restingmotion

Readings past...

The best intentions.....

 

I have read three books already in 2020 and yesterday I spent some time catching up with my reading notes.  I had been remiss concerning this task and I realized the omission felt significant.  So too the missing book posts, and although I have decided to forgo catch-up blogging in general, this remains the exception: the one case in which I cannot move forward without first looking backward.  The books I read always end up informing my thoughts, past reading informing future reading, the way our experiences, all our experiences, and all our acquaintances end up informing and shaping the people we are.   The books I read can become either acquaintances of friends, certainly the books I keep become friends, and I think sometimes we humans are simultaneously too narrow and too broad in the way we define friendship.  As to books, I am reminded this morning of this quote from William Churchill:

If you cannot read all your books at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them — peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are.  Let them be your friends;  let them at any rate be your acquaintances.

               William Manchester: The Last Lion: Visions of Glory. page 31.

I hear Churchill’s voice in the quote, a voice that is familiar to all of us with a penchant for history at least, and it was a sweet discovery earlier this week, as my own view toward books is quite similar.  I have begun the task of rereading the first two volumes of The Last Lion in the coming months, mostly as a refresher and prologue to the third volume, which I own but have not yet read.  

 

But today I must deal with housekeeping.  Beginning with November and working may way through to books read in December, I hope to finish up the 2019 reading list over the course of the next week or two.  Notes or thoughts arising from current reading may, or may not be interleaved, depending on the whims of the muse.

 

Books that were just ok to good.

I have long loved Lee Child’s Reacher series, and of course I read the newest installment, Blue Moon.  As usual, Child has an ability to capture, in spare but haunting words, the forgotten places, the places we don’t really think about, the places we ignore.  This quote, from the opening lines of Blue Moon sticks with me, for all of its simplicity, reminding me of a lifelong fascination with maps, and with dreamy wonderings and imaginings of life, not just in exotic locales, but the places we both see and do not see.

 

The city looked like a small map of America. It was just a tiny polite dot, near a red threadlike road that ran across an otherwise empty half inch of paper.  But up close and on the ground it had half a million people. It covered more than a hundred square miles. . .

 

Alas, that was the most memorable part of this book for me.  As usual the storytelling was excellent but the body count got to me and aspects of the story seemed weak, geared more to provoking thrills or outrage rather than a coherent story. Alas, my own outrage was aimed more at the author than the injustices portrayed. I will read the next one and see if this development is the exception or a trend.

 

Allison Pittman’s Loving Luther was an engaging, easy-going, and entertaining read that placed no demands upon the reader. Told from the perspective of Katharina von Bora, the first half of the book, which revolved around Katharina’s life in the convent before she met Luther, was more engaging than the second half, which seemed to be trying too hard to turn the story into a conventional romance.  Sometimes, light bits of fluff like this are just the thing, temporary amusements.

 

Likewise, Stephen King’s Elevation.  I picked this up in an airport bookstall while I was waiting for a short, one-hour flight.  It was the perfect entertainment at the end of a long day, and perfect for the duration of the flight.  It is very well written, which is not at all surprising, and sweet; a different perspective from the kind of dark psychological exploration that we tend to expect from King. This novella is a rather pointed look at the kinds of issues that fill contemporary newscasts, but it is also a story of letting go of the things that weigh one down. In fact this dichotomy encapsulates its power. Although I have been accused too often of being cynical, I perhaps am also too easily satisfied by simple hopeful things. In retrospect the memory of this book has grown on me, and although I think the book may be dismissed as simple pandering to cultural unrest, or even blind hopefulness, it is actually a bit more than that.  It has snuck up on me perhaps.

 

Last, in today’s discussion, but far from least, Marty Makary’s book, The Price We Pay, is about how the commodification of medicine has broken the health care system.  It is a good book that I think more people should read.  

 

Makary starts with stories, stories that are at times shocking, and then moves from there to the data behind those stories.  This is where the strength of this book lies, in the naming and the call to action.  Makary admits that he has been, through much of his career, ignorant of these very forces, forces that have created an unwinable game, despite the fact that he works from deep within the system.  And yet it is this very fact, the fact that he is in the middle of the system, that has allowed him to reveal some of the inner workings, inner workings that appall him as much as they will outrage the reader.

