134: We Didn’t
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
We think of our lives as a series of events, of things happening, one after another. But you know, it's just as accurate to see our lives as a series of things that don't happen to us. There's a story where all the crucial action takes place within just a short bike ride from the spot where I speak to you from right now, here in Chicago. The setting? A summer? Much like the one we're living through even as I speak. On this humid mid-western day. It's a piece of fiction. Really, really great piece of fiction, actually. By a writer named Stuart Diebeck. We didn't. We didn't end the light. We didn't end darkness. We didn't end the fresh-cut summer grass. We're in the mounds of autumn leaves. Or in the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn't end your room on the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you'd slept in as a child. We're in the backseat of my father's rusted rambler, which melted the smoke to chubs and kill Basa that he delivered on weekends for my Uncle Vincent's meat market. We didn't end your mother's Buick Eight or a rosary twined the rear of your mirror like a beaded black snake, the silver cruciform fangs. After this opening paragraph, Stuart Diebeck has 11 pages, thousands of words, describing all of the things that two people can do when they're not doing something. Turns out that not doing something is every bit as vivid and complicated an experience as doing something, but my friend, where are the stories of the things that we do when we're not doing the thing itself? Well, we bring those to you today right here. Part of our ongoing quest to document our actual lives in this country from WB EZ Chicago and Public Radio International to this American life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week in our program, of course, we choose a theme. Today's show, we didn't. Act one, you come and go, the waiters remain, in which we hear a few words from the D.H. Lawrence of not doing it. Act two, dance, a scientific investigation by Mr. Danny Hawk into what exactly is happening between two people, step-by-step, moment-by-moment, when they're not falling above. Act three, same time next year. A couple nearly gets together, but does not. And then an uncanny coincidence intervenes as in a fable, as in a dream, as in a movie. But what does it mean? Act four, saying no for 75 years. The story of what happens when you say no to exactly the wrong person at the wrong time. When you're 20 years old, they're looking at prison. Stay with us, don't say no now. Act one, you come and go, the waiters remain. We begin today's program with this story. It's a part-story, part-philosophical inquiry into the nature of not doing things from Jeff Dyer. For years I'd wanted to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, a homage to the writer who'd made me want to become a writer. It was a cherished ambition, and as part of my preparation for realizing this cherished ambition, I'd avoided reading anything by Lawrence, so that at some point in the future I could go back to him, if not afresh, then at least not rock, stale. Then, after years of avoiding Lawrence, I moved into the phase of what might be termed pre-preparation. I visited Eastwood, his birthplace, I read biographies, I amassed a horde of photographs which I kept in a once-new document wallet, blue, on which I'd written D.H.L. photos in determined black ink. I even built up an impressive stack of notes with Lawrence vaguely in mind. But these notes, it's obvious to me now, actually served not to prepare for and facilitate the writing of a book about Lawrence, but to defer and postpone doing so. There's nothing unusual about this. All over the world, people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for. My case was more extreme, for not only was taking notes about Lawrence a way of putting off writing a study of, and homage to, the writer who'd made me want to become a writer, but this study I was putting off writing was itself a way of putting off and postponing another book. Although I'd made up my mind to write a book about Lawrence, I'd also made up my mind to write a novel.
Transcription truncated.