the book club: August 2007 Archives

Sherri Tepper: Six Moon Dance, Grass, A Plague of Angels, The Family Tree, Gibbons Decline and Fall

Orson Scott Card: Xenocide, The Worthing Saga, Alvin Journeyman, Seventh Son, Prentice Alvin, Shadow Puppet, Treason, Children of the Mind, Red Prophet

Graham Green: Monsignor Quixote, The Power and the Glory

Poul Anderson: The Stars are also Fire

Deepak Chopra: The Return of Merlin

Sherman Alexie: Indian Killer

Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird

Margaret Mead: Coming of Age in Samoa

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land

CS Lewis: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time

Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon

Ursula K. LeGuin: Orsinian Tales, The Beginning Place, The Eye of the Heron, The Dispossessed

Madeleine L’Engle: An Acceptable Time, A Ring of Endless Light

Jean Auel: The Plains of Passage

Linda Lay Shuler: She Who Remembers

Lucia St. Clair Robeson: Walk in My Soul

Marion Zimmer Bradley: The Fall of Atlantis, The Firebrand, Priestess of Avalon

Isaac Asimov: Prelude to Foundation

John Barnes: Mother of Storms

Mary Stewart: The Last Enchantment

Star Trek: The New Voyages, and The New Voyages 2. edited by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath

After spending hours shredding the evidence of broad swaths of my existence, it was kind of a few friends to allow me to join them for dinner despite the Orwellian eye of the blog. They promptly and thoroughly diminished the residual shards of self-importance to mere egotistical flotsam. With friends like these . . . !

I finished Morton’s novel this afternoon. “Love me, love my goblin,” Nora wishes of Isaac, but doesn’t know if he will (284). “She knew that this was going to be her life: wherever she turned, the suffering world would be upon her.

She didn’t know if she had stumbled onto a fact about existence or merely a fact about herself. Life isn’t just suffering; she knew this. Life is also joy and creation and procreation. Yes, we’re a community of suffering, but we’re a community of ecstasy as well. (278)

I identify with Isaac too. “It was amazing, the way thirty years can be irrevocably altered by one bonehead move” (262).

Tonight’s discussion themes over dinner verged on the morbid (aging, death by water, alcoholism), yet were tempered by laughter, teasing, and hopefulness. “You have too many friends.” Cassiopia was by turns sympathetic and a liability, the Ever-Smiling Evil Indian relished her pseudonymity, while the innocent friend ridiculed swimming only in water where one’s feet can touch bottom. I know I can tread water for some hours, but I will be sure to get well-trained in the use of emergency communications gear so that I can call for help when the seagulls, flies, and gusts of breeze appear!

“No matter how many wrong turns you make, you can always go in a new direction. As long as you’re alive” (257). Renee is an iconic representation of the future to Isaac; she reads Frederic Jameson on Hegel [The Cultural Turn]. Isaac wonders if

“what he really missed was the belief that there was an overarching meaning in his life . . . a thread that tied one day to the next, a bright thread of meaning that took the loose purposelessness of everyday life and gave it form and value and direction” (287).

We also spoke, tonight, of pedagogy and the ending of a course, which always seems to happen right when the norms get settled and the group is ready to evolve. Finally, a majority of individual students have become willing to be affected by the material and each other. Perhaps the institutional structuring of higher education was not deliberately designed to curtail critical re-education, but the course-by-course (teacher-by-teacher) system is starkly effective at cutting off community-building that might lead to social change. “Death moves in on you from a distance, taking things away. The circle of places you even dream of visiting becomes smaller and smaller” (195). Nora’s Aunt Billie has been like a parent to her, within the limits of her capacities.

Nora insists on treasuring the moments with her Aunt, loving her without reason: “Billie was kind, but it wasn’t because of her kindness; she was generous, but it wasn’t because of her generosity. The love wasn’t there because of anything Billie had done. It was just there. Certain people are given into our care, and we have no choice but to care for them” (188).

Nora admires Isaac’s photographs: “He had a distinctive style…a distinctive way of seeing people….his subjects, his people, seemed strong…

People, she was thinking, have handles, and different artists grasp people by different handles. Dostoevsky grasped people by their feverishness, their intensity. Yeats grasped people by their nobility of character. Whitman grasped people by their sexuality, or by whatever it is in us – something that includes but is larger than sexuality – that makes us want to merge with others. (168)

Time slowed for me today. For several stretches of road, coasting well under the speed limit, I felt oddly vacant. Nora muses “that maybe the point of life was to send one dream into the mind of the universe. Everything else in your life is incidental to the dreaming of that dream, but you can’t know which one it is” (263).

