Wednesday
Professors with PhDs are very smart in certain narrow areas and very dumb in many others. For some of us, the stupidity extends to timeshares. Indeed, because we prize ourselves for our thinking abilities, we can be particularly vulnerable to fast talkers.
Thirty years ago Julia and I purchased a timeshare from Fairfield (later taken over by Wyndham), thinking of the affordable vacations that would be available to us. Little did we know that we had committed ourselves to a lease that we would be stuck with for the rest of our lives, along with rising maintenance fees. Even worse, death itself wouldn’t release us from our unsellable deed. Our sons would inherit it and the fees.
To save them from the dead hand of the past, Julia and I paid an exorbitant amount of money to Wyndham to escape the lease. For those of you who have never bought a timeshare, my advice to you is (1) thank your lucky stars you escaped and (2) resist all offers, no matter how enticing.
If my knowledge of literature didn’t save me from embarking on the purchase, it has at least provided me with literary friends in similar predicaments. I think of those duped by Herman Melville’s confidence man, by Mark Twain’s King and Duke, and by Gogol’s Chichikov (in Dead Souls). And then there are those trapped in a morass of officialdom, such as K in Kafka’s The Trial.
The work that resonates the most with me, however, is Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” published in The Atlantic in 1941. In it a man on a pleasure trip chances upon the place of his dreams. Rather than allowing him to fulfill his desire to spend the rest of his life there, however, the vacation management company intervenes and plunges him into a bureaucratic nightmare.
At first glance, our stories appear to start differently. Vasili Ivanovich doesn’t want the pleasure trip he wins through a charity raffle but decides to go after learning about the difficulties of declining. When he tries to sell his ticket at “the office of the Bureau of Pleasantrips,” he is told that to do so
he would have to have special permission from the Ministry of Transportation; when he tried them, it turned out that first he would have to draw up a complicated petition at a notary’s on stamped paper; and besides, a so-called ‘certificate of non-absence from the city for the summertime’ had to be obtained from the police.
We, by contrast, were more than ready to travel. We thought that a free weekend in Williamsburg, Virginia and a free visit to the historic site there were worth sitting through a timeshare pitch.
Then again, we didn’t realize that, had we failed to show up for the pitch, we would have had to reimburse Fairfield for everything. Although the company had a gentler way of getting us to comply than Pleasantrips, the results were the same. The tactic worked especially well on Julia and me because, like Vasili, we like to be agreeable.
Both Vasili and we thought we were free agents as we set off on our trip, not realizing that the organizers in each case had their ways of getting us to follow the mob. Vasili is subjected to peer pressure and bullying by his fellow train passengers whereas we, always with inducements, attended special group sessions in which everyone was encouraged to enthuse about past vacations. Slowly but inexorably we found ourselves being drawn in and buying more points.
To Vasili’s surprise, all the torment proves to be worth it for he finds the place he has always dreamed of. First we learn of his fantasies:
[H]e began to imagine that this trip, thrust upon him by a feminine Fate in a low-cut gown, this trip which he had accepted so reluctantly, would bring him some wonderful, tremulous happiness. This happiness would have something in common with his childhood, and with the excitement aroused in him by Russian lyrical poetry, and with some evening sky line once seen in a dream, and with that lady, another man’s wife, whom he had hopelessly loved for seven years—but it would be even fuller and more significant than all that. And besides, he felt that the really good life must be oriented toward something or someone.
Then, miraculously, his dream is fulfilled:
[A]fter another hour of marching, that very happiness of which he had once half-dreamt was suddenly discovered.
It was a pure, blue lake, with an unusual expression of its water. In the middle, a large cloud was reflected in its entirety. On the other side, on a hill thickly covered with verdure (and the darker the verdure, the more poetic it is), towered, arising from dactyl to dactyl, an ancient black castle. Of course, there are plenty of such views in Central Europe, but just this one, in the inexpressible and unique harmoniousness of its three principal parts, in its smile, in some mysterious innocence it had,—my love! my obedient one!—was something so unique, and so familiar, and so long-promised, and it so understood the beholder, that Vasili Ivanovich even pressed his hand to his heart, as if to see whether his heart was there in order to give it away.
Vasili determines to live there for the rest of his life.
Wyndham has large photos of clouds, lakes, and local landmarks in its sales offices. And if you want castles added in, perhaps you’ve seen those ads for Viking River Cruises on National Public Television. One of Wyndham’s favorite questions is “where do you dream of visiting?” which encourages the kind of fantasizing that Vasili engages in.
Unfortunately, in Vasili’s case reality sets in. His group leader will not let him remain:
You are taking a pleasure trip with us. Tomorrow, according to the appointed itinerary,—look at your ticket,—we are all returning to Berlin. There can be no question of anyone—in this case you—refusing to continue this communal journey.
In our case, we too wanted to leave the group, and what we were then subjected to reminded me of Vasili’s fate. “What if we stopped paying our maintenance fees,” I said at one point, at which point it was pointed out that we could lose our house. Nor would death save us as our will would go into probate. While I admit that Vasili has it worse, I identify:
“If necessary we shall carry you,” said the leader grimly, “but that is not likely to be pleasant for you. I am responsible for each of you, and shall bring back each of you, alive or dead.”
Swept along a forest road as in a hideous fairy tale, squeezed, twisted, Vasili Ivanovich could not even turn around, and only felt how the radiance behind his back receded, fractured by trees, and then it was no longer there, and all around the dark firs fretted but could not interfere. As soon as everyone had got into the car and the train had pulled off, they began to beat him—they beat him a long time, and with a good deal of inventiveness. It occurred to them, among other things, to use a corkscrew on his palms; then on his feet. The post-office clerk, who had been to Russia, fashioned a knout out of a stick and a belt, and began to use it with devilish dexterity. Atta boy! The other men relied more on their iron heels, whereas the women were satisfied to pinch and to slap. All had a wonderful time.
At the end of the story Vasili, “much changed,” resigns from his job, telling his boss that “he had not the strength to belong to mankind any longer.”
Wyndham’s tactics are softer–more Brave New World than 1984 or The Trial—but they often achieve the same ends. Thankfully I am not as broken as Vasili is but, God almighty, it has been painful!
Perhaps you’ve heard the expression, “If it seems too good to be true, it is.” Believe it.
