How do they not think about the sharks when they’re swimming that 1,400 miles? Green turtles must have the kind of mind that doesn’t think about sharks unless a shark is there. That must be how it is with them. I can’t believe they’d swim 1,400 miles thinking about sharks. Sea turtles can’t shut themselves up in their shells as land turtles do.So shrieked Sartre, “Man is condemned to be free”. This condemnation is as difficult to imagine as it is obvious and plausible. Freedom as condemnation is as real a marriage of the incompatible that is lasting, nevertheless. Such is the travesty of modern man, he seems always in chains and yet it’s the freedom’s cross he bears across his breast. Life is a bondage where man is free. Free in incarceration; its his condemnation. Absurd as it sounds, absurd as it feels, absurd as it appears and even absurd in its surreptitiousness, that is how it is. No condemnation is overtly sweet in the plebeian parlance, neither is this one. Again, absurd as it is, the very condemnation replete with visible misery and desperation hides in its bosom, satiation, fulfillment and if I may, happiness and joy even. Nothing but absurd and absurdly so. “I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself. Very good. Wonderful.”A tight-rope walk is what life is akin to. Untrained and uninitiated, its us who are thrown over this stretch of string. Well if we ignore the involuntary accidents, does everyone of us end up on the other side? Even from among those who do end up on the other side, how many manage it meaningfully? Is it possible for a tight rope walker to be free all the time, fearlessly free? How can fear ever leave the one whose every step can mean whether he will retain the choice for the next one? Never abandoned by fear, how can he be free? So, does everyone who make it on the other side, finish up the tight rope walk? What good is the crossing if it is ugly and replete with wriggling and slips galore, sissy and wet with nothing but frets and catcalls? To hide in nooks and crannies, pusillanimously writhing through the sieves and selfishly treading over, is not finishing. Its not merely the crossing over but the manner of doing so that matters. In Actual reality, its hard to imagine anyone more freer than a tight rope walker; he has gotten rid of the greatest impediment to freedom, fear. Right within our condemnation, lies our freedom, either we must succesfully cross over, or fall with a bang... To live with a yowl and die with a WHAM! Falling in fear is simply dying. But the glory lies in fearlessly, successfully carrying out to completion, that tight rope walk or even merely attempting it fearlessly. Completion is glory but even falling to death in the pursuance is brilliantly scintillating. By being born in this maze, we are condemned till the eternity of our lives. But its not that we are ever condemned just for the sake of it, to be condemned. The freedom that is inevitably and inextricably tied to this condemnation, rather gilds the condemnation, often loses its sheen in the 'business' of life. Freedom is the yoke of human condition and it feeds on the best that each one of us has to offer, nothing short of the best can sustain it. Death of course is inevitable and so is pain that accompanies man in life but freedom always has a knack of shining through the futility, is at all times welcoming with its accouterments of metaphors, signals and signs, whether we are prepared or languishing in our tepid, despondent languor is another matter. This morning near the bus stop by a tree a dead cat said hello to me. There he was, he too had gone into winter with a wham. He looked as if he’d been flying high until he was brought down. I’ve never seen such a lively-looking dead cat. ........... A grey stripy tom he was with a head like a Roman senator, one eye open, one eye shut. His whole corpse seemed expressive of the WHAM! when his life met his death. He looked as if he’d been one hundred per cent alive until the lorry closed his account in the flower of his tomcathood and his mortal remains were cheerful rather than depressing. To live with a yowl and die with a WHAM! The cajoling metaphors can be the turtles that simultaneously piqued William G. and Neaera H. Sea-turtles, eternally attuned, to the lengthy sea journeys stretching over thousands of miles of dark, deep seas and not to the zoo aquariums they belong. The improbable thought of re-installing them back to their original homes, suddenly assumes willful yet involuntary exigency and re-defines the future lives of reluctantly enthusiastic protagonists. Then it doesn’t seem hard to believe. It seems the only way to do it, the only way in fact to be: swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind. And