I believe we can choose which dream we want to shape the meaningfulness of our lives, but we may not be able to assess its success. After all my many (oh so many!) years on earth, my patience improves. Some times are for pleasure – being asked questions (162) by my friends tonight pepped me up a fair bit. Having a still mind is the most recent manifestation of patience – who knew such quietude is possible? Other times are for holding tight with “a love that [is] unbendable and complete” (140).

If I built an ontology on the triad of dreaming into mind, taking turns as necessary, and seeking the strengths of everyone I encounter, might this balance the force of devils and angels (Rilke), or Nora’s goblins and graces, warring for my soul? And who will remain my friend, as we try to make out each other’s words through the static of our own thoughts? (60)

"She was thankful for her life. She had the thought that she didn't regret anything she'd ever done, because the course of her life had brought her to this moment. She was grateful for everything, even grateful for her mistakes" (165).

This is Nora from A Window Across The River, which was feeding some sadnesses the other day. She is describing a transcendental moment, flying with friends in a small plane, passing from the city "beyond the bridge [when] it was like being ripped backward through the time barrier: the buildings fell away, and out her window, on the west side of the river, she saw nothing but lush green cliffs, everything looking as it must have looked a thousand years ago" (165). I have had a few experiences like that: I try to recall and grasp them tightly when their recurrence feels most improbable.

The story is about two artists, a writer and a photographer, and the nuances of their intimacy. Isaac's idealism about going into photography as a means of saving people had been amputated by experience: "it turns out you can't save anyone. You can only bear witness to their suffering" (153). Isn't this always true? Doesn't it always apply? Except in those literal situations when an action keeps someone from dying, everyone suffers their own way through this life. Meanwhile, despite the impossibility of salvation, we affect each other deeply: "If you as much as walk outside your home," Nora muses, "you find yourself with someone's life in your hands" (151).

I value my friends more than ever. Even those who bang me up during soccer (my wrist really hurts again after last night's spree!) It is good to be around friends who don't take your problems as seriously as you do, paraphrasing Nora's response (145) to a friend who mocks her problem of needing real people to inspire her creativity as a writer.

Then there is forgiveness. Nora has to forgive an Aunt who simply wasn't capable of taking care of Nora when her parents both died within a couple of years of each other while she was a teenager. She justifies her anger with a line from T.S. Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" As she matures, however, "Forgiveness brings knowledge of its own" (143).

Did Nora find forgiveness through the act of writing? Or was the relationship necessary enough that she would have arrived there regardless? For me, I know writing has helped me construct a consistency in my life's timeline, including expanding capacity for emotions I've at times thought could never arrive:

The diary gave her a way to link each day to the days that had come before, to link her life with the life she'd had when her mother was alive. Writing was the only way to join the days. (138)

A Window Across the River hooked me by the title. I suspect I am similar to the protagonist, Nora, in that I'm much better writing about real people than fictitious ones. Perhaps I divine frailities, but unlike Nora (I hope!) I am better at using words to reinforce possibility instead of despair. I found author Brian Morton's portrayals of intimacy compelling - and had to take a break.

Not that Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star is any lighter.

It is probably too much to say that Lispector anticipates my own journaled story, but there is no doubt she arrives there first: "...a story that is patently open and explicit yet holds certain secrets" as the outcome of an ambition

to write a story with a beginning, a middle, and a 'grand finale' followed by silence and falling rain" (13). She writes a "story [that] will emerge from a gradual vision - for the past two and a half years I have slowly started discovering the whys and the wherefores......of what? Perhaps I shall find out later. Just as I am writing at the same time as I am being read (12).

"How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen?" (11)
She is not mocking Rilke, she agrees with him. "One cannot prove the existence of what is most real but the essential thing is to believe" (8).

Most of all, I dedicate [this narrative] to the day's vigil and to day itself, to the transparent voice of ... all those prophets of our age who have revealed me to myself and made me explode into: me. This me that is you, for I cannot bear to be simply me, I need others to stand up, giddy and awkward as I am... (7-8).

Rilke's Letters to A Young Poet are the souce of my favorite quote: "the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens." (Letter #8). This is why, Rilke argues,

it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being.

I continue to practice my ability to believe.
I extend myself to faith.

Letter #3 includes one of my other favorite quotes:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.