May: One for the Books

Ground painted with sweeps of hawkweed --

May disappeared much too fast, as my "Books Read 2024" continued from #79 through #96. One book I re-read for the umpteenth time (The Haunted Bookshop), several were very short, and The Past Recaptured I re-read off and on starting in the beginning of the winter, only reaching the last page, finally -- reluctantly! -- a few days ago. If I had to select only one book to recommend from my May reading list, it would have to be Committing Journalism (comment following the title in the list will tell you why), but there are other worthwhile books here, also, so take a look and see if anything moves you.

 

Images today are from a drive I took (with Sunny) on Sunday down through Benzie County and over the border into Manistee County, soaking up the scenery.

Not in Europe, so, not a castle in ruins....

Morley, Christopher. The Haunted Bookshop (fiction). See this post for details.

 

Banks, Russell. Foregone (fiction). A famous Canadian documentary filmmaker is dying and wants to talk honestly about his early life, on film, for the first time. He feels he owes that honesty to his wife but can only lie to her unless a camera is there as witness. Fife (the man’s name) drifts between past and present, attended by his wife, his nurse, and the film crew headed by one of his former students. At the end I found myself if he had imagined all of it as he died. You tell me.

 

Lahey, Anita. The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship (nonfiction). What makes a friendship special when you’re young, and what makes it last? How do you stand by your best friend from 9^th grade to age 22 when you realize she really is dying? How do you balance honesty with positivity? And when she’s gone, how do you go on without her?

 

Malamud, Bernard. Dubin’s Lives (fiction). The protagonist is a biographer and often referred to as “the biographer” rather than by name. Does he investigate the lives of others rather than living his own? Harsh focus on marriage (separate from “love”), but most disappointing to me was the lack of anything that might be called a climax or an epiphany. I’ve complained before about novelists who slam the door after their novel’s climax, giving us no denouement, but in this novel Malamud jumps straight from a meandering story line to a brief dénouement, leaving a tangle of unsatisfying loose ends.

 

Brodsky, Joseph. Watermark (nonfiction). A slender volume that is not exactly essays or memoir but certainly not a novel, Watermark defies classification. That a poet would write poetic prose is no surprise, and the sentences are beautiful; however, I advise not trying to make sense of every subject-verb statement. Better simply to let yourself drift sybaritically in Brodsky’s impressions of Venice, rocked by its watery waves.

 

Toews, Miriam. All My Puny Sorrows (fiction). I laughed out loud several times while reading the first chapter of this Canadian novel of two Mennonite sisters. Sisters in the backseat of the car, parents up front, long trip: a recipe for hilarity. Then a suicide attempt by the older sister, now a concert pianist, in the second chapter. Not so funny. But I stuck with it and am glad I did – not just for the laughs that reprised in the last few pages, either. “Life is a strange old ‘possum,” as someone I used to know used to say. But there’s also love.

 

McGarey, Gladys, M.D. (nonfiction). The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age (nonfiction). A good friend recently widowed insisted that I borrow and read this book, and now I am thinking of so many friends with whom I would also like to share it. A centenarian and medical doctor, Dr. McGarey spent much of her childhood in India with her parents and siblings. Herself the mother of six children, divorced (not her decision) after almost 50 years of marriage, she is someone with a lot of life experience, and she has distilled for us young 'uns what she has learned along the way. Someone whose advice is worth heeding.

 

Goodman, Allegra. The Family Markowitz (fiction). I always enjoy Goodman’s fiction, and this early novel of hers was no exception. The family dynamics and characters’ shifting emotional responses are completely familiar. Sarah is nurturing matriarch, easing the way for her husband and mother-in-law, as well as the younger generations, but the author shifts seamlessly from one character’s inner self to another’s. Masterful.

Arikawa, Hiro. The Travelling Cat Chronicles (fiction). A small novel in size of book and length of story (the cover is beautiful), largely not exclusively narrated by the cat, did not thoroughly overcome my resistance to its cuteness. Was it too cute? I was not won over, though I had hoped to be. 

 

Bennett, Alan. The Uncommon Reader (fiction). Absolutely charming! Late in life, the Queen of England takes up reading, much to the alarm of her staff and almost everyone else. Then she goes a step further and announces that she is going to write a book! Could anyone read this tiny book (not much over 100 pages) without laughing out loud? I could not. 

