Reservoir 13

One of the enigmas of human life is that as humans what we know for certain about the nature of our lives is most often inconsistent with our lives as we actually lead them. We know, for example, that the universe is unimaginably large and has been in existence for an unimaginably long time. In his book the Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan included a graphic called the Cosmic Calendar, in which he laid out a timeline as if the history of the universe were overlaid on a calendar of a single year. In these terms, the origin of the Milky Way comes around May 1, the formation of Earth on September 14. Life on Earth begins on September 25. The first humans arrive at 10:30 p.m. on December 31. All of recorded human history occurs in the last half second of the year. The birth of Christ? 11:59:56.

Here’s the poet Rosser Reeves, coming at the same concept from a different direction:

E=mc²

Someday, perhaps, some alien eye or eyes,

Blood red in cold and polished horny lids,

Set in a chitinous face,

Will sweep the arch of some dark, distant sky

And see a nova flare,

A flick of light, no more,

A pin-point on a photographic plate,

A footnote in an alien chart of stars,

Forgotten soon on miles of dusty shelves

Where alien beetles feed.

A meal for worms,

Sole epitaph,

To mark the curious end of restless man,

Who for a second of galactic time

Floated upon a speck of cosmic dust

Around a minor sun.

An individual human life, seen in this context, is a very small thing indeed. And yet that is not the way that we as individuals experience our lives. For us, “a lifetime” is a synonym for “forever.” Our consciousness is housed in blood and bone, and as individuals we are the center of our own worlds, regardless of whatever scientific evidence might offer by way of contradiction. We are, in this sense, always deluded. Our subjectivity skews our vision of the world and overemphasizes the importance of our place it. We live within a network of what we take to be certainties, but are surrounded by much greater and numerous uncertainties.  What we don’t know is always by many orders of magnitude greater than what we do know. But we do not, we cannot, live that way. It’s a dilemma that raises existential questions.

This past Sunday, Maria Popova, in her blog Brain Pickings, cited Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue talking about how we might respond to this dilemma:

Every human person is inevitably involved with two worlds: the world they carry within them and the world that is out there. All thinking, all writing, all action, all creation and all destruction is about that bridge between the two worlds. All thought is about putting a face on experience… One of the most exciting and energetic forms of thought is the question. I always think that the question is like a lantern. It illuminates new landscapes and new areas as it moves. Therefore, the question always assumes that there are many different dimensions to a thought that you are either blind to or that are not available to you. So a question is really one of the forms in which wonder expresses itself. One of the reasons that we wonder is because we are limited, and that limitation is one of the great gateways to wonder.

O’Donohue suggests, and I certainly agree, that the proper response to our inevitable ignorance is to ask questions that are rooted in wonder, which is to say, appreciation. The other, and unfortunately more common response, particularly in our present political climate, is to simply double down on your certainties, whether or not you have any evidence that they are in fact reasonable. The problem with that, as O’Donohue points out, is that “thought, if it’s not open to wonder, can be limiting, destructive and very, very dangerous.”

One of the most powerful and value-creating functions of literature is to liberate us from our certainties, free us from the constraints of our inherited perspectives, and allow us to see our lives as individuals, however briefly and ephemerally, from a broader perspective.

Which brings me to the best novel that I read during 2017, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. It tells the story of an English village in thirteen chapters, one chapter for each year. McGregor eschews most of the familiar novelistic conventions. There are characters in the novel, more than 40 of them, actually, but the narrative does not focus on them one at a time, nor does it include what we would normally think of as scenes with dialogue. (The closest thing to a plot device is the disappearance of a teenage girl in the first chapter, which is revisited in each following chapter.) Rather, the story is told from a strategically distanced third-person perspective, written in simple declarative sentences, focused as often on animal life or landscape or weather as it is on human characters. It reads like a prose poem of sorts, an inventory of absences and presences. As you read, you get to know each of the characters in small doses over an extended period of time. You get a sense of the larger rhythms and patterns of their lives circling back on one another, moving forward in time even as they stay in one place.

An example, taken more or less at random, but indicative of the narrative style and tone throughout:

At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from the towns beyond the valley but they were too far off in the distance for the sound to carry and no one came out to watch. The dance at the village hall was canceled, and although the Gladstone [the local bar] was full there was no mood for celebration. Tony closed the bar at half past the hour and everyone made their way home. Only the police stayed out in the streets, gathered around their vans or heading back into the hills. In the morning the rain started up again. Water coursed from the swollen peat beds quickly through the cloughs and down the stepped paths that fell from the edge of the moor. The river thickened with silt from the hills and plumed across the weirs. (5)

Or, later:

The winds changed and came from the north, pulling a bog-sweet smell of damp down from the hills. After dark two of the badgers snuck out of the sett at the top end of the beech wood, sniffing at the air before foraging across the wet soil around the edge of the abandoned lead pits, looking for the earthworms that had always been there. Will and Claire came back from the hospital with a baby daughter, and went straight to the Jackson house to introduce her to Tom. They were calling her Molly, and when they laid her on Tom’s lap he looked terrified… On the television there were pictures of an earthquake’s aftermath; people walking down a road covered in dust, collapsed bridges, rescuers kneeling in the rubble to reach down into dark spaces… (123)

Reading Reservoir 13, one is put on constant alert to the larger patterns that underlie the lives of the individual people in the village, of which the villagers themselves are often only tangentially aware. The book is a reminder, to borrow O’Donohue’s words, of the many different dimensions of life that we are either blind to or that are not available to us, unless they are called to our attention, as they are in this case by an extremely confident and gifted writer.

This is the first book I’ve read in a long time that, having finished it, I was moved to go back and start again from the beginning. Reading it is an experience of the pleasures and rewards of the simple act of paying attention.

End note: If you’d like to get a fuller sense of what I’m talking about here before deciding whether to read the book, I suggest you take a look at James Wood’s characteristically brilliant review of it in the New Yorker. That’s how I found out about it.