Everything is a cycle.

Last night, I finished Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries. Overall, I really liked it. I mean, I wasn’t head over heels for it the whole time, although there were a few parts that I thought were extraordinarily touching and poignant, and I always wanted to start reading it again. It was one of those books that I would pick up and start reading, thinking that I was going to read one or two pages, but then end up reading twenty or thirty. So that is a good thing. 

Perhaps the most striking thing about this novel to me was the abundance of terrible sex. Not terrible in the incestuous or rape variety, although I guess you could argue that it was abusive in a way, but just the complete lack of passion and enjoyment by the vast majority of the women described in this novel. I suppose I should not be too surprised. It was just sad, in general.

Did I ever tell you what this book was about? It’s about a woman. Her entire life. From her birth to her death. And of course, other people’s stories are interwoven into her own–creating this huge web of family history and experience. I find myself very fascinated with “ordinary” lives, so this book was right up my alley. To me, ordinary people’s lives are all about being human. We are one in our humanness.

Anyway, there’s something else I wanted to talk about briefly, something I haven’t ever written about before, but I think about often, and that is the moment after you finish a book. For me, it is such a strange moment. You’ve just finished taking this long journey, which often lasts days if not weeks, with a whole set of new characters who you often feel empathy for, excitement with. And then it’s over, there is no more nagging obligation to pick up the worn cover and keep reading, and the book is closed, and you lie there on your bed, the book lying flat on your stomach, and stare at the ceiling for a minute. You are reading and then you are not. It is just a second, just a moment, and yet it is something more. And maybe you immediately get up and wring more information about the book out of google, or maybe you just sit there and stare, and it is quiet and there is a pause as your attention drifts from the people you’ve been thinking about so much for days back to your own life, on your own bed, in your own house, in your own place and time. A breath before you walk to your bookshelf and pick out something else.

Neither here nor there

So it is July, and I have misplaced my notebook with my list of books in it, so I’m not going to do my monthly wrap-up for June yet. Besides, I don’t even know if I read any books in June. If I did, it was early on in the month because I gave up on reading after the first couple of weeks–of that I am sure.

Anyway, it’s July, and I’ve read one book so far. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I am always surprised at how much I love Toni Morrison, and although I rarely think to pick up her books on my own, if I pick one up and hold it long enough to read through the first page, I just can’t put it down. Which is what happened on Friday while I was going through my books and arranging them on shelves and trying to empty out boxes, and then I lifted the cover and read the first sentence and then the first paragraph and then the first chapter, and before I knew it, I was lying sprawled on my bed fifty pages in with no desire for anything else but to read. 

I finished it yesterday as I stood outside in the rain on the national mall while I waited for the fireworks to start, surrounded by people in ponchos and umbrellas camped out in the mud. It was sad and lovely and touching, and I especially loved the afterword that Toni Morrison wrote for my edition because it talked about her criticisms of the novel and her view of it after thirty-some years. Toni Morrison is a genius, genius, genius.

Now I am a reading a book called The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. It was the 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner, which is the only reason I picked it up at the library book sale a few months ago. As I’ve mentioned before, I think Pulitzers vary. Sometimes I think they’re great, and other times I am unimpressed. But this one, I am enjoying it very much. I’ve only read the first two chapters, but it is absolutely fascinating from my perspective to read about the women in this novel, which begins in 1905. Sad and eye-opening and inspiring. 

There’s a passage I would like to share for you which has nothing really to do with women and their lives, but everything to do with time, which is something I think about a lot but have never seen put into words so precisely as in this novel. Here it is:

It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another begun. There is something here that speaks of our essential helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives is bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say “Twelve years passed” is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us? Months, weeks, days, hours misplaced–and the most precious time of life, too, when our bodies are at their greatest strength, and open, as they never will be again, to the onslaught of sensation. For twelve years, from age fourteen to twenty-six, my father, young Cuyler Goodwill, rose early, ate a bowl of oatmeal porridge, walked across the road to the quarry where he worked a nine-and-a-half-hour day, then returned to the chill and meagerness of his parents’ house and prepared for an early bed.

The recounting of a life is a cheat, of course; I admit the truth of this; even our own stories are obscenely distorted; it is a wonder really that we keep faith with the simple container of our existence. During that twelve-year period it is probable that my father’s morning porridge was sometimes thin and sometimes thick. It is likely, too, that he rubbed up against the particulars of passion, snatched from overheard conversations with his fellow workers or the imperatives of puberty, or caught between the words of popular songs or rare draughts of strong drink. … My father was not blind, despite the passivity of his youthful disposition, nor was he stupid. He must have looked about from time to time and observed that even in the dead heart of his parents’ house there existed minor alterations of mood and varying tints of feeling. 

Oh, I like it. Yes, yes, yes. 

Okay. I guess that’s what I’ll leave you with tonight. I am happy to be living with my parents right now. Happy to spend time sitting in the living room, all three of us reading books. Happy to be in the middle of a book I want to read. Happy July.