 

Berry, Wendell. Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer (nonfiction). If I were to write something like this, it would be WIANGTB a Dishwasher or …a Garbage Disposal or …a Self-Propelled Lawnmower or a Computerized Cash Register for My Business or Central (Or Any Other Kind of) Air Conditioning for My Home. But I do have a laptop computer, and I am keeping this list on it and writing my blog posts with it, so there you are, but I love his arguments and would never argue against his conclusion.

Closed! That made me sad.

Martin, Dannie M. & Peter Y. Sussman. Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog (nonfiction). If you are an American taxpayer, you should read this book. What kind of punishments do you feel are deserved, and what do you think our prisons accomplish? How much do you know about what we call the justice system, and how much do you know about incarceration? Opinions without information are worse than no opinions at all.

Arcadia Marsh -- a watery wonderland!

Wodehouse, P. G. Jeeves (fiction). One night I needed a silly, trivial, pointless book, and Jeeves fit the bill.

 

de Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine. The Princess of Clèves (fiction). Persevering through the confusing and tedious opening pages, at last I reached the story proper and read through to the end of this period classic of French literature. There! That’s done! I must admit it was, though somewhat turgid, suspenseful and the end surprising, and I’m glad I read it, although it’s not something I expect to re-read.

Always impressive Lake Michigan view

Hughes, Dorothy B. In a Lonely Place (fiction). From classic French to classic noir was quite a transition. The suspense in this novel is not in whodunit but in how long he will escape detection and how he will finally meet his end. Perhaps unfairly, I read it as another reason to say “No, thank you” to California. (Very subjective response, I realize.)

 

Proust, Marcel. The Past Recaptured (fiction). This re-reading spread itself out over many, many weeks, as I turned to Proust again and again between other bedtime books. “Eternal existence is not promised to books any more than to men,” he wrote, and yet the life of Proust’s epic work seems only to gain vitality as years go by. I used to say (thinking myself witty) that life was “too short to read Proust.” Later I realized that it too short not to read him.

 

Tey, Josephine. A Daughter of Time (fiction). Apprehensive when I saw family trees preceding the story, I was relieved, surprised, and delighted to find that the story itself was neither a modern nor a historical fictional murder mystery but research into history by a couple of fictional characters thrown together when one is sent to cheer the other in his hospital bed. Did Richard III of England have two nephews murdered? Was he truly a monster so often depicted? Fascinating.

 

McCann, Colum with Diane Foley. American Mother (nonfiction). What would you expect if a member of your family was taken hostage by terrorists? Government assistance? Rescue? Ongoing updates? Diane Foley got little if any of this, but her son’s gruesome death did not stop her from working to make the future better for others. She even met with one of her son’s kidnappers, presumably also one of his torturers. A remarkable woman.

Quiet interior corner of Platte Township pleased me.

If you’ve read my two previous posts, you already know that I’m currently reading both Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (daytime) and Jerry Dennis’s A Place on the Water (bedtime), two nonfiction books that could hardly have less in common. Their commonality for me will be their presence, weeks from now, on my June list. Please, don’t let June speed by too fast! – Oh, but Bonnie Jo Campbell is coming to the bookstore on Saturday, June 22, so if Time does fly (as I'm only too sure it will), it will seem all the sooner that Bonnie arrives. And there you have another example of my philosophy of life in a nutshell: Everything is a double-edged sword. 

As I wended (yes!) my way south to make a circuit around Arcadia Marsh and then turn back north and head for home, I was somewhat dismayed at how up-to-date and full of people all the lakeside towns and beaches already were (the first weekend after busy Memorial Day) and how “fancy” so many new businesses seem to be. Even signage for parks and lookouts seemed excessive. Is it just me? Is it just being old? (Probably yes and yes would be the answers there.) It made me sad to see the Big Apple abandoned and derelict, as I remembered the last time the Artist and I stopped there for burgers and beer (the Big Apple opened in 1937, the year the Artist was born), while the ruins of an old building in Elberta seemed nothing short of charming. That sounds inconsistent, but it's the erasure of memories that troubles me. More about that another time.