when they can’t see the sun, what then? Their vision isn’t good enough for star sights. Do they go by smell, taste, faith? In a single moment of brilliant surprise, a symbol expresses itself and initiates its beholders into concretely real action, a subtle tumult that potentially extricates the two freckled souls from the throes of rusted pasts and into the intuitive brilliance, that is now. To fearlessly ‘hope’ for nothing and yet being conscious to everything. Nothing sensational happens that transforms everything in one sway but sure streaks of energy and freshness, of novel agility are felt in the very same common place lives that they previously led. Something very slowly, very dimly has been working in my mind and now is clear to me: there are no incidences, there are only coincidences. Finally, freedom is felt even in the presence of trenchant condemnation whose acerbic grip is loosened. The very conundrum of hum-drum life that they traversed in, didn’t seem bothersome and taxing any longer. It was all the same but the change was inside them and they just did not care any more. Any of this cannot be explained or deciphered mathematically in any greater detail but can only be marveled at in surprised awe. And it must remain so if it has to retain its power as a symbol. Camden Town is the windiest tube station I know. Coming up on the escalator with my hair flying I felt as if I was coming out of a dark place and into the light, then I laughed because that’s what I was actually doing. ............. Nothing was different or better and I didn’t think I was either but I didn’t mind being alive at the moment. After all who knew what might happen? ............ Between now and then were all kinds of minutes, all of them good. Who knew what might happen at the typewriter? Before going up to the flat I went into the square, played hop-scotch in it just as it was, with no fountain. Nothing changes or leaves its place, only we forget it. Life beats us all, or we get beaten by it, I feel there is a choice with us. When we are not afraid to leave it with a WHAM, we can never allow ourselves be undone or out-done by the condemnation to life. Irrespective of our situations, the will and zeal cannot be sedated unless we let the rot to set in. Not ever at the cost of turning into insensitive brutes, fearlessly yet consciously sensitively dealing with pain and suffering, there is always that trail in the wood that leads us out of it. Guided by the metaphors, we can always find our way out. They are always there, only patiently tranquil steps can guide us to them. ‘But with people you never know straightaway what does what. Maybe launching them did launch you but you don’t know it yet.’........... I was waiting for something now and the waiting was pleasant. I was waiting for the self inside me to come forward to the boundaries from which it had long ago withdrawn. Life would be less quiet and more dangerous, life is risky on the borders. Gillian Vole and Delia Swallow live in safer places. Come, I said to the self inside me. Come out and take your chance. After staring at the blank paper for a very long time I wrote: The fountain in the square isn’t there. Well, I thought, it’s not much but it’s a beginning. If life is a meaningless exercise in futility, its not only that. If life is all cozy and comfortable journey through a utopian garden of ephemeral and brilliant resplendence, one must only be foolish to presume that. If life is all spirituality and depth, then we must all have been born saints to survive a single day in here. Life is all of them combined and at the same time, nothing from among them best describes it, its something entirely different. Our lexicon has supplied us with a word, ‘Enigma’ and there is nothing more worthy to honor this word by eschewing its very essence. It’s okay to feel burdened in this hub-bub called life but resilience is better than slavery to hopeless desolateness. The human condition wherein we reside, the quest for all answers may stall the very human movement that we are obliged to espouse. The symbols are all there if only we let for once our egotism wither away and not block our inquisitive selves and intrigue doesn’t die. Perhaps, for once, we don’t let it to. The turtles would be swimming, swimming. It had been a good thing to do and not a foolish one. Thinking about the turtles I could feel the action of their swimming, the muscle contractions that drove the flippers through the green water. All they had was themselves but they would keep going until they found what was in them to find. In them was the place they were swimming to, and at the end of their swimming it would loom up out of the sea, real, solid, no illusion. They could be stopped of course, they might be killed by sharks or fishermen but they would die on the way to where they wanted to be. I’d never know if they’d got there or not, for me they would always be swimming............ They could be stopped of course, they might be killed by sharks or fishermen but they would die on the way to where they wanted to be. I’d never know if they’d got there or not, for me they would always be swimming. I was in my ocean, this was the only ocean there was for me, the dry streets of London and my square without a fountain. No one could make me freer by putting me somewhere else. I had as much as the turtles: myself. At least I too could die on the way to where I wanted to be. Nevertheless, metaphors adorn the journeys that we undertake like nothing else. They embellish the very canvas of life with their majestic splendor like guiding stars. And there awareness is as much entrenched inside us as much as we are human. It’s the veneer of doubt and defeat which spreads its tentacles over our conscious best and at times its spread is complete. Although fortuitously do they re-appear but they never left us in the first place. But in their mystery and sudden appearance and catching us unawares lies their defining beauties and perhaps that is also how it should remain always. It doesn’t take much to decipher the power of a symbol that adorns our existence. GR – despite the current hiccup and hopeless uncertainty of potentially losing it, is a trough holding the elixir of sustenance, at least for my despondent soul. In-describable and Un-definable precisely, as every metaphor but amenable to easy revelation to those who feel it. Feeling more close to the denizens of GR and distant to the meaninglessness of confusing bashings of life, aloof to the world that is, is the sanest thing to do in the presence of this symbol. The strength gained shall be lasting, self-sustaining and propagating, is what I believe in with all my might.The moment a symbol enters the realm of our beings and captures our imagination, it is given a new life of its own which can be entirely original and distinct from its previous identity or at least it accrues additional massive meanings. The reality is nothing but actually only our own version of perceptions of the very same things, potentially differently envisioned in other’s eyes. Even truth is seldom absolute, its rather our very own version of it. The point that I am driving at is the utter vacuousness of freckles that bound us at the behest of these ‘realities’, ‘truths’ and the ghosts of past. The blinking visions when we experience our perfect releases from the chains of time, of space, of mind, of traditions, customs, religion, gender, ideology… how beautiful to envision its sustenance, eternal sustenance; ultimate freedom from all which brings us even microscopically closer to the dungeon. Release, Break-Free, Radicalize! Let’s imagine the Sisyphus happy…..“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”........... Oh yes, I thought, feeling something good just round the corner of my mind: just be all the way in it and you’re all right. Just let go of everything like a falling star. The far-away ones, when you see their light it’s already happened millions of years ago. This too, my brief light, maybe it had flashed across the darkness long long ago. Not my light, just a light. Now I was the one to be it, to flash across the darkness with it. Somebody else’s turn next. Nothing to be selfish about, be it while it’s you and then let go.
Review published in 3:AM Magazine: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/turtle...It would be understandable to expect Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary to be a light-hearted romantic comedy, one where two lonely protagonists come together over a crazy caper, a plan to set free the sea turtles in the London Zoo, fall in love, and live happily ever after. Fortunately, Hoban’s 1975 novel bears little resemblance to this simplistic narrative. Instead, Turtle Diary is a quiet, thoughtful examination of the loneliness of middle age and the quest to break free of it. William G. is divorced, 45, living alone in a small flat. He is estranged from his ex-wife and his two daughters, works in a bookshop and searches for ways to fill his empty hours. Neaera H., a writer and illustrator of children’s books, is single, 43, living a solitary life in which she works late into the night, and goes days without talking to another person. They both seek solace in visits to the London Zoo, where they independently arrive at the same plan: to set free three large sea turtles that are confined in a small area in the zoo’s aquarium. After meeting