Today's winter walk along Bloor Street proves to be a restful respite from the New Year's celebrations. There is a kind of lull around the area, as lone pedestrians walk their shaggy dogs and take in the isolated flakes of snow around them. If I settle into this walk long enough, there is a sense of not having a personal agenda, but being freely able to engage with whatever is happening around the neighbourhood. But of course, even this sense of peace does not stay. Worries come up, concerns, and things that do need taking care of. Of course there are going to be thoughts, and they require care. But the space around the thoughts allows me to interact with them without getting obsessed or overly preoccupied in identifying with them. In the midst of this experience, I sense that there is something in the moment that cannot be defined or made into an object whatsoever. Yet, that space contains everything and freely allows concerns to be addressed. I consider this to be a kind of mystery.
I contrast this sense of mystery with a different kind, which often comes up in novels or other fictional forms. Rather than being about the mystery of awareness (the everyday), this 'other' mystery seems to be about trying to solve a problem or being allured by some detail. Here is an example I found from a short story by W. Somerset Maugham, called "The book bag", in which one of the characters, Featherstone, relates his fascination with another person:
It was strangely exciting to think that if she loved you, and you were married to her, you would at last pierce right into the hidden heart of that mystery; and you felt that if you could share that with her it would be as it were a consummation of all you'd ever desired in your life. Heaven wouldn't be in it, You know, I felt about it just like Bluebeard's wife about the forbidden chamber in the castle. Every room was open to me, but I should never rest till I had gone into that last one that was locked against me (p.26)
I think that Featherstone presents a striking metaphor for the never-ending pursuit of mystery, which is also embodied in the title of the story. It describes mystery as a kind of temptation: 'if only' it were pierced or penetrated, there would be a kind of final fulfilment of everything desired in life. But this mystery that Featherstone speaks of is also the mystery of the forbidden, the hidden , or the veiled. It is as though there is something out there that needs to be resolved before Featherstone can make peace with himself.
Reading this passage, I begin to wonder how often this can form the model for how people see relationships in general. Rather than seeing their moments as already complete, there is something in someone else that promises to "complete" a person. It's perhaps no accident that this short story ends in the tragedy of unrequited love. The ''mystery" that Featherstone speaks of is really the concealment of a dark secret in his beloved's heart, which in turn becomes his own obsession.
A question that comes to my mind is how Maugham's story of intrigue functions in his readers' minds. Just as Featherstone is fascinated by Olive, are readers not also drawn into the desire to know who Olive is? Do readers also become 'voyeurs' of sorts, wanting very much to continue to read in order to find out what happens, or whether the two get together or not? Why do readers come to this story, what are they looking for, and what sustains them in continuing to read? Maugham's story is also a meditation on why readers read, and what keeps them hooked on the power of words and images. Comparing the process of reading to a drug, Maugham's narrator remarks, "Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without--who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him (sic) when he has been severed from reading too long..." (p.9)
I think Maugham's story serves on some level as a kind of cautionary tale about what happens when people get bogged down by their thoughts, and sense themselves as incomplete unless they can somehow 'finish' the thought with another. Just as the character in his story longs for the consummation of the mystery of beloved, so he also suffers from a romantic fixation on the mystery of someone else, which ends up being a fantasy in the end. But I also wonder if reading Maugham's tale is also not a catharsis for the reader, who is unable to get over the sense of wanting to figure out something in order to feel fulfilled.
Maugham, W. Somerset (1951), "the book bag", from Volume Four: Collected Short Stories. London: Pan Books
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