Out of Sheer Rage. Geoff Dyer

I was idling over Rodin’s words. Il faut travailler, rien que travailler. I should be writing my book about D. H. Lawrence, I said to myself, everything else should be subordinate to that – but who can tell where that task begins and ends? Some huge benefit may yet accrue from reading Rilke’s letters. The more I read, in fact, the more convinced I became that a better understanding of Rilke was crucial to my understanding of Lawrence. Had I gone to Alonissos to write a book about Rilke then I would, almost certainly, have been sitting on Hervé’s terrace reading books by Lawrence; as it was, the fact that I was meant to be starting my study of D. H. Lawrence meant that I was sitting there reading the letters of Rilke who, though he was seduced by and persuaded of the truth of Rodin’s exhortation to do nothing but work, found it difficult to submit to it in practice: ‘Already I am wavering in my absolute determination to shut myself up daily, wherever I am and in whatever external circumstances, for so-and-so-many hours for my work’s sake.’ He also wavered about whether work and idleness could be so easily counterposed:

      I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction . . .

      Now that idea immediately took my fancy, that was an idea I liked a lot. So much so that after a few more days the Rilke letters went the way of The Complete Poems and lay unopened on our bedside table. Everything lay unopened in Alonissos, even the cover of my tennis racket. It was impossible to write on Alonissos, it was impossible to read, and it was impossible to play tennis. Laura found it impossible to make any progress with Greek. It was actually impossible to do anything. I had thought that after working on my book about Lawrence in the mornings I would spend the afternoons playing tennis but there were no courts and so, having spent the mornings not writing my book about Lawrence and not reading Rilke, I spent the afternoons not playing tennis. The last time I had been on a Greek island there were regular, ill-tempered matches between the tourists and the locals. Here there was no football and no tennis. In fact there was no anything. All you could do was eat lunch and jump into the jellyfish-infested sea from the snake-infested rocks of the plaka. We saw a snake there on our third day. Laura and I were walking through the little wood before you get to the rocks and we saw it at the same time. All my life I have dreaded seeing a snake and on Alonissos I saw one. We both saw it at the same time, turned on our heels and fled. Lawrence in his white pyjamas had a rendezvous with his snake; we fled from ours. I wasn’t even sure what happened: either we saw it lying motionless and then, as a result of our panic, it suddenly sidled away or it heard us and began darting away and as a result of this movement we saw it. It all happened too fast: it saw us and fled, we saw it and fled; we hoped we never saw it again and it probably felt the same about us. Not exactly sentiments to make a poem out of.

      After that we were nervous about being on the rocks of the plaka because although we saw the snake in the woods it was actually on the sun-warmed rocks of the plaka that the snakes, like us – like us before we saw the snake – liked to bask, like sharks. We were nervous about the sea anyway, because of the jellyfish, and now we were nervous about the rocks, because of the snakes. We were also nervous in bed. We lay there and heard slithery, rustling noises suggesting that things were slithering and rustling outside our door. We lay awake talking about what things they might be.

      ‘I hate slithery things,’ I said.

      ‘I hate rustling things,’ said Laura.

      ‘Some things rustle and slither,’ I said. It was an idiotic conversation and on one level I couldn’t believe we were actually having it. On another level . . . on another level I still couldn’t believe we were having it but eventually it wearied us to the point where we could sleep.

      In the morning we had breakfast with Hervé and Mimi, an event dominated by buzzing things: wasps, swarms of them. They came for the honey and the jam. Mimi had a live-and-let-live policy. I wanted to slaughter them all – at least it would have been something to do – but Mimi argued that the best policy was to ignore them.

      ‘Try ignoring them when you’ve been stung in the mouth, your tongue’s swelling up, you’re choking and you’re looking round for someone who knows how to do an emergency tracheotomy,’ I said. Seeing a wasp crawling over my plate I flattened it with a copy of the local, yoghurt-spotted Greek paper. Mimi looked at me. She was wearing a yellow and black head scarf which may be why I had half a mind to take a swipe at her too.

      ‘Life is more vivid in the dandelion than in the green fern,’ I said. ‘Life is more vivid in the wasp than in the dandelion. Life is more vivid in me than the wasp. The wasp can devour the dandelion. I can destroy the wasp.’ With that Laura and I got up to leave. We were so bored on Alonissos that tempers were getting somewhat frayed. There was nothing to do except pick quarrels with each other and drive faster and faster on the moped along the winding roads of the island. Now that was fun! Even though it was only fun because of the condition of almost catatonic boredom in which we found ourselves – and was itself, therefore, contaminated by boredom to some degree – it was still fun to drive round the island at speed. One way of keeping boredom at bay would have been to make a start on my book about Lawrence in much the same way that he had translated Giovanni Verga on the way to Ceylon and Australia, but making a start on Lawrence seemed more boring than doing nothing. Even writing a postcard required more concentration than I could muster. In a matter of days chronic boredom had come to seem the natural condition of existence and the only response to it was the bored one of zooming round the island on a moped.

      In Rome Laura travelled by moped the whole time, it was her way of getting around the city, but in Alonissos we drove around just for the hell of it because there was nothing else to do. We sped along the deserted roads, throttle back, sky in our hair. In Rome I had been a nervous passenger and we had quarrelled many times because I was always shouting out warnings, alerting Laura to danger and thereby, she claimed, taking the fun out of one of the activities she most loved in life which was riding through Rome on her moped. Since there was no danger on Alonissos I even did some of the driving, something I never did in Rome. We leaned into curves, swept through bends, glided down the long inclines of hills, engine off. This proved a terrible mistake. The gradient was such that as we glided down one twisting hill, the moped accelerated with every bend until, just as Laura shouted, ‘Careful!’ we smashed into the cliff wall at 20 mph. Crumph! It was unbelievable. I sat on the floor, stunned. Laura was groaning. I just sat there, moaning and groaning, stunned, hearing Laura groaning.

      ‘Did you hit your head?’ I said.

      ‘Yes,’ moaned Laura. I just sat there, moaning and groaning. Whatever we didn’t want to happen had already happened. It was already too late to do anything about it. One moment we were about to crash, the next moment we had crashed. The crash was wedged between these two moments. There wasn’t even time for things to go into slow motion as they allegedly do in the build-up to a crash. Laura was lying on the floor, moaning, now she was sitting up and walking. I was sitting, moaning. A taxi stopped.

      ‘We can take a taxi,’ Laura said, as though we were late for a concert with no bus in sight. I got up. ‘I can’t move,’ I said, moving towards the taxi. Everything was terrible and in the back of the taxi I kept saying sorry to Laura. Through the shock there were different kinds of hurt: the stinging of grazes which was nothing, the pain of cuts which was also almost nothing, the hurt of my hip which was less but worse, an ache in my back and, deeper within, hardly even perceptible as pain yet, there was a very dull ache of something that might be badly wrong. Laura was crying. I kept asking if she had hit her head and she said yes but there was no bump or blood or anything and so I said you can’t have hit your head and she agreed. We got out, the taxi stopped and left. It was terrible, walking into the hospital which was not even a hospital, just a kind of dressing station where there were no doctors to be seen. Then one appeared, a doctor, or at least someone in a white coat, moving unhurriedly. Laura said her ribs hurt and I said, ‘I am so sorry.’ I sat there, on a chair, hurting everywhere, but differently in different places. The doctor-orderly took Laura into a room and she lay down while I sat there, not in the room with her but in the waiting room. I held myself