I’m really competitive; not what you would describe as mucho, Wolf of Wall Street competitive. I do play sport – tough, physically demanding, contact sport – and as a young man I was the guy on the court or pitch who would argue with a referee/umpire convinced that he was variously blind or biased and very often both. It’s not something I am particularly proud of, just part of my experience growing up. While I may never completely grow up I am well past this stage of my life.
No, I am more the kind of person who just really hates mediocrity and mediocrity in myself is not something I am comfortable with. And that’s a problem, as it leads to chronic procrastination, not wanting to start something until I am absolutely convinced I can be moderately successful, and certainly never last or the worst at anything. Geez, I sound like a real piece of work.
When it comes to reading, I like to think I’m pretty widely read. I absorb anything that comes my way like a gravitational singularity inside a black hole absorbs matter. While studying a post-graduate degree I loved reading detailed, highly technical academic journals and I’m a veracious ‘Googler”, reading up on anything that spikes my curiosity from quarks to syllogistic logic, and sometimes I even understand what they’re talking about.
That’s why it is so hard to admit I have been defeated; resoundingly, thoroughly and completely defeated. I tried, I really tried. My form was flawless and nothing I had faced got close to bettering me. But in this case I wasn’t good enough. And the protagonist of this humiliating defeat is a book.
What makes it worse is that this book is described by some critics as the most important book of the 20th Century, James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The first time I picked it up I was really looking forward to it. Of course I had the usual trepidation I feel faced with a monster read – it is long, very long, at 933 pages (see my previous post, I’m a coward) – but I’ve read Joyce before. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a modernist masterpiece of creative, intellectually stimulating poetic prose. I devoured it, enjoyed it and even understood it. But Ulysses was too much for my feeble mind. It is opaque and reading it is like wading through quicksand.
Since then I’ve tried twice more and each time I haven’t got past page 137 (of 933) … that’s less than 15%, not even close to a 50% pass mark.
Sure, the language is complicated. In the process of writing Ulysses Joyce effectively invented a new dialect of English. According to Wikipedia he used 30,030 different words out of the 265,000 words in the book. But I’ve read complicated, modernist books before, so this can’t be it.
May be it’s because of its parallels to Homer’s poem Odyssey, which has been translated in to English dozens, if not hundreds of times, over hundreds of years. I’ve read a little of the Illiad, but none of Odyssey and Joyce apparently once wrote to his aunt Josephine that, ‘If you want to read Ulysses you had better first get or borrow from a library a translation in prose of the Odyssey of Homer.’.
May be I just didn’t get in to the story or Leopold Bloom. The ‘hero’ is indifferent and in the 137 pages of I have read of the novel I just haven’t warmed to him. Or it could be that each time I have tried to read it, it has been at night, before going to bed; Ulysses could be a day time book, needing the soft warmth of the sun and higher ultraviolet or infrared light; may be the production of vitamin D helps an unmalleable mind be shaped in to a form capable of appreciating the story. Now I’m clutching at straws.
Whatever it is, it has beaten me.
The book still sits on my book shelf, in fact right at the top of a pile of similarly silvery-spined books I have managed to consume my wife has curated on our colour-coded shelves.
One day I may be ready to read it, but I suspect I’ll procrastinate for many years to come. In the meantime I have waved the white flag.