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Re-reading Camus

Re-reading Camus

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Once we went into lockdown in March, the battered old copy I have of Albert Camus’s The Plague was much on my mind. Part of me wanted to re-read it. I’d always liked the book, ever since I read it in college and taught it in high school. I thought it was profound — and that was before we were in a worldwide pandemic. But another part of me wondered, why do I want to read a book about a plague when I’m living through one?

The glutton-for-punishment part of me won out. I re-read the book — and am glad I did, even though cracking the volume open and turning pages guaranteed its destruction. When I began reading, my copy was hanging together not by a thread but by some errant glue that had not yet dried and flaked away. After I finished, the book was essentially a sheaf of loose-leaf pages. But that was okay; killing a book by reading it seems an outcome that an existentialist like Camus would have appreciated.
But beyond the mechanics of reading — the gentle way I had to handle the paperback, as if holding the hand of a dying victim — there was the content, which was both comforting and illuminating. Yes, we are suffering from a devastating coronavirus. But it’s at least not the bubonic plague. There are no buboes to lance, no dying rats to herald the crisis. 
There were passages that could have been written yesterday, so clearly did they plumb the human heart in a time of mass contagion and illness. “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise,” Camus wrote, at the beginning of the novel. And, toward the end, he said this: “Whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and … exacerbated the sense of injustice.” 
And then, there is this passage at the end, which I noted a few months ago and will always give me shivers: “He [Dr. Rieux] knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedroom cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
Reading in Circles

Reading in Circles

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I still remember what I said when I opened the Kindle I received for Christmas some years ago. It was “get back from me, Satan,” or some such line, punctuated with a laugh and accompanied by lots of thank-you’s. Because it was a lovely gift and I appreciated it, even though I’d always said I’d never use one of the things.

The Kindle has been used often since then, and it has especially been pressed into service the last few months. I’ve found free classics to consume on it, purchased a novel my book group was reading, and it’s now on top of my bedside table book pile.
A digital e-reader is perfect for these digital times, but, more to the point, the Kindle is just one of several book delivery platforms. I can listen to a book, courtesy of another generous gift (this one for Audible), I can read one on my computer through the library’s lending service, I can use my Kindle or … I can read a good, old-fashioned book.  I was saving the best for last.  
An Old-Fashioned Girl

An Old-Fashioned Girl

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First, I re-read Eight Cousins, because I could find it in an old bookcase. Little Women I felt no need to re-plumb, having just enjoyed the movie a few months ago. But there was one Louisa May Alcott book that I’d been dying to read again. It was An Old-Fashioned Girl, one of my favorites.

It’s not in the house — I believe one old-fashioned girl I know is keeping it on her bookshelf now — but I was able to find a free copy for my ancient Kindle, and am now happily ensconced in the joys and sorrows of one Polly Milton, a bright, kind girl who lives alone with a bird and a cat, who fights disappointment by reaching out to help others, and who makes life pleasant for all who know her.

Is it saccharine? Is it treacly? Yes, ma’am, it is. But it’s wonderful to be a part of Polly’s world again!

Book Maps

Book Maps

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I’ve loved maps since I was a child. I grew up with a mother who would eat her lunchtime sandwich and pickle while looking at a map, feeding her body and her soul at the same time. I’ve done the same off and on through the years (minus the pickle).

If I were to write another book, I’ve long hoped it would be the kind of book that would have a map in its frontispiece. I had no idea that so many others felt the same way. Enough to fill an entire book, The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones.

I found this book on my last trip to the library March 15, and since I’ve not yet had to return any of those books, I’ve had plenty of time to savor this one. In it, authors from Philip Pullman to Robert McFarlane wax lyrical about the book maps that inspired them and the books they’ve written because of them.

“A map helps to make an imaginary place real. The more detail you put into your beautiful lie, and the more you base it on things that are true, the more it comes alive: for you and for your readers,” says Cressida Crowell in one of the book’s essays called “First Steps: Our Neverland.”

Crowell sees maps as story starters. “When I draw the map of my imaginary world, it will tell me the direction I want to be going in, even when I don’t yet know it myself.”

I’m starting my own map soon.


(Photo: The Land of Make Believe from The Writer’s Map by Huw Lewis-Jones.)

Contented with Containment

Contented with Containment

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The more I read of Niall Williams’s This is Happiness (more about this wonderful book in a later post), the more I realize that, although I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, I also grew up in an Irish storytelling culture. Although on the surface my dad seemed to be the chief yarn-spinner, Mom was no slouch in the storytelling department, and her mother, my nana, could tell tall tales with the best of them.

One of Mom’s stories, which may have come in part from her mother — or at least happened when Mom was a little girl — involved a man whose name was Mangione, I think, or maybe Mahoney. This man lived on High or Maxwell or one of the tree-lined streets around the University of Kentucky.  And one fine day he went into his house, climbed up into an attic room, and — Mom always said this part dramatically — never came out again.

As a child I was always fascinated with the mechanics of this arrangement. Was there a bathroom up there? Did he receive his food on a tray? As an adult I realize that this man must have have had agoraphobia or some other anxiety that kept him from leaving the house. But whatever the reason, I’ve often thought of his as a cautionary tale, what happens to people who don’t get out enough — they simply stop wanting to leave.

