Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page B

and sounds—the weather, the temperature, the odors. It was winter: frost, rattling branches, wood planks shrieking in the house, night skies, dead leaves.
    I also needed the artifacts in that house, objects such as pictures and knickknacks. My chair. My desk. My books. With these, I felt, I could begin again. Once, about six years before, our London house was burglarized. People have various responses to news of a robbery. You feel violated, they say. The thieves must be desperate, they say. Criminals come from awful homes; they're on drugs; they need your stuff; you're lucky you weren't home; you might have been killed.
    Mine was none of these. I felt, They stole my memories—they removed a portion of my mind! The insurance people asked how much my things were worth. I told them truthfully: they were priceless. I would never look upon those objects again and remember. For this reason, for a period of time I ranted like a fanatic. I am not talking about a video recorder or a radio. I am speaking of a small silver box that had the camphor-wood odor of Singapore, of the pen with the worn-down nib with which I wrote seven or eight books, of the amber necklace I bought with my last twenty dollars in Turkey. All of it gone, flogged to a fence somewhere in London. Sentimental value, people said. Yes, but to me there is no other value. If all we were talking about was money, then these things could have been replaced and I would have had no problem. What was removed from me by these thieves were the stimuli for some of my dearest memories.
    Interestingly, Freud was just such a magpie in the way he collected little objects. His house and study were crammed with pots and statues and artifacts, most of them Egyptian, Greek, and Roman. He never wrote about them, but undoubtedly they stimulated him, for his work is full of classical allusions and historical detail. It's a pity that Freud's house was never burgled, because I would have loved to read his analysis of his own emotions as the victim of a theft of his treasured things.
    I aspire, where material possessions are concerned, to the Buddhist condition of non-attachment. That is my ideal. I am not so acquisitive that I am possessed by these objects, though I do feel dependent on them at times. I think one must practice ridding oneself of them, but that requires concentration and great mental poise—I want to learn how to give them away; it must be my confident decision. I don't want them torn out of my hands. Obviously, the happiest person is that Buddhist who truly sees that such objects are illusion, and who owns nothing—all these possessions are in his or her memory.
    The act of writing—artistic creation—dependent on memory, is itself a mnemonic device. And what is strangest of all is that drawing on memory—say, writing a novel—I am giving voice to one set of memories while creating a structure for remembering the circumstances of writing that book. Looking at almost anything I have written, I can remember the room, the weather, my frame of mind, the state of the world, or whatever, while I was working on that piece of writing. For a reader or critic this can be deceptive. For example, it was in Dorset, in the west of England, that I described the hot, cloudy tropics in
Saint Jack,
and in Charlottesville, Virginia, that I wrote about Dorset in
The Black House.
I look at
The Mosquito Coast
and see south London, and I glance at
Jungle Lovers
and hear the cooing voice of the Chinese amah feeding my children in our Singapore house.
    My books mean as much to me for what they are, for their narrative, as for those personal scenes and circumstances that they have the power to evoke. Often, the memory of writing the book overshadows the work itself. This aspect of writing has not been explored or analyzed, and yet most novelists, when asked to introduce a particular work, reminisce at some point about the surroundings of their creation—the house,