 

The book is well-written and clear, and Makary takes the time not merely to expose the problems but to honor agents of change.   Makary’s suggestions for fixing the problem are not enough, in and of themselves, but i agree with him that the first step toward healing is in the naming.

 

 

And it feels as if I have written more than enough for one post, even though I have discussed merely a third of the twelve books I read in November.  This project may take more than a week, but I will get through it.  Until next time....

 

 

 

 

What I Did Over My Christmas Vacation

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  And it felt wonderful.

 

That statement is, in fact, a bit of an exaggeration. I spent whole days knitting, well maybe 6 or 8 hours of a day. I think that counts.  I reported that I had finished a sock, the second one of a pair.  I have worn them frequently since.  But I also spent a lot of time knitting my cozy, oversized, pink cardigan, a cardigan I dearly hope to finish and wear before the relatively short Knoxville winter comes to an end.  Of course it may also work as a spring sweater as cool evenings and mornings often extend well into the Knoxville spring. Whether late frosts are actually a part of spring or an extension of winter seems to be semantically contentious here, although I do not think that the seasons are determined by temperature alone. 

 

But I digress.  As you can see, I was doing something. I finished the back and one front of this long sweater.  The other front, the sleeves, assembly, and a knitted-on cowl remain.  But this is where the something/nothing debate becomes important. I live in a culture where we admire people who do handwork, admire craft, music, art, but which also thinks of this activity as outside of the “normal” or “productive” part of life and culture. Increasingly think the opposite is true.  It is the making and the makers that are truly living and the rest of the world that is spinning its wheels on a little hamster-wheel of our own creation.  But this is not supposed to be a philosophical post.

What I really did not do was keep up with email, facebook, instagram, or social media in most forms.  I could go whole days without connecting to the inter webs and it felt good.  I saw people individually and socially, but otherwise I explored skills, skills that need significant amount of sharpening before I can achieve that happy place where idea and muscle memory join forces, where the idea is the spark, and one’s collection of tools (skills), as well as one’s ability to get out of one’s own way, can allow art to occur.  I think this tool-building stage of life will take some time.

I did try my hand at some sewing, with mixed results. I made a pair of black silk evening pants which are quite wearable but which do not really live up to my former standards.  There is a good bit of “happy hands at home” imperfection to the finished product.  

 

I could have started with something easier and more practical.  But I have never been one to take the measured, practical path. I had despaired of the fact that all my clothes were casual.  I desperately wanted something dressy, hence the idea of evening pants; but it was a project was both perfect and foolhardy.  Sewing silk, and silk chiffon is tricky under the best of circumstances, and I was starting with two deficits in that I neither had a well-fitting pant pattern or much in terms of recent sewing practice.  Still, I managed to make the pants and the construction is decent, if not couture quality.  I simply served the edges and did not bother making french seams.  The problem came with the tiny hems.  In fact I initially hoped to wear these pants to a Christmas party, but did not because I couldn’t manage the hems.  My plan, and a perfectly logical one at that, was to put the pants aside until after the holiday, when I would make the narrow hems by hand.  I am much more confident of my hand-sewing at the moment than my machine sewing.  But the many edges to be turned under meant that I had several days of hemming ahead of me, so no party pants for the party season.

 

And then, on December 30th my foolish little inner demon reared her head. I decided I could wear the pants to a New Year’s Even party.  There was not enough time for hand-hemming. so I just dove in, figuring that wearing something, and something I made, even if it was finished badly, was more appealing than not trying at all.  

I worked in a variation on the normal procedure, doing the hems first, and then the side seams on the open chiffon panels, reasoning that the hems, being near the floor, would be less visibly wonky to others than the side seams.  That worked.  My hems look like a first year home-ec student did the sewing, but the narrow hems at the sides of the chiffon panels looked good, and I was happy wearing the pants, feeling festive and swishy.  I paired the pants with a sweater I had finished a year ago, and not yet worn, knit in Artyarns Beaded Silk and Sequins and Merino Cloud. And yes, a bathroom selfie seems to be the best I can manage at the moment.

