Working on a Master's degree feels like learning to ride a horse

I thought that the experience of being a student would provide lots of writing inspiration, like an insider view as I explored realms of information. But it isn’t that… Being a master’s student is more about patient labour than anything else. I imagine that it’s like seeing a horse in the wild… “Wow!” you think. “What a beautiful horse!” It’s gem-stone eyes look like they beckon to you and you want to know this horse. You daydream about one day riding on its back.

Do you know how long it takes to domesticate a wild horse? I don’t. I do remember reading a book titled The Horse Whisperer when I was in high school. I thought it was fascinating. I thought I would like to train horses like this guy said he did. It seemed magical. I lived in a family that thought all kinds of things were possible.

Do you know how to train a horse? I don’t. Almost two years ago now, we bought a puppy and I cried tears of frustration over its training. It is a beagle, chosen for its medium size, its adorable face, its friendliness. A horse would be intimidating, the way zooming out from your house on Google earth is intimidating: my kingdom is a disappearing collection of pixels.

So I’m not sure why I chose this horse metaphor, except that in my imagination the information I’m handling feels about as big as a horse… not impossibly big, but still unwieldy. And then managing that information so that I can say something interesting about it, also feels like a kind of domestication. It requires organization and understanding. When I’ll have managed this, I think it will feel as if I’d mounted a horse and rode it to a destination.

In movies, characters just get on horses no problem. If there’s a problem, it might be saved for the blooper reel. Outside of movies, riders take training. Has there been a slow-tv channel dedicated to someone’s training? No. That’s because training is long and boring and has progression but also setbacks and good days when things go according to plan and days when other things interfere and the project is set aside. It is more interesting to pretend to sit in a train as it travels through tunnels and a frozen countryside than it is to be submitted to someone’s training. It is why time-lapse was invented. (No. But the invention of time-lapse is horse-related!)

To conclude, as students say when they’re finishing an essay, I’m working on my master’s degree, but writing updates on the subject is not as exciting as I thought it would be. It’s a rite of passage, a professor told me, and it’s true. It’s this academic training you submit yourself to, and it’s not meant to be very exciting.

Reading list: The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West

How to start: Rebecca West is an acclaimed British author with an impressively long Wikipedia entry. The Birds Fall Down is a “spy thriller based on the deeds of the historical double agent Yevno Azef”.

Favourite quotes: “That taught me a lesson I’ve always found it useful to remember if I have to deal with difficult men. When they are hard they are probably dealing with things they do not understand. If one brings them back to what is familiar to them they become soft.” (p. 23)

“His voice was strong now that he had re-established the importance of his grief.” (p. 78)

“‘When there is a great tragedy, all other things should go well,’ he sighed. ‘It’s not fair, having to look after all sorts of secondary matters as well.’” (p. 95)

“It’s often been remarked that every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris. A Polish professor has found an explanation in the presence in the subsoil of the city of certain earths heavily charged with electricity. It is wonderful how science is solving all mysteries. It seemed to me that the proportion of men and women quite evidently in love was higher than would have been the case in Berlin or Zurich or St. Petersburg, but also that they were exhibiting their state more candidly than they would have done in these other capitals. They walked arm in arm, their eyes shining, and they chattered and laughed.” (p. 172)

“The glasses had come from Prague, from another honeymoon, and they had survived a hundred years, only because they were always washed in a basin lined with several layers of flannel.” (p. 175)

“Most of the crowd had dispersed, but a few people still watched him as they might have watched a cab-horse fallen in the street, with maudlin smiles of pity confused with gratification at their own pity and a cold expectation of further calamity.” (p. 213)

“…for it’s sound medical practice to put the patient’s mind to rest before we start on correcting his body.” (p. 236)

“…but their real occupation was the talk, which by jerked hands, shrugged shoulders, hands flung out palm upwards, wove the French fairytale about other people having shown an extraordinary lack of common sense. In the middle of the paved causeway children in blue overalls played gentle games. If a wrangle turned rough, parents started forward in their chairs and shot out jets of scolding, but the mellowness set in again at once. As the street darkened the sky grew brighter.” (p. 247)

“They raised their glasses to each other in gaiety which was false yet true; it was a container for their kindness to her.” (p. 268)

“She recognized what he was doing; piling up grievances to kill his sense that he was in the wrong. She often did it herself, but had hoped that she would grow out of it.” (p. 361)

“But she assumed it to be a point of honour with Chubinov not to take grace poured out generously.” (p. 422)

Tangential: Googling the title of this book leads to alarming reports and investigations of birds falling from the sky. But it comes from the line of a poem the author uses as an epigraph. But neither the poem nor the poet exist… West used a pseudonym and invented the poem herself. We know this thanks to Victoria Glendinning’s biography of West, excerpted here.

