a vision of Louis Armstrong
The other day I found myself home alone on a long, empty afternoon. I've been busy lately, so rather than finding something useful to do I turned on some old jazz recordings and crawled into bed to read.
Of course I fell asleep almost immediately-the kind of sleep you fall into in the middle of a summer day under a sunny window, where it feels as if your head were filled with cotton, and you probably drool a little on your pillow.
But I woke up after just a few minutes when my phone rang. Hardly anyone knows my home number, so I almost always answer. I staggered out of bed reached for the phone with one hand and the volume knob on the speakers with the other. My phone and speaker aren't actually that far apart, but somehow neither operation went as smoothly as it could have.
In the end, though, I got the music turned down and the phone answered.
The woman on the other end asked for a Ms. Lin.
"You've got a wrong number," I said.
"That's impossible. I'm looking for Ms. Lin Yuexiu. Doesn't she live here?"
I was still half asleep, and found this terribly confusing. But I stuck to my line. "No, you've got a wrong number, sorry."
"Are you sure? I really think-"
"Oh, wait. Lin Yuexiu. That's my landlady."
"Oh. Your landlady. OK, can I talk to her?"
My grogginess was starting to lift-underneath, apparently, was irritation. "She lives downstairs. And I don't think she's home right now. Sorry." I hung up the phone.
It rang again right away.
"Hello!" said the same cheerful voice. "You hung up on me! So you were saying? She's your landlady? Does she live there?"
"No. She's my landlady, she doesn't live here."
"Oh, I see. What about your parents?" Just when I thought I had a handle on this conversation.
"Uh.... My parents? I live alone."
"Oh, you live alone? Are you a student?"
I'm not a student, of course, but I have been, and I will be again soon, and it's easier just to say yes, so that's what I said.
"So how come you're home in the middle of the day?"
Who asks a question like that? I was more irritated than ever, but by some weird deeply ingrained social protocol I couldn't hang up. A long, confused exchange took place before I figured out what was happening.
"Uh, I'm not a high-school student."
"Oh! Your voice sounds really young. So you're in college?"
"No, no I'm not in college. I'm twenty-five. I graduated from college years ago."
"Oh! Just a couple years older than me. What'd you major in?"
I am convinced that talking can be an effective way of holding certain people hostage. Thank of all the things you might do rather than violate certain terms of politeness, certain ideas of the way society functions. The way people stand around the scene of an accident not helping-not because they don't care, but because this sort of intervention is simply not part of the program. Not knowing how to deal with a chatty young telemarketer, I kept up my end of the conversation, telling her all sort of things about myself-although I didn't do more than answer her questions.
She seemed willing to talk about anything, asking random specific questions that were clearly intended merely as a way of dragging out the conversation. My actual responses didn't seem to matter much. She was surprised when I told her I was a foreigner-she hadn't even been paying close enough attention to notice my accent. And her attitude didn't change at all once it came out. Whether I was a Taiwanese teenager or an American twenty-something were all the same.
After a couple minutes she said sadly, "Hey, I've got to go," told me again that my voice sounded "young," and said she'd call me again sometime-if that was OK, which of course I had to say it was.
"So what's your number?"
"Uh, you just called me, remember?"
"But are you home all the time? What about your cell phone?"
I made some excuse not to give her my cell, and we hung up.
Something had caught my attention about the way she said goodbye. It was sad, but not politely sad, and not the kind of sad you fell when you fail to get someone's phone number. It was a much deeper sort of sadness, and one that I realized had been present throughout the entire conversation.
Which makes sense, of course. This incorporeal voice was actually a woman, about my age in the grand scheme of things, whose life had gone so off track that she'd ended up a telemarketer. Through some circumstance-probably a completely uninteresting one-she needed some sort of connection badly enough to carry on a meaningless conversation with someone she believed was a high-school student. Am I psychoanalyzing too much? I don't think so. I'm usually more cerebral about this sort of thing, but in this case I'm going to play the I've-been-there-and-I-know-it-when-I-see-it card.
I had gotten back into bed at some point, but I wasn't sleepy anymore. I got up and turned the music back on, just in time to hear Louis Armstrong singing the last line of "What a Wonderful World." It was one of those moments you want to write about. During most of that conversation, Louis Armstrong had been silently singing.
