friendship

Leaving Tricase (part 2)

In which we abandon the fair Pugliese hamlet of Tricase for a while, to discourse on love, lost opportunities, loneliness, despair and other light-hearted subjects. You might want to put the kettle on, and have a Kit-Kat on standby.

Some kind of dog – “Volpino” I think- 20 June 2021, Tricase

7 September, 2021

In part one of this essay, I finished on a question: what leads so many of us, people with qualities – kindness, generosity, courage, intelligence – people with friends, colleagues – perhaps a parent or both parents still living, or a sibling or two– to be experiencing the kind of loneliness in their forties or fifties’ that drains all the meaning and pleasure out of life, and leads some (see part 1) to take their own lives?

There’s no definitive answer, but I can discuss this from my own experience. Until the age of forty-one, it never entered my mind that there might be a time when I would be lonely, or that I would experience an absence of love in my life; and it follows that it never entered my mind what an absence of love in one’s life might feel like. You see, I had two of the most affectionate, doting parents you could imagine, and I could always call on them for advice, conversation, compassion, encouragement, sanctuary, fidelity and all those other things that a human being needs to feel valued in the world. The door to their modest suburban bungalow was always open, literally.

This love was such an ever-present thing in my life that – I won’t say I wasn’t aware of it, or that I wasn’t grateful for it – that’s not the case – but it became something like part of my environment, like the ground one walks on, like the familiar sounds one hears every day in one’s usual habitats. In short, I became as someone who believes a certain resource, like food, or fresh water, or fuel, is boundless, when it is, in reality, finite – at least, it is finite if you don’t leave your familiar lands and sail off to find more of it. The resource I’m speaking of is love.

You have probably heard at some time or another of the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous “pyramid of needs”. Maslow’s theory, in a nutshell, is that human beings have a hierarchy of needs, depicted as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are “basic needs” – physiological and safety needs – food, water, warmth, rest, security, safety. The next level is “belongingness and love needs” – intimate relationships, friends – then higher still “esteem needs” – prestige, a sense of accomplishment – and right at the top of the pyramid is “self-fulfilment needs”, which is defined as “Self-actualization”, which is further defined as, “achieving one’s full potential, including creative activities”.

Well, it’s a long arduous climb to the top of a pyramid (if it is even possible to climb a pyramid, I may be thinking about one of those Mayan temples, but you get the idea), and some people would just like to get to the top and fool around with “self-actualization” as soon as possible, and for as long as possible. You can take a few short-cuts through some of those levels to get up there to the top faster, but you may have to pay for it later.

My attempt at drawing a comparison between Maslow’s pyramid and me might be starting to drift (to quote the title of a Hemingway novel) across the river and into the trees here, and so I’ll put it in simple terms. I underestimated, at a crucial period in my life, the importance of finding love, and did not recognise that it was finally worth the sacrifices that need to be made to keep it. I was not hungry for it. My romantic encounters in my youth, which were sporadic, I viewed – I see now – as temporary detours from the comfortable path of my life rather than as possible roads to a more difficult but also more rewarding and complete life. In other words, I treated these encounters like adventures or experiences, when I should have been treating them – the best of them, anyway – like projects.

But maybe even that isn’t completely true. Some unexamined part of my consciousness understood, I believe, that this was cowardice, masquerading as wisdom.  I told myself that getting too involved for too long would lead, inevitably, to marriage, kids, domestic life, dull jobs, responsibilities without end – how would I ever be able to continue to fool around with self-actualization at the groovy point of the pyramid?

With more insight, or courage, I would have answered that one of my favourite writers, Raymond Carver, had just such responsibilities by the age of twenty. Marriage and the birth of children created responsibilities for Carver that made it a titanic struggle to get work completed (something he wrote about directly in several essays for his wonderful book Fires), but it was that titanic struggle that forged him as a writer. He had so little time to write, due to his financial and paternal responsibilities, that when he did, it really had to count for something. He also had the love and support of his wife, Tess, to shore him up through the years of rejection letters, dead-end jobs, and despair.

My copy of Raymond Carver’s “Fires” (at Marina Serra, 29 October 2020)

If I had had even more insight, as I do now, many years later, I would have realised that the love that shored me up, that allowed me always to fall back from love when I should have charged forward, was not from some eternal source, but in fact was the creation of two people, my parents, who had themselves come from families where one parent either had died or was otherwise absent from their lives. They were providing the familial security and support to me and my younger sister they had never had themselves. They found each other, fell in love, and married before they were even out of their teens, and they stayed together for life, happily, even crazily at times (I mean crazy in the sense that couples that stay together for a long time, if they are happy, seem to give one another the confidence to take huge risks, and live without apology). And so, at the age of forty-one, when my mother died, leaving my father broken in half (there is so much truth in that colloquial English expression for a spouse, “the other half”) for six more years, before he followed his love to “the undiscovered country” (to quote Hamlet), I had my first sense of what it might be like to experience the absence of love in my life.

