The Mysteries of [insert city name here]

One of my favorite novels to date (and there aren’t many that I’ve read due to my issues with works of fiction) is Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It’s a brilliant account of a guy’s first post-graduation summer of growing up and making love. I discovered this read during my first summer out of college, while coming to terms with my geographically-forbidden sexuality and struggling with the question of what was next for me in life. Although there are obvious differences between the narrator of this story and I, his writing definitely moves me enough to feature it on my blog.

This passage comes from the last chapter, entitled “Xanadu”:

Among the few things I took with me—clothes, passport, Swiss Army knife, three thousand ancient, inviolate bar mitzvah dollars converted into slick, ethereal blue traveler’s checks—were a photograph of Phlox, and a gold lame sock that she left in my bathroom, sometime in July. I have often thought, since, that I know I loved Cleveland and Arthur, because they changed me; I know that Arthur lies behind the kindly, absent distance I maintain from other people, that behind each sudden, shocking breach of it lies Cleveland; I have from them my vocabulary, my dress, my love of idle talk. I find in myself no ready trace of Phlox, however; no habit, hobby, fashion, or phrase, and for a long time I wondered if I had loved her or not. But as I have found that I may fall quite completely in love with a man—kiss, weep, give gifts—I have also discovered the trace a woman leaves, that Phlox left, and it is better than a man’s.

My father I will never see again, Cleveland is dead, Arthur is now, I believe, on Majorca. But because I can find them so easily in myself, I no longer—say, Bechstein—I no longer need them. One can learn, for instance, to father oneself. But I can never learn to be a world, as Phlox was a world, with her own flora and physics, atmosphere and birds. I am left, as Coleridge was his useless dream poem, with a glittering sock and a memory, a garbled account of my visit to her planet, uncertain of what transpired there and of why precisely I couldn’t stay. To say that I loved Phlox imples no lesson, no need or lack of need for her. She is a world I gained and lost. I have this picture, this stocking, and that is all. I wish that I had seen her one last time.

In any case, it is not love, but friendship, that truly eludes you.

One word…BRILLIANT.

For me, the summer of 2003 included much reflection and mental maturation. It was the last summer spent in my native Mobile. And it was the first summer that I became good at being silent and alone…not because I had to be, but because I realized those two characteristics are key in obtaining & maintaining clarity (which is so important in this crazy city (& world) that we live in!

I’ll conclude this post with the last line of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (one of my favorites):

No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

I’ve never been to Pittsburgh, but I think we can all relate to Chabon’s account by drawing from the mysteries that lie within every city we’ve called home.