“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
–Calvino
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The novel begins with a nameless woman. Halfway through the journey of her life, she’s found herself lost in a dark wood.
A mid-life crisis, for sure.
Deciding to leave her husband and their life in Sydney, she runs off to a Catholic convent located on the windswept Monaro Plains in Australia. The convent is near to the town where she was born and raised, and so the running away is also a kind of running home. There are no children, which makes things simpler. And as she says, her marriage was over a long time ago. The real problem, it turns out, is the relentless despair that has taken hold of her heart. Her work as an activist on behalf of animals and the planet has left her hopeless (a sin, according to Dante). She longs to retreat. And that is exactly what happens. Despite being a non-believer, in enacting the routines of the place, she is able to calm her mind and still her heart.
In our aim toward being the best we can be and to maximize our lives, we are literally optimizing ourselves into oblivion.
Reading Charlotte Wood’s 2024 Booker Prize short-listed novel Stone Yard Devotional, I wondered whether most people haven’t, at least at one point in their lives, considered disappearing. For me, this desire began as early as in my teenage years, when I fantasized constantly about running away. Like the protagonist in the novel, it was less a running toward something, as much as it was a wish to not be embroiled in the demands of the world. That is to say, like the nameless woman in the novel, I was not running toward God, but rather fleeing from what a friend of mine calls “the vortex” of marriage, a mortgage, and raising kids in what sometimes feels like a relentless struggle lasting every last minute of our lives to become “a have,” instead of “a have not.” To make a difference. To matter.
But how to keep the demands of the world at bay—how to quiet the noise?
My husband is an astrophysicist. And so much of his work is removing the “noise” of closer light, so he can capture the data of those far away red-shifted galaxies.
As a translator, part of what I do is likewise to try and remove the noise of the target language when trying to isolate and crystallize into an English equivalent what is there glowing in the Japanese. Quiet and contemplation are essential to my work both as a translator but also as a writer, where my ability to sit alone in a room is fundamental to my craft.
I recently came across this quote by novelist Haruki Murakami:
When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.
Everything about Murakami’s routine conveys the discipline and the ability to be alone with oneself necessary for doing art, which is arguably more challenging for women—especially mothers, who so often take on the bulk of the day-to-day caregiving—cleaning, cooking, sacrificing. Not always, of course, but Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” resonates so strongly in Wood’s book.
“You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain, or you’ll turn a little mad,” says Rumer Godden.
Re-reading Godden’s Black Narcissus recently, I remembered all the reasons I had always loved her. In the novel, a group of young Anglican nuns is tasked to set up a school and medical clinic in a former Indian prince’s “seraglio” high in the Himalaya—a few days walk uphill from Darjeeling. It doesn’t take long before things start to unravel. One falls madly in love with the local unkempt British agent (a man of questionable character); while another becomes fixated on her desire to have children by the helping of local kids that borders on a complete lack of understanding of cultural sensitivities; one is taken up in a grandiose plan to create a garden; while even the sister superior is not immune as she becomes more and more wrapped up in memories of a failed romance back in Ireland. They find themselves unable to stop gazing at the mountains for hours upon end and experience varying levels of elation. They feel happier and yet undeniably less committed to the religion that had brought them to this very remote place.
The world came and found them.
In Wood’s book, she has what she refers to in interviews as the three visitations. These arrive first in the bones of a member of the order who was murdered years earlier in Thailand. This first trauma is carried by another member named Jenny who stirs up the second trauma in the heart of the protagonist. And if all this is not enough the world shows up a third time in the form of a massive infestation of mice.
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I moved to Tokyo when I was barely twenty and my father had just passed away from a long fight with cancer that started when I was ten. There was no job waiting for me, a useless philosophy major from UC Berkeley. When I stumbled on a job advertisement to teach English in Japan, I jumped on it.
My life was peaceful there—almost monastic in the way Wood’s protagonist experiences in her convent. I did get sucked into the Japanese version of the vortex, a quiet echo of the American one—married with one sweet baby, my work as a translator kept me tied to books and my screen most days in a way that I enjoyed. When I returned to California after two decades away, I was told I had an adjustment disorder. I had heard there was such a thing as reverse culture shock but mine was off-scale. I found life impossible to deal with.
In those early years thinking and conversing in English, I constantly felt that people were trying to persuade me of things—endlessly telling me what to think or what I should do or what I should be buying. Everyone in high persuasion mode, confident of their opinions and choices. In Japan, people hesitate to give advice let alone tell people what to do, because an imposition of one’s will is an implicit acceptance of responsibility for the consequences.
But maybe talk is cheap around here.