I am not saying my experience was my friend’s experience, or why she had difficulty finding a lasting relationship. Miranda had been married many years before, in her twenties. For some, the disappointment of a failed marriage or relationship leads to a subsequent caution or ambivalence towards love that is, I believe, fatal to the chances of finding it again. I sensed that Miranda and I had that caution or ambivalence in common. We felt we were independent and self-contained, we felt we knew “How to be Alone” (to refer back to the Franzen essay mentioned in Part 1), and that we could find substitutes for that tempestuous and terrifying thing called romantic love – in friendships, in literature, in work, in creativity, in learning, and in Miranda’s case, in her love for her dog, which became finally the only relationship that came close to the kind of reciprocal love she needed.

Links

Reference to Hamlet – “the undiscovered country”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56965/speech-to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-question

Leaving Tricase (part 1)

Leaving Tricase (part 1)

Monday 6 September, 2021.

The day the beach umbrella died, my apartment, Tricase, early September 2021.

In which a meditation on leaving the coastal hamlet of Tricase after a two-year stay leads to a perspective on the city of Lecce, and a memory of a friend.

It is Sunday 5 September 2021, and I have begun writing this on a bus heading back to the hamlet of Tricase from the city of Lecce, a distance of 50 kilometres between these two points, a ride or drive of around an hour by the fastest route.

I was in Lecce for a weekend, to get my second Covid vaccination shot, spend some time with a friend and to try to get myself excited again about moving to Lecce.

I’ve been visiting this city regularly over the four years I have been living in the vicinity, working as an English language teacher. Lecce is a relatively small city, but that is part of its appeal. Outside of the summer season, its wide, oak-lined boulevards and small cobbled-stone streets are rarely empty, but hardly ever overcrowded. There is a relaxed and cultured atmosphere about the place, and indeed relaxation and culture are really the city’s main lures.

Promontory children’s playground, Porto Tricase, 16 July, 2021, at sunset.

Lecce is a fascinating city, but unlike the city of Bari to the north, it is not a city of industry and commerce. It has a university, some excellent cultural centres such as the Castromediano museum and the Bernadini public library, and is full of great restaurants, bars, enoteche (wine shops), delicatessens and boutique clothing stores. Mainly though, it is simply great to look at, and is efficiently maintained and policed – the streets are clean, and the average resident or visitor can feel pretty safe walking those streets.

However, in recent years, its appeal to students and the well-heeled has made Lecce a more expensive place to live than it was (I’m informed) ten or fifteen years ago. I’m having a hard time finding a decent flat at a price commensurate to the salary of an English language teacher and I am starting to wonder if I should consider a Plan B.

It was (at least in part) the desire for affordable accommodation that led me to go work in a small town in southern Italy in the first place. Now I feel driven (though with reservations) back to a city.

The reason for this has been a creeping feeling of desolation that overcame me, starting from the last Christmas period onwards.

I had been doing okay up to that point. I had completely abstained from alcohol for six months. I continued my project to read the complete works of Joseph Conrad. I stopped writing random pronouncements nobody was particularly interested in on social media. I went cycling to the coastal point of Marina Serra most days, a ninety-minute round trip. I lost weight, my hair seemed to have stopped falling out, I looked in the mirror and what I saw did not seem too bad, all things considered. I felt I had achieved a certain dignity and equilibrium.

House with the perfect view of the Adriatic sea, viewed from the crest of Marina Serra, 27 June, 2021.

I tried to be content in my roomy apartment… the local church bells chiming melodically….

But then, Christmas got to me. I tried to be content in my roomy apartment, with my soft drinks and coffee and books, and the local church bells chiming melodically, but the total loneliness and a sense of being a redundant individual in the world overwhelmed me like a typhoon.

You ask yourself that question – or rather, you don’t, but that question arrives, when the bells stop chiming: if you were to keel over right now on this floor and die of a heart attack, how long would it take for anyone to notice? This leads to further questions: Once they noticed, how many people would it affect? And for how long would it affect them? And what would be your contribution to this planet? What could anyone point to as something – or somebody – you developed or to which/whom you gave life? In short, would the results of your life so far add up to anything? The answers to these questions were sobering, as they say – and I was already sober, so I got out the bottle of wine that had been idling in the cupboard for six months and opened it.