Ever since I learned to play "What a Wonderful World" on the piano when I was twelve, I have associated a very specific image with it: a fat, cheery black man in a suit strolls down a street that looks like the set of a movie-musical. The concrete sidewalk is so white it almost hurts to look at, the sky is gaudily blue with perfect spray-point clouds for realism; there are bright purple and red flowers and a picket fence, and everything is a little too small; friends-skinny smiling white men in gray pinstrip suits and brimmed hats-shake hands with ridiculous 1950s smiles in their faces; a woman in a big skirt pushes a freckly baby in a stroller, and Louis Armstrong looks down at it and smiles knowingly.
The thing is, in this vision Louis Armstrong is totally alone. That, in my mind, has always been the point of "What a Wonderful World": that the world is wonderful-so wonderful that just being in it, and being part of the big fraternity of Man, is all anyone could ask for, more important than any immediate pleasure. Furthermore, in this world, we are all surrounded by a wealth of immediate pleasures: sunshine, birds, glimpses of babies, etc. Whoever feels existentially needy has failed to count their blessings.
But in my vision of Louis Armstrong, he does not just happen to be alone-he has to be alone. His observation can only be made outside the intimacy of community. He sees friends shaking hands, but he doesn't shake anyone's hand himself. If he did bump into a friend, he wouldn't be able to help feeling a little annoyed.
Sometimes you really do feel that way, and it's not necessarily opposed to community and personal intimacy. But for me there's always been a connection between that "Wonderful World" feeling and loneliness. Like if you weren't lonely, you'd have your own stuff to do-you wouldn't need to take pleasure in the happiness of strangers and the wonderfulness of the world in general.
Loneliness can work like that, and it can be nice, and yet somehow the things that seems nice sometimes is horrifying at others. Life, in the biological sense, is odd that way. There are certain things we must have to a degree but only a degree. Say salt-NaCl. If you don't have it, you feel tired, your muscles stop working, and you die. But just a bit too much and it becomes a murderous desiccating poison. It will literal suck the life out of you.
Is it just me who finds things this hard to balance? Or is life supposed to be a war between noise and quiet, between too much and too little of everything?
In the case of my telemarketer, it's lopsided war. How do people end up like this, and why don't we care about them more? It's been a question that was important to me. Why is there so much distance between us?
Of course I fell asleep almost immediately-the kind of sleep you fall into in the middle of a summer day under a sunny window, where it feels as if your head were filled with cotton, and you probably drool a little on your pillow.
But I woke up after just a few minutes when my phone rang. Hardly anyone knows my home number, so I almost always answer. I staggered out of bed reached for the phone with one hand and the volume knob on the speakers with the other. My phone and speaker aren't actually that far apart, but somehow neither operation went as smoothly as it could have.
In the end, though, I got the music turned down and the phone answered.
The woman on the other end asked for a Ms. Lin.
"You've got a wrong number," I said.
"That's impossible. I'm looking for Ms. Lin Yuexiu. Doesn't she live here?"
I was still half asleep, and found this terribly confusing. But I stuck to my line. "No, you've got a wrong number, sorry."
"Are you sure? I really think-"
"Oh, wait. Lin Yuexiu. That's my landlady."
"Oh. Your landlady. OK, can I talk to her?"
My grogginess was starting to lift-underneath, apparently, was irritation. "She lives downstairs. And I don't think she's home right now. Sorry." I hung up the phone.
It rang again right away.
"Hello!" said the same cheerful voice. "You hung up on me! So you were saying? She's your landlady? Does she live there?"
"No. She's my landlady, she doesn't live here."
"Oh, I see. What about your parents?" Just when I thought I had a handle on this conversation.
"Uh.... My parents? I live alone."
"Oh, you live alone? Are you a student?"
I'm not a student, of course, but I have been, and I will be again soon, and it's easier just to say yes, so that's what I said.
"So how come you're home in the middle of the day?"
Who asks a question like that? I was more irritated than ever, but by some weird deeply ingrained social protocol I couldn't hang up. A long, confused exchange took place before I figured out what was happening.
"Uh, I'm not a high-school student."
"Oh! Your voice sounds really young. So you're in college?"
"No, no I'm not in college. I'm twenty-five. I graduated from college years ago."
"Oh! Just a couple years older than me. What'd you major in?"
