Again!

 

Sunday, 1/25/26: Another sunny January day!

We had another sunny day on Sunday. Sunshine again, for the third time this month!

Thursday--sunshine again!

On Thursday’s sunshine (sunny day #4), I locked up my shop just before noon, leaving a sign on the door telling anyone who might wander by that they could find me down on the corner to the south, where I stood with a group I call “the stalwarts.” They were a much larger group back in the summer, before the thermometer took a dive and the larger segment of Northport’s population took off for Arizona, Florida, and other points south, but nine or ten or eleven of them still get out there on Thursdays for half an hour or so, standing where they are most visible to drivers coming down the hill and turning left onto Waukazoo Street, and I decided it was time for me to join them.

 

I was sure I had posterboard somewhere, either at home or in the storage area behind my shop, but it stubbornly refused to reveal itself, so my sign was black felt marker on the raggedy top of a cardboard file box—not as big as it might have been and nowhere near as “professional” in appearance, but I justified the look by assuring myself that no one could mistake me for a “paid demonstrator.” 

 

(Does anyone really believe that there are paid demonstrators against ICE in American villages and towns and even large cities, Minneapolis or any other? I know the people who turn out for these events! They are my friends, my family, my neighbors! But I guess the same people who think it’s okay for right-wingers to carry assault weapons to demonstrations  and even kill people (do your own online search if you don't remember the names) but wrong for an ICE nurse from a VA hospital to carry, holstered not drawn, a gun he had a legal permit to carry—those people will clearly swallow any blatant lie or absurd argument in the world, as long as it comes from the “leaders” they follow blindly.)

 

Winter. Snow. COLD! Although even a sunny day without wind is darn cold when the temperatures are in the single digits, there are important reasons for not huddling indoors full-time, e.g., meaningful gathering of people aiming to protect democracy, e.g., getting a dog out for regular exercise.

Very COLD week!

Is a "warm-up" coming?

Thought-Stopping

A friend of mine who had trouble with anxiety was taught a method of overcoming it called “thought stopping.” When an anxiety-provoking thought or image comes into your mind, you say aloud, “Stop!” and then visualize something calm and beautiful, replacing a negative with a positive image. Some people have good results; however, the method is of very limited or no value for others, particularly anyone with OCD. By attempting to block the thought rather than dealing with it, the thought itself develops resistance to your resistance, studies have shown. Despite occasional temporary relief, you may be strengthening the fear you are trying to avoid by stuffing it into a closet. (See alternatives here.)

The other day another friend sent me a link for another kind of thought stopping, the kind that seeks not to conquer chronic fears but to avoid critical thinking, i.e., to avoid questioning whatever orthodoxy someone has accepted, to silence one's own doubt. The man who posts on Instagram under the name “epistemiccrisis” (great name!) says he was “born into” the MAGA culture and learned ways to avoid questioning the ideology by reaching for handy mind control techniques. Thought stopping, as epistemiccrisis explains it in this ideological world, holds questions and doubt at bay with phrases that short-circuit critical thinking and keep believers comfortable. One such phrase is “Fake news!” The phrases are used as shields to block a person's own intrusive thoughts but can also be used to block information from other sources that could lead to doubt.

One phrase that epistemiccrisis doesn't mention (please excuse me for not spelling it out completely) is “Tr__p Derangement Syndrome,” commonly shortened to TDS. Confronted with any unpleasant fact about the current president, his followers block thoughtful doubts with the catch-phrase, “TDS!” (That is supposed to imply that the person criticizing the president or simply bringing up an unpleasant fact about him is completely unhinged on the subject of the president, not that the president himself is unhinged or deranged, which would make much more sense.) A true-believing follower might follow up the thought-stopping accusation by asking the person who has criticized or brought up the unpleasant fact, “Are you off your meds?” 

You will notice that this method of avoiding critical thinking also has the general effect of shutting down discussion by sideswiping anyone with a different perspective, sending the clear signal that no challenge to the received orthodoxy will be received by the blocked mind.