Is our sheltering-in-place creating an epidemic of agoraphobia, a generation of hermits? Will the quarantines be relaxed, the doors thrown open, and people just yawn and say, that’s fine, but I’ll stay inside, thank you very much.

I feel it in myself, this lessening of desire to be out and about in the world, this contentment with containment. I wonder if others feel the same way.

Elevated Apes

Elevated Apes

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“It is the same shabby-genteel sentiment, the same vanity of birth which makes men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.”  — William Winwood Reade

I thought of this quotation while on a recent walk with Copper. The little guy is old now and seems to have lost most of his hearing and much of his sight. But there’s nothing wrong with his nose. He must retain most of the 300 million olfactory receptors dogs are reputed to have because he seems to enjoy sniffing now more than ever.

But he’s not the only one. Every day on our strolls together (and on my solo walks), I take a deep whiff of lilac. Say what you will about stopping to smell the roses, it’s the lilacs I walk across the street to inhale.

Savoring their delicious aroma gives me a hint of the pleasure dogs take in their own frequent sniffing. It is, then, a unifying activity, one that reminds me that we are “elevated apes” rather than “degenerated angels.”


(I first read this quotation in the book Love, Sunrise and Elevated Apes, by Nina Leen, a volume I treasure for its wisdom and photography.) 

Adventure Stories

Adventure Stories

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Maybe it’s because I just read a book about exploring caves and catacombs, but I’m finding myself drawn to adventure stories these days.

Which is why Into Thin Air is on my nightstand and in my backpack. Jon Krakauer’s tale of the 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest is nothing if not gripping. Even though I’ve read it before, even though it’s dedicated to the ones who didn’t make it, I’m still pulled along by the power of a good story well told.

Adventure books are good for pandemics, inspiring in their accounts of adversity overcome. Some day, people will be writing stories about this time. They will know by then how the virus behaves, how long it lasts on surfaces and why (thank God) it spares children. They will know how we handled it here in this country, what we did wrong and what we did right. They will know how it all turns out. But for us, right here, right now, the adventure story is still being written.

Underland

Underland

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Like the underworlds Robert Macfarlane plumbs in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, there is much going on beneath the surface in this marvelous new offering by one of my favorite authors. 

And there would have to be to combine prehistoric cave art, Parisian catacombs, the “wood wide web” (the fungal and rooted connectedness of trees in the forest), underground rivers, sweating icebergs and burial sites for nuclear waste — all in one book.

One theme that ties them together, besides Macfarlane’s exploration of them (no one is better than he at describing fear) is a growing recognition of the Anthropocene, the geologic age that experts have come to accept we are living through, one defined by human influence on the environment.

To comprehend the enormity of this designation, Macfarlane brings many tools to bear — literature, myth, science, philosophy and language, always language. “Words are world-makers — and language is one of the great geologic forces of the Anthropocene,” Macfarlane writes. But of the many terms for this “ugly epoch,” only one seems right with Macfarlane — “species loneliness, the intense solitude that we are fashioning for ourselves as we strip the Earth of the other life with which we share it.” 


“If there is human meaning to be made of the wood wide web,” he continues, “it is surely that what might save us as we move forwards into the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead is collaboration: mutualism, symbiosis, the inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human communities.”


And so the image at the heart of these pages, he explains, is that of an opened hand — extended in greeting, compassion, art — the prehistoric hand prints in ancient cave paintings and the touch of his young son’s hand. 


I know I will write more about this wonderful book; this is a start.

The Plague

The Plague

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And so it begins. The averted handshake at this morning’s Ash Wednesday service. The shunning on Metro of anyone who’s coughing or sniffling. The headlines and newscasts and public health warnings.

It will worsen, no doubt. There will be closures and restrictions, dire predictions. There will be confusion and panic. Truth will be elusive.

It’s no less than what other eras have had to bear, but for us it will be novel (in more ways than one).  Because we were raised with vaccines not quarantines.

I’m reminded of the ending of one of my favorite novels, Albert Camus’ The Plague:

He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. 

Walking the Way

Walking the Way

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I picked up Walking the Way, by Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum, because I was browsing the library and liked the title. (It was no doubt the word “walking” that did it.) I almost didn’t check it out when I saw the subtitle, 81 Zen Encounters with the Tao Te Ching, which sounded too esoteric for me. But I brought it home anyway — and now may have to buy it, so wise and calming do I find its words.

Walking the Way is a series of reflections on 81 poems from the Tao Te Ching, a book of wisdom and fundamental text for the Chinese religious and philosophical system of Taoism. It is, as the foreword describes, like an “ancient, weathered, solitary pine that exists above the tree line that whistles the tunes of the wind on a high mountain.” Reading these words reawakens my desire to meditate, or at least to sit quietly for a while each day.

Here’s a passage that speaks to me:

It is easy to fall into the tyranny of doing. The feeling that you should do more is a tyrant worse than any dictator. It will wear you out and bring not just an early demise but the daily death of a thousand stressful cuts. If you do not free yourself from this tyranny you’ll die early, or daily, or both.



(Illustration, Wikipedia: Laozi, reputed author of the Tao Te Ching.)