Earlier this year I met Pankaj Mishra at a festival in The Hague. Ever since reading The Romantics in 1996 I've admired his writing and read nearly all of his articles in The New York Review of Books. My father's colleagues helped him while he was a fellow at the NYPL, and my sister took care of Barbara Epstein, his mentor, while she was dying of lung cancer. I've also always had an interest in Indian politics, and one of my former professors is an expert on Kasmir.
I was very nervous meeting Pankaj, and was unable to drive across the first impression I dreamt of beforehand. What was I expecting. But somehow I always have this fantasy, and I'm sure it's not uncommon, that I'll meet someone like him whom I've admired for so long, and he'll be just as happy to meet me, and in one glittering moment he'll recognize something unique in me and want to be friends... Perhaps it's just an overactive imagination, but I swear he noticed me sitting there in the audience.
Of course none of this happened. And besides, from close up you can see all of my large pores, and acne scars, and then it's all over, the admiration from afar of the blond beauty.
It was all such a disappointment I've decided catching glimpses of people, and then introducing myself, doesn't do me any good.
When I told him I was a writer, too, he asked if I'd written a novel, and I said, no, but I'm working on one. To which he replied, "Oh, so you're a slow writer." Yes, Pankaj, I am a slow writer.
Recently I've been trying to watch, or re-watch, as many Bergman films as I can obtain at the library in Rotterdam. The actresses are all so beautiful in his films. If I could turn the clock back twenty years I would start taking acting classes. Tom Hank's talent agent once asked me if I were an actress and gave me his card. I was eighteen. It took me a few weeks, but I called him and he told me that if I didn't know by then that I wanted to act then I wasn't an actor. I was looking at Max von Sydow playing an emotionally isolated man in The Passion of Anna, and I realized how fully an art acting is. While I sit here in my little house and identify with many of the emotions in his films, and the revelations the actors make, I realize that they are playing a role. It might sound simplistic, but Liv Ullman isn't the sad, conflicted woman she portrays on screen. They play their roles so convincingly I am under their influence, realizing at the same time that they have both led personally fulfilling, artistically rich lives. How marvelous it must be to create such great works of art. To use your face, body, beauty in artistic expression. Perhaps I'm too shy, but my current mood is that acting would be the ultimate for me. If only I'd been more assertive with Mr Maslow. I could have told him about the music video I directed and played in at Mountain View High School in Orem, Utah at 15. Is that young enough? ;-) How remarkable to play a person in anguish, but not to be that person in daily life. Sometimes I think that my life resembles a Bergman film without the opulence, but this isn't a fair comparison, either. Anguish is also a performance you can play for yourself. It can be just as easy to shed it and play a titteringly happy person on the verge of gushing joy.