Also shown in this post are two photos of the bowl I made at the “pottery indulgence” workshop I attended, and wrote about, in November.  It too is a bit rustic and far from perfect.  In fact I think if I can learn to celebrate anything, I hope to celebrate the fruits of the process of making, imperfections and all.  But then, I have always felt it is our imperfections that make us human, and therefore lovable. 

 

 

Winter Solstice

December slips away, a time of busyness and reflection, of preparation, of waiting, of darkness and promise.  Despite the fact that East Tennessee autumns are not as appealing as Hudson Valley autumns were, this time of year remains my favorite season.  December, the culmination of that process of winding down, of preparing for darkness, for hibernation, for pulling inward to the center, is waning.  Advent as well, the Christian period of waiting, of preparation, reminding us of the necessity of dark passages in life, of the necessity of rest, necessary sustenance to fuel the light. The solstice occurs tonight. 

My new trees were planted Thursday.  Even though they currently just look like sticks in a bare landscape, they are filled with promise.

 

Winter begins.

 

I too have been slowing down.  It strikes me that I am increasingly out of sync with the cultural mania surrounding this season in particular.  It is not that I don’t love parties, baking cookies, wrapping gifts, time with friends — all of that is a joy but only in so far as it doesn’t get wrapped up in the tangled threads of obligation.

 

The first part of December was extraordinarily busy.  Intentionally then, I have left the end of the month fairly lightly scheduled.  Even so, I have been a flake, missed appointments, cancelled obligations that felt more burden than joy, taken long naps.  

 

But this too is part of this preparatory season.  Much of what is important to me had been laid aside.  This is my time of burrowing.

 

I cooked for the first time in weeks, making a Franco-Vietnamese beef stew from Andrea Nguyen, a dish that had once been a winter staple, but which I had temporarily forgotten about in all the hubbub over moving (again and again), construction, and settling.  A little baking may have also occurred.

I spent most of Tuesday knitting a sock, the second of a pair, the sock I had ripped out before Thanksgiving, but had not yet begun again.  Knitting from the top down, I got through the turn of the heel on Tuesday, perhaps staying up a tad past my preferred bedtime.  Wednesday offered less time for knitting, and a little less ability to focus due to lack of sleep, so I finished up the toe early Thursday morning before heading off to the gym.  Above is the completed pair, on the library carpet, just after closing the toe and before washing and blocking.  The lines of slight laddering, from the divisions of my four double-pointed needles, have settled into the fabric now, and are no longer visible.  I have tried other sock knitting techniques, magic loop, two circulars, even tiny little circulars, which I find difficult, but I keep returning to double points.

 

I wore the socks yesterday with ankle boots and rolled up jeans.  I loved the slightly longer length, loved wearing new socks, socks I made.  I believe these are my Christmas gift to myself.  Or perhaps the gift is actually just this act of settling, of letting myself delve into process and just do whatever it is I am inspired to do.

 

No promises here.  I shall write when the inspiration strikes.  In the meantime I hope the waning of the year offers time with family and friends, times of love and warmth, but also times of quiet contemplation and burrowing-in. Our inner selves are the soil that feeds our lives.  We need to give them time for nourishment.

 

Family Week

Spent a great Thanksgiving week in San Antonio.

 

The impetus for the trip was my aunt’s 89th birthday and it was a lovely celebration indeed.

But I also had time to walk along San Antonio’s River Walk and spend time with both of my brothers and their families.  

 

I was back in Knoxville on Sunday; the first Sunday of the month is Altar Guild Sunday, at least for my team.  It was the first Sunday of advent, the anniversary of my uncle’s death, and the kirkin’ o’ the tartans.  Somehow I think Uncle Ted would have loved that. I sponsored the advent greenery, and although I played no role in the selection, I think it was perfect.

It amazes me sometimes how things sometimes all fall into place in unexpected, and unexpectedly perfect, ways.