Contrast

If you read more than one book at a time, and you change from one to the other, you can feel a little shock. Take this passage from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit:

Out of the blue, May sent me a long passage by Virginia Woolf she’d copied in round black letters on thick unlined paper. It was about a mother and wife alone at the end of the day: “For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” [p. 15]

And then take this one from Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates:

Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.

“Synchronize watches at oh six hundred,” says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jewelled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything’s happening right on time.

“I’m afraid I’m booked solid through the end of the month,” says the executive, voluptuously nestling the phone at his cheek as he thumbs the leaves of his appointment calendar, and his mouth and eyes at that moment betray a sense of deep security. The crisp, plentiful, day-sized pages before him prove that nothing unforeseen, no calamity of chance or fate can overtake him between now and the end of the month. Ruin and pestilence have been held at bay, and death itself will have to wait; he is booked solid. [p. 213]

Solnit gave me a feeling of comfort. It is unhurried and quiet. Yates is loud by comparison. His examples are authorities who establish control. A schedule is tight and disciplined.

I might not have appreciated the feeling of difference if I hadn’t been reading more than one book at a time. This is a little thrill when you are a person like me who finds their thrills more often in books than in stadiums.

Another little thrill is finding a person who explains something just as you have felt it. Cup of Jo linked to an interview with book critic Molly Young.

As a New York Times book critic, Molly Young often reads three to six books at a time. Under that workload, she says, she likes to spend two hours with one book, then change to another. For her, the practice is sort of like moving from a hot steam to a cold bath. “It resets your circulation,” she said. “I like to shock myself between vastly different books.”

Just like Cup of Jo, I like how Young describes how she felt able to become a book critic:

There was a moment, probably in my early 30s, when I realized that I had read enough books that I had not a sense of mastery but a pile of knowledge that I could be a worthy conduit to books. Something clicked. I felt like a humpback whale swimming through the ocean with my mouth full and I was capable enough to filter the nourishing bits of plankton from the rest. I was finally able to discern what I felt was good from what I felt was less good, and could make an argument. And that couldn’t happen until I read as many books as I had read.

This is how much

A friend, on a trip to Belgium, sent me a picture of greenery. My brother-in-law on a visit to Toronto sent us a snapshot of an icing-sugar-dusting of snow. The other evening a supper-delivery person asked our kid who was standing atop a pile of snow, what he was building. “A mountain!” our son answered.

I came home from a walk Sunday and could hear the kids’ voices from the street. We have so much snow, the garage roof is our kids’ playground.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is “of, relating to, or concerning interpretation or theories of interpretation” (OED). It is what James Wood uses to describe Jane Austen’s heroines - hermeneutical. They were people “who understood other people, who attended to their secret meanings, who read people properly…”

James Wood argues that the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher influenced Austen’s work. Schleiermacher “stressed repeatedly that hermeneutics could be applied to ordinary conversation as well as to the Scriptures” and gave a speech wherein he “referred to the art of reading ‘significant conversations’”. He asked his audience: “Who could move in the company of exceptionally gifted persons without endeavouring to hear ‘between’ their words, just as we read between the lines of original and tightly written books? Who does not try in a meaningful conversation, which may in certain respects be an important act, to lift out its main points, to try to grasp its internal coherence, to pursue all its subtle intimations further?” James Wood writes: “This is what the Austen heroine does.”

I really liked Jane Austen when I was young. I must have picked up on all this “inwardness” because I thought it applied to everyone. I suppose that was why I was frustrated when my not-yet-husband saw me as beautiful but opaque. The visual impairment had to be made up for with words. It’s strange how Austen’s heroine’s are to be admired for their inward life and yet only a writer of talent is able to expose their quality. It makes them inimitable…

“I have a wonderful inward life!”
”Oh yeah? So…?”