Or another way to say this is that, compared to conversations in Japanese, in English, there seemed to be an obvious lack of reflection. People were less circumspect and loud than what I’d grown blissfully used to in Japan.
And I could not help but think of this when reading Wood’s novel, marveling at the way the protagonist willfully and forcefully insisted on bringing the act of contemplation back into her life again. Leaving the noise behind in Sydney and becoming more meditative, she now had time to really think about things, to go over memories, and become more circumspect about when to act and when to be silent.
Reviewers have called Wood’s novel “contemplative,” but I would argue that at its heart it is a book about the act of contemplation itself.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han saw a new translation of is work come out this year called Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity. Taking his cue from Hannah Arendt, he writes about how our time is best characterized as an era of action. We see this in our frenzied over-scheduled daily lives and the relentless striving and greed that can often characterize our activities, adding that, “even our relationship to nature is determined by action rather than wonder.”
This constant desiring and striving is making it impossible to respect the planet and animals, which was what led the protagonist in Wood’s novel to want to retreat from the world. In our aim toward being the best we can be and to maximize our lives, we are literally optimizing ourselves into oblivion.
Han says that action should only ever serve the life of the mind, for the true meaning of our lives, he argues, comes out of our ability to find personal significance through contemplation.
But this requires time. And quiet.
A few years ago, my step-father died and I was stunned when my husband’s parents, who knew my step-father well having shared many meals together, never said a word. Not even a text message to acknowledge his passing or my grief. I knew it was not out of malice but rather just that they were spinning in the vortex of a life in chaos. The usual American busyness and consumed by the fires needing to be put out closer to home. It was an issue of attention, not love or care. But so sad, I thought, not to even stop for the dead.
This need to be alone—to have a room of one’s own—is fundamental to being a writer and artist, and perhaps even to recentering our humanity.
And so, I was deeply moved by the ending of Wood’s novel, when the nuns coming together to finally lay to rest the bones of their murdered sister. Working together they celebrate their fallen sister’s life and their own mourning in a way that, at base, is predicated on having the time to do this.
The Chinese term wuwei 無為 is often translated as “non-action.” But translator David Hinton has a better explanation of wuwei in his book China Root. He says, “wuwei is not “not acting,” but rather is acting without the identity-center self, or acting with an empty and therefore wild mind.”
More simply but also to the point, China scholar Roger Ames translates the term as “non-coercive action.” I think it is up to the English thinker to keep in mind that action is not coercive if one does not act from the ego, with ego meaning broadly all self-clinging. Much communal activity and ritualistic behavior is like that: a body does what a body must do in that time and place. The goal of Zen meditation, according to Hinton, is to empty the mind—but that really means to remove or decrease the wall between self and other, inner and outer. The empty mind is ready to receive the world, the other. Harmony, then, is achieving a better attunement between “self and other” and “inner versus outer.”
He calls the goal of meditation the mirror mind…which is a wonderful image.
And this is something experienced viscerally reading Wood’s novel, as the protagonist slowly goes about the routines of the convent. As I mentioned above, she is not a Christian believer and yet in participating in the communal activities, she becomes a part of the place.
“To pretend,” wrote Derrida, “I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”
I studied tea ceremony in Japan for many years, and in my practice fūryū was a word I heard used often by my sensei and tea friends—held up as a value of supreme importance on the path of character-cultivation. In tea, having fūryū means you have the time to notice things. It is the time to write a haiku, or time to stop and smell the roses; fūryū is having the heart to stop and linger; to look up at the moon or the stars; or lovingly tend to a way of life that is mindful of beauty and style. So often in the U.S., I hear from people complaining how busy they are and how they have no time. This is a shame, for self-cultivation and self-reflection first and foremost is about taking the time, the time to breathe and the time to really look at things, to listen and smell and taste. To be open, to relinquish one’s will for a breath or two.
A long time ago, a friend said that she felt I was building a little boat with my writing and all my words—and that this would become a great ship that could ferry me away to safe harbors.
Indeed, I have organized my life around this.
This quiet “alone-with-the-alone” is partly what has drawn me to become a translator and writer—both activities requiring countless time sitting silently. And this need to be alone—to have a room of one’s own—is fundamental to being a writer and artist, and perhaps even to recentering our humanity.
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A garden among the flames O Marvel, a garden among the flames! My heart can take on any form: a meadow for gazelles, a cloister for monks, For the idols, sacred ground, Ka’ba for the circling pilgrim, the tables of the Torah, the scrolls of the Qur’án. I profess the religion of love; wherever its caravan turns along the way, that is the belief, the faith I keep.
From Poem 11 of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Tarjuman al-Ashwaq