Recent Reading

Ah, but we still have books! Not only my own interests but semipopular demand has determined me to enlarge my offerings of classic philosophy writings. Notice also Mary Webb’s novel, Precious Bane, for which I am an evangelist. Escape to the quiet world of Shropshire, back when plows were drawn by livestock and the Saturday market was as good as a county fair. Don’t worry, though. There is plenty of conflict and drama in the story; it isn’t all sweetness and light. Simply one of the Western world’s great books, too long overlooked.

The story told in journalist Martin Sixsmith’s work of nonfiction pictured above was partially familiar to me from the film version, “Philomena,” starring Judy Dench and Steve Coogan. While the movie focused on the mother searching for the baby she was forced to give up for adoption, however, the book follows the life of the child from birth to death and also delves deeply into political struggles within Ireland (between Church and government), as well as in the United States, where the adopted Irish child grows to be a successful lawyer working for the RNC on (of all things!) redistricting, so book and film are complementary, and I recommend both. 

This Week Up North

 

Despite single-digit temperatures and subzero wind chills, Leelanau bodies of water are not yet covered with ice. Looking past the mountains of snow that hide most of the Northport Youth Sailing School buildings, you can see the blue water of Grand Traverse Bay. How long will that be the case? How soon will ice boating and ice fishing be possible on Lake Leelanau? Stay tuned. I’ll let you know.

Blue water in Grand Traverse Bay is still visible.

From the Tenth to the Twelfth

Looking out onto Waukazoo Street

December

Oddly enough, the name of our twelfth month of the year comes from the Latin word for ten, decem, thanks to an earlier Roman ten-month calendar. New months January and February were added on at the beginning of the year on the new Julian calendar, rather than at the end, in 45 BCE, making the old tenth month the new twelfth month. 

 

To a friend who remarked gloomily the other day that winter “hasn’t even started yet,” I gave my own Pollyannaish (not my nature--I have to work hard at it) view of December 21: That’s when darkness begins to retreat, days begin to lengthen, so I see the official first day of winter as a happy turning toward spring—and don’t try to talk me out of it! 

Morning sun! A rare winter treat in Michigan!

 When Is Your Work “Finished”?

 

French writer Albert Camus died in a traffic accident at age 46, and his last book, an unfinished draft manuscript, was found in the mud at the scene of the accident. Russian fiction writer Gogol completed only the first volume of his projected trilogy, destroying multiple copies of sequels that failed to satisfy him. American poet and novelist Jim Harrison died in his writing studio with an unfinished poem on his desk. 

 

Some people find it tragic when writers’ last works are not completed. I find it inspiring. 

 

Is this an old Chinese saying or something that can be traced to Japanese samurai Miyamoto Musashi? “A man builds his house; then he dies.” My husband the Artist took it to mean that living meant working toward a goal, “building one’s house,” and that having finished the house down to the last perfect detail, there was nothing left to do but die. And so, the Artist’s thought continued, it was best to have many unfinished projects, goals to anticipate, and reasons to get up in the morning. Having finished all projects meant no more reason to live, as he saw it.

Unfinished, unsigned --

From time to time I wonder what people do with themselves when they retire, sell their houses, stop driving, and move to senior apartments. Some, I’m sure, remain socially active in their new environments, but what about life outside of socializing? What would I do if deprived of my housework, yard work, dog responsibilities, long walks and drives, travel, gardening and foraging, and my bookselling life? Reading and writing would remain, as long as my eyes and mind cooperated, and maybe I would even get more writing done—actually hold myself to a daily schedule! (There’s a concept, eh?) Physical tasks, though, have always been fruitful interludes during any big writing project (say, a doctoral dissertation) I’ve ever had. Washing dishes or raking leaves, shoveling snow or taking a long walk or drive—anything to jog the mind out of a rut, because getting away from a desk re-opens space for thoughts and words to find each other in the happy, cooperative way they can stubbornly refuse to do when a writer sits too long in one place. 

 

The Artist and I talked about taking a very long, meandering way home from Cochise County, Arizona, in the spring of 2022, driving north as far as the Badlands of South Dakota (he’d never seen my birth state) and then east to the Twin Cities of Minnesota (to visit kids and grandkids). He had in mind an experimental method for casting his wax sculptures and looked forward to trying that, also. A friend asked if he left unfinished paintings. Of course. But that’s just it. He went into the hospital that last time already looking forward to coming home and going on. He was living, not dying, until he died. For Harrison, life was writing poems, and so Jim, too, caught mid-poem, despite his acknowledged loneliness in the months following Linda’s death, was still living up to the end. 