in William’s bookshop over books about turtles, they eventually share their “turtle thoughts” with each other, and embark on a plan to set the turtles free off the coast of Polperro, Cornwall. Turtle Diary explores both the turtles’ significance as symbols of a different way to live, and William and Neaera’s respective struggles to reshape their lives. This is a novel that focuses not so much on William and Neaera’s freeing the turtles, as on their attempts to free themselves.The novel’s structure provides rich opportunities to get to know both characters’ thoughts and fears, as its chapters are alternating diary entries written by each character. Hoban creates internal monologues that weave together observations of settings, recollections of interactions with others, philosophical musings, passages from novels and poems, memories, and the minutiae of daily tasks. Both William and Neaera are frozen by fear of being hurt. Although they are lonely, they veer from contact with others. And their loneliness bears the weight of time lost with little to show for it. As William notes,I used to think when I shaved and looked at my face that that bit of time didn’t count, was just the time in between things. Now I think it’s the time that counts most. It’s those times that all the other times are in between. It’s the time when nothing helps and the great heavy boot of the past is planted squarely in your back and showing you forward. Sometimes my mind gives me a flash of road I’ll never see again, sometimes a face that’s gone, gone. Moments like grains of sand but the beach is empty. Millions of moments in forty-five years. Letters in boxes, photos in drawers.For both William and Neaera, sea turtles represent a different way to live. No regrets, no hesitation, no existential struggles. Throughout their diary entries, William and Neaera marvel at the sea turtles’ uncanny ability to navigate through thousands of miles, swimming through ocean currents to Ascension Island to breed. The turtles live by instincts, and their actions embody what they are. As Neaera notes, “[The turtles] were compacted of finding, finding was embodied in them.” In one passage, William jumps from his speculations about shamans to this reflection about the sea turtles,Could I be a turtle? Could I through an act of ecstasy swim unafraid and never lost, finding, finding? Swimming with Pangaea printed on my brain and bones, the ancient continent that was before the land masses drifted apart. That’s part of it too: there were no seas between, the land was one, there was one thing, unbroken. Now there are thousands of miles of open water and the strong ones, the swimmers, the unlost, are driven to trace the paths between, maintain the ancient connection. I don’t know whether I can keep going. A turtle doesn’t have to decide every morning whether to keep on bothering, it just carries on. Maybe that’s why man kills everything: envy.William and Neaera cringe to see the turtles and other animals caged at the zoo, yet another example of humans’ callousness. Throughout the novel, animals are juxtaposed with humans. Animals represent a kind of integrity, an ability to live in the moment and to act without agonizing over potential dangers. In one passage, Neaera considers the behavior of the wading birds at the zoo:The birds were all quite good-natured and reasonable about it, they seemed more grown-up than the Zoo management, as if they’d been caught and caged not because they weren’t clever enough to avoid it but because they simply didn’t think in terms of nets and cages, those were things for cunning children. So here they all were, interned for none of them knew how long. They made the best of it, better than people would have done I think, and all of them appeared to get on rather neatly together…. I felt dissatisfied, as one does when morally strong preconceptions have to be questioned. The birds were not silent prisoners wasting away like Dr. Manette in the Bastille nor were they beating pitiful wings against the wire mesh of their captivity. Their understanding of the whole thing seemed deeper and simpler than mine.William describes the gibbons as “Zen-like” as they swing from bar to bar, not appearing to be bothered by their confinement. In another example, Neaera marvels at Arabella, a spider on Sky Lab-2 that had successfully spun a web in space, in spite of not knowing which end was up, literally. Even a dead tomcat gives William inspiration, “He looked as if he’d been flying high until he was brought down. I’ve never seen such a lively-looking dead cat.”William and Neaera are not the only people who have lessons to learn from animals. Some of the supporting characters in Turtle Diary reflect other ways to