James Wood says it is what made Jane Austen happy: “I suspect that Jane Austen, so private, so enigmatic and contradictory, went through life as if she were the possessor of a clandestine happiness. Like her heroines, she saw things more clearly than other people and therefore pitied their cloudiness.”

(All quotes from The Broken Estate; Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood, pp 32-41.)

Two history-related things

I was a teen when I watched Chariots of Fire. I loved the movie: the English countryside, the romantic scenes, the upright main character… and I wished I could run. I liked the story and I thought that the scene at the Olympics was just another scene. That scene when the trainer is in his room and sees the flags raised and knows his guy won the gold and so bites his knuckle and punches through his straw hat out of happiness… I had no idea that all this quiet celebration was because coaches were banned from the Olympics. I learned this today, listening to Michael Lewis’s podcast Against the Rules (episode: The Unfair Coach). In the episode he interviews a historian who talks about the British class system in 1924, when coaches were frowned upon.

On Steven Levitt’s podcast, People I Mostly Admire, (episode 62), the historian Brad Gregory says: “A good historian is somebody who evokes and enables us to understand that even though somebody might have lived dozens, or hundreds or thousands of years ago, the three-dimensionality, the lived-reality of their human lives were every bit as real as the lives that we’re living now. When history is reduced to lists of names and dates and important battles and treaties and so forth, that’s when the blood is sucked out of it, so to speak, and I think that’s partly why people don’t like it.“

The point is: history is full of interesting stories; research makes them come alive.

Quotes on planning

I just finished reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. What he writes about planning reminds me of Ellen Hendrikson’s comments about the various forms social anxiety can take (in this post over here). What Oliver Burkeman writes about planning is a larger observation:

[…] we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have. Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time - our culture’s ideal is that you should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want - because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships. [page 31]

Further on in the book he writes:

But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaning full life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is - all it could ever possibly be - is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

It’s easy to argue that this isn’t a new idea. The New Testament’s letter from St James reads:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. [Chap 4: 13-16]

When I tutor students, I send them links to a resource that can help with a recurring problem they have with their writing. I try to encourage them to look at the link by making it specific. I take it for granted that they might not have the inclination to read through much information, but I also hope that the nudge might lead them to finding it useful. You never know if maybe, the way the information is presented just makes sense, if you haven’t just helped them have their own lightbulb moment.

And so, people talking about planning… Look at this lovely variety and the different aspects they highlight! A quote from C.S. Lewis that Oliver Burkeman included in his December 9th newsletter, The Imperfectionist, blesses even interruptions:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own', or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Ah... Winnipeg!

What a city you are! You transform dog-walking into an extreme sport. Your dog-owning inhabitants fall through ice-crusted snow, cut drifts with snow-pant scissor legs, and must carve their own paths when overnight winds have shuffled the landscape. Cheers, Winnipeg. Your winter so far has been epic.

January recipes

There are a variety of ways I could introduce the topic of “food we ate in January” here. There were Christmas leftovers, like lingonberry sauce from IKEA that pairs so well with breaded chicken cutlets, my mouth waters thinking about it. The kids like breaded meat… panko crumbs or bread-crumbs, simply flavoured with salt and pepper, maybe parmesan too. Thus, chicken cutlets and schnitzel made with pork are reliably liked.

But there was also comfort food (chicken noodle soup and salmon en papillote), the meals you can transport to someone else’s house, to warm and serve and bring a feeling of home.

But also, there floats about the month of January that siren song of New Year’s Resolutions. Some people favour vague ideas (more of this, less of that). Others argue specificity is the key to success. I waver between the two… This year, I’ll draw every day-ish. This year, we’ll expand our vegetarian repertoire. Both come from a feeling of dissatisfaction: I want to draw better, I’m tired of a routine formula for a meal.

Thus, I made tofu wonton soup, from Hetty McKinnon’s cookbook To Asia, With Love. I mixed the wonton-filling with a mortar-and-pestle and Christian said it was his favourite tofu-based recipe to date. Even the kids ate all their wontons. While tofu-filling tends to make for a crumbly texture, chicken suddenly seemed rubbery in comparison, with a back-to-back serving of both wonton-filling variations. I learned a new way to fold wontons, thanks to Youtube. Hetty writes that her mom keeps pre-assembled wontons in the freezer and adds them to a meal as she sees fit, which sounds delightful.

