So for the last twenty years or so I’ve been reading a book. I started reading it somewhere around 1994, and have yet to finish it. It’s my white whale. One of them, anyway.
The book is Magister Ludi, by Hermann Hesse. It has barely a plot, is basically four hundred pages of prewar German existentialism, and I’ve never managed to get beyond about half of it. Every couple of years I take another swing at it, figuring that eventually I’ll either plow through and be free of it, or finally get the more sublime underlying message that scored it a Nobel in 1946. And every time I get about a hundred pages in and get distracted by some other book and back on the shelf it goes.
Been doing this now for almost half of my life, and now I’m doing it again.
I don’t even remember exactly when or where I picked up this battered, ancient little paperback. Probably in that funky used bookstore that was in downtown Orlando in the mid-nineties, the place that sold mainly oddball novels and jazz CDs. I really loved that place, as every other used bookstore in Orlando then (and I assume now) was the usual romance/western/scifi paperback mill, the predigested plots and colorful covers that filled reader shelves pre-Amazon. At that place, though, you could get real books. It was where I learned what real books could be.
I’d read a number of Hesse novels back then, and figured I’d just push through Magister. After “Demian” and “Narcissus and Goldmund”, how hard could it possibly be?
It’s funny how the white whales – the pointless obsessions, the long term stubborn streaks, the cherished fantasies that you just can’t ever put down – end up contributing so much of the form and shape to your life. Writing in general has been a white whale for me, dating back to high school; in every shitty job, every stressful situation, every moment that left me feeling like somehow I’d been misplaced into a life off the books, I’d go back to this dream of someday being a rich and famous and brilliant and loved writer. And over time, that list of adjectives got narrowed down.
Rich? Eh, not so important. Comfortable is fine.
Famous? Oh god. A few crazy phone calls from unhinged client prospects cured me of any desire to be famous. I’ll just be here in my big floppy hat, sunglasses and fake moustache.
Brilliant? The older I get, the less I think that’s really a risk I’m running anyway.
But at the heart of it, this dream of a writing life as sort of skeleton key, the deus ex machina that opens all the boarded over doors in regular normal living, that remains my white whale. I can’t put it down or let it go, and in so many ways, that obsessive and pointless quest has shaped me as a human being. I even ended up with a so-called career from it, almost in spite of myself.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do when the day comes that I actually finish reading Magister. Probably go back and reread it, I imagine. It’s dense. And frankly, excruciatingly boring. Yet, I also can’t help but to think that it’s probably one of those books that’s only boring until you really understand the point of the story, and then you go “AHH!!” and it all comes together in a flash of dramatic brilliance.
And that right there, my friends, is the essence of the white whale. Year after year of seeming pointlessness, drawn on by the unrelenting promise that one day the scales will fall and relevance will appear in a revelatory flash. And that keeps you going, and the cycle endlessly continues.
What I’m learning slowly over time is that the white whales are important. Crucial, even. They add that long term shape and form to life when otherwise you’d be forever mired in day-to-day minutia, bent this way and that in whatever direction the wind happens to be blowing. That idiot nerve that refuses to let you give up on the endeavor, it also keeps you going when you’ve just exhausted the current possibilities of here-and-now.
So am I going to finish Magister this time? Dunno. Going to try. Again. And so far, I’m making good progress, at the 150 page point, and I think I’m seeing patterns and meanings in the story that I haven’t caught before. But whether I finish it, or am satisfied with leaving it at just one finished reading, I’ve no idea.
Because that’s the other funny part of white whales, I’ve found. They’re often catch and release. Because really: after twenty years of a faith-based uphill climb, what do you do once you’ve hit the summit and suddenly it’s over? Start planning to do it again. A white whale is just too damned useful to catch and be done with.
I hope you have at least one decent white whale in your life. They generally don’t eat much – though they do have ravenous appetites and contankerous temperaments – and make decent companions in those long, boring hours between paying jobs. And a good white whale lasts a long time, particularly if you opt for classic construction and forgo the allure of trendy design. And who knows, it might even make you a friend or two.
One last bit of advice, however, on the caring and feeding for your white whale: don’t name it. You name it, you’ll get attached to it. You’ll love it. You’ll be reluctant to let it out of your sight. You’ll buy it toys and give a comfortable place to sleep, when in fact it’s meant to bunker outside in the cold, away from the warm hearth of sentimentality.
Naming it only makes it that much harder – when the critical moment of truth comes – to finally pick up the sharpened precision tools of craft and aged perspective to kill it and eat it.
One day. Sometime soon. This time. Really. Right?