Timbuktu

by Paul Auster

Novels and memoirs featuring dogs are a dime a dozen; some are tragic, some comic, and others are filled with maudlin clichés.  When my children were in elementary school, one of their favorite books was No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman, about a boy who finds it upsetting that dogs in literature usually die.  Where the Red Fern Grows and Old Yeller are two fine examples of this phenomenon.  The sad fact is, however, that dogs only live about ten years in the best of circumstances so even if Old Dan, Little Ann, and Old Yeller had survived their travails, their owners’ hearts would have been broken anyway.  For those of us who are fortunate enough to share our lives with dogs, the end always comes too soon, because no matter how much trouble they cause dogs have a way of wrapping themselves around our hearts, and without them our lives and homes feel empty.  Of course, not every dog is loved and wanted and not every person loves dogs; but when a dog and a person bond, it is a mysterious and beautiful connection.

Timbuktu,  by Paul Auster, invites the reader into the world of a homeless man, Willy G. Christmas, and his canine companion, Mr. Bones.  Unlike the typical dog story, Timbuktu is about a dog who loses his person and not the other way around.  Mr. Bones, with his keen olfactory, recognizes that it’s the end of the line for Willy G.; and as the two make their way to Baltimore, Maryland, we learn bits and pieces of their individual and joint life stories, just enough to paint a picture of two good souls who live their lives on the fringes of society.   While Mr. Bones cannot engage in a dialog with Willy G., he listens carefully and patiently to his partner’s constant and rambling monologue, paying close attention to the unspoken messages and the magnificent “symphony of smells” that greet his miraculous senses at every turn.  

In Willie G.’s mythology, “Timbuktu” is the afterlife.  (In reality, Timbuktu is an ancient city in the African nation of Mali, which was once a major crossroads on the Trans-Saharan caravan routes.  It was long a place shrouded in mystery because no westerner who ventured there had come out alive until 1828, when a Frenchman named René Caillié, disguised as a Muslim, visited the city and returned to France to collect his 10,000 franc prize.)  Mr. Bones worries that Timbuktu is not a place for dogs and he fears that he will never see Willy G. again.  For all of Willy G.’s love of and devotion to Mr. Bones, he never speaks of seeing his dog in the afterlife.  Instead, Willy G. provides Mr. Bones with plenty of warnings about the dangers lurking everywhere a stray dog might find himself.  His most dire warning is about Chinese restaurants.  “The chefs round up strays and slaughter them in the alley right behind the kitchen – ten, twenty, thirty dogs a week…  Unless you want to wind up in a platter of moo goo gai pan, you’ll think twice before you wag your tail in front of one of those [Chinese] beaneries. ..  Know thine enemy – and then keep a wide berth.”

A theme Paul Auster often explores in his works of fiction is that of the social misfit who writes endlessly in notebooks which pile up over a period of years.  We learn that Willy’s reason for walking from Brooklyn, New York, to Baltimore, Maryland, is to deliver his manuscripts and his dog to Miss Bea Swanson.  Willy G. explains to Mr. Bones the urgency of finding his English teacher because without her to safeguard his manuscripts, it will be as if he had never existed.  When the hour of Willy G.’s death is at hand, Mr. Bones dreams a clairvoyant dream in which he becomes a fly and is able to watch as Willy G. is taken to a hospital by ambulance and reunited with his high school English teacher, the one person who ever believed in him. 

When the police officers from Mr. Bones’ dream appear in reality and call an ambulance, rather than wait for them to start chasing him he runs, confident in the knowledge of Willy G.’s fate.  During the seven years that he accompanied Willy G. Christmas on his ramblings across America, often hungry, but never lonely, Mr. Bones’ world was narrated, annotated, and footnoted.  Willy’s monologue continues to play in Mr. Bones’ head and in this way we learn how it is that Willy Gurevitch, a gifted Columbia University student, lost his way in life and ended up homeless; why he overcame a lifelong indifference to dogs in order to adopt Mr. Bones; and how the the long arm of history distorted his parents’, and therefore his own, life.

