I really enjoyed this book. It’s not very linear, so in some sense it’s one of those books that could be adequately appreciated in the first 50 pages and put down. But I liked lingering with it. Maybe it’s that I’m 38 years old, combined with the fact that a baby, a house, and marriage (in that order) are all happening now and not 15 years ago. But the thought of how life is compared to how it could have been is increasingly familiar.
The house-hunt really played into this. As many people will tell you, looking for a house is practically guaranteed to be a stressful experience, especially in a market that remains as chaotic as ours. (Though, has it ever been “easy” for the average person, anywhere, ever? And have I really had it bad, ever?) One of the biggest causes of that stress has to be the multiplicity of imagined lives you can run through in such a short amount of time. Each house found is a house hoped for. From the moment the first image of a house is seen, you start imagining life in it — life in this house, what you might do in this kitchen space and in this backyard, living on this street with these neighbors and in this town. (Oh, and a bookshelf right here.) On it goes, with a mind-blowing amount of wishful imagery and narrative stuffed into any single minute between the offer and the answer.
In seems unavoidable: house-hunting brings on the psychological equivalent of insecurity and regret. (Much like the marketing and consuming industry in general.) But then, this is only a more clearly causal and condensed version of what life tends to bring about anyway.
Take, for instance, Carl Dennis’s poem “The God Who Loves Us“:
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.
This is one of those poems that turns on itself in the best way. At some point down the lines, you realize that you, the reader, have actually taken it and yourself a little too seriously. And the more times you read it, the earlier the sarcasm and delightful self-ridicule come in.
Miller expounds on this poem early in the book, and he reminds you just how deep the Rabbit Hole of Unled Lives goes. More diagnostically, Miller highlights what the poem is ultimately getting at: our complete inability to trust our self-analysis of the past.
From the vantage point of life now, you look back on your youth. While you might suffer from the memory of past possibilities, you might also welcome their flattery. The realtor’s loving god allows him to be warmed by the gilded halo of his unmet potential. If, then, he crowns that god with thorns—if he betrays god’s love with his failures—the guilt he suffers is merely the price he pays for keeping faith in his capacities. The more harshly you punish your failures, the more securely you can believe in your exalted potential. You side with your judge and congratulate yourself, righteously and ruefully, on your high standards.
The act of looking back at those past, unled lives is never a fruitful one. It’s an onion-peeling expedition par excellence, one that invites an elusive amount of egotism. And it helps to know this. It helps to catch yourself in the act, to laugh at your ego, and to shrug it off (“…for all you know…”) for the vanity that it is.
[The speaker of “The God Who Loves You”] wants you to let go of the thought that you might be a loving, all-knowing narrator of your own existence. He wants you to let go of the lives you haven’t lived.
. . . as if the value of a life, like the value of a house, could be assessed by looking up comps in the neighborhood. Don’t use that language, the speaker says: it takes you from yourself. Return to your earthbound ignorance and find words for it.
I love that sentence, the utterly relevant imperative of it: “Return to your earthbound ignorance and find words for it.”
The book is chalk full of thoughtful commentary like this on other pieces of art, from poems to books to films. I can’t say that I like all of Miller’s commentary; he sometimes goes to places that I certainly didn’t expect — places, that is, that I still don’t expect him to have gone. But I’m sure they are meaningful for him. (I had a similar feeling in Peter Wayne Moe’s Touching This Leviathan. A lovely book, but with some surprising, idiosyncratic turns.) And in terms of substance, there probably isn’t much in the book that you couldn’t find a way of encountering by spending a good amount of time pondering and rereading Dennis’s poem. But more of the same substance is not at all a bad thing, and it was worth reading through to the end.
The book ends on what I wish it had spent more time with, or at least more time subtly hinting at throughout: the thrill of merely being at all.
Commenting on a character’s walk through a garden in a Thomas Hardy novel, Miller breaks into something that rings not unlike a Pauline doxology:
This has happened, it happened here, and it needn’t have happened at all. . . . For a moment, what might have happened drops away, and we’re left lingering with what has happened in this one radiant world, with snail shells denting our feet, and the descent of music into our neglected garden.