Away from lakeshores, things are quieter, and I feel more at home. There are still unpaved roads, almost free of traffic -- though I noticed along the edges of one of my favorite back roads here in Leelanau those little orange flags telling me that fiber optic cable for Internet access had been laid down there, too. Is the expectation that this road will eventually be lined with houses? Heaven forbid!

Please do not disturb the shadows!

Again, September

Once, we were there....
 

Not at all like a thief in the night but perceptibly, on Monday evening, August 21st, a good week and a half before the calendar announced ‘September’ to us, the season turned the corner. Already there had been blackberries fermenting on the stem, wafting their sickly, drunken perfume abroad, and goldenrod putting forth its brilliant pyrotechnical displays, but that Monday evening, as friends and I were finishing up the pizza they’d brought for dinner, which we’d been enjoying outdoors in the shade of black walnut and basswood trees, all at once the temperature dropped and we agreed to have dessert on the porch. The calendar didn't say so yet, but September had come. 

U.P. "home away from home" in the old days

Bessie and Heidi

Superior Hotel, Grand Marais

September used to be the time the Artist and I would take a break after our summer in the public eye – my bookstore, his gallery -- and drive up to the U.P. for a few days on Lake Superior or, the last couple of years, over to Lake Huron, where his grandfather had farmed long ago. All traces of the old farm are gone, but we hunted out his grandparents’ graves in a little country cemetery and one time ran into one of his shirttail cousins having breakfast at a lakeside diner...

... and we ventured down to the tiny crossroads of Glennie and little Vaughn Lake, where his parents had rented a cottage for a few years and for a while owned a lot that David fondly imagined, as he, a boy, cleared away popple trees with his little axe, would be his someday. When a neighbor on the lake became more than a little nutty, however, his father sold the lot. 

“Tell me a story about when you were a little boy in Detroit,” I would say when nighttime found us both sleepless. “Or the time you buried the chartreuse bop cap [his most regretted fashion faux pas] at Vaughn Lake.” Sometimes he would protest, “Oh, you know all my stories,” but I could prime the pump and weasel him into a storytelling mood every time. He was, as all friends and family will attest, a wonderful storyteller. I only wish I had recorded some of those sessions, because he was never interested in writing them down. He sometimes made brief notes for stories but never went further. Maybe, though, record his storytelling would have put a crimp in his style, and I need to be content with the memory of our intimacy and not yearn for wordy details….

I’ve been reading a very dreamy book, Pamela Petro’s The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir. I live daily with "presence of absence” since the Artist died, but the idea she describes of having more than one sense of “home” is familiar, too, and has been since David and I went out West and I encountered and fell unexpectedly in love with mountains. Oh, and then there was Paris – and the Auvergne! I recommend the Petro book to all dreamers, but for now I ask you at least to follow this link for an introduction to the Welsh concepts of hiraeth and hwyl.

 

I did not grow up in the place where I was born, and the place where I grew up is one I longed to leave all through my childhood and youth. I love France, and I truly love Cochise County, Arizona. But Midwest, mountainless, English-speaking, Great Lakes-surrounded Michigan is my home, mon chez moi, and I cannot imagine giving it up. My own life stories are here.

Here, where every mile holds memories

 

A third echo my own life finds in The Long Field is the author’s love of stones, of rock. She writes not only of mountains but also of megaliths, rocks made to stand upright by ancient humans for reasons lost to time. The mystery of them.

 

We know we can’t live forever, but stones can, almost. Right up to the threshold of immortality. So we prop them up and carve them. We make cairns and temples and snuff bottles. Sometimes we shape them to look like us. 

 

I wonder if she has ever read David Leveson (whose name I see I spelled wrong in this old blog post). Stones, rocks, mountains – their “innocence” (as Leveson sees them) and their vast age (Petro’s focus) as compared to our own brief lives combine to make them endlessly fascinating – to those of us fascinated by them, I suppose. Perhaps others are left unmoved. Probably. Chacun à son gout, said the old lady as she kissed the pig.

Hiking Arizona rocks with a neighbor

September, though – ah, September! No more going back to school for me, either as student or teacher, and no more rambles with my love in our familiar home-away-from home, Grand Marais, with its hollyhock-lined, grass-carpeted alleys. (Here was our getaway in 2015, and another the following year.) The haunting music of the song “September When It Comes,” by Johnny and Rosanne Cash, fills me with hiraeth and the bittersweet, unquenchable longing evoked by the presence of absence.

