#477 Oblivion- David Foster Wallace

#477 Oblivion- David Foster Wallace

Oblivion is a paradox about a dream, or it’s a dream about a paradox, or it’s a story about a dream about a paradox. It’s one of those things, or it’s none of them. What it is, is another brilliant example of the genius of DFW.

Imagine a fight you’ve been having with your significant other, a fight that has persisted for months, neither side making headway and no chance of a resolution. You both firmly believe you are in the right and that the other one is just oblivious. Now imagine, as we all do sometimes, are sitting somewhere having the argument play out in your mind, all the anger and vitriol spinning and overflowing until you are about to explode. That’s what this story is.

The paradox turns out to be a Bizarro-Gift-Of-The-Magi-esque circumstance that has kept both parties from a good night’s sleep for quite a while. Wife is kept awake by her husband’s apparent snoring, sits up and screams for him to turn over or sleep in the other room. The husband is flabbergasted because he apparently hasn’t fallen asleep yet so could not have been snoring. After months of fighting they agree to be observed at a sleep clinic. Their analysis astounds both of them.

Then again, none of this may have been real.

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40

#216 Sleepy- Anton Chekhov

#216 Sleepy- Anton Chekhov

The Masters are asleep and the thirteen year-old nanny, Varka, is tending to their child. She is exhausted, cannot keep her eyes open, but she must. The child needs care and if she sleeps, the masters will beat her. All night, she falls into half awake half dreamlike states, never getting enough. When the morning comes, even without sleep, she is expected to work:

-Varka, light the stove.

-Varka, set up the samovar.

-Varka, clean the master’s galoshes.

-Varka, wash the front steps.

-Varka, run and fetch the bottles of beer.

-Varka, rock the baby.

Night after day after night, reality is a myth. The baby is the enemy and must go. Then she can get sleep. Chekhov does a great job creating tension and anxiety. You really feel tired and angry and want this poor girl to get some rest.

Rating: 7-8-9-7 Total= 31

#177 Hunting Knife- Haruki Murakami

#177 Hunting Knife- Haruki Murakami

This is a tiresome piece. I don’t mean boring I mean literally sleepy:

--“He yawned. A long formal kind of yawn. Elegant, almost.”

--“He sank back into an insomniac silence.”

--“The waves lapped at the rocks, leaving white foam behind; by the time the foam vanished, new waves appeared.”

Life seems meaningless when nothing changes. The helicopters came at the same time, the sun crossed the ocean in the same way, the mother/son duo appeared on the beach at the same time everyday.

“One listless day followed another, with nothing to distinguish one from the next. You could have changed the order and no one would have noticed. The sun rose in the east and set in the west, the olive-green helicopters zoomed in low, and I downed gallons of beer and swam to my heart’s content."

Perhaps, life is a dream, or we are in a purgatory holding pattern waiting for salvation: “Was it all an illusion? Or was I the illusion? Maybe it didn’t matter. Come tomorrow, I wouldn’t be here anymore.”

The things that change are the things that we remember, but change is what makes us sick, or hurt, or injured. Change is a knife cutting whatever it can reach.

Notable Passage: “It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the right point in the conversation to say goodbye.”

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total=31

#27- The Silver Key- HP Lovecraft

#27 The Silver Key- H.P. Lovecraft

This wonderful story by Lovecraft, narrated as many of his tales are, by the fictitious occultist Randolph Carter.  Carter is either caught in or waking up from a deep dream state (the details of his dreams while interesting are only important if you read the longer companion piece).  He waxes philosophic about the differences between reality and imagination and within those realms truth and falsehoods.  What’s more real, earthly myths or ethereal dreams?

Carter “could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it.”

Many believe that there is a level of reality I dreams that science has yet to adequately explore.  In fact our brains react identically to dreaming of an image and actually seeing that image. If our brains believe what we see in our dreams is as real as what we see with our eyes, then why can’t we visit, in our dreams, the past or worlds in other dimensions?  Why cant dreams be just as tangible as our awakened experiences?  And to true dreamers, reality is actually more false and hollow than the “reality” of our nightly nocturnal wanderings…“with the dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything…”

According to Randolph Carter, all we need to provide is context, as no thought or idea can exist in an absolute vacuum. “…even humor is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency”

As always Lovecraft’s use of language is intoxicating and the philosophical questions he poses are far more interesting to me than some stories steeped in uncreative realism or the mundane slices-of-life many authors present as fiction.

What better way to describe Lovecraft’s style than to use his own description:

“…he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace.”

Notable Passages: “Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings.”

 “calm lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.” 

Rating: 8-9-8-8