One Chance Out Between Two Worlds

October 12, 2023

People are often bewildered by my ability to let things slip my mind. For several months last year, I was planning to take a few odds-and-ends to the recycling depot. Every time someone came to my house and pointed at the pile, I would say, “Oh yeah, I’m going to take them to the recycling depot.” Occasionally, I would even write on my white-board, “Recycling depot.” But when no one was there to point them out to me, I couldn’t see the box of odds-and-ends, or even the writing on the board. I would pick the box up to sweep around it, and still not notice it was there.

More than chores and errands, I often forget about entire concepts. I used to frequently forget about money, or that it was connected to the act of going to work. I would call in sick for a week, or take days off for a vacation, and it wouldn’t occur to me that my paycheque might be smaller a few weeks later. Recently, I find myself forgetting what food I eat for lunch and dinner, and find myself staring into my fridge and pantry wondering what is and isn’t a “meal.”

To sum up the nature of my memory: I remember everyone’s birthdays, but I don’t realize when they are coming up. This is because I only ever know today’s date as an approximation — generally within a range of three or four days. This means that I usually know what month it is, although of course things can get a little muddled when we move from one to the next.

It seems like it would be easy enough to take yesterday’s date and add one every morning, but in order to do that, you’d first have to think to do that, and how are you supposed to remember to think to do that? Also, you would have to know how many days are in each month.

I find myself, once again, thinking of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov. That Oblomov is apathetic is self-evident, but what interests me more about Oblomov is how this apathy takes the form of total forgetfulness. He can receive a letter, forget about it, find it on the table a few days later, read it, decide he must respond to it, and then allow it to leave his mind completely, such that he never gets around to thinking of it again. If something’s not directly in front of his eyes every day, it may as well not exist.

Oblomov’s field of attention works like a magnifying glass. He can focus with full attention on one particular thing, occasionally with such a passion that it burns, but there is no room left for anything else. When he is in love, he is wholly in love; but if distracted, he might forget her name, or where she lives. He may even forget that he ever met her. His plans for his estate can keep him up at night, but since they don’t have any tangible presence in his everyday life, they are easily set aside as soon as a new day begins and brings with it new concerns.

I may be alone in the specifics of what I do and don’t remember, but selective memory is, in fact, the only kind of memory. To some people, today’s date is important to their lives, so they remember it. They may not remember as well as I do the premise of the Japanese variety TV show they watched at midnight in an Osaka capsule hotel eight years ago.

I tend to remember the moments in my life that feel the most like literature. My thoughts are connected with visual stimuli; when I remember a thought I had, I will remember exactly what I was looking at when I thought it. If I go for a walk with someone and have a conversation, and then the next day, I walk the same route with that same person, I will be able to recall for them exactly what we were talking about at each landmark. I am most likely to forget something you tell me within my own house, because I’m there all the time, and I look at everything in it every day. The reverse, however, is also true: if you tell me something while in a particular place, I might not think of it again until I’m back there in that same place.

When Oblomov’s friend Stolz shows up and invites him to travel, he agrees, and even develops a certain passion for the idea. His everyday world disappears and is replaced by the plans and dreams for his upcoming travel. Once Stolz leaves, the everyday steadily returns; these plans and dreams, not being turned to action, and not being replenished by new stimuli, evaporate. When Stolz returns several months later, the passion is reignited as if it had never left, and the cycle continues. The fact is that Oblomov can only live in one world at a time: either the everyday world or the world of ideas. When he lives his mundane reality, he becomes apathetic to ideals, passions, and ambitions. He literally loses the ability to imagine anything different. Conversely, when he finds himself dreaming of a new future and a new reality for himself, he can barely get out of bed.

The practical world and the ideal world are entirely separate to Oblomov. While Stolz uses his ideas as motivation for activity in the here and now, Oblomov’s ideas take the form of dreams, so disconnected from reality that it’s hard to even imagine that actions in our everyday world could possibly bring them to fruition. He doesn’t see actions in terms of steps, but only leaps. There is no step 1, step 2, step 3… but only “now” and “then,” with a mighty gulf in between.

