back to The Moon and Sixpence

“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.”

I read The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham when I was around 11 years old. At that time my family was still in a remote desert town in the Middle East, a city that didn’t  have any libraries and definitely no stores with any English books. I read it upon my father’s suggestion from his diverse collection of books. I told him the print was too tiny and it had all these words that I could not possibly understand and I did not want to look them up! He said I understood more than I knew and to just read to enjoy the sentences however I understood them.

To date I can’t recall the impact of The Moon and Sixpence other than a child staring at a shooting star for the first time: I understood nothing, I understood everything.

I moved on and shortly thereafter we moved to the United States. My 6th and 7th grade experiences in New York City would set an extremely high standard for what constitutes learning given I lucked out to have the teachers I had. All my teachers in New York City for every subject not only welcomed me but very clearly understood and appreciated I was “advanced” in many ways. They nurtured aspects of me that I didn’t know and challenged what I did know, not just intellectually but in a manner that would leave a permanent imprint for the wonders that awaited me around every corner in New York City. This learning experience came to a painful halt once my family moved, unbeknownst to my parents, to a rather affluent suburb of Kansas City.

In my “advanced” English classes in “one of the best” high school no teacher cared that I had read Maugham, which was just fine by me for I didn’t recall much of the story, although I never did let go of the book—once I have underlined even as much as a single sentence in a book I carry the book in my collection, always. The aggregate impact was that I nearly failed out of my “Advanced Placement Honors” English class in 12th grade because I was so bored (this is not an exaggeration and there is nothing to relish in this memory no matter how far I have come).  I was not bored of the literature in the syllabus which is typical of any high school curriculum at that level but what was demanded of my intellectual engagement: not much. When I offered what I understood it was beyond what was required of the assigned  papers and when I tried to write “for” an assignment I was unable to articulate what I understood and hence never did well. So I just gave up. I was a clown that doodled stars and passed notes back and forth when I didn’t cut class (it was the last period and Fridays were so sunny outside and being a senior who had more than 1 year’s worth of transferable college credits already, ‘inside’ was the last place for me).

So today when I came across an excerpt by Maugham I felt a deep meeting of two souls except both souls were mine. After reading this excerpt (see below) I picked up my copy of the The Moon and Sixpence. Of course I recall the story to the extent everyone knows the story, it is inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, but I don’t really remember the details like I do of other books. I started flipping through the pages and wondered how in the world I underlined the sentences I had which is very much how I view art, literature, and life now!

I am left with a parcel of thoughts after re-reading the passages I underlined as an eleven year old. I am still opening the understanding.  For now I share: if we are really blessed in this lifetime we carve our way back to what we have always understood very clearly and there are no words for that re-understanding. It is indeed meeting of two souls only to realize it has always been one.

Literature and art are the stardust on a very dark night no matter our understanding of that light and that is how we glide on.

The excerpt:

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

—from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919

From Glimmer Train Bulletin

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“I write in service of illumination and memory.” ~ Mark Helprin Orhan Pamuk on Writing & Literature Understanding California, thanks to Steinbeck