My Little Life

One little begonia bloom

Does it ever strike you (my sister will forgive me for repeating here something I wrote to her in a letter) how focused each of us is on our own personal lives, even as we recognize how small they are on the global scale? The other day I notice a woolly bear caterpillar on my boardwalk and wondered what concerns were occupying that small creature in its own brief little life and if it had the slightest clue of the big changes it would undergo if it survived! I know the diminishment ahead for me as I grow older, but let’s not get into that. 

 

 

Let’s Begin Instead with Beauty

 

We have had some gorgeous fall mornings lately. I’ll start with that and will try to end on a high note, too, wedging my gripes somewhere in the middle, where you can jump over them if you like. Sometimes we have what my grandmother called “red sails” both at sunrise and sunset—and what does that tell sailors? I guess “Red sails at morning/sailors take warning” is about the day to come, and “Red sails at night/sailors’ delight” predicts overnight calm, so there is no contradiction, but I am not a sailor, so don’t take my word for it.

What is prettier than sumac in autumn?

As fall color begins to paint Leelanau, Sunny and I continue to take long walks or mini-vacations in the morning. You can see one of our mini-vacations down into Leland Township here. It’s all still Leelanau County, after all, beautiful in the big picture and in the details, as well.

 

Griping About Grammar

 

Call me petty, but I will never get over incorrect pronoun usage. As one of my sisters remarked when I quoted an example to her, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard when I hear or read these errors. Consider, please:

 

They gave it to Jim. They gave it to me.

 

There you have two statements. Now conjoin them, for a compound statement, and you have:

 

They gave it to 

Jim and me.

 

You would never (I hope!) say, “They gave it to I,” would you? 

 

An or conjunction works the same way: 

 

Call Mary.

Or you can call me.

Call Mary or me.

 

 

If there is a question about which pronoun to use when a sentence involves a proper name and a pronoun, just drop the proper name, and the correct pronoun will be obvious. 

 

Sunny and I had a glorious morning!

The morning was good to Sunny and me.

 

Here’s a factoid that I find interesting. In logic, the conjunctions and and or are equivalent. There is no logical difference between them. 

 

Sun was shining. The air was chilly.

Sun was shining, and the air was chilly.

Sun was shining, but the air was chilly.

 

Do we hear the second and third compound sentences the same way, though? I think we hear them differently, that in sentence #3 we hear “chilly air” as somehow detracting from the “shining sun.” It’s the old “Yeah, but” phenomenon. What do you think? We would never say “Everything worked out perfectly, but I was happy.” The oddness of that sentence sends a mixed message beyond grammar or logic.

 

 

I spent much of last night in Algiers.

 

“I don’t expect to sleep the night,” as the Paul Simon song says. Almost every night, I wake up at least once and often as many as three times, reading myself back to sleep each time rather than lie awake staring into the dark. My current read-myself-to-sleep book is an unfinished autobiographical novel by Albert Camus titled Le premier homme (The First Man), which I’m reading in French, though not rapidly. I run into unfamiliar words and would be hard pressed to give any kind of smooth translation of the text, but I just keep going most of the time, only rarely stopping to look up a word, figuring things out from the context, and it's quite astonishing to me how vivid the scenes are in my mind as I read. Page after page, I am seeing what the author describes. As when reading the novels of Niall Williams, I am elsewhere. 

The First Man (to use the English title) is as different as can be from The Stranger. Typical sentences in The First Man are not short, staccato, Hemingway-like statements but long, voluptuous, descriptive meanders, with many phrases separated by commas between the subject at the beginning and the verb near the end. A sentence may begin two-thirds of the way down one page and go on until halfway down the next page. It comes across (to me, at least) as generosity in the writing. Here is an article I found online that seems to capture very well the soul of the work. 

 

Besides sentence structure, another enormous difference I notice between The Stranger and The First Man (Eve Webster, in the article linked above, notes many important reversals from one story to the other) is the absence of emotion in the narrator of the first contrasted with its overflowing presence in the narrator of the second. Jacques Cormery, thinly disguised alter ego of Albert Camus, is full of both joy and anguish. Rather than accepting each day without question or reaction, like Meursault, Camus/Cormery’s life is a quest for meaning from boyhood through to adulthood. 

 

I recommend The First Man (David Hapgood translated the English version published by Penguin Random House, paperback $16) for anyone who wants to know le vrai homme Camus, as well as he can be known at this distance in time. 

 

On hot days the thick blue sky lay over the street like a steaming lid, and the shade was cool under the arcades. On rainy days the whole street was nothing but a deep trench of wet shiny stone. Under the arcades were rows of shops; wholesale textile dealers, their façades painted in dark colors, piles of light-colord cloth glowing softly in the shade; groceries that smelled of clove and coffee; small shops where Arab tradesmen sold pastries dripping with oil and honey….

 

The passage above is from Hapgood’s translation, a copy of which I have in my shop,handy for this post. 

Did it set you dreaming?