Saturday, January 9, 2021, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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Remembering KH

Tough day yesterday. I want to the funeral of a friend, a young man with a wife and four children.

I met him 20 years ago on the mats. We were doing light contact fighting. He landed a light jab squarely on my forehead. I went right to the floor. I was fine, but he was worried. “I’m fine,” I told him. “What the hell did you hit me with? It felt like a sledge hammer.”

KH was in his early 20s at the time. He was a big, barrel-chested kid, with traps that stood like mountains on his back and arms as thick as timber. He was also an excellent grappler. I remember thinking about how helpless I would be in a real fight with him.

KH was one of several members of my jiu jitsu team that I recruited into my business. During the first year of their apprenticeship, I would meet them during lunch hour in an attempt to educate them on certain things that were lacking in their education. We would play educational games – using flash cards I made about American presidents, modern artists, and philosophers. But our favorite game was a store-bought one called Le Nez du Vin – a box of 40 little bottles that contained different aromas inherent in wine tasting. I smile when I think of it. Imagine four 200+ pound men sniffing little bottles and saying such things as, “It’s definitely a floral… not lavender… maybe hibiscus or acacia?”

KH had perhaps the best nose of the group. And so he was seldom the recipient of the hazing that went on afterwards. (To keep the game athletic, the rule was that the loser each day had to lean over the pool table outside my office and receive a kick in the ass from the other players.

KH married a beautiful woman that worked for that very business, had four children with her, and enjoyed a very successful career. Earlier this year, he visited me and told me he was in the market for a new job. I was happy to recommend him to a half-dozen colleagues, all of whom were eager to employ him. He was going to start with one of them next week.

This weekend, I sent him an email, asking when exactly he was going to start his new job and how he felt about it. I didn’t get a reply, which was odd. The next day, BW (another member of that original group) texted to tell me that KH was dead.

KH had many qualities besides a strong intelligence and a good nose for wine. He was thoughtful, reliable, extremely loyal, and he was funny. His humor ran towards pranking sometimes, which I didn’t appreciate when I was the victim. As I knelt beside his coffin and looked at him, I half expected him to spring to life. (“Ha! Mark! I got you!”)

I felt awkward at the wake – and until I started writing this, I wasn’t sure why. I think it was because I could see so much of the 40-year-old me in him. He had so much more to do in his life. And here was I, at 70, at his funeral.

What can be said about a death so young? It’s not fair. Life isn’t fair. Carpe diem.

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Worth Watching

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Iris (2001)

Directed by Richard Eyre from a screenplay he co-wrote with Charles Wood

Starring Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, Jim Broadbent, and Hugh Bonneville

Based on John Bailey’s 1999 memoir, Elegy for Iris, the film looks back on his relationship with his wife, Iris Murdoch. It takes us from their early days, when Murdoch was an outgoing, freethinking intellectual and Bailey was a shy young professor, to their final days together, when Murdoch was virtually helpless, suffering from Alzheimer’s.

I watched the movie because I’ve always wanted to read Murdoch, ever since DK, a former colleague of mine at the University of Chad, recommended her to me. I read a few short stories and a couple of essays, but nothing more over the years. I felt vaguely guilty about that. And so when I saw the movie listed on Netflix, I thought I should watch it. And so I did.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s quite a good one. The story of the relationship is irresistible and heart wrenching. And the portrait of Murdoch, so capably played by both Dench and Winslet (as the young Iris), was so fascinating that I decided to read more about her and read one of her novels.

She wrote about two dozen novels. I chose The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1987. (See below.)

Interesting Fact: For his role as John Bayley, Jim Broadbent won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor at that year’s Academy Awards. The film also picked up nominations for Judi Dench (Best Actress) and Kate Winslet (Best Supporting Actress)

From Washington Post: “Not just a fitting document of a life brilliantly lived but a vibrant, almost palpitating piece of cinema.”

From Rotten Tomatoes: “[A] solidly constructed drama, Iris is greatly elevated by the strength of its four lead performances.”

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The Sea, The Sea

By Iris Murdoch

528 pages

Published in 1978 by Penguin Classics

After a successful but sometimes scandalous career as a playwright and director, Charles Arrowby retires from the hubbub of London to what he expects will be some years of tranquil solitude. His plan is to write a memoir about a love affair he had with his mentor, and to enjoy an occasional tryst with an actress he has been having sex with, off and on, for many years.

His plans are altered by the appearance of a middle-aged woman whom he has not seen since his adolescence. She was his first lover, and he remembers her as beautiful and slender. She’s now stout and very ordinary looking, but the spark is still there and he sets about trying to seduce her.

The first hundred pages of the book give the reader hope that the rest of the book will be a pleasant story of rekindled love. I’m just now getting further along than that and can tell that it’s going to be a very different kind of story. Other characters – mostly former lovers – are coming and going, and most of them don’t have good feelings towards Arrowby.

A great deal of the action is interior (his impressions in the memoir) and show him to be a somewhat selfish and superficial individual, despite whatever accomplishments he has had in theater.

This is a very modern novel in the sense that the protagonist is a somewhat ordinary man with many ordinary vanities and vices that leave him, like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, unable to carve out any real meaning from his life.

Murdoch’s language is rich, and her dialog and descriptions are filled with allusions to myth and magic. Arrowby’s confrontation with love and forgiveness makes this one of Murdoch’s most moving and powerful novels.

From Dwight Garner, The New York Times: “Profound and delicious for many reasons… a multilayered working out of [Murdoch’s] feelings about the intensity of romantic experience.” 

From Sophia Martelli, The Guardian: “Murdoch’s subtly, blackly humorous digs at human vanity and self-delusion periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is a brilliant creation: a deeply textured, intriguing yet unreliable narrator, and one of the finest character studies of the 20th century.”

From Time: “The author renders her immorality play with painstaking attention to atmosphere: the changing hues of the waves, the slippery amber rocks, the strangely damp house are all made palpable. The old scandals are shrewdly reexamined, and Murdoch’s style is as saline as the sea below.”

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Readers Write

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An email from NB:

About your essay “Being and Becoming”… thanks for the great read Mark. I am constantly saying (to my loved ones) that it’s not the achievement of the goal that matters but who I become in the process. I must have heard that from Zig Zigler or somewhere in the past and it stuck. I also saw a bit of myself in your personal story of becoming a writer.  

 

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