Friday 21 January 2011

The Here and Now

Looking back over Looking Back... (below), I realise I left out perhaps the most important thing about the drugs. No, not that they're great - thanks, Worm! - but that they were a short cut to total immersion in the here and now, that here and now that becomes increasingly hard to focus on as the busyness of life crowds in around us, occupying so much of our minds with what is not here, not now. I recently read (on Bryan's recommendation) Tim Parks's Teach Us To Sit Still. This is a very readable, disarmingly honest and often funny book. It tells how the author's desperation in the face of what seemed to be symptoms of a potentially fatal prosrate condition led him, having explored all medical avenues to no avail, to seek solutions in therapeutic approaches he wouldn't normally have touched with a bargepole. In the end, he learnt that his problem was something deeper-seated than a medical condition, and that the only way to address it was to learn to sit still, to breathe correctly, and to lose himself in the here and now. None of which is easy. Clearly a driven and ultra-tense man, Parks also had to overcome the affliction common to all writers - that they instantly and instinctively translate the here and now into carefully composed words, thereby throwing up a barrier between themselves and the actual experience. His account of his efforts to overcome this - and so much else - makes remarkably gripping reading. Teach Us to Sit Still is a rare example of what happens when the kind of book you wouldn't normally touch with a bargepole is written by a writer who can actually write, and think, and laugh at himself. I'd recommend it to anyone - especially those who are driven and ultra-tense, if any such read this blog. Which seems unlikely.

9 comments:

  1. He this day enlarged upon Pope's melancholy remark, "Man never is, but always to be blest."

    He asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope. Being pressed upon this subject, and asked if he really was of opinion that though, in general, happiness was very rare in human life, a man was not sometimes happy in the moment that was present, he answered, "Never, but when he is drunk."

    Boswell, Life of Johnson

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  2. Ah the good Doctor puts us all to rights. Mind you, he'd never smoked dope...

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  3. ...while listening to Dark Side of the Moon.

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  4. In a smoke filled room in a tenement behind Fairfield halls.

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  5. I found Parks' book a thoroughly amusing and worthwhile read too, Nige. Found his quirky obsessiveness strangely charming.. And we could certainly all benefit from slowing down and reflecting on our lives. It's partly what inspired me to book a place on a juice fasting retreat. Should be suitably excrutiating.. can't wait.

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  6. His Italian Neighbours is a good book. It really gets under the skin of Italy.

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  7. "'Mindfulness meditation' – getting to know the here and now – could be the key to a calmer, happier, healthier you. Mark Vernon reveals what's involved":

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/22/how-to-meditate-mark-vernon

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