Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

the writer softens and disguises his daydreams, and with style or wit he gives us aesthetic pleasure. It is all in the telling, Freud says, which is true enough, and this "enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds." He goes on in an aside to say that "not a little of this effect is due to the writer's enabling us [as satisfied and enlightened readers] thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame."
    In a word, reading is liberation. We are vindicated in our dreams. The same is true of writing, since a dream is being fulfilled in its artistic recreation. And the dream has a complex time frame of past, present, and future. Something in the present provokes an impression that rouses a wish that is linked to an earlier memory.
    Being in Africa certainly liberated me, and I did remember a great deal that I had thought I'd forgotten. This access gave me a sense of conviction; it calmed me, and in that reflective mood I was given greater access. I discovered, for example, that if I was very calm, at a point of resolution, I could write well. It might be truer to say that I needed to be calm, needed my mind clear, in order to remember. My sense of freedom grew: the joy of writing made me more joyful, because at its best it has always demanded a mental journey and led me deeper into my unconscious mind. There is a paradox in this: the deeper I have gone into my own memory, the more I have realized how much in common I have with other people. The greater the access I have had to my memory, to my mind and experience, searching among the paraphernalia in my crepuscular past, the more I have felt myself to be a part of the world.
    The political dimension of this creative process was something I had not expected. There was a dissatisfaction among Africans, a hankering for something better in their lives. That yearning and that bewilderment was familiar to me. They felt as I had growing up, and in many ways their condition, the way they had been patronized by colonial powers, recapitulated the condition of children in a large, oppressive household. Imperialism is like a big unhappy family under the control of domineering parents. It was the way I had felt at home. Contemplating the conditions of Africans stimulated my own childhood memories—the frustrations, the longings, the fantasies. Consequently, in this atmosphere, writing about Africans and recalling my past, I could truly express myself.
    The provocative occasion that Freud mentions as stimulating the memory and producing a creatively useful fantasy might also be the simple contemplation of an object, or the chance association of music or an odor. A musical phrase stimulates memory in Proust's
Jean Santeuil,
the famous memory-unlocking taste of the cookie in
Remembrance of Things Past.
    I developed internal ways of stimulating my memory. It is possible for a writer to think creatively only if he or she manages to inhabit a mood in which imagination can operate. My need for external stimuli inspired in me a desire to travel—and travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is for me the opposite: nothing induces concentration or stimulates memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. More likely you will experience intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life. This does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present, however; in fact, what makes the whole experience thrilling is the juxtaposition of present and past—Medford dreamed in Mandalay.
    It was a deliberate dream for me. In the dark, in distant places when I needed the consolation of memory, I used to calm myself and reflect on the past by mentally getting into my father's old Dodge and driving from home through Medford Square, up Forest Street, down to the Lawrence Estates, past the hospital where I