suffer from loneliness. Mrs. Inchcliffe, William’s landlady, spends evenings in her lumber-room, remembering her former boyfriend who used to refurbish antiques there. Mr. Sandor, an immigrant who lives next to William, describes his feeling of invisibility: “You make effort, put fake smile on face, make politeness. You nod hello but you don’t look at foreigner like regular human person.” And Miss Neap, his upstairs neighbor, rushes in and out of their building, clasping theatre tickets or rushing to see her parents, but without having any substantial interaction with her neighbors other than smiling and saying a quick hello. There are some moments of humor in William’s interactions with his neighbors, but also poignant scenes in which William has to confront the consequences of a life lived without meaningful relationships with others.Of all the characters in Turtle Diary, George Fairbairn, the Head Keeper at London Zoo, is the only person living a harmonious life. Early in the novel, William and Neaera both meet him and discuss the turtles with him. George plays a small but meaningful role in the novel, especially as Neaera gets to know him better.George Fairbairn had been a background person until now. Now he was the dot before my face, the face before my face. Knowing that I should never see the whole picture I didn’t bother to ask myself what it was. He had seemed so medium, so unspecially placed between the top and bottom of life that I hadn’t really given him full human recognition…. He had a clean look and a clean clear feel, nothing muddy. That was enough. There was about him the smell or maybe just the idea of dry grass warm in the sun.Neaera, whose life is even more isolated than William’s, immerses herself in details. She lacks perspective on her life, how lonely she is, because she could not step back to see herself in the context of a wider world. Just as William’s challenge is to live fully in the present, Neaera’s is to gain the perspective to see her life, and the people around her, in context.In Turtle Diary, Hoban refuses to present simple solutions or pat endings. Their plan to free the turtles is a catalyst for change in William and Neaera’s lives, rather than serving as the novel’s focus. This is one of the novel’s strengths: exploring loneliness in all its complexity. Although Turtle Diary was originally published in 1975, Hoban’s exploration of William and Neaera’s loneliness feels like it could have been published in 2013. This relevance comes in part from Hoban’s ability to depict interior lives, to weave existential speculation and emotions through quotidian tasks and quirky observations. In part, it stems from the persistence of Hoban’s main concerns: coming to terms with middle-age; learning to live fully in the present; gaining true perspective on a life, past, present, and future. It seems we still have lessons to learn from Hoban’s sea turtles.
What do You think about Turtle Diary (2000)?
I came across this book when I read Proustitute's review, and as always, he steered me in a good direction. When I first read the description, it sounded a bit like John Irving's debut novel, Setting Free the Bears, and Hoban does use a few ideas from Irving, but the similarity is limited.Turtle Diary is actually two diaries, one written by William G., a recently divorced father of two currently working a deadend job in a bookstore, and one written by Neaera H., a 40-something single woman and successful writer/illustrator of children's books who is experiencing a serious existential crisis as a writer and a person. Both protagonists are adrift, and when they each see (separately) a group of three large sea turtles drifting in a tank of murky water at the London zoo, something about the injustice of the turtles' captivity inspires them to liberate the turtles and return them to the sea.Of course, the real captivity is happening in the protagonists' heads as they find themselves trapped in the murky green tanks of their own limited lives. By chance, they meet in William's bookstore and somehow recognize each other as kindred spirits in search of liberation through the surrogate agency of the sea turtles. With the help of a sympathetic zoo keeper, the pair successfully bring the turtles to the sea. Thankfully, Hoban adds no drama to the zoo-break. Instead, the plan works with no further complications and this choice on the author's part helps to place the focus of the story where it belongs, i.e. on the desperate lives of the two lonely-hearted protagonists. The next day, the turtles are free, but William and Neaera must face the fact that their problems are not over.This is a sensitive and well-written book that is worth the time spent. Highly recommended!