 

On a lighter note, if you’re in Ohio and you visit these people, tell them Dog Ears Books sent you. They came to Northport and visited Dog Ears Books on August 29, 2023. 

The “Same” Day Never Is

November 12, 2022, Alamo Township, Kalamazoo County

 

Looking back at old blog posts, I see that any date in any particular year brought very different weather and very different events and thoughts. For example, no previous November 12 in my life was, for me, in any way like this one. The image above is from this morning in Kalamazoo, and below is what greeted us at home in Leelanau Township on November 12, 2019, the day the Artist said we would be leaving earlier from now on to drive to Arizona!

November 12, 2019, Leelanau Township, Leelanau County

This year, also, November 12 was the second leg of my long solo odyssey – well, “solo” with Sunny Juliet as copilot!

Copilot Sunny Juliet

(Do you ever think about words for travel, as I do? For me, as I hear in it the French journée, ‘journey’ seems a day’s travel, whereas ‘odyssey,’ from the travels of Odysseus, I hear as long and challenging, and I also think of my challenging cross-country travel as a ‘trek,’ though I would never consider making it on foot.)

 

Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” brings into focus the same/different aspects of any date on the calendar from year to year. For example, the first airing of the television show “Sesame Street” occurred on November 10, 1969, the birthday of both Martin Luther (1483) and poet Vachel Lindsay (1879). What would Martin Luther have made of Sesame Street? And I was especially struck by the variousness of events on “same” dates by Keillor’s noting that November 9 was the birthday of both Anne Sexton and Carl Sagan but also the infamous anniversary of the horrible German Kristallnacht.

 

Not surprising at all, this difference in “the same,” but I often find the unsurprising as much cause for reflection and wonder as something realized for the first time. 

Where I stayed this past week

I was glad to have loaner wheels while my car was in the shop.

Spending time in a place where I once lived (for many years) also invites notice of change. Kalamazoo was my home from December of 1971 to the fall of 1987, so now, while it is lovely to be with friends and family still here, others are with me in absentia, most notably the Artist, of course, but other friends, also. Ghosts appear everywhere -- including the ghost of my own former, younger self! The past tugs at my sleeve, whispers in my ear, and distracts me from the present with the urgency of Marley’s ghosts! It can be unnerving. Nothing went wrong in Kalamazoo, however, and many things went very, very right, mostly lots of time spent with those I dearly love. And yes, three visits in four days to one of my new favorite bookstores! 

Two more new books from This Is a Bookstore

Still, it felt good to resume my travels, barely ahead of the season’s first Michigan snow, which caught up with me in Amish Indiana, where my copilot was entranced by the sight of horse-drawn buggies on the road. But you will have to imagine those sights, as my copilot can operate neither car nor camera. She just keeps me company, but that's a lot.

Her new outdoor wear makes leash-walking much easier.

Disloyal — or Accommodating?

Oak tree, Arizona

The extreme contrast between the two centers and the two influences became itself a blessing: it rendered flagrant the limitations and the contingency of both. …In each of these places there was a maximum of air, of space, of suggestion; in each there was a minimum of deceptiveness and of the power to enslave. - George Santayana, Persons and Places: The Background of My Life

The passage above introduces the chapter called “Avila,” the center and influence of Santayana’s life in Spain, as it contrasted with his American life in Boston. He describes Avila as an ancient country town, dependent for its sustenance on the surrounding agricultural lands, which it can never shut out or forget.

The town walls, for all their massiveness, do not shut out the country from the eye. At every turn, through one of the city gates, or over some bastion, the broad valley remains visible with its checker-board of sloughed fields and straggling poplars lining the straight roads, or clustered along the shallow pools by the river; and at night, in the not too distant mountains, the shepherds’ fires twinkle like nether stars. Or if the townspeople are too busy and nearsighted to remember the country, the country every Friday morning invades the town, and fills the market place with rustics and rustic wares. At dawn they ride in from their villages in groups, on their trembling little donkeys….

