Hermit Diary 58. My Companions the Books

Today, I learn, is #WorldBookDay. Who makes up these things? (And immediately hear a response in my head: "Publishers like you!") Be that as it may, in my life, every day is book day, and it's been so practically ever since I can remember. Last week the members of my book group started talking about when we had begun to be readers, and what form it took for each of us. We told stories about the books in our homes, local libraries in the small towns many of us had grown up in, how reading early made problems for us in school, happy hours spent reading in treehouses, or curled up on couches on rainy days, what those favorite books were and how they shaped us as the readers we are today. I've never been a solitary introvert, but I was definitely a bookworm whose parents often told me, "Come on, get your nose out of that book, and go outside!" This was a somewhat half-hearted admonition from my mother, who was pretty much of a bookworm herself. As an only child, I was alone a lot, and books always felt like my friends as well as boats and planes and magic carpets on which I could travel to other places and times.

Exactly one year ago today, Jonathan and I made a decision at 5:00 in the morning, half an hour before calling a taxi, to cancel our planned trip to Mexico City because a pandemic looked like it was actually going to happen. We figured we could get down there all right, but coming back on March 20 might not be easy, or safe. A number of people thought we were being over-cautious, but it proved to be the right decision. During this long year, one that I don't think any of us will be able to truly process until much more time has passed, life has changed a lot. In addition to the good developments, like becoming proficient at Zoom and finding new friends, communities, and artistic outlets through that medium, we've stopped seeing family and friends, moving freely from place to place even within the city, having a studio, singing with my choir and going to the cathedral, shopping in stores, having routine medical appointments or getting our hair cut, going to any kind of in-person event, or even having normal visits with our neighbors. Montreal has been hit very hard, and people over 65 have been asked, and at times required, to stay in their homes. Thank God none of us knew it would be this bad, or go on this long, or I think we would have been even more despairing. Although it's been a very hard year for us in a number of ways, I feel incredibly lucky that we're still here, and we have appointments for our first vaccinations next week. I'm immeasurably grateful to the scientists who have developed these life-saving, world-saving vaccines in record time. I just wish that they would be available equally and fairly to all human beings -- but, as this year has also shown, inequality and injustice are concentrated in minority populations, and there is no vaccine for that: we ourselves are the only solution.

Fortunately, during this time I've had three steady companions: my husband, my cat, and books. As always, books have transported me to other places and allowed me to glimpse other lives, and that has been both a saving grace and at times uncomfortable, as it should be. Walking with James Baldwin, Ibrahm X. Kendi, Toni Morrison or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have forced me to confront realities and histories that have not been my own. While I've already read a lot of Haruki Murakami and his rather peculiar world of male-female relationships, the experience of reading a previous generation of Japanese writers like Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata is disconcerting in a different way. They speak of a world where women's and men's lives were markedly stylized and fixed, often to the great detriment of women, but there is little sense of happiness or fulfillment on anyone's part. I've gone on this year to read some contemporary Japanese female authors like Banana Yoshimoto and, most recently, Mieko Kawakami, whose Breasts and Eggs depicts in graphic detail the lives and preoccupations of non-wealthy Japanese women seeking self-fulfillment in a rough life, mostly without men at all. Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a literary exploit that took me from academic literary Europe to the horrific world of Mexican drug cartels -- an undercurrent we have always felt and guarded against during our tips to Mexico City, but never experienced directly. Then there was the pre-revolutionary Russia of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamzov, where a sense of social morality and ethics based on tradition, culture and religion clashed with "new" nihilistic, atheistic ideologies espoused by young thinkers influenced by Europe, who insisted that free will is all, and "everything is permitted." The book list has been long and challenging, and probably isn't most peoples idea of escapist, but it's been a big part of what's kept me going while living in a two-room apartment, especially through this long winter.

Right now I'm re-reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon, written in the 5th century BC, which reminds me of how little human beings have actually changed. The immediacy and familiarity of the characters and their thought and language goes a long ways toward erasing the cultural and historical differences between us and 2500 years ago; it's what drew me with amazement to those myths and stories when I was young, and then to the original works of literature. Agamemnon was written when Athenian democracy was just beginning, and its author was critical of government and especially of tyrants who fought wars that cost thousands of lives -- he himself had fought at the famous battle of Marathon during the Persian Wars. Athenians were preoccupied with the questions of justice, the rule of law, and free will in a society where the tyrant and the fear of his wrath had been removed: a new form of justice had to be created and agreed upon by its members. At the time of Aeschylus, most people still believed in fate being determined by the will of the gods, and that the sins of the father were often visited through subsequent generations, but as the Greek plays and Athenian democracy evolved in the next hundred years, we see a change away from this sense of fate and divine retribution to a greater exercise of free will and human choice, and how that is reflected in the government.