They say alcoholism is a slow form of suicide, but it could be argued that, considering it’s slow enough to have time to turn things around, like Raymond Carver did in his last decade, it is still better than the fast version. A good friend of mine, whom I’ll call Miranda (as I have never known anyone called that), died in the autumn of 2019.  She was an English language teacher like me, except she was a lot better than me. She was an examiner for one of the two accrediting English language exam boards, and when not teaching, she travelled all over the world for her examiner work, a well-paid occupation. She had a cosy ground-floor flat, in a desirable area of southern England, with a garden, and she had finished paying off the mortgage on it many years before. She had a home that no one could take away from her, and the security of being a sought-after member of the higher tier of her profession.  

She was talented. She wrote poems and short plays. She did voluntary work helping refugees to learn English. She was intelligent, she was well-read, she was compassionate, she was witty, and she was much-loved by colleagues, neighbours, and friends, of which she had many.

Perhaps she felt it was something that you could learn how to handle, with the use of intellect…

But Miranda was lonely – I can say that, based on what followed. She must have been – deeply, heartbreakingly lonely. Perhaps she was only vaguely aware of it, or perhaps she felt it was something you could live with – a lifelong condition that you could learn how to handle, with the use of intellect, as is tentatively suggested in the title essay of a book of essays by Jonathan Franzen she had loaned me in 2017, How to Be Alone (2002). If my memory serves me well, Franzen’s essay was more focussed on the difficulty of maintaining some private life and private thoughts in the new era (as it was, back then) of internet sharing and “over-sharing” than the actual problem of loneliness. I remember thinking that although Franzen’s intelligence was impressive, and he had clearly experienced some of life’s “ups and downs”, in his way, the author did not strike me as a man who had ever experienced real, extended loneliness. For such people – and I believe I was once one of those people – “being alone” may be imagined something like a holiday on an exotic island – enjoyable, because you know that you are not marooned there.

Miranda had at least one boyfriend in the five or six years I knew her, but the relationship didn’t last long. Her greatest love seemed to be reserved for her dog. I saw a series of posts she made on Instagram about her dog being ill, in 2019, and the last post I saw was posted soon after her dog had died.

She had a funeral for her dog, with several bouquets of flowers, in her garden. It seemed as if it were something she had done alone. I posted a message of support in the thread of that post because I could see Miranda was distraught, but I didn’t realise just how inconsolable. I was busy working for an intense university summer programme some ninety kilometres away, and intended to visit her in the brief hiatus between the end of my job, and my return to Italy. I felt sorry for her loss, but felt she would probably have started to move forward with her life by the time I saw her, in three or four weeks.

Less than a fortnight later I received an email from my former manager at the school Miranda and I had worked at– the email said that Miranda had died, and Miranda’s father and brother were inviting all her colleagues from the school to attend the funeral.

At the funeral, which I was able to attend (fortunately, for my return flight was booked for the very same evening), I saw at least a dozen of my former colleagues and there seemed to be at least a hundred and fifty people in attendance. As I said, Miranda was loved by many. The cause of Miranda’s death was never mentioned and of course, it was not the right time or place to ask. However, as Miranda was only 58 years old at the time of her death and had no health problems anyone knew about, and as I had read her last messages on Instagram, I strongly suspected (as I think did some of my colleagues) that she had committed suicide.

When I researched the facts on the Internet – because I needed to know the truth – the website of the established local newspaper confirmed that this was the case. No reference was made to the death of her dog as the catalyst that led to Miranda taking her own life, just the cause of death, which was reported to have been an overdose of sleeping pills. This led me to believe that Miranda had been planning her suicide for a while, maybe during her dog’s period of illness or maybe even before; it takes time to gather enough sleeping pills to effectively kill oneself, if one only deals with respectable doctors, and I find it hard to believe she knew any other kind.

Miranda’s suicide affected me and continues to affect me. I miss her. But more than that, I wish I could have helped her. There were friends closer to her than me, and yet we were (I believe) close friends.

Miranda was loved by many people, but this was not enough.

Miranda was loved by many people, but this was not enough. It was a sincere love, but it was not a strong enough love. It was what is sometimes called affection, or perhaps gratitude. The hungry heart cannot be fed on this alone, and it led Miranda to focus her strongest love on her pet dog. Pets, of course, love a kind master or mistress unconditionally and unreservedly, with none of the complications or vacillations of other human beings. When her dog died, for Miranda it was the end of hope for the kind of love she needed. She felt, I believe, she was facing slow starvation – and she preferred a quick death to slow starvation.

How did so many of us – intelligent, kind, generous, not-unattractive people – end up coming to this kind of desolation in our later years? This is something I will explore further – and come back to leaving Tricase – in part two.