Another Catch Up Post

Still working on the backlog, reading wise, with the hopes of finishing up the September inventory here.   My reading was rather random, with no apparent themes, so I think a simple list will get the job done.

I started the month with Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians and read the entire series of three books over the course of the month, mostly while riding an exercise bike at the gym.  The series was perfect bicycle reading, and a perfect escape.  I thought the first novel was good but I struggled with the second, China Rich Girlfriend.  The book felt rushed to me and the story was not as strong.  I was also annoyed by the tendency to footnote everything, as if the book was trying too hard, taking itself too seriously.  The asides (still annoying) continued in the third volume, Rich People Problems, but I felt the story line was the strongest of the three, and the book was therefore much more enjoyable.

Other Books:

10 Minutes, 38 Seconds In This Strange World. Elif Shafak.  I wrote about this pretty fabulous novel in my post last Friday.  

 

Why Dad’s Leave: Insights and Resources for When Partners Become Parents.  Meryn G. Calendar.  This seemed to make sense and had some thought-provoking ideas but I found it very repetitive and at times circular. It might or might not be useful to people in the field, and I don’t have the expertise to judge.  Although I don’t mind having read it, much of it seemed like common sense, or like it should be common sense, but perhaps is not.  Or I am completely out of my depth.

 

Gypsy and Other Poems.  James Baldwin.  Powerful.  Beautiful. Haunting.

 

Tributary: Poems. Cid Corman.  I’ve had this book a long time and I reread it as I was organizing the library shelves.  When I first bought the book I loved the poems but knew nothing about Beauford Delaney.  Now I live in Knoxville, Delaney’s hometown, and I was struck by the photos of Delaney’s paintings in the front of the book.  Even in my youth I thought the poems themselves captured something essential about art. I still think this, and perhaps find the poems even more expressive of the artistic moment than my younger self knew.

 

A Better Man.  Louise Penny.  Sigh.  I shut the door and plowed through this, forcing myself to pause only for necessities.  Call me a fan.

 

Ordinary Light. Tracy K. Smith.  Smith’s memoir of her childhood describes what is essentially a perfectly normal life. That is its strength, and the source of its beauty.  One of Smith’s talents is in capturing the ordinariness of experience and sussing out the light within, showing that it is the very ordinary itself that is truly extraordinary.  

 

Bottle of Lies. Katherine Eban. An expose of the dark underbelly of the global generic pharmaceuticals industry, as well as a good story of the politics, compromises, and cognitive dissonance that is necessary to run the current US system.  I found it upsetting.  Haven’t yet researched sources. Also mentioned previously, but not in detail.

 

 

Weekend Update: Socks, Playing with Clay, Music

I ripped the sock back on Saturday, ripped it back to about an inch and a half from the ribbing at the top.  I knew I had dropped a stitch, and was holding it with a marker.  But at some point after the heel I discovered that I had dropped another stitch on the foot, and a I tinked back I also discovered that there were other errors.  I am not a perfectionist.  One error I can live with, but this was too many.  

 

The sock is not done.  But I will be much happier with it, having accepted my mistakes and started over.

Saturday night I went to a “Pottery Indulgence” party/workshop at Arrowmont School of Craft in nearby Gatlinburg.  I had never made anything out of clay before, I was a bit nervous, and my bowl is a bit rough, but I had a lot of fun.

First we played with texture on a sample slab, then we applied the texture and cut out our bowl shape, refining the edges, smoothing and beveling, and finally folding it up and forming it into a bowl.  I had a little trouble with the seams, but I got them together.  My thumb, index and middle fingers are the ones most plagued by arthritis, but I managed.    Somehow, while I was trying to form my bowl without simultaneously deform it, I was reminded of childhood, of making mud pies with my friend Ginny, and the perfect little turkeys she would mold from the mud.  

Perhaps I am not a natural at clay.  But I would like to play some more. The “handles” on my bowl were a last-minute whim.  I had planned to leave the top plain, but then started drawing free-form leaf shapes in my practice clay.  They may be the best thing I did.  They may prove to be a disaster.  As you can tell, it was time to walk away.

 

Friday night was symphony night, and I took the family.  Grandson O is very interested in percussion, and one of the works on the program was a fabulous percussion concerto, Spices, Perfumes, Toxins! by Avner Dorman.  The percussionists were two members of Nief Norf, a contemporary music group based in Knoxville (which I adore), Andrew Bliss and Mike Truesdell.   The performance was energetic and dynamic, a conversation really between these fabulous musicians and the orchestra itself, almost a marathon given the huge number of percussion instruments the two men played, including marimbas, vibraphones, tom-toms, bells, bongos, drum sets and things I can’t identify.  They brought both power and subtlety to the performance: from the complex tapestry of sounds that was the first movement (spices), through the often delicate lyricism of the middle section and into the dynamic combativeness and melding together of the closing, feeling very redolent of the complexities of modern life.  I was awed, amazed and enlightened.

 

The concert ended with Beethoven’s 7th symphony, a piece that revolves more around rhythmic passages than around complex melodies, and it was heavenly, perhaps the finest Beethoven I have heard this orchestra perform.  It seems that I am becoming boringly repetitive in that I keep saying that the orchestra has never sounded better, and they haven’t.  It is true.  The performance was held lightly, buoyant even, the orchestra seeming to achieve a kind of relational nuance that I tend to associate with fine chamber groups, even if on a larger scale.  The music was crisp, conversational, happy even, as tensions that arose and resolved, like an evening spent with the best of friends.  As I sat listening, my fingers and toes dancing to the music, O’s head resting on my shoulder, I could think of few things more magical.

A Friday Five

Look!  Dare I say I might actually complete a post on a Friday? 

 

This post will be but a simple thing, and probably a bit fragmented, but the “five things Friday” format seems to be a good starting place, as I pull myself back into regular postings, balancing of the simple and the day to day with the wider ruminations of my meandering mind.  Perhaps acceptance is also key: acceptance that I am one of those people who are restless of mind; one of those people who always dreams of doing more; one of those people who is never bored.  I live in a world define by the concept of a week. Even though the pacing of my own time is somewhat more fluid, I still begin each week filled with grand plans of everything that will be done by weeks’ end, and, somehow, I still fall short of my own goals.   

 

So, where are we this week?

 

 

Poinsettias:  I attended a workshop/demonstration at Stanley’s Greenhouse, focused on holiday arrangements.  The event was inspiring and although I have never considered arrangements to be one of my gifts, I found myself excited by possibilities.  I was also inspired by the variety of Poinsettieas that were filling the greenhouse, especially the variegated variety shown above.  Apparently I have given poinsettieas short shrift, a situation that may need to change.  But first, Thanksgiving travel, and the opening of the Christmas boxes, newly out of storage.

 

 

Pickled Ginger:  I opened the first of three pint-sized jars of pickled ginger I put up in October.  Oh my!  It is good.  It is the best pickled ginger I have ever tasted.  Not jut something pretty and a bit sharp/sweet on the plate.  This ginger is something I want to use in its own right.  I got a little overwhelmed the week I put this up, and it is not particularly evenly sliced, not as decorative as it perhaps could have been, but the flavor is superb.  I added it to an impromptu stir-fry of chicken and bell peppers, and it elevated the dish to something special.  Now, despite the fact that I initially worried that I would never use three pints of pickled ginger, I am worried that I will run out before I can make more.

 

 

A Book:  Recently it seems that my reading is somewhat circular meaning that as I read each new book I find myself circling back to books I have read before, mostly recent reads, but often books deeply filed away in the interstices of my reading memory.  And so it was this week, when I was reading a new book by my friend Rob Gieselmann, Irony and Jesus,  that I encountered this statement:

How many times have I sunk in water because I could see surf and gale only, having lost sight of the other side.

And, a few lines later, “go to the other side”.  Such a simple thing and often also such a difficult task.  In this instance these words also provided a spark of insight, a coalescence of sorts, about how to write about Deborah Levy’s new novel The Man Who Saw Everything, a book I finished reading last week.  In this novel Saul Adler is attempting to cross Abbey Road.  It sounds like such a simple and inconsequential thing, and in one sense it is, but as the novel progresses we learn that nothing in this short novel is what it seems. Truly. Nothing.  What seems inconsequential proves full of weight, and what should be full of weight almost vanishes in the ether.  

