Attraversiamo

Of all the books I read in 2009 – and, admittedly, I did not get through nearly as many as I’d have liked – the one that perhaps struck the greatest chord was – wait for it – Eat, Pray, Love. This is a big admission for me: during the year, I read beautiful poetry (if I did read anything, it was part of a poetry binge of sorts), some interesting novels (you know, highbrow literary stuff the enjoyment of which I don’t need to explain) and other non-fiction (John Armstrong’s Love, Life, Goethe – another three-word, three-comma title – that perhaps figured second in the 2009 greatest chord-striking stakes), but it was this book that got to me, that stayed with me.

This book that I bought so reluctantly, that I baulked at because of its immense, folksy popularity, and the author’s voice of which I had already presupposed I would not enjoy. Well, many times I really didn’t enjoy Ms Gilbert’s voice. Often enough, she grated, she whined, she stubbornly didn’t help herself or see the rut she was in for what it was.

But then, there were things like this:

… I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time – everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

And this: ‘Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognised yourself as a friend.’

There were things like India, like bel far niente, like Ketut, like Richard, like Liz telling Wayan: ‘But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favourite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.’

And this: ‘Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.’

There was all this chatty profundity, all this stuff that was – hey – true. And perhaps it was all the stuff I was going through, perhaps it was all about the timing, but it resonated with me (and, it seems, the millions of others who also bought copies). I read it quickly, and more eagerly than I have many other books – I read it with emotion rather than intellect, and took notes because I was worried I would forget. I would stop in places, and pick it up weeks and weeks later, and read slowly or again eagerly according to some cosmic instruction.

And finally, I recognised not only the sadness, the searching, and the providence in the parts I quoted above, but also this:

Somewhere in me I am able to recognise that this is not my melancholy; this is the city’s own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it.

And this:

I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late – through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures – into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person – the magnification of one life – is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody’s but my own.