I am convinced that talking can be an effective way of holding certain people hostage. Thank of all the things you might do rather than violate certain terms of politeness, certain ideas of the way society functions. The way people stand around the scene of an accident not helping-not because they don't care, but because this sort of intervention is simply not part of the program. Not knowing how to deal with a chatty young telemarketer, I kept up my end of the conversation, telling her all sort of things about myself-although I didn't do more than answer her questions.
She seemed willing to talk about anything, asking random specific questions that were clearly intended merely as a way of dragging out the conversation. My actual responses didn't seem to matter much. She was surprised when I told her I was a foreigner-she hadn't even been paying close enough attention to notice my accent. And her attitude didn't change at all once it came out. Whether I was a Taiwanese teenager or an American twenty-something were all the same.
After a couple minutes she said sadly, "Hey, I've got to go," told me again that my voice sounded "young," and said she'd call me again sometime-if that was OK, which of course I had to say it was.
"So what's your number?"
"Uh, you just called me, remember?"
"But are you home all the time? What about your cell phone?"
I made some excuse not to give her my cell, and we hung up.
Something had caught my attention about the way she said goodbye. It was sad, but not politely sad, and not the kind of sad you fell when you fail to get someone's phone number. It was a much deeper sort of sadness, and one that I realized had been present throughout the entire conversation.
Which makes sense, of course. This incorporeal voice was actually a woman, about my age in the grand scheme of things, whose life had gone so off track that she'd ended up a telemarketer. Through some circumstance-probably a completely uninteresting one-she needed some sort of connection badly enough to carry on a meaningless conversation with someone she believed was a high-school student. Am I psychoanalyzing too much? I don't think so. I'm usually more cerebral about this sort of thing, but in this case I'm going to play the I've-been-there-and-I-know-it-when-I-see-it card.
I had gotten back into bed at some point, but I wasn't sleepy anymore. I got up and turned the music back on, just in time to hear Louis Armstrong singing the last line of "What a Wonderful World." It was one of those moments you want to write about. During most of that conversation, Louis Armstrong had been silently singing.
Ever since I learned to play "What a Wonderful World" on the piano when I was twelve, I have associated a very specific image with it: a fat, cheery black man in a suit strolls down a street that looks like the set of a movie-musical. The concrete sidewalk is so white it almost hurts to look at, the sky is gaudily blue with perfect spray-point clouds for realism; there are bright purple and red flowers and a picket fence, and everything is a little too small; friends-skinny smiling white men in gray pinstrip suits and brimmed hats-shake hands with ridiculous 1950s smiles in their faces; a woman in a big skirt pushes a freckly baby in a stroller, and Louis Armstrong looks down at it and smiles knowingly.
The thing is, in this vision Louis Armstrong is totally alone. That, in my mind, has always been the point of "What a Wonderful World": that the world is wonderful-so wonderful that just being in it, and being part of the big fraternity of Man, is all anyone could ask for, more important than any immediate pleasure. Furthermore, in this world, we are all surrounded by a wealth of immediate pleasures: sunshine, birds, glimpses of babies, etc. Whoever feels existentially needy has failed to count their blessings.
But in my vision of Louis Armstrong, he does not just happen to be alone-he has to be alone. His observation can only be made outside the intimacy of community. He sees friends shaking hands, but he doesn't shake anyone's hand himself. If he did bump into a friend, he wouldn't be able to help feeling a little annoyed.
Sometimes you really do feel that way, and it's not necessarily opposed to community and personal intimacy. But for me there's always been a connection between that "Wonderful World" feeling and loneliness. Like if you weren't lonely, you'd have your own stuff to do-you wouldn't need to take pleasure in the happiness of strangers and the wonderfulness of the world in general.
Loneliness can work like that, and it can be nice, and yet somehow the things that seems nice sometimes is horrifying at others. Life, in the biological sense, is odd that way. There are certain things we must have to a degree but only a degree. Say salt-NaCl. If you don't have it, you feel tired, your muscles stop working, and you die. But just a bit too much and it becomes a murderous desiccating poison. It will literal suck the life out of you.
Is it just me who finds things this hard to balance? Or is life supposed to be a war between noise and quiet, between too much and too little of everything?
In the case of my telemarketer, it's lopsided war. How do people end up like this, and why don't we care about them more? It's been a question that was important to me. Why is there so much distance between us?