 

I am in one sense torn here.  I believe The Man Who Saw Everything to be an incredibly beautiful and powerful novel, one that I find both essential and impossible.  It is a novel I recognize that many people will not be able to stand.  Truly the story itself is simple, straightforward and a bit boring.  But the novel is not about the story.  And I cannot tell you what the novel is about without disrupting, even perhaps aborting your experience of the novel.  It is, actually a novel whose meaning and interpretation is multi-layered, and that in and of itself is a marvelous feat of writing and design.  At the moment I see a novel about fragmentation, about who we are, how we become the people we become, but also about chance, distraction, care and carelessness, and about the possibility and impossibility of memory.  Our memories shape who we are, but who we are today also shapes our memory.

 

 

Another Book:  And this of course sent me back to another book, a book I read in September (I still haven’t caught up with September books).  This book is also about memory, or, more exactly, Shafak uses memory as a vehicle to tell the story of a life:  the life of a woman, the life of a town, a country, a culture.  This is a poetic novel, a turbulent novel, a novel that could seem overwhelmingly bleak except that it is not. It is a novel filled with beauty and hope. Shafak’s poetic way of setting a scene, of describing a place, made this reader feel palpably present. Beautiful, powerful, touching, absurd.  It is a novel about Turkey.  It is a novel about women. In fact it is a novel about all of humanity, its joys and its tragedy, captured, if only for a moment.

 

 

A Sock:  After a brief interlude where I worked on other projects, I have returned to sock knitting.  Necessity called.  I do need another pair of socks, and although it would be easy enough to buy such a thing, I prefer the ones that are knit by hand, simultaneously luxurious and practical.  I turned the heel on the second sock last night, perhaps staying up a little later than I should to be sure if was finished.  It is now smooth sailing to the end.  Hopefully it will be finished this busy weekend, but then of late it seems all weekends are busy.  Hopefully it will be finished and blocking before I embark on Thanksgiving travel, ready and waiting for me upon my return.

Meandering and Twisting....Sometimes In Slow Circles

A meandering path:

I unearthed the leaf blower from the bowels of the basement last week.  Then I proceeded to blow all the leaves onto the flower beds, thinking the added organic matter and acidity would be useful in  the newly added heavy alkaline clay soil.  Shortly after I did that, a landscape crew came in and started to blow all the leaves off the beds and up to the street.  

 

Enter screaming banshee white woman yelling “No! No! Stop! Put them back!” Yes that was me.  I understand, intellectually anyway.  I had been a previous client.  Why not try to help and assume the client will be happy to return to the fold?  Ahh.  No.  Protect me from people trying to help.  Nothing is wrong with help.  But it needs to start from the same frame of reference.

 

The rest of the week may be a slow week.  I pulled my back doing something minor, and foolish, a lift and twist move — the kind of thing we all do without thinking but which we really aren’t supposed to do at all. I am having a bit of trouble moving around.  Or I move well, once I get started... until I don’t.  Short walks are called for, many short walks, which will hopefully lengthen over the next few days.  I don’t know if I can afford the slowness and yet at the same time I cannot afford to not take the time.  

 

And so it seems my walkway is not the only thing that meanders.  Life meanders as well, sometimes in convoluted twisty ways that we never anticipate.  But so many of the our goals and deadlines, the things we twist ourselves up over, aren’t really what we are supposed to be working toward at all.  The goal of life isn’t the next party, the promotion, the next job.  Sometimes we forget that we are really just trying to cross the street.  

 

 

Finding My Way Home

How does the world get away from me?  I did in fact plan to write another blog post last week, and then, poof, like a puff of smoke, the opportunity was gone.   Does it matter?  Of that I am not yet certain.  I know that my mind is still fragmented, working on little things, and even though those small details all add up to something cohesive, it often feels like cohesiveness itself eludes me.

