The Universe is Unmoved

"If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder--which, repeated, becomes order:  the Order.  My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope."  Jorge Luis Borges in The Library of Babel

This morning I decided to heed at least part of yesterday's message and pull out my volume of Borges short stories.  I read "The Library of Babel," which is a symbolic representation of the universe and a lesson in how perspective colors everything.  Everything has only the value you assign it.  A word that might be harmful or dangerous or offensive to you, for instance, would mean nothing to someone who didn't share your perspective and language.  In the space of seven pages, he makes the above point, along with touching on humanity's inability to comprehend anything very far beyond the bounds of our existence, leading us often to worship what we don't understand.  He ends the story reassuring us that the universe is infinite and unaffected by humanity.  And this idea makes me think of one of my favorite lines from A R Ammons in his poem "Gravelly Run."

for it is not so much to know the self 

as to know it as it is known 

by galaxy and cedar cone,

as if birth had never found it

and death could never end it

Synchronicity is Scary!

“The Möbius strip, also called the twisted cylinder...is a one-sided nonorientable surface obtained by cutting a closed band into a single strip, giving one of the two ends thus produced a half twist, and then reattaching the two ends.” http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MoebiusStrip.html (I cannot believe I am citing something called mathworld, but there you have it.)

Until eleven o’clock this morning, I had never heard of a Möbius Strip. I am an English major, after all. I stumbled upon the term in a book blog, of all places, in an entry about the Borges short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” I remember attempting unsuccessfully to read this story a few years ago. I will now be re-visiting it, as I do not like to be defeated. The blog entry I am referring to is here:  http://somanybooksblog.com/2012/02/13/who-needs-drugs-when-theres-borges/.

After my return from lunch, perusing another, completely separate book blog, I came across a review of the book, This Möbius Strip of Ifs by Mathias B Friese. I must say I find it most bizarre to have lived almost 45 years without hearing of a thing and then to run across it twice within three hours on completely separate blogs on the same day, especially given the infinite-seeming nature of the Möbius Strip itself.

What does this mean? Is the Matrix speaking to me? Will I be moving closer to nirvana (not the band, oh culturally-challenged ones) soon? Or is the message more quotidian in nature? Should I re-decorate my bathroom with Möbius Strip-themed wall paper? Should I read the book and short story reviewed? Or maybe I should just get back to work, but how boring is that, when infinity beckons?

Three Day Week-ends! Now!

It's Sunday night, and once again, I've spent the week-end running around too much to read enough for my liking.  I'm thinking a new law may need to be enacted to provide a three, if not four, day week-end to accomodate both my reading and my life.

The few times I've been able to sit down with my current read, I've been swept up in a world that only Margaret Atwood could imagine.  I love the way her mind works.  So often in her work, small details emerge that make me feel like I'm in on some obscure, clever, inside joke, where she interprets the outcomes of current events in ways most people would never predict.  I've only had time to delve a small way into Year of the Flood, but it promises to be as engaging and entertaining to me as I found Oryx and Crake to be ten years or so ago. 

I did spend this morning catching up on book blogs I try to follow, but there are two problems with reading book blogs.  One:  you are not actually reading your book, and two:  you proceed to want to read almost every book you read reviewed.  For a person with a TBR pile numbering the hundreds, this becomes a frustrating exercise in futility.    So here we go headed into another busy work week, where falling asleep by nine is the norm, and time to read becomes as realistic as the three day weekend.  Happy reading to all you independently wealthy and/or retired and/or smarter than me people who have just said screw it to the capitalistic society that holds the rest of us hostage. Here's hoping for more hours in the day or more holidays in the year.

Saturday Snapshot

My Wounded, Expanded Self-Esteem

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all." Thomas Szasz

After finishing Crime and Punishment, I tried to read the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy. I had taken a break during the reading of Crime and Punishment to read the first book, which I enjoyed. But I wasn’t able to get beyond page ten of the second book, and that made me wonder if the problem was along the lines of “Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions” (Oliver Wendell Holmes), or if the second book’s plot is really going to be as predictable and banal as it seems. If you’ve read the second and/or third books, and you want to advise me, feel free. For now, I’ve moved on to Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood ( to satisfy my hunger for dystopia) and Trinity by Leon Uris (on my brother’s recommendation), but I’m feeling propelled toward the Brothers K or Tolstoy's  War and Peace, I’m not sure which.

It’s not that I think Dostoevsky is a great writer. He’s not. His prose is stilted, and his characters are annoying. His mastery lies in the ideas he introduces and the way he introduces them. In the space of roughly 550 pages, he threw so many new, mind-expanding ideas at me that I still haven’t caught up. Not necessarily even ideas I agree with, but what does that matter? You cannot become a fully developed human being if you aren’t willing to “suffer an injury to [your] self-esteem.”

My experience with trying to read Catching Fire after Crime and Punishment makes me wonder if reading great literature ruins you for lesser, entertaining literature. It’s kind of like skiing the greens after skiing the blacks or riding a beginner MTB trail after you get used to an advanced one. Can you go back and still enjoy yourself? I don’t know. Stay tuned to find out.