 

“We must draw a lesson from this,” say the Chinese. What lesson do you draw? I say, don’t finish your house and call your life over. There is always more to do, and it’s good to keep living as long as you have breath.

 

 

Mailman Wisdom

When Stephen was laid off from a high-paying job as some kind of business consultant in the early days of the COVID epidemic, everyone else was laying off or being laid off, too, which is how Stephen found himself taking the test and training to become a rural mail carrier in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his home territory. Accustomed to feeling smart as well as being well paid, Stephen was overwhelmed by his new job and discouraged by mistakes. One day everything came to a head when he forgot that a house on his route was vacant, stuck his hand into the mailbox, and was attacked by hornets. “I can’t do this,” he tells a fellow carrier who has been helping him with the new route. Her advice is simple.

 

“…It’s like this for everybody. Just show up one more day. Just deliver the rest of this stuff and you’ll be done for today.”

 

“Okay.” 

 

“Don’t quit today.” 

 

-      Stephen Starring Grant, Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

 

 

A friend and I were talking about how difficult life can be, especially these days, what with aging (for us), and political division, and what feels to us like the tearing-down of the America that had been built during our lifetime, and we acknowledged how easy it can be to slip into depression and say, “I can’t do it!” We talked about how often people say, “Take one day at a time,” when there is, after all, no alternative! 

 

When I told her about the mail carrier saying, “Don’t quit today,” she liked it as much as I did. Really, “Take one day at a time” and “Don’t quit today” may look like the same advice, but don’t they feel different somehow? For me, when things look particularly gloomy, “Don’t quit today” is all I need to promise myself. Not quit today? I can do that! I’m not looking at a whole long string of “one day at a time” days, just this one day I’m in. Don’t quit today. All right!

 

(I don’t need to tell myself that every day or even most days. Most days are either neutral or brightened by what Dana Frost calls “forced joy,” or begin and end in downright deep gratitude. Once in a while there are spots of bliss. It’s just good to be able to pull out a mantra that works when you need it.)

Postage stamps are miniature works of art.

I found Mailman an inspiring book. In one early chapter, I feared the author was going to bog down in procedural minutia, but I waded through those pages and was glad I did, because knowing how much the job involves makes Grant’s livelier stories all that much more vivid, and without ever having worked for USPS, I can appreciate and identify with his feeling for the postal service. They don’t cherry-pick profitable routes! USPS delivers to everyone. In that regard, they are like public schools and similarly foundational to the social infrastructure of the United States.

 

Coming from a family of letter-writers, I absolutely love the United States Postal Service! Their service is priceless! But how many of us know how hard the work is, how efficiently it is managed at the over 40,000 local offices, and what a downright bargain it is compared to postal prices in other parts of the world? Thank you, Benjamin Franklin, and thank you, U.S. postal workers, past, present, and future!

 

And now, a little shameless self-promotion

 

First, I’ll boast on behalf of my village and say that Northport’s holiday-decorated tree is easily the most beautiful in the county. Of course, you know I am completely unbiased, right?

 

What I have on offer now at Dog Ears Books is a postcard featuring that beautiful tree (from 2024), and on the reverse side, where you put a postage stamp and address to someone you want to remember with a written message, are the words “Happy Holidays from Northport, Michigan!” 

I’m asking 94 cents a card, so that with tax it’s just a dollar, and I’m also selling a dozen cards for the price of ten: $9.40 + tax = $10. You may not send out hundreds of cards for the holidays, but there are surely a dozen people in your life whose hearts would be warmed to having a greeting from Northport. Anyway, I’m hoping that’s the case.

 

New Playground!

Now that snow is falling and piling up and drifting along our driveway and in the yard around the old farmhouse, once more we have periodic morning visits from a snowplow. Sunny finds it alarming to have a truck drive right into the yard, but the great part for her comes after the truck leaves, having cleared a big new playground for us! Room for the bouncy ball to bounce! Room for Sunny to run and leap after a Frisbee! Maybe that old snowplow isn’t such a bad thing, after all!

Goodbye, November. Hello, Winter!

Holiday greenery at home

The Sunday after Thanksgiving came with more snow than I had expected. We’d had so little with the predicted big storm on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by continued clear roads on Friday and Saturday, that I had grown complacent, and even when snow began falling and blowing on Saturday evening, I didn’t expect enough accumulation to to get in the way of a visit to the dog park. 

 

I was wrong. 

That’s okay. Sunny and I walked in deep snow close to home, which she found exciting, and then came indoors where I began a project for the day: turkey soup. We live a revisable life, my dog and I, with much improvisation amid the constants.

 

Soup begins here.

It was the last day of November. Hanukkah will begin at sundown on December 14. The official beginning of winter is December 21. Christmas comes on the 25^th, Kwanzaa on the 26^th, and then, the following week, the last day of the year. Meanwhile, on the last day of November, as I neared the last page of Wieseltier’s book on Kaddish (mentioned and quoted in my previous post), I came upon the author’s remarks on closure, an idea he finds a “ludicrous notion of emotional efficiency” and a very American delusion.

 

Americans really believe that the past is past. They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities. 

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

 

This accords with my own life experience, with what I love in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and with what I see across my country and around the world today. What do you make of these words?

 

The soul does not heal as the body heals, because the soul is improved, and even enchanted, by its wounds.

 

Improved? I need to think about that. I remember being surprised by a French mother’s concern that her young child’s fall would result in a small scar. Life, I thought then, as I still think today, is the accumulation of scars visible and invisible. I remember, as a child, being very proud of the slightest scar, happy to have been visibly marked by life, with my own personal, unique history inscribed on my skin.

 

Another:

 

…Nothing happens once and for all. It all visits, it all returns. But ‘closure’ says once and for all. This is a misunderstanding of subjectivity, which is essentially haunted.

 

Enchanted. Haunted. It all returns.

"Love returns always"

A friend asked me to recommend writers who have addressed the question of the meaning of life, and her request alarmed me. Countless people through the ages have written books on the subject, from the simplistic and maudlin to the impossibly sublime, but why would anyone take a writer’s word for the answer? Why would anyone take anyone else’s answer? How could they? 

 

I can see, of course, the value of considering what other people have said, but I replied that I don’t think there is a singular correct answer to the “Why?” question (“Why are we here?”) or some unique hidden meaning already given for all to find by diligent searching. This is not intended to be an answer, mind you: I am only stating my personal belief, which is that we find our own life’s meaning by making it, find something to live for by giving our life to it. We can live for God or for love, for art or literature or history, for birds or dogs or elephants — the list is endless. We may attempt to grow a perfect apple or ear of corn or write a perfect sentence or build a perfect bridge or simply do our best in whatever small corner we find ourselves. Why not multiple meanings? And maybe, even probably, what is most meaningful in one phase of life will be replaced or enlarged by something else later on. 

 

My friend asked another question: How should we live in the world? I feel on more solid footing with that query and hesitate only to put my answer clearly and briefly: 

 

Toward others (and oneself), practice compassion. Toward the natural world, practice curiosity and gentleness. Pay attention to all around you and be grateful.

 

But then, maybe this answer too is an answer for me and not for everyone? I don’t know. I only know that it has been many years since I first felt that paying attention was my #1 job in life. It is such a miracle, after all, to be alive. And surely part of the gratitude we owe for that miracle is awareness of it in as much detail as we can take in. 

 

(Not that we can ever be fully aware of everything every moment. As I sit tapping out these words, it is all too easy to forget the patient dog girl waiting for my attention. And do I even notice the tiny spider in the corner of a picture frame? But what is not the central focus of my awareness is still there, nearby and all around. I smell turkey broth simmering and dried apples rehydrating in cider, see lamplight falling on a bowl of fruit, hear the wind driving snow across the meadow, and I remember noticing, only an hour or two before, that the tall dry giant bluestem grass in the meadow is the same toasted gold color of the highest branches of the black willow trees along the no-name creek.)

Not only is life a gift, but it goes by quickly. Friends who married each other in their 70s, a new start late in life for both, acknowledged that they were entering the game in the fourth quarter but realized that the game wasn't over. A widowed friend recently took the plunge and brought a new puppy into her home. I cut small cedar branches for the house for Thanksgiving and on Friday got out my little Santa band. Where there's life, there's life!

 

Winter beginning on December 21? For me, this year, it began November 29. It is here now. 

Winter has arrived! Are you prepared?

Winter is all around us.

A friend of mine goes places in her car in winter in her indoor clothes, adding only a down vest. No gloves or mittens. No knitted cap. No heavy jacket. “I’m in the car!” she tells me. I ask her, “What if you had car trouble?” and she replies, “I would use my cell phone!” 

So wiper blades don't freeze to windshield overnight....

By contrast, I am not only layered up for driving but have an extra pair of work gloves with me in case I need to, say, open the hood—or get that shovel out of the back of the car to dig myself out of a snowbank—or whatever! Yes, I have a shovel with me. (No sandbags, but I figure I could use the car’s floormats, if necessary. Sandbags are very heavy.) Also engine oil, windshield wiper fluid, antifreeze, flashlight, and jumper cables. The bottle of drinking water, for myself and my dog, if she happens to be with me, has to come in the house overnight, or it would be just a bottle of ice, and who needs that in an emergency? (Note to self: Put blanket in car!) I take my clue from the old Tom Lehr song, “Be Prepared!”

 

On the evening of the day of his state funeral, I began reading Jimmy Carter’s memoir, Keeping Faith, about his years in the White House. I have had the book for several years but hadn’t read it because, while I have always loved Jimmy, I am usually bored by political memoirs. Too many big names, too many dates, generally not much that is personal, not much to give me insight into the writer’s personality and character. 

 

I’m happy to say that Carter’s book is very different. For one thing, he wrote it himself. It isn’t the work of a ghost writer. For another, he begins at the end, leading off with the most painful episode of his presidency, the hostage crisis. How many presidents would ever have done that? In the first pages of his memoir, he shows himself at his most vulnerable. And, of course, by then he has already lost his bid for re-election, so as the hostages are being released, he is onstage at the inauguration of his successor, Ronald Reagan. Hardly a moment of glory for Carter. But he had done the work, and the hostages were freed and came home alive.

 

He was never one to take shortcuts or “fake it,” in any of his life roles. He took the job of president of the United States seriously, writing of his preparation:  

 

From the beginning, I realized that my ability to govern well would depend upon my mastery of the extremely important issues I faced. I wanted to learn as much as possible…. (p. 57 of the Easton Press edition)

 

In his first campaign for the presidency, coming to national politics from the governorship of Georgia, Carter was so confident that he would win the White House that many called him overconfident. Yet he wrote that his “freedom to act and speak during the campaign was severely restrained by the same confidence.” What could that mean? How and why would confidence of victory restrain his freedom to act and speak? Precisely, again, because he took so seriously the job of president.

 

I ran as though I would have to govern—always careful about what I promised and determined not to betray those who gave me their support. Sometimes I irritated my opponents and the news reports by firmly refusing to answer to questions to which I did not know the answers. And repeatedly I told reporters, ‘If I ever lie to you, if I ever make a misleading statement, don’t vote for me. I would not deserve to be your president.’ Even during the earliest days I was always thinking about what would have to be done in the Oval Office after the inauguration ceremonies were over. (p. 65)

 

It drove reporters crazy that he would occasionally “I don’t know” to a question. What he needed to know, he worked to find out. What he couldn’t know ahead of time, he admitted. But always, as he campaigned for the highest office in the land, he prepared himself not only to win but to govern.

 

My life is ever so much simpler. I prepared for winter with snow tires, a new furnace, and a refill of my propane tank. Good thing, because in keeping with yo-yo weather patterns of recent months, our temperate winter weather over the holidays in northern Michigan has now given way to January temperatures in the ’teens, with single-digit wind chill (or “feels like”) readings. 

We have wind chill!

("When I was a kid," I used to tell my son, "we didn’t have wind chill!" That is, of course, we didn’t have a name for it. What would the word ‘rose’ name if there were no more roses?)

She doesn't mind snow or cold.