 

And then without warning, something falls into place. In my life, realization seems to occur after the fact.  I turn around and wonder how it happened that whatever unrest I was holding onto dissipated before I realized that my fists were tightly clenched on nothing but air.

Let’s look backward, just a little. The photo above was taken, and posted on Instagram, last Wednesday, the morning after the snow, and I was at the gym, suddenly fascinated by the small eddies of fog rolling across the water.  The pattern of fog made me feel at home.  In one sense then, I could say it reminded me of my time in New York State, of the fog on the Hudson, although the geology of the landscape, the rivers, and the fog itself are very different.  But that is not it either.  It wasn’t that long ago that I still felt like Hyde Park was still home, like I had left home, and not fully settled in this new place, even though I had been here a few years.  The patterns of the fog in the trees one morning, a different morning, the patterns of the fog on the water, all of these helped to remind me that this is home now, that I am home, despite the fact that I still struggle on occasion.

 

But I also realize that we all struggle on occasion, struggle with wanting something we don’t quite have, or can’t quite put our finger on.  Perhaps this sense of struggle is universal, part of the human struggle, the struggle between our dual needs for safety and creativity, the very thing that makes us human.  Homo Sapiens Sapiens.  The species that thinks and knows it thinks.  

 

Perhaps this kind of struggle is endemic to people who move, who are willing to uproot themselves.  I could argue that statistically this would apply to most of humanity.  We were originally a migratory species.  Even in recent history, specifically American history, the majority of Americans uprooted and moved during their lifetimes, separating themselves from friends and family in search of something better.  It always strikes me as odd that, in this day and age when we can travel further, and more comfortably, when we have so much, that we are, in broad patterns again, living in the times of the least mobility, at least in terms of physical mobility. Let us not leap into excited discussion of interpretations and implication.

I do realize that no one really moves without a reason, sometimes overt, often covert.  We are not particularly good at looking inward, we are not even certain, at least in any conscious way, of what we are looking for. Understanding often comes after the fact.  

 

Moving is hard.  Uprooting ourselves is hard.  It is easier when you have a purpose that takes up your energy — a new job perhaps — but even then, I wonder if the focus on the job or the career can act as a pacifier as well, a way of distracting the mind so that one doesn’t really acclimate to one’s new environment.  Is it possible to keep bouncing around, constantly looking for home, never realizing that what your are actually looking for has been there all along, elusively under the surface?

 

The roses above are from a floral arrangement, a centerpiece at a luncheon.  I love the color, and also love that they reminded me that I need, when planning my garden, to not be singleminded and single-noted, to allow for complexity and surprise.  All my cool greens and blues and violets, need a touch of orange or yellow to bring them to life. Perhaps this applies to my life as well, this need to be less single-minded.  

Also, as I sit here, I realize that one does not actually have to leave a place to lose one’s home.  It happens all the time.  A loss, a betrayal, grand or small, it is no one else’s place to judge what hurts us, and what had previously felt like home can feel like a scam, a myth, itself a betrayal even though the betrayal had nothing to do with the place. Our immediate response is twofold — run and hide, or deny, sometimes both.  But as soon as we do either, we have already built another wall. Sometimes, it seems, a big move can be emotional or psychological even though the place remains the same.

 

We humans are complex creatures.  Things break.  We glue them back together.  We hold too tightly, not wanting things to change, forgetting that we change every day as easily as we slough off dead skin cells.  That the only way for things to remain safe, to offer some semblance of continuity, is to allow, even embrace change, to adapt to the things we do not like and do not want, because they will always be with us anyway.  If we run to avoid the unpleasant, we simply encounter a different unpleasantness.

 

We need boundaries of course, but how do we build boundaries without building walls?  How do we learn to keep our fences low, to protect our own inner spaces while still allowing, ourselves to grow — not merely ourselves as individuals, but our worlds, our homes, as a symbiosis of which we are an integral part?  Home can only be home when we engage with it.  We can only be home when we allow the place to feed us as we feed the place.  

Reading Review — October (More or Less)

I was sitting in front of a fire, drinking a glass of wine with a friend and chatting, thinking how nice it would be to curl up with a book in front of the fire....