I recently remarked to my wife that the most ambitious period of my life was between the ages of six and ten, when I wanted to be a professional hockey player. Not only did I want to be a professional hockey player, but I wanted to break all the scoring records and all the goaltending records during the same career, by alternating positions each season. I thought about this eventuality all the time, while dreaming of lifting the Stanley Cup year after year.

I was able to do this because when you are six, being an adult at all is a fantasy. There’s no way to conceptualize the process of turning from a child into an adult: all the realities you must face, all that you must leave behind, and all that you will learn along the way. I thought that I could become the greatest professional hockey player in the history of the game just because I wanted to.

While I certainly improved at ice hockey as I learned how to more effectively control my human body, there were certain gaps in my skillset that I never bothered to address. I couldn’t do a slapshot, for one. I just never quite figured it out. For two, I couldn’t stop with my left foot forward, only my right.

Connor McDavid wouldn’t have let such things slide. Putting aside his natural talent, his ambition took the form of developing every aspect of his game, even the parts he wasn’t so good at at first. He wanted to become a great hockey player. I wanted to just be a great hockey player. I didn’t want to bother with the becoming. Connor McDavid is a Stolz, and I am an Oblomov.

Friction is the nature of our world. Every time you want to move, you have to push against something else. Pushing requires effort. Effort requires energy.

Dreams lack friction. You want something, and it’s there. You want to go somewhere, and there you are. There are no immutable physical relationships between anything and anything else; it’s all whim and emotion. If your feet get stuck when running away from a monster, it’s not because the surface you’re stepping on is sticky — it’s because the scenario has been constructed to invoke fear, and it’s more scary when your feet get stuck.

Oblomov’s ambitions — his dreams — centre around an emotional state. His final goal is to be serene and content. The exact nature of the world that surrounds him while he is serene and content is irrelevant. He tends to imagine an environment that resembles his childhood, simply because that was when he last felt serenity and contentment. To reconstruct his childhood environment — i.e. to develop his country estate — would mean encountering friction and putting in effort. Friction and effort cause turmoil and discontent. That’s the opposite of what he wants. So, instead, he settles on being serene and content where he is right now.

This is certainly possible, but it too requires effort, albeit of a spiritual and emotional nature. To be serene and content where you are requires serious training. That training often brings about turmoil and discontent.

It turns out that there is no easy way out. At some point, you’re going to have to push against something, and it’s going to be uncomfortable.

Ivan Goncharov clearly found it difficult to come up with an ending to Oblomov’s story. A sudden breakthrough on Oblomov’s part would feel unrealistic and dissatisfying. However, equally unsatisfying is Oblomov sitting around doing nothing until he dies. Goncharov attempts to sidestep the problem by turning his attention to the characters that surround Oblomov, but none of them feel quite as real or vivid as he does. As a result, the book’s final chapters feel like letting the air out of a balloon.

I’m left wondering where my story is supposed to go. How am I ever supposed to reconcile my dreams with reality? My dream is for my work to be appreciated. When someone appreciates my work, it feels like a dream — that is to say, it doesn’t feel real. I don’t feel that the effort I put in has any relation to what is being appreciated; they feel like two completely disconnected concepts, like when I forgot that going to work has anything to do with making money.

I still struggle to come up with plans. I still struggle to recognize how one action can lead to another, and to another, until finally a result is achieved. When I write, I forget that I have goals and ambitions; when I remember my goals and ambitions, I forget that I have to write. I live in the real world, and then a dream world, and then the real world again.

When I was away from home for two weeks, I forgot that I write novels at all. I consider writing novels to be the most important thing that I do, so what does it say about me that I can, in the right circumstance, completely forget about it? What am I going to do next, forget that I’m married? Forget to eat? Forget to breathe?

Is there hope for an Oblomov such as myself? Am I cursed to live this life of a goldfish, swimming from one end of the tank to the other, turning around only to realize there’s a whole tank behind me?

Perhaps one day I will go so far as to forget the very fact that I am an Oblomov: wake up one morning as a normal person, and never think to look back at this life I have lived…