Dogs, though. A dog is like the legendary postman: Whatever the weather, out we go, and little does Sunny Juliet suspect how slight is her dog mom’s inclination for outdoor adventures in a punishing, sub-freezing northwest wind, sun perpetually hidden above low-hanging clouds of depressing gunmetal grey! I make my voice enthusiastic and let her watch me load my pocket with treats.... 

 

She doesn't mind at all.

Every day of our human lives, in one way or another, we are preparing for days to come, aren’t we? For me, Sunday was housework (an attempt to keep entropy at bay), Monday paperwork (getting ready for tax time), and Tuesday an early morning expedition, sans dog, to Leland to have a new (working) headlight installed, which gave me an opportunity while my car was at Van’s Garage to have coffee and breakfast in what was formerly the Early Bird (now Great Lakes Chocolate & Café) and to sit in the very corner where the Artist and I sat so many, many mornings in past years. 

View from the "bus driver's seat" --

The restaurant has not been the Early Bird for a long time, but after we moved from the village of Leland out to Leelanau Township in 2021, the Early Bird routine was no longer part of our lives, and more recent incarnations of the place never really registered on my radar. Anyway, the building has the same configuration, and the view from what the Artist used to call the “bus driver’s seat” (no booths now, but I hitched my chair around to face north) is pretty much the same. I should have been prepared for the flood of memories, but the emotions caught me off-guard. 

Then, home to books and dog! I am so lucky to have a warm, sheltering home and a lively, affectionate little companion! I still inhabit the life the Artist and I made together, and Wednesday will find me back in Northport, on Waukazoo Street, in my other little world, surrounded by books. 

Be prepared!

Voluptuous Winter Pleasures

Indoors, winter need not be monochrome.

Long Days, Long Trails

 

Though winter days be the shortest of the year, they often seem longest, when for days on end we see not the sun. –The voice of that sentence, although I am its author, is an echo of the long book that occupied my bedtime reading for a week, a novel written in the late 19^th century, its story set in the 15^th. But more of that anon!

 

Back to the present year, 2025, Sunny and I encountered a pair of interwoven coyote trails one recent January morning. I noticed that one animal of the pair had veered briefly from the straightaway to leave a circular path before returning to its mate’s side. What was the motivation for that detour? I could spot no clue.

Can you see the circle?

Closeup of tracks

We see—and Sunny Juliet scents—the trails of many neighbors in the snow this time of year. We discovered a wild turkey trail on Christmas Day. Deer, coyotes, squirrels, rabbits, mice, and more live near us all year ’round. It is in winter, though, that the paths they take appear most sharply to me, an eye-dependent explorer.

Her nose tells alerts her to secrets hidden in the snow.

What did you find, girl?

 

Long Creations and Events

 

Thinking how to ease into a discussion of long books, I considered other ways that life’s gifts are enriched by length of time spent on them. Long friendships came first to mind. Then long travels and long residences in particular places: an entire month spent in Paris on my first trip to France; the months the Artist and I spent in our rented mountain cabin in an Arizona ghost town for several winters; past years in Kalamazoo and recent decades in Leelanau. For me there was one year, beginning in January, when I spent an hour each week sitting outdoors in one place, with only a sketchbook in which to make occasional notes, the object being awareness of everything around me in the natural world. Not rushing from one encounter to another or one place to another but immersing oneself over time: That is the common thread, also to be found in reading a long book.

The Artist had a gift for friendship!

Long, Slow Books

 

Are long books also always slow books? Maybe others have thoughts on this question. I do think the long book generally invites slow reading. When I first came across The Flowering of New England, by Van Wyck Brooks, earliest (I believe) of his volumes of American literary history, it seemed to take forever to get underway, and for a while I was impatient at his slow setting of the stage, until finally it dawned on me that this was not mere introduction but the overall pace of the book, and my reading spirit slowed to an almost voluptuous pace as the author carried me back in time. Delicious!

When a friend wanted me to read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, at over a thousand pages, I quailed at the prospect. “Just read the first hundred pages,” she urged. I was thoroughly hooked long before that, and while I thought the novel would last me a complete summer, the month of June saw me from start to finish. Still, an entire month! At that pace, my year’s reading list would be very short! But the aim of a list is not to make it as long as possible, only to keep a record. (Note: I do wish Seth would make good on his promise of a sequel to that story, and I would happily give it a month or even an entire season!)