 

Alas.  I had other things to do, and was struggling with my current novel. I remembered, however,  that I hadn’t written a book post since September, when I had attempted a marathon catching-up. I am still behind, but rather than delve into another huge post, I am going to start with October, which is easier in a way, because I only finished four books.

 

There were several reasons for this:  travel, stress, perhaps a touch of depression, but also some good things.  I am increasingly more interested in diving deeper into whatever I am doing, letting time slip away. This means that for now my reading is slowing down, becoming more reflective and conversational even.  Perhaps I am simultaneously reading and rereading. Life is not a contest after all, although for me sometimes my biggest struggle is accepting that, letting go of behaviors that were once adaptive but have become maladaptive, preventing me from being the best person I can be, according to my own understanding of what that entails.

 

And so on to the books — except that somehow my reading and my understanding is not all that straightforward:

 

Devil In the White City was the first book I finished, although not the first book I started.  I had read it years ago, was rereading it for a book club, and found myself fascinated by the juxtaposition of the stories.  And it is a book about two stories, stories that happen to take place in the same place at the same time but seem unrelated. Or are they?  I saw a lot here:  the rise of industrialism and the dream of a shiny future; a book about opportunism but also about the not so pretty underside of opportunism; a book about dreams and hopes for but also a book about how our dreams can blind us.  I kept turning back to David Graeber’s book Debt, and to David Brooks’ books The Road to Character and The Second Mountain, which I was reading simultaneously (and savoring slowly, not finishing until this month).  

 

I am not sure that Erik Larson pulled off that grand sense of connection, but the book still haunts me, haunted me through the reading of Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, which I also read slowly, beginning in September and continuing throughout October,  savoring every morsel. Reading and rereading. Sometimes I would put it aside confused by a reference that seemed just beyond my ken, until the meaning hit me and I was back.  The book is fun, smart, witty, terrifying and sometime deliciously sarcastic.   But it is also thought-provoking and filled with challenges. Rushdie puts his own spin on modern life, mixing our obsessions with surfaces, our yearnings for depths despite our inability to hold on to them.  In some ways he is exploring the same malaise as  Graeber and Brooks, Larson as well, although less obviously so.

 

Quichotte also came uncomfortably close to Katherine Eban’s revelations about fraud in the generic drug industry in Bottle of Lies, which I had just finished at the end of September.  He was referencing a different case, one I had forgotten, but I remained unsettled, and perhaps felt the boundaries of my own bubbles pushing in a little more closely than I might prefer.

 

 

 

All of these books explore uncomfortable truths, our ongoing struggles with cognitive dissonance and the kind of moral dishonesty it inculcates, despite our best, and mostly well-meaning intentions.  This is the same kind of moral dishonesty that was also painfully evident in the portrait of the lives of free blacks in the movie Harriet. Necessary, probably yes, at least for free slaves in the south, but what may be adaptive and necessary in one setting can become blindness, self-justification and maladaptive in others.

 

The other two books played perhaps a smaller role in my thoughts, although I have no regrets for having read them. I did not find Anne Thurston’s book Knowing Her Place: Gender and the Gospels, to be completely successful, although I did find it thought provoking and insightful in places.  The author appeared to want to explore the way we read and understand biblical stories based on our own cultural gender biases blinds us to possibilities and meaning, meaning that can be beyond gender itself, but the book often became mired down in the very gender details the author was attempting to uproot, to the detriment of the very issues she seems to want to explore.  

 

Kudos is the third in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy that began with Outline, and in some sense the author has come full circle.   In the first book the narrator seemed to be in the process of rediscovering herself, having lost one view of herself, and in this, the final novel, she has reached the goal, only to find that the success itself becomes another loss of self, exploring the way  “successful writer” is itself a role outside of the self.  Throughout the novel Cusk explores both the internal and external person of the writer, as she absorbs the narrative of others, and they project their narrative onto her.   In short, self can never be defined by success, and, as the author rather pointedly reminds us in the final scene, whatever internal or external success we might achieve, it is only the internal that can sustain us as we can never quite escape the roles others assign to us.