want, more than I’m able to say.” Never have I encountered this idea of narration anywhere else. The first person narrative is impossible, this seems to be saying. No one can write their own story. We are all, in part, written by other people—even by people who don’t mean us well.
In her relationship with men, Lenù is the least free. As a writer she has the liberty to travel around Italy and overseas and publicly speak her mind and enter into contracts with new publishers and opine on many subjects, and yet in her personal relationships, she is chained to harsh realities. Love is not exactly freedom. To be truly and deeply in love is to accept new constraints—to accept and even welcome them. Lenù’s great love, Nino, is married to someone else, Eleanora, and he cannot bring himself to leave Eleanora because she threatens to kill herself. Lenù feels this state of affairs is impossible. How can she continue seeing a man who is obligated to another woman and other children? “I lived those days despising myself, I couldn’t tear Nino out of my mind. I finished my work lethargically, I departed out of duty, I returned out of duty, I despaired, I was collapsing.” She stays in this impossible situation, seemingly unable to do otherwise.
Cusk, too, places marriage under particularly close scrutiny. Her fictional alter ego arrives at a writer’s festival and after meeting up with her publisher and another of his clients, meets up with an interviewer, a woman she met about a decade previously, and who, it had then seemed to her, had the perfect marriage—not to mention the perfect house in the perfect part of town. In an interesting twist of expectations, the interviewer at first hardly asks any questions but rather enters into a long monologue about her marriage. It was not always as perfect as it seemed, she declares. This woman and her husband used to frequently entertain another couple in their home, and it was this second couple that had the perfect marriage. The husband was endlessly supportive of his wife. He would always take her side and always egg her on in every battle against “the travails and oppressions of womanhood,” and moreover he was endlessly attentive to the house and to the children, with whom he was frequently going sailing and camping. This second couple had interesting and varied hobbies and pursuits. They were creative and cultured. The first couple felt themselves to be quite boring by comparison. And then, suddenly, the second couple separated. They had an acrimonious divorce. The wife would frequently come over to the first couple’s home and complain vociferously about her husband, and now it turned out that everything that had seemed perfect was merely a surface appearance. This sudden reversal of fortune makes a lasting impression on the first couple. Their marriage, which they had perhaps undervalued, suddenly seems so much better than it did previously.
This insight seemed almost perverse to me. What the interviewer is saying here is that a marriage contains a happiness that can only be truly appreciated in comparison to other marriages. I won’t speculate as to whether or not that’s true or if I agree with it. The effect of Cusk’s technique is rather flattening: each of the anecdotes she hears and reports has just as much merit as any other.
In my last post, I talked about the first two hours of my day—the hours of four to six—which are, if not the happiest, definitely among the most sacred. I get up, I go downstairs and turn on the coffee machine, which already contains the appropriate amount of coffee and water, and then if I’m feeling up to it, I do a short workout in the basement, and then I’ll go serve myself a cup of coffee and retreat to the den, where I can read and write in near perfect silence. It is like my church. Indeed, I start with a prayer to God—with the Lord’s prayer—and then I ask Him to help me and give me wisdom for whatever challenge I will encounter that day or that week, and then I open a book or a laptop and I immerse myself in words. I can usually keep going until six-thirty, when my youngest daughter wakes up.
I achieved a rare feat in recent months: coming to see these two hours for what they are—not a scarce resource and hence a limitation in life that I resent, but rather, as a culmination of other strands of my life. Here I am in a house, with three other sleeping souls, all of whom I love deeply, and whom I will get to see quite soon, and meanwhile, I can think and write whatever I want. The love that makes this freedom possible has boundaries that are just as firm as the walls of the house. We know what the rules are. We know what our duties are. It’s the constraints on my general freedom that makes particular freedoms possible.
I take another sip of my coffee. I listen to the purring of the laptop and a more distant, more mysterious noise. It’s the ghostly tune of the music box in my daughter’s room, playing over and over again, conveyed to my ears through the baby monitor. That’s the sound that reminds me of my duty, a duty that can be just as exquisitely pleasurable as any kind of freedom with which I might attempt to satiate myself. The beauty of these two hours—or three, if I get that much—is that they eventually come to an end.
Notes
The Outline trilogy consists of Outline, Transit and Kudos. I really only leaned on the third book for this essay. One of my favourite quotes from Outline, which I couldn’t find a place for above, is that a writer “must hide in bourgeois life like a tick hiding in an animal’s fur, and the deeper they’re buried the better.” This line consoles me whenever I feel I have the wrong kind of life for writing. There is no wrong kind of life for writing. The most ordinary life serves just as well as the most exciting and unique.
Books
Kudos, Rachel Cusk. HarperCollins Publishers, 2018.
The Story of the Lost Child (Book Four of The Neapolitan Quartet), Elena Ferrante. Europe Editions, 2015
A Woman's Battles and Transformations, Édouard Louis, translated by Tash Aw. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022
Essays
“Verisimilitude,” Melinda Harvey. Sydney Review of Books, March 10, 2020
Images
Paris, National Geographic
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/your-shot-black-and-white-photos
Aircraft, Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/photos/black-and-white-airplane-aircraft-4218650/
Lovely.