A Kind of Healing

 

"...to live the slow quiet rhythm of a day as a kind of healing"

Several years ago, I discovered May Sarton’s journals. What a blessing it has been to have them keep me company through these last few years of transition as my children have moved away, and I have gone through my own deep,unguided changes, learning to grow into a not-always-welcome solitude. She and Rilke, among others, have become cherished company in my morning readings.

This is the fourth of Sarton's journals that have kept me company over the last four years. I read and loved Journal of a Solitude first, and since then I've been trying to read them in the order she wrote them. Sometimes, she annoys me, but for the most part, I find her voice a welcome and recognizable comfort in my own struggles.

If you're looking for drama and engaging happenings, these journals are not for you. If you're looking to inhabit the slow, thoughtful world of an introvert who finds more comfort in plants than in people, I highly recommend them.

Sweet Irony

 

"Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful,

but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless."

When I first began reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, I admit, I was not in the best frame of mind. Between the end of Daylight Savings Time and Winter Solstice, I struggle to console myself even for my own existence, so naturally, I'd choose a book with that kind of title as a pick-me-up.

For much of the first part of the book, I read with one eye on the page. It just wasn't catching me. I couldn't decide if I even liked the narrator. I found her slippery and not easily pegged. Don't we all like easily pegged? We don't have to think. I get impatient with astrologists, and she is definitely into astrology, so at first, I was dismissing her often based on my own bias. 

By page 200, I read raptly, with no breaks.

If I've learned anything in my life, it is that keeping an open mind should always be my go-to. While I still don't believe in astrology, I do believe in many of the ideas this narrator espouses. 

I love that she assigns descriptive nicknames to humans in lieu of  given names for most people. I find it interesting that she (or I guess the author) capitalizes the word Animal and the Types of Animals, but not of plants. Do I know for sure this is consistent? No, but I did often notice it. So she herself is making the kinds of distinctions she asserts we have no right to make.

I can't say much about the plot without spoilers. People die. Animals die. The point is that all killing is wrong. Is it?

Our narrator is far from perfect. She's neither always right nor always wrong. In her choices and in her actions, she embodies the imperfect hypocrisy she so rightly disdains.