After several days on the street avoiding capture, Mr. Bones surrenders to hunger and allows a young Chinese boy to befriend him.  The boy, whose parents own a Chinese restaurant, suffers from loneliness and harsh discipline at his father’s hands.  He and Mr. Bones bond immediately, in the way that dogs and children will, and a surreptitious feeding program begins.  Because dogs live in the moment, Mr. Bones temporarily forgets about Willy G. Christmas and adapts to life hidden in a box in a blighted vacant lot behind the restaurant.  When the inevitable happens and Mr. Bones finds himself once again homeless, he remembers Willy G.’s warnings and runs as far and as fast as he can until he collapses in a thicket behind a suburban home many miles away from Baltimore.

At one point in Mr. Bones’ remembering of Willy G.’s surreal and poetic monologue, he reminds us that “dog” is used as a metaphor for everything from sickness to happiness.  We have the dog in the manger (greed), junkyard dog (violent bully), sick puppy (head case), and bitch (mean lady).  On the other hand, the big dog (leader) often has his (or her) lucky day.   Paul Auster obliquely refers to the differences in human relationships with dogs:  some cultures revile them, some eat them.   Why many of us in the Western World live with them and treat them as family probably has much to do with our conception of the soul as the essence that departs the body upon death.  We look at them and they look into us.  When they leave us, we mourn, sometimes for years; and yet they remain in our hearts to remind us that goodness exists.

Understanding the nature of existence is the essence of Timbuktu.  Existentialism is a branch of philosophy concerned with the notion that each human is an individual adrift in a sea of other individuals.  For many, living a social life seems easy and natural, but for others every interaction is a challenge.  Life in primitive societies was about surviving day by day: hunting, gathering, and protecting the young.   As societies moved away from clan-based subsistence and evolved into complex social hierarchies in an industrialized world, people began questioning the purpose of life and a few, who did not have to toil in order to eat, became consumed with finding reasons for their own existence.   As monarchies fell to democracy, fascism, and communism  -- and news of cruel and hateful acts, committed on an epic scale, spread far and wide -- the absurdity of human existence became the primary focus of writers and philosophers such as Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Eugène Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others.  Paul Auster studied the existentialists as well as Freudian psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan in his own attempt to make sense of a perplexing world.

The great beauty of dogs is that they don’t care about things like mental illness and physical attributes.  They love us no matter what we look like, who are parents are, how nice our home is, or the number of friends we have.  The nature of this love is unknowable, however.  Some scientists posit that domestic dogs evolved over time as a matter of survival:  becoming appealing to their human hosts in order to secure regular meals.  They theorize that the love is one-sided, that dogs are mirrors reflecting what we want to see.  Paul Auster’s book suggests something else; that dogs are spiritual creatures who connect with us to help us see that there is an afterlife where hope never dies.

Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander all rights reserved

The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch


Book review by Teresa Friedlander, copyright 2010

Some kids never grow up. Randy Pausch, who departed this world at age 47, held fast to his ability to find fun in life, even after learning that he was dying of pancreatic cancer. Dr. Pausch was at the height of his career as a professor of computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. He was married to the woman of his dreams and was father to three small children. While neither rich nor famous, Randy Pausch was successful in all the ways that mattered: he was happy at home and at work, by himself and with others. When physicians delivered his death sentence, Dr. Pausch – a perpetual child at heart – reacted in a very un-childlike manner. He skipped the denial and anger phases of grief and set about creating a legacy for his family which would enable him to remain part of their lives long after he was gone.

Carnegie-Mellon University sponsors an annual lecture by a professor who is considered singular, remarkable, and in demand. The idea behind this lecture series, entitled “Journeys”, was to ask great professors to share vital life lessons, as if this were a last opportunity to do so. In 2007, one year after his diagnosis, Dr. Randy Pausch, delivered his lecture to a standing-room-only audience. He called it “The Last Lecture” and began with a slide show of his diseased liver before dropping down to do push-ups. It was ironic, he said, that he could be so fit and feel so well while cancer was rapidly stealing the life from him. Dr. Pausch wasn’t interested in crying and he didn’t want his audience to cry either. So he made them laugh instead. Following the lecture, which became an overnight sensation, Dr. Pausch wrote a memoir, celebrating the people in his life whom he felt enriched by: his parents, wife, children, friends, colleagues, mentors, students, etc. The result of this rapture is The Last Lecture, co-written by Jeffrey Zaslow of the Wall Street Journal.