—Jim
“The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense. My end seemed immanent in every breath and my beginning seemed never to have happened.” William G. (page 160)"In my end is my beginning" cries out William’s subconscious in desperation, quoting T.S. Eliot’s words, while three fine specimens of turtles swim in the green deep ocean towards a destiny they carry within themselves. He doesn’t know if they will ever get there, that’s why they will always be swimming in his mind.William is a middle-aged man who works in a bookstore, lives in a boarding house and leads an isolated life, tormented by embittered thoughts of his past. He intends to smother his ghosts by smoking cigarette after cigarette, seeing he only feels alive when he does so while despondently wondering about this contradiction “I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself. Very good. Wonderful.”Divorced and utterly estranged from his two daughters, William has lost all motivation to keep swimming the course of life and now drifts the murky waters of despair and loneliness, wanting to be hurried out of existence. “All the turtles have is themselves but they will keep going until they find what is in them to find” muses Naerea while looking at the water beetle she keeps in a tank in her flat, as a way of gathering inspiration for her next illustrated book for children. Inspiration that won’t come, even when she sits in the square without a fountain next to her place, trying to imagine how the square would look like if there was one. She can even visualize the bronze sculpture of a girl sitting in the edge of the imaginary fountain, but no words will be written down in her blank, accusing notebook.Naerea is forty-three, an arty-intellectual-looking spinster, whose weaknesses run from collecting pebbles to watching documentaries about birds, especially when they show oystercatchers. She is slowly drowning in hopelessness, not being able to overcome her writer’s block, which she keeps denying to herself.The Green Turtles make William and Naerea’s paths cross in one of those daily chance-miracles when they both become hypnotized by their graceful swimming in the Aquarium of the London Zoo. Enraptured by the notion that these creatures are capable of making a migratory journey of thousand of miles, William and Naerea feel an irrepressible urge to set them free from an artificial life led in captivity, and they decide to embark on a bizarre plan to liberate the turtles and release them in the rough blue waters of the Cornish Coast, counting on the cooperation of the turtles' keeper.It wouldn’t be amiss to describe this novel as the story, told in the form of alternating journal entries, of two depressed Londoners with a lot in common - some would even talk of soul mates or parallel lives- who find each other at their lowest and, in the most extravagant of circumstances, are granted the chance to transform separate misery into potentially comfortable togetherness.That brief summary might not be amiss, but it would be overly simplistic.None of the words written in this slim novel are casual, they are all carefully woven, oozing with symbolism and second meanings, each word a dot that will be indispensable to see the bigger picture when the last page is turned and one’s unconsciously withheld breath is finally released. Mr. Hoban masters his hard-edged and self-deprecating tone, wrapping his characters’ voices in wry irony and mordant intelligence, threading literary, philosophical and musical references along the way while subtly drawing an exquisitely detailed map of coincidences that will leave the reader with more questions than answers. Is it possible for hearts blistering with loneliness to revive in mutual understanding? Can another appease the silent roaring in oneself? Is a moon filled night, freighted with promise and freed turtles, enough to change the course of a lifetime? These questions run deep, like piercing splinters, inside me.I have something to confess, before I conclude. I am guilty of being a romantic at heart. I have had idealized notions about the power of love all my life. I still get all emotional when I read the passage where Mr. Rochester, glancing unblinkingly at Jane, asks “Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre?” It’s this kind of girl who notes that this novel is unsentimentally honest about love. It’s this girl, whose eyes are still burning with unshed tears, who bows at the sublime display of quiet heartbreak and acquiesces the truth behind Mr. Hoban’s allegories and sad humor, crackling with linguistic geniality. “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise, said Blake. If the coward persists in his cowardice does he become brave?” The world is mostly tinged in darkness and, in the end, we are the only ones capable of gathering enough courage to reach for that flickering candle buried deep in us and shed some light in our obscure pathways. The answer lies within ourselves rather than in others.This girl is aware of that. And so is Mr. Hoban.******Note: I want to thank Kris profusely for having brought this wonderful novel to my attention with her astonishing review, which all of you should read if you still haven’t done so.
—Dolors
Turtle Diary is a story about two groups of living things with the desire to be set free - two people, one a book shop assistant and the other a failing children's book author, and three turtles, trapped in a small, glass box in the London Zoo aquarium. The two people, played by Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley, feel the turtles' pain without knowing each other at first and plan a heist to send them back into the ocean, which some people think is a daft idea, and some think is worse than daft. But this story is more than a turtle heist. Much more.Directed by John Irvin and adapted by Harold Pinter from Russell Hoban's novel; also starring Michael Gambon and featuring a cameo by Peter Capaldi.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iyHE...
—Laura