As a confirmed country mouse, I am most enchanted by Santayana’s descriptions of his home in Spain and his walks taken from the town out into the countryside. The world of Boston, even the limited world of Harvard, one can find in so many other books of the period, and, in any case, it is not the world that attracts me. Similarly, I lose myself in the first volume of Proust, wandering with him through the countryside surrounding Combray, but lose interest in the second volume, with the country left far behind and all focus placed instead on human relationships in a limited social stratum, where the actors have little to do but obsess on one another’s words and looks and gestures. Yes, of course, human psychology is endlessly fascinating, but so is the rest of the world, and “society,” for me, without a wider focus in which to view it in natural and historical perspective, fast becomes suffocating.

Michigan field and trees

Give me open spaces! I have, however, found enchantment in Proust’s final volume, where he “refinds" the past living on, but that is another story.

Like my winter base in Dos Cabezas, Arizona, my Michigan home in Leelanau County is blessed with “a maximum of air, of space….” Suggestion? Yes, that, too, I suppose. Also, in Northport (as Santayana observes in Avila), one can never forget the fruit orchards or Lake Michigan, while here, in like manner, whatever Cochise County town one visits the range is never shut out but always visible on the streets. In Northport in summer, tractors and cherry shakers make their slow way through town traffic, followed in turn, in their own time, by heavy trucks hauling cherries to the processor, a sequence replaced in fall by the apple harvest parade. Here in Arizona, besides the weekly livestock auction in Willcox, there  are on every road and in every town livestock trailers hauling cattle (and often saddled horses), along with pickup trucks carrying bales of hay and huge bulk water containers. 

Cattle on open range

Dandelions in cherry orchard

But reminders of country sustenance are not the only outside reality always present in the towns. Beyond what human beings bring into being and provide for one another, there is what nature has long ago formed, remaining into the present. So always, every day, on all sides, except during hours of snow or fog or blowing dust that temporarily obscures their outlines, the mountains are present to the eye and soul. They are to this part of the country, to my winter eye and heart, what lakes are to Michigan.

“We’re surrounded by mountains,” the Artist observes on one morning drive from ghost town to cow town.

“Like Shangri-La,” I hint mischievously, for the night before we had watched watched the old movie “Lost Horizon,” based on the James Hilton novel.

The Artist snorts. He finds my comparison absurd, and yet I am prepared to argue (“You would argue with St. Peter himself!” my mother used to say in exasperation) that Dos Cabezas is better than Shangri-La in many ways. For one thing, Dos Cabezas is a real place, and we’re here. It isn’t a book or movie that’s going to come to an end and dump me back in someplace I don’t want to be. And — how many of you have seen the movie? Do you remember that there is no jealousy in Shangri-La, because the men are so “generous” that they willingly share “their” women with anyone who desires them? Believe me, that did not escape my notice! The women seem to have nothing to say in the matter, and it is not they who are “generous,” but the men! Shangri-La? No, thank you!

Desert view, Cochise County

Water view, Leelanau County

Well, nothing on earth is perfect, and no one on earth is perfect, but we human beings (like other animals) make homes for ourselves, and over the course of time most of us develop feelings for the places we live, even if they are not places into which we were born. One of my friends, born in Rhode Island, has been married for decades to a Brazilian, with the consequence that they divide their lives between the eastern U.S. and Sao Paulo. (Sorry, Jeanie, this program lacks many of the accent marks I would otherwise employ.) Another friend lives half the year (winter) in northern Michigan and the other half (their winter) in southern Australia, while still another maintains dual U.S.-Irish citizenship. As for me, I have few if any memories of my infant and baby life in South Dakota, only snapshots and ephemera carefully saved by my mother.

Northern Michigan and southeast Arizona. I love them both. Is a divided loyalty a lesser loyalty? What do you say? 

I used to think so, but now I think“divided” is not the right adjective at all. It is a dual loyalty that people with two home places feel. And if that is not possible, how would it ever be possible to love equally more than one child?

At home in Michigan

One road home in Arizona

Briefly Close Encounters

I'll ask you to picture most of today's post in your mind, as I have no decent photographs of my coyote encounters and went out walking without my camera on Sunday morning. 

Coyotes are common in our area, though they were less so in the past of living memory. Deer are more common, too, than they used to be. If it seems a paradox – wildlife increasing along with suburban-type spread – think of all the new lawns and gardens carved out of former forest as a never-empty buffet table spread for wild deer. Is it any wonder they approach the houses? And with the deer come their predators.

