`I'm Going for a Walk'

People talk in Seattle and environs. I met a Russian-born librarian, a middle-aged woman with a young daughter, who told my boys, “You read! Good! Good! Always read!” She pronounced “good” to rhyme with “food.” A 44-year-old teller in a Redmond credit union was born in the Ukraine. Her husband’s job with Microsoft brought her to Seattle eight years ago. I asked if she was living in Kiev during the Chernobyl disaster. She was, and said she knew many people who were sick or dead. “They have,” she said, pointing to her throat. “Thyroid?” I asked, and she nodded.

On Monday, the trucker who picked up my car in Houston last Wednesday delivered it to my apartment in Bellevue, a minor miracle. He arrived by way of deliveries in Austin, Denver, Boise, Portland and somewhere else in greater Seattle. He liked to talk, which makes sense for a man who routinely drives thousands of miles a week, his only living company a voice on his CB radio. He was born in West Virginia and spoke with a drawl I recognized from childhood, when West Virginians came north to Cleveland looking for a job with Ford. He owns his rig, a massive white hulk with eagles and American flags painted on the doors. Except for Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and New Hampshire, he has visited every state in the line of work. Now he was headed home to his wife and three kids in Minot, N.D. I asked how far it was and he answered, “Thirteen-hundred miles and change. No biggie,” as though he were driving to the drug store.

In Tuesday’s post I mentioned Joseph Roth and the two volumes of his journalism in English, admirably translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. That sent me back to the first collection, published in 2003, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, a gathering of hard news/feature hybrids, feuilletons from the heart of Weimar that have no precise counterpart in American journalism. The subsequent collection, from 2004, is Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939. Roth was a journalist most of his life, as well as a great novelist. His method in What I Saw is seemingly casual, impressionistic and “poetic.” The title piece, “Going for a Walk,” published in 1921 in Berliner Börsen-Courier, is typical. He describes a walk through the city, and begins:

“What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.”

Roth is often gently satirical but never puffed-up or superior. Like his contemporary, Alfred Döblin, in Berlin Alexanderplatz, Roth revels in the urban swarm. Here’s the passage from “What I Saw” that flashed for me here in Seattle:

“Strolling around on a May morning, what do I care about the vast issues of world history as expressed in newspaper editorials? Or even the fate of some individual, a potential tragic hero, someone who has lost his wife or come into an inheritance or cheated on his wife or in one way or another makes some lofty appeal to us? Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I’m going for a walk.”

Roth, bursting with attentiveness and good humor, interested in everything, feigns ennui while enjoying the human spectacle. He finishes the piece like this:

“In consequence of which, my outing was that of a curmudgeonly soul, and I wish I hadn’t undertaken it.”