By the time you read this I will be halfway up, inside or possibly underneath a volcano in the Indian Ocean. Earlier this week, far too early in the morning, I flew for Getaway magazine to Reunion island to fulfil number 17 on my List of Things To Do Before I Die.
Number 16 is Win the Booker Prize Twice, which I’m currently depressingly short of halfway to achieving, and 18 is Spend a Night Alone In Dracula’s Castle, which I don’t even quite know what I was thinking, so it’ll be nice to be able cross off 17: Climb a Live Volcano.
I’m not quite sure what to expect from the volcano experience, except that it will certainly not be what I imagine. I imagine setting out just before dawn in the crisp dry air, wearing a lightweight tweed walking suit and stout shoes and carrying a cherrywood walking stick. A small, indomitable donkey will carry my provisions, including a lightweight collapsible writing-table-slash-breakfast-table. At the edge of the caldera I’ll stand with one foot propped on a hunk of cooled magma and peer like Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderer down into the crimson lake of fire and I’ll realise things and understand other things and puff a briar pipe.
But of course it’s never as you picture it. Last year I crossed off number 47 by walking the Cobb, the old stone harbor wall at Lyme Regis in Dorset. In my head there’d be a mighty winter storm coming in and I’d be pale-faced and tragic and hooded like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, just me and the black sea-rain and my wasted, heartbroken beauty. Instead it was a hot bright day and there were red-faced Brits everywhere, eating chips and wobbling in the halter-tops. But who am I to complain? I wasn’t exactly Streeping the place up myself.
This has been a big week for life goals, actually, because number 38 on the list was to write something for the theatre. I didn’t really mind what it was, I just wanted to sit in a live audience and hear someone say something aloud that I’d written. There I’d be on a red plush seat, listening to the faceless crowd around me laugh or weep or nod thoughtfully at my words, spoken by someone better at speaking than I am. In fact, I realise now, no one else actually featured in this fantasy scenario: no matter who was on stage, in my head the spotlight was all on me.
Last Friday I shuffled edgily into the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town for the opening night of Nik Rabinowitz’s one-man show, The Power Struggle. I obviously wasn’t the only writer. I worked on it with another rootin’-tootin’ six-shootin’ young columnist named Tom Eaton, and with Nik himself and with a Broadway director named Daniel Kutner who came out from New York to add some stagecraft and razzmatazz.
But as the lights went down I was surprised by what I was feeling. I had been expecting to be anxious about how it would go over, worried about whether moments that worked in small rehearsal rooms would translate to the stage, whether that mysterious chemistry that animates some audiences and anaesthetises others would run in our favour, about all the thousand things that are supposed to make a show a success or not. But in fact I was thinking about the process that had brought us to that point. I was thinking about the coy three-legged race that is the act of writing with somebody else, the delicate pas-de-deux of finding ways to trust and be trusted, the complicated pleasures of putting aside ego. I was thinking of what a terrifying, humbling thing it is to have someone trust you enough that they’ll stand in front of strangers and say your words. I was thinking how the experience had been frightening and enlarging in ways that had nothing to do with me as a big-shot, and everything to do with my relationships with other people.
And then I realised that my volcano trip will be memorable not for the experience of climbing a volcano but for the people I’ll meet along the way, the chance encounters, the connections and shared journeys. And finally I realised how my list of Things To Do Before I Die is a folly, conceived by a boy, with a boy’s idea of how to derive value from life: that it’s meaningful to be able to say “I did that”. That’s not how life yields value. Lists of things to do are only useful when doing things is a way of bringing you in contact with people, and finding new and better ways of being with them. I’ll be climbing the volcano on my birthday; I’m looking forward to another year.
Times, 6 April 2016