Crime and Punishment

Finishing Crime and Punishment feels a bit like I imagine having scaled a sheer rock face might feel.  Ninety-nine percent hard work for one percent beautiful view.  Talk about delayed gratification.  Good grief.  I will say that all through the 551 pages, I had no view to hope for the resolution of the last two pages.  Not that I would necessarily recommend reading the book just for the redemption of the last two pages, but it is nice to know that redemption is possible, even for an axe murderer.    (Gives us lesser, petty transgressors hope, ya know.)  So many ideas are introduced in the novel that it is impossible to wrap my head around even a small percent of them at this point.  I highlighted more passages than I have time to recap.  As difficult as finishing the novel was, I feel like I could read it ten more times and still not absorb everything.  And that, I suppose, is what makes a great novel great:  too much brilliance for one small mind over the course of one cursory reading.  Did I like it?  Not particularly.  Did I find it beautiful or uplifting?  Not at all.   I don't even think Dostoevsky is a particularly "good writer."  But still I fear that what I read next will seem petty and mean in relation.

Cutting for Stone -- All of December -- UGH!

Finally, I finished Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  I had read a review in 2010 by a book blogger who loved this book, so I went in with high expectations.  It took me three weeks to read, which is a long time for me to spend on one book.  The book wasn’t bad enough for me to abandon but not good enough for me to devour, which is quite frustrating.  It’s not poorly written, but the character development is weak, especially the development of one of the main female characters (Genet), and the plot moves from tedious and plodding to rambling and implausible.  The author, quite obviously, is a surgeon, and an excessive amount of the prose is dedicated to (often gross) details of medical conditions and surgical procedures, which was a problem for someone who reads while eating.  If Verghese had omitted all of the medical school informataion, I might have finished the novel in a week and actually enjoyed it.   I’m glad I finished the damn thing, but I won’t be recommending it to friends.  Now, on to January, my month to read the Russians.   First up, Crime and Punishment; Raskolnikov, here I come!

Happily Ever After...Really?

Today’s blog entry gets back to the root of why I blog: reading.  Over the years I’ve tried to figure out how to explain which books speak most eloquently to me. It seems the common threads are damaged, lonely people who come to some kind of grace and redemption, or at least to some kind of love and communion, in their lives. I suppose these books appeal to me because they make me believe happy endings can exist for those of us who feel adrift and alone in the world.

Instead of reviewing each book, I’m just going to note what I remember most about each one. I liked the pondering of such a multitude of religious “truths” in Life of Pi by Yann Martel. The stark beauty of Kent Haruf’s prose in Plain Song, especially in the chapters inside of the leaving mother’s and the older grieving mother’s minds, was breath-taking and made me cry for the depths which are possible in love. The women-children who either narrate or around whom revolve the books Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons and The Honey Thief by Elizabeth Graver made me proud to be a sensible, intuitive, deep-feeling, unbreakable female. I wish our tween and teen culture held girls like these as examples to follow instead of the shallow, over-sexed caricatures they seem to worship. Nightwoods by Charles Frazier and State of Wonder by Anne Patchett were both told from the points of view of solitary, strong but vulnerable women who learned to thrive in their lives in spite of the emotionally dangerous, vast crevasses lurking just below the surface of who they were. (Seeing a pattern here?) Elizabeth Graver describes one of her character’s minds as being made up of night colors and describes his thoughts as being something like stark, grey-limned images. I love how these odd, solitary characters are drawn into each other’s orbits in spite of, or perhaps because of, their detachment and woundedness and find in each other kindred spirits in an inhospitable world of mundane, everyday tragedy.

What IS that Smell?

I feel sure my Nanny Brandon would be proud and my Nanny Byrd mortified at the housekeeper I have become.  I just now discovered that it is possible to clean baseboards AS YOU MOP!  I had never thought of this before, and all that baseboard gunk really gets me down.  I often find myself indisposed and thinking, "What IS all that goo?  From whence did it come?  And do I really have to bend down and wipe it off?!?"  Lo and behold, all I had to do was mop! Who knew?  I NEVER mop.  I have a hard time convincing myself to do housework of any kind with so many books to read, trails to ride and fun to have.  So, if you walk into my house, and find yourself wondering, "What IS that smell?" now you know.  No mopping.  There's the answer.  Maybe that sums up a lot about me:  Needs to mop more.  And now that I have strenuously exerted myself mopping my 6 X 10 bathroom, I'm off to ride Iron Mountain Trail and hike Grayson Highlands for the week-end.  When I'm outside, I don't notice that smell at all. 

Wake Up Little Amy, Wake Up

I must surely be on the way to a healthier psyche to be writing again.  For far too long I have felt like either I had nothing important to say or like I was too tired of hearing myself say the same old things over and over to keep repeating them.  Today, for the first time, I was able to write a poem again.  I will include it here at the end of this entry.  I'm sure these entries will seem disjointed and unedited (because they are), but as I begin to understand and realize things about myself, I am going to note them here for my own benefit, if for no one else's.

Jeff stresses often to me the importance of always being hopeful in every situation.  While I can rationally understand this viewpoint, it's not easy for me to be hopeful because so many times over the course of my adult life, the things I hoped for were the opposite of the things that happened.  I am glad that people are able to be hopeful, and I would like nothing better than for hope to become the default setting in my life.

And here is the poem that came to me as I read the section of Ellen Foster where her mother dies:

One more day,
Can I have one more day?
But the answer is always the same.
Her heart has stopped,
And mine goes on.

And I wish for some
Kind of reverse mothering,
Where I can keep her alive
With my body, like she
Kept me alive with hers,
But the answer is always the same.

May Peace Be Your Way in the World

As if I don't have enough to keep me from my reading and blogging, now I've decided to participate in NaNoWriMo, so here's a poem to get us all through November's dearth of blogging entries:

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry