Home Alone
Meg has gone to Portland (or Portopia, depending how you feel about it) for a week, and I'm here by myself for a few days before I head to my ancestral home for summer vacation, part deux. Though I would in no way want to live alone here, I think I'll enjoy the few days of quiet and the knowledge of the loong weekend ahead.
I am feeling very good tonight. I am feeling very good since coming back from California. Good about work, good about life, even good about New York City, despite all the respects in which it is not Big Sur. Which even a casual observer will agree are manifold. This city is full of strange and wonderful things. On my train home from Manhattan tonight (later than usual, since I stopped by an art show -- of art influenced by, invoking, or demonstrating the paranormal, which Gavin has been helping to curate, I think -- after work), a man with dreadlocks and three or four missing front teeth came into the car and played a fast 'n' gritty rendition of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," accompanying himslef on a harmonica suspended in one of those neck-brace things. So I gave him the eighty-five cents in my pocket when I got off the train at Bergen, naturally.
I am still reading Middlemarch, and am now a bit more than half-way through. (It is over 800 pages. I like the idea of reading one honking huge book each year. Last summer it was Anna Karenina. This year it is Middlemarch. Is it a coincidence that Causaubon and Karenin are such similar characters?) Anyway, I'm dorking out in the extreme about this book. I feel about it like a person standing before the pyramids: I know humans made this, but it's so impressive I can't quite grasp how. The thing that amazes me most, probably, is the force of George Eliot's psychological insight. There are a couple of passages I've dog-eared because they are so blindingly wise, so accurate. When I read the book, I get the same feeling that I received reading Karen Horney. The 'oh my god, she understands *everything*, she understands *everyone*' feeling.
Eliot also has an interesting style of storytelling; she gives you a little action, then a little commentary on the action & the universal human principles it illustrates, then a little more action. That sounds hokey, but somehow it's not.
I am fascinated by the way that, with some of these older novels (I'm particularly thinking of this one and of Jane Austen), the narrator is basically a consciousness with perfect moral and aesthetic judgment of people. To read such novels is to be invited up into the captain's seat with the narrator, and look down and come to see, together, who is good and who is not good. Thus, these books give one the flattering sense of possessing superior powers of moral discrimination. That is a large part of their charm; in short, they make you feel like the coolest girl in the room, an effect especially pronounced with Jane Austen. I don't mean to be glib abou them "imparting a sense," though; I also believe that good books can and do convey knowledge/skills/"emotional intelligence" or whatever, that helps people get along, discern, self-assert, adjust, be happy.
In other news, I wish that I were in better shape. Shall I find some kind of class to sign up for, this fall? Something whole-body and immersive? Any suggestions?
I am feeling very good tonight. I am feeling very good since coming back from California. Good about work, good about life, even good about New York City, despite all the respects in which it is not Big Sur. Which even a casual observer will agree are manifold. This city is full of strange and wonderful things. On my train home from Manhattan tonight (later than usual, since I stopped by an art show -- of art influenced by, invoking, or demonstrating the paranormal, which Gavin has been helping to curate, I think -- after work), a man with dreadlocks and three or four missing front teeth came into the car and played a fast 'n' gritty rendition of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," accompanying himslef on a harmonica suspended in one of those neck-brace things. So I gave him the eighty-five cents in my pocket when I got off the train at Bergen, naturally.
I am still reading Middlemarch, and am now a bit more than half-way through. (It is over 800 pages. I like the idea of reading one honking huge book each year. Last summer it was Anna Karenina. This year it is Middlemarch. Is it a coincidence that Causaubon and Karenin are such similar characters?) Anyway, I'm dorking out in the extreme about this book. I feel about it like a person standing before the pyramids: I know humans made this, but it's so impressive I can't quite grasp how. The thing that amazes me most, probably, is the force of George Eliot's psychological insight. There are a couple of passages I've dog-eared because they are so blindingly wise, so accurate. When I read the book, I get the same feeling that I received reading Karen Horney. The 'oh my god, she understands *everything*, she understands *everyone*' feeling.
Eliot also has an interesting style of storytelling; she gives you a little action, then a little commentary on the action & the universal human principles it illustrates, then a little more action. That sounds hokey, but somehow it's not.
I am fascinated by the way that, with some of these older novels (I'm particularly thinking of this one and of Jane Austen), the narrator is basically a consciousness with perfect moral and aesthetic judgment of people. To read such novels is to be invited up into the captain's seat with the narrator, and look down and come to see, together, who is good and who is not good. Thus, these books give one the flattering sense of possessing superior powers of moral discrimination. That is a large part of their charm; in short, they make you feel like the coolest girl in the room, an effect especially pronounced with Jane Austen. I don't mean to be glib abou them "imparting a sense," though; I also believe that good books can and do convey knowledge/skills/"emotional intelligence" or whatever, that helps people get along, discern, self-assert, adjust, be happy.
In other news, I wish that I were in better shape. Shall I find some kind of class to sign up for, this fall? Something whole-body and immersive? Any suggestions?
posted by katherine | 11:32 PM
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