In general, of course, there is more wildlife around us than we ever see. Few people in Michigan have ever seen a vole, and yet it is the most common mammal (woodland and meadow) in the state. I have only seen two – and neither for more than half a minute, if that. Fuller and rounder in body than a field mouse, with a pudgy little face, the vole is as shy as a Borrower. Caught out in the open, seen, he is seized by panic and cannot disappear fast enough. Yet when we go walking in the country we are strolling over countless vole highways.

The presence of larger mammals such deer and coyotes, is more obvious. It’s a rare walk along a dirt road that fails to turn up deer tracks or coyote scat. Deep, sharply outlined hoofprints with sand and dust thrown up tell you that deer ran across the road very recently. How many were there? Were they being pursued, or did they scent your approach? That greyish coyote scat is old, not from this morning. Later in the summer fresh scat will usually contain (and it’s surprising when you see this for the first time) cherry pits, but fresh cherries are a long way off in mid-March. This is scanty scat. Was it a young coyote or only a very hungry one?

Along a line of giant old pines, trees collaborating with the wind off the lake to produce a symphony, nature’s power their theme, on the ground between the pines and first row of cherry trees lies half a deer leg. Bent delicately at what would be called the ankle if this were a human leg, the hoof is a healthy black, fur still intact, while above the joint the bone is almost completely exposed. Only a few shreds of red meat remain. And yet, though the remainder of the carcass is nowhere in sight, this tattered, bloody remnant manages to project the spirit of the living deer. Before death came life.

These are the signs. This is the drama of prey and predator, of nature red in tooth and claw but, for all that running and killing, animals only doing what they must to survive. Hatred has no part of this drama, which is not a question of war or demonization. And so, even a scene of carnage carries a sense of peace. Somewhere nearby are pups with warm, fat, full bellies, and soon there will be new fawns born.

At night the coyote chorus seems gathered beneath the bedroom window to serenade us. They sound closer than they are, but in the early morning, from an east-facing window, it is not uncommon to see a lone coyote making its way back through the orchard from the creek, returning to a den along the edge of the woods. A den, like tracks and scat, can be read as active or abandoned, according to the freshness around the opening, although giving any den a wide berth is never a mistake. One animal might have dug it last year and another taken it over for winter quarters.

Human beings rarely surprise wild animals attuned by necessity to everything going on around them, but once a coyote and I surprised each other. It was on an old cleared lane through the woods, a lane that descended into old woods from higher cleared ground, tilled fields, and my dog was still behind me, up on that open, higher ground. Since on our walks together she never allows herself to be left behind, I went alone down into the woods, confident that she would follow in her own good time. And there coming toward me in that wide, open, clear green swathe cut through the woods, expecting me as little as I had expected him, trotted a confident young coyote. We both stopped and faced each other silently, watchfully, unmoving, across the distance separating us. Then, as if by mutual consent, each of us turned back to go the way we had come.  Regaining the high ground, I went another way with my dog that day. Where the coyote went or what he did was his business.

I have seen other coyotes, and one other time the animal stared at me. It was on a hill just past our barn, in winter. Sarah was a puppy, new to our household, and for some reason I had taken her out on a leash that morning. She was fascinated by the coyote that looked through us with its blank, wild stare, standing its ground. I waved my arms and yelled at it to leave but had to take a few running steps to goad the animal into a gentle, reluctant, loping retreat, frequently interrupted by halts and backward glances.

Sarah was young then, and we had conversations with friends and veterinarians about dog vs. wild encounters. “Wild always wins” was the chilling verdict from one vet. Now, as then, I prefer the words of cowboy poet Max Black’s “Ode to a Border Collie,” which states that the border collie “makes coyotes tremble.” Sarah is a mix of border collie and Australian shepherd, and she’s grown into a big girl.

Not that I wish the coyotes bad luck with their hunting. I just don’t want them messin’ with us, and so far they have not. Peaceful coexistence is close enough.

A Pleasant, Quiet Holiday

Christmas Day Landscape, Leelanau

We did not have a white Christmas this year. On the other hand (the more positive view), the roads were handily ice-free, and the threatened storm and power outages did not arrive, so it was an easy day for most of us in northern lower Michigan. We were not traveling and had no holiday guests ourselves (our holiday visiting was all by phone), but it was good not to have to worry about others, either. 

Lack of snow also made the painter in our household very happy. He loves the tawny colors and "bare bones" look of November, which is just what we had (a month later) and which tempted us outdoors for a country drive and dog walk between late breakfast and early holiday dinner. 

Sarah had no presents to open and did not think much of my holiday plan to trim her toenails with a new clipper (which she would never have regarded in the light of a present), but she was on board 100% for a ride and a run. I couldn't help finding it lovely to walk so easily and comfortably, without ice or sleet or bone-chilling wind. David drank in the browns of the landscape greedily. We all enjoyed our holiday outing. 

One tree in the woods stood out so sharply that I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it before. I wonder what its life story could be.

Our dinner for two was simple, leaving me lots of reading time during the day. I enjoyed A School for My Village: A Promise to the Orphans of Nyaka, by Twesigye Jackson Kaguri, with Susan Urbanek Linville, and the opportunity it gave me to spend time vicariously in Uganda, where days are twelve hours long twelve months of the year. David also read out loud to me bits from a book I'd given him about the painter Russell Chatham.

Shortly after dark (Michigan), our neighbors came to the door bearing Christmas treats. Cheesecake! My dinner plan hadn't included dessert, so this surprise topped off the day perfectly. 

12/25/2014

Reality and Realities, Close to Home and Faraway

Being Myself

It’s easy to tell when Bruce isn’t around. When I’m expecting him in for a spell at desk and counter, I have to clean up my act. He likes a neat desk, and if he comes in and finds a mess, he’ll clean it up himself, and then how will I find all my stuff? But Bruce is gone for the whole month of November, and I’ve been reveling in what looks like a complete letting-go of standards. Ah, but if you were to look under desk and counter, where messes usually get stashed “temporarily” and then end up accumulating for months on end, you’d see a much neater story. It's dark under there, though, so imagine it for yourself.

Dealing with the Onset of Winter

Does it look cold? It’s cold. Roads have been, in those immortal words of broadcasters, “ice-covered and slippery,” although we did not get anywhere near the two feet that dumped all at once on Lake Superior, far to our north. I wonder.... Sometimes it's easier to go into four-wheel-drive and get through deep snow than to stay on a slippery road and negotiate a thin, greasy skin of the white stuff. But we get what we get, and this past week we got slipper roads.

The Nineteenth Century Pulls Me In

Roads were so slippery, in fact, that our intrepid little band of readers, shrunk from nine down to six when Proust was selected for November, then to five when one of the six had a schedule conflict, numbered in the end only four around one of the round tables at Fischer’s Happy Hour Tavern. We were sorry not to have the others with us, but we were a congenial quartet nonetheless.

Quite honestly, if I had to choose between the 18^th and the 19^th century, without knowing what my place in society would be or even what country I’d land in, I think I’d take my chances with the 18^th century, or about a hundred years before la Belle  Époque in France or the Gilded Age in the United States. Those overblown years leading up to the First World War have little appeal to this country mouse. But then there’s Proust, isn’t there?

“What made him different from literature that came before?” our Fearless Leader asked. 

We four agreed that Proust’s long, sensuous, voluptuous descriptions and microscopic attention to details of nature and the slightest nuances of human gesture or glance was worlds away from Voltaire, the last French writer whose work we read. Remembrance of Things Past is almost the antithesis of Candide. In Voltaire the events come fast and furious, piling up one on top of the other, whereas in Proust very little happens at all, but the moments are examined and stretched out like hours. And that makes sense, since Proustian time is very much Bergsonian time:

And besides, even from this point of view, in mere quantity, in our lives the days are not all equal. As they travel through the days, temperaments that are slightly nervous, as mine was, have available to them, like automobiles, different “speeds.” There are arduous mountainous days which one spends an infinite time climbing, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full-tilt singing.

Now you know that’s true, whether or not you have a “nervous” temperament. You've experienced it yourself, time dragging or racing by.

We also addressed the question of the main theme of the work. It’s too easy to say (as I originally did) “time and memory,” though, and here I dug deep down to a Bergsonian and phenomenological conclusion that convinced me, whether or not my friends were convinced, but I probably won't lay that all out today.

Over and over, in the first section, “Combray,” young Marcel is hungry to get behind the world of his senses, to some deeper reality he believes is hidden.