Fast-forward to Russia in the waning years of the Tsar; and further still to our own time when large swaths of society believe that individual freedom is more important than the collective good. These seem to be fundamental human tensions, with which we still struggle, along with the fact that justice is never equally applied. Thinking these questions through and acting on them are a lifetime's work, and for me, that task is helped by reading what humans have written not just in our own time, but throughout the millennia. While justice struggles to advance and our understanding of difference is greatly enhanced and shaped by contemporary writing, the best and the worst aspects of human behavior have always existed; we are neither unique nor isolated from the past, and, frankly, we believe so at our peril -- as books and their authors have always tried to tell us.

Comments

[Duchesse]

Always an avid reader, but I have found that the exigencies of the past year did something to my concentration. I turned to the novella, short story and essay forms instead of the "good long read" I formerly enjoyed. Now, 800+ pages feels like a chore. And I embraced audio books! A first for me. Maybe it's something about more "friends", more voices.

Twice in the past year, I visited a new (English language) bookstore on Duluth, État de Style, which strictly enforces the rules. Two weeks ago I was the only person in there besides the owner, which felt very safe but broke my heart. When you get your jab, I hope you will go to enjoy the space and support this beautiful, brave venture.

[am]

Although I've been a faithful reader since I learned to read, this year has given me more time for reading than I've had since childhood. Your title for this blog post reminded me of something my mother said when she was a small child, "Books is my friends. I will stick by their sides until I die." A few months before she died unexpectedly from a heart attack at age 78, she gave me a copy of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie, for my 44th birthday. When she died, an unfinished copy of the Satanic Verses was at her bedside. I've yet to read her copy of The Satanic Verses, but I have read the story of Haroun numerous times since then -- once again in the past few weeks.

I've saved your book list and want to recommended There There, by Tommy Orange, which is a novel which connects 12 people from diverse Native communities in the U.S.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXCbmuIFD8M

[Beth]

Thanks for commenting, Duchesse. I'm glad you've been able to read this year, since many people say they can't. For me, the absorption of long books was what I needed but I know that's not for everyone. It's great that there's a new bookstore on Duluth and I'm looking forward to going over there to support her as soon as I can! The recent story about Welch's bookstore in the Mile End is disheartening: if we want these places to continue we have to support them.

Thanks, Ella, I appreciate the Tommy Orange recommendation very much, and loved hearing the story about your mother. I haven't read the Satanic Verses yet either, but want to, and now I think I'll always connect it with this story. You must like the Haroun book a lot -- and I will look for this as well. Thanks for writing and affirming this connection to books through our mothers.

[Huw]

The human condition is quite a thing!

And thanks for sharing these thoughts, Beth, always a pleasure to consider them.

[Kim]

I was reading at four and have never stopped. Reading is a great pleasure and my main source of intellectual stimulation. I had a period during this last year where I found it difficult to concentrate on reading. Thankfully I’ve pulled through and am back to my normal self. I would second the Tommy Orange recommendation and would add any Louise Erdrich book and Kelli Jo Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah. That last one is set fewer than a hundred miles from where I grew up.

I share your love of the Greek playwrights since reading my first—Agamemnon—my freshman year of college. I’ve enjoyed Madeline Miller’s recent retelling of the stories of Achilles and Circe. Another fabulous retelling is Christa Wolf’s Medea. Like you, I’ve also been reading anti-racism. Right now it’s Isabelle Wilkerson’s Caste. A powerful book; I think it should be required reading for US citizens. It’s serious and sobering. I love it so far. It’s such a pleasure to read your thoughts on reading. My love to you.

[Roderick Robinson]

One of the penalties of old age is an inability to handle heavy books for long stretches. I look up at David Lean's almost cuboid autobiography (which is also bigger than most in two dimensions alone) which I read four or five years ago and wonder whether I could manage it now.

And how many biographies of the same person is one inclined to read? Years, perhaps decades, ago I read Sherry's three-volume biog of Graham Greene and reckoned I knew everything I needed to know about that flitting, evasive character. For Christmas VR bought me Richard Greene's biog of GG with the curt explanation: "It was well-reviewed".

It deserved to be. A living yet detailed tableau emerges and I'm happily coping with the kilograms.

As to that dusty, less-visited attic that is the thinking part of my brain I am dipping into Louise Gluck; Poems 1962 - 2012, thanking the Nobel Prize committee for bringing her to my attention. Here is the poet I would aspire to be, a sort of refined Auden, if I dared to aspire. There's 634 pages, fortunately bound as a paperback.