 

Book lovers of the long and the slow can hardly omit Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, though I admit I have read and re-read only the first and last volumes of that monumental work. The first volume alone constitutes a long book, not to be hurried through. Proust took pages to describe the angle of light coming through a window, a description which, like descriptions of hand-to-hand fighting in books of swashbuckling adventure, take much more time to put into words than the incidents would take in living time. 

 

But that’s just the point. We’re not in a hurry. We are giving ourselves time! Delicious! And while I read A Suitable Boy in June, winter is the more obvious season for a long, slow book.

 

A Forgotten Classic

 

And now I come back to the sheep I left grazing in the first paragraph of this post. 

 

Describing Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth is a tall order. It is a love story; a tale of innocence lost and redemption found; an epic of the road and a “buddy movie” on printed pages. It is an exposé of the absurdities of war and religion, as well as an encomium for true bravery and piety; a tale of danger and adventure, with cliff-hanger episodes; and a soap opera of characters we come to know better and better as we progress with them through time and their lives’ changes. How likely is it that the hired assassin would be the husband and father of the woman and child the intended victim saved from death in a storm at sea? How believable that the masked woman seeking to wash the wandering friar’s feet as an act of penitence for her sins would be the woman who hired the assassin to kill this very man? In all of Europe, throughout all the countries encompassed by this meandering, melodramatic tale, a small cast of characters intersect again and again, as in a television soap opera—or, truly, in the stories of Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens—but a reader accepts these amazing coincidences, as we do in Hugo or Dickens, realizing that the meetings are integral to the story being woven, a story in which every page draws us further in. We as readers find ourselves deeply invested in these people and their conflicts. 

 

The single illustration in the Modern Library edition.

What do you think of Chaucer? Maybe find his language difficult? Reade’s on-the-road chapters are written in English close enough to our own that they are much easier to read, with plenty of adventure, danger, violence, humor, and vivid characters that make the Middle Ages seem not so very different from our own times, though there is a strong flavor of Canterbury Tales, as well as echoes of Don Quixote. 

 

I would say more and urge all my friends to seek out this novel, but I realize that an 1880s bestseller, set in the 15^th century, has tough competition with so many new books—and worthy, too!—coming out continuously in our own times. I do, however, recommend it, along with Proust, along with Vikram Seth, along with Van Wyck Brooks, Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, and others. While blustery winds blow, you can give yourself a travel vacation without leaving home.

"Except for outdoor adventures, right?"

Books to Own

 

My last post contained a paragraph on libraries, with the admission that one need not always buy a book in order to read it, and yet all of us who are lifetime readers surely have a few books that we must own. The list may be short or long and would vary from person to person and household to household. In our home, the Artist and I always had more than one copy of Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, along with its human equivalent, Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat. I had my Proust, of course, and the Artist his Painting Nature’s Quiet Places, by Thomas Aquinas Daly. Jane Austen and Jim Harrison share shelf space in our home. How many copies of Malabar Farm have I bought and given away? The Artist loved to read Machiavelli but also the Tao Te Ching. In the last weeks of his life, I had finally persuaded him to read The Little Prince, and as he lay unconscious in the hospital I read aloud to him from one of his lifetime favorites, The Count of Monte Cristo.

 

One reading corner in our old farmhouse

My personal copy of The Cloister and the Hearth, Modern Library edition, will not be offered for sale in my shop. Text block having parted company completely with binding boards, the book came home with me because of that condition, an orphan I could neither sell nor discard, and I am so glad that it did! The condition was another feature that suited it for life in the slow reading lane and led me to begin reading it at last. After all, Modern Library—how could it not be worth my time?

 

Rubber band holds cover to text block on this orphan volume.

Are you immersed in a long book yet this winter? Maybe instead, several of moderate length? What books call your name when the temperature remains stubbornly below the freezing mark for days on end?

 

For my thoughts on the state funeral of former President Jimmy Carter, visit one of my other of my blogs. Thank you for taking this time with me today.

The book I began reading Thursday evening