...[S]uddenly a roof, a glimmer of sun on a stone, the smell of the road would stop me because of a particular pleasure they gave me, and also because they seemed to be concealing, beyond what I could see, something which they were inviting me to come take and which despite my efforts I could not manage to discover.

He believed that a “philosophical subject for a great literary work” would have to solve this mystery, but

...I would feel I did not have the tranquility I needed at the moment for pursuing my search in a useful way, and that it would be better not to think about it any more until I was back at home....

And then, back at home, he would think of other things, avoiding the “arduous task,” and so the images would accumulate, guarding their secrets, until one day on a drive he asks for a pencil and writes a description of the teasing images of the disappearing and reappearing church steeples marking the progress of the carriage drive. And

...at that moment, when ... I had finished writing it, I was so happy, I felt it had so perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them, that, as I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.

So writing is a key – but not the complete answer.

In the central section of the volume, “Swann in Love,” Swann realizes that much of the value he places on Odette, as well as his interpretations of her actions and utterances, comes not from her but from himself. So what about her that he knows or believes is real? Again, is the real something hidden behind appearances?

All of us loved the final section, “Place-Names: The Name.” The first name we encounter here is that of Balbec. Nothing is less like his Combray bedroom in his grandmother’s house, the narrator tells us, than his hotel room at Balbec, and at the same time nothing is less like Balbec itself than the Balbec he pictured in imagination, long before seeing the place. The name ‘Balbec’ to him was a storm at sea plus Gothic architecture. He wanted to see a storm at sea because it would be pure nature, not fashioned by man, therefore “more real” than even he himself.

When his parents began planning a trip to northern Italy and said that he might go, too, for Easter holidays, his dreams altered.

From then on only sunlight, perfumes, colors seemed to me of any value, for this alternation of images had brought about a change of direction in my desire, and ... a complete change of tone in my sensibility.

To ‘Balbec’ were added the magical names of ‘Venice’ and ‘Florence,’ brought forth out of abstract Space to become specific places, determinately situated, and differentiated from abstract Time, in that days passed in one could be passed nowhere else. – That is, if one were to go to Balbec, Venice, Florence, or anywhere else. But the young, nervous boy who was the narrator in childhood becomes ill from overexcitement and cannot leave Paris. His excursions will be limited to the public garden on the Champs-Élysées, too well known to contain magic. Until he hears 

"Good-bye, Gilberte, I’m going home, don’t forget we’re coming to your house tomorrow after dinner.” The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the existence of the girl it designated in that it ... addressed her directly; thus it passed close by me, in action so to speak....

The name called through the air is described as a “cloud of precious color,” Proust going so far as to name the color – heliotrope – and now young Marcel’s life takes on a new focus. Away from Gilberte, he can think only of seeing her again, but in her company he is frustrated, feeling that the Gilberte he plays with in the park, with other children, is not the Gilberte he loves, the one of his dreams.

He becomes obsessed with everything relating to her hidden life, the life she lives away from him – the name of the street where she lives, the name of her father, Swann, the old woman in the park (whose name for a long time he does not know) to whom the girl speaks in so friendly a manner. But eventually he realizes that Gilberte feels no answering concern or need for him, that he is “the only one who loved.” His love is not a reality they share. 

Since Swann’s Way is only the first volume of Proust’s multi-volume work, it is not to be supposed that even the last achingly poetic page of this book will completely answer the question of theme. What we do find there is the narrator, visiting the Bois de Boulogne years later and finding it so changed – the women’s hats and dresses all different, automobiles in place of horse-drawn carriages -- as to be meaningless to him, saying: “The reality I had known no longer existed.” The time he had known is now lost, le temps perdu, but we know that the final volume of the work is called in English, Time Regained, so this is not the end of the story.

The story is – forgive the term – intensely metaphysical. What is reality? What is the relationship of names to reality? Where does the real exist? And does it pass out of existence with the passing of time? If not, how can it be accessed?

But by now I fear I’ve lost not only time but readers. Time to stop. Past time to stop.

Other Books

I'm posting this on a cold Saturday afternoon, the happy, laughing morning crowd all dispersed now. The sun is not present peeking out, either, so to close on a warm note I'll include photos of a few new books.