The Last Lecture is a delightful 206 pages of how to approach life positively, and can be read in one sitting. It is the kind of book which easily could have been maudlin, morbid, or both. Rather, its purpose is to inspire all of us to retain or re-find our childhood dreams, because it is these dreams which can lead us to a happy and fulfilling life as individuals, and on a larger scale to save humanity from our baser nature. That was the essential message Randy Pausch imparted to his audience. So, what were Randy Pausch’s childhood dreams?

“Men first walked on the moon during the summer of 1969, when I was eight years old. I knew then that pretty much anything was possible. It was as if all of us, all over the world, had been given permission to dream big dreams.”

During a visit to Disneyland in 1969, Randy decided that when he grew up he wanted create experiences that were equally fun and inspiring. A life-long “Trekkie”, young Randy wanted to be Captain Kirk. Most of all, geeky Randy Pausch wanted to be the “coolest guy at the fair”, the one who won the giant stuffed animals. His other dreams included playing in the NFL, being published in the World Book Encyclopedia, and experiencing zero gravity. While, none of these dreams was aimed at saving the world, the point is that whatever your dream is, don’t leave it behind with your childhood toys.

Before succumbing to pancreatic cancer, Dr. Pausch realized all of his childhood dreams, perhaps not in the way he originally envisioned, but in the end that didn’t really matter. Dr. Pausch worked for Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts, helping to create cutting edge virtual experiences for modern Disney patrons before establishing innovative programs at Carnegie-Mellon; he and William Shatner became friends and communicated frequently; and on numerous occasions he won the giant stuffed animals at many fairs by doggedly keeping his eyes on the prize. He published the definitive entry on virtual reality in the Encyclopedia Britannica. As far as playing in the NFL, shortly after delivering his “last lecture”, the Pittsburgh Steelers invited Dr. Pausch to attend one of their practices. In his lecture, Dr. Pausch had related the most important lesson he had learned as a child from his first football coach: with twenty-two players on the field, and only one touching the ball, the emphasis had to be on the other twenty-one players. That ended up being a parable for how he dealt with his cancer. Rather than letting the cancer drive his life, Dr. Pausch focused on everything and everyone else. He wasted no time feeling sorry for himself because he wanted to enjoy every second of the time he had left.

Whatever your political or religious beliefs, this book will make you feel better about being here, now, in America. We have great differences which politicians and lobbyists exploit (for their own benefit) at the expense of honest, decent, citizens struggling to get through life one day at a time. Reading this book made me remember that wonderful feeling of optimism in our country before President Kennedy was assassinated and the Vietnam War created social and political divisions which have yet to heal. The Last Lecture also reminded me that in spite of that turmoil, visionaries, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, dreamed of a world in which one’s race and ethnicity were facts rather than barriers. Today we have a president whose father was Kenyan and whose wife is the descendent of American slaves. Whether you voted for him or not, President Obama represents a great step forward for our nation in terms of moving beyond the painful legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism. Without one great man saying to one great nation: “I have a dream…” Barack Obama would never have become a senator, Mike Steele would never have been Maryland’s lieutenant governor, and culturally we all be rather boring.

Reading this book reminded me of the poem by Langston Hughes, entitled “Dreams”

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.


Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow

I can’t help but think that Randy Pausch read this poem in high school and took it to heart. Without dreams, wishes, and aspirations, he would have quietly died, leaving a widow and three children with little more than Social Security benefits. By dreaming and reaching out, Randy Pausch created an enormous support network for his family, wrote a best-selling book, and inspired countless thousands of people to reorient their priorities.

The Last Lecture reminded me that life is a gift that we should make the most of because we never know when the end will come, and it would be terrible if we left our loved ones wondering how we felt about them. When confronting his demise Dr. Pausch said, "I don't know how not to have fun. I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left." Dr. Pausch’s wife, children, friends, and others all knew how he felt about them. Before he died, he cleaned up after himself so his wife wouldn’t have to and wrote lots of thank you notes to people who had done kindnesses to him and his family. Until he drew his last breath, Randy Pausch was loving life. We should all exit so gracefully.
To access Dr. Pausch’s lecture online, visit http://www.cmu.edu/uls/journeys/randy-pausch/index.html.