I also made cabbage-mushroom hand-pies from Six Seasons, which was a meal with a chicken and apple-filled version for the kids. Chicken and apple is fine and all, the kids opined, but really, the effort would be better spent on a dessert version. And so, last weekend for a family visit, I made apple turnovers from a simple recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s cookbook Around my French Table. It exceeded our expectations… Six or seven McKintosh apples cooked slowly with a bit of water, a bit of sugar, a pat or two of butter, a generous sprinkling of cinnamon, cooled and spooned onto puff pastry cut in a circle and “painted” with an egg-wash, as Dorie puts it… Mwah! Chef’s kiss! And in spite of the fact that assembly takes time, the supermarkets are determined to help home cooks because they offer puff pastry that is pre-rolled! Pre-rolled! All I had to do was defrost the package, unfold the sheets and cut the circles! Amazing!

So there… those were the new things we tried in January.

Groundhog day

I thought I’d pop out my head, like the groundhog, so busy underground, so absent-seeming on the drifts of snow. There was a blizzard yesterday, and then, just like that it stopped and the sun came through and filled the sky with a gentle yellow.

I filled up a sketchbook. It’s not really anything I want to show, even though I caught this quote by David Hockney who said: “… of course, art is about sharing”. I’m sure he’s right, and I’ll feel that way eventually. For now, I hold on to a thought from Paul Heaston on the Sneaky Art podcast: “…you become so results oriented that you would rather see no result than a poor one, and that goes back to everybody no longer being creative. It’s like, because the idea of being a failure is much more horrifying than doing something at all, that you don’t even do it.” It’s about patience. Jared Muralt in an Instagram post wrote: “Drawing mountains is like mediation for me. I constantly got confronted with my own impatience. But to succeed I have to focus on what I do and only that.”

I will pop in again to add books read to the reading list, to share pictures of the dog and a handful of quotes. For most of January, the kids were home from school. I sat at my desk for only the most urgent work. I joked in our family newsletter that my studies had been pushed so far to the back-burner as to have fallen off the stove. But in the quiet of the house right now, I can see myself picking up the contents and bringing them back to a warm simmer. It is what groundhogs do below four feet of snow.

Hiatus-ing a hobby

Oh dear! Have you come looking for new content? I’m afraid I must disappoint you for a moment… I’m not sure how long. See, there’s this degree I want to get on with. It requires data organizing and then, once that’s done, it requires about 60 solid days of writing 500 words a day. Once the words are written, I have to add the proper references, for the bibliography, and I’m sure that will take a week… And then I have to go through the stack of pages I’ve written and edit them after they’ve rested awhile. Once that’s all done, I hope to get an official paper that says I’ve earned a Master’s.

I really like writing. I like thinking of things to say and pushing past reticence into thoughts that make some sense, that give me joy just to see “published”. It has been a gentle form of accountability, of proving to myself that this is fun more than it is scary.

I might pop in sometimes though, but mostly, I’m taking a moment to focus on academics and fill a sketchbook with silly things.

Cheers!

Tuna on peaches

Seated on the plush leather couch in her yellow living room, where a rubber plant has grown past its stakes to the ceiling, we discuss food: what was eaten for supper, what pre-packaged find was a success, what in her country of origin is a staple meal-snack-appetizer: “You take tuna and mix it with some mayonnaise and spoon it in the centre of a sliced canned peach. Pêches-au-thon! It’s familiar to everyone in Belgium!”

As I walked the dog over leaves cast to the ground, still and dampened from an earlier light rain, the air smells good and the feeling of coziness makes me want to plan supper; maybe lentil soup with home-made broth and a plate towered high with grilled cheese…

Doggy daycare

I brought Enzo to the doggy daycare under coral pastel skies, leaving filled-out forms with the woman who remembers him from when I last chanced the experiment a near year ago. Underneath the deodorizers is such a concentrated dog smell that even if I stay only moments in the building’s lobby, I am, hours later self-consciously sniffing my hair to see if this phantom-limb of a smell finds its source somewhere on me, surreptitiously having seeped-in the way a short-haired middle-aged woman once described it when a few high school friends and I were awarded a trip to a pig farm and had to strip and shower before entering and before leaving: “The smell, you cannot wash it away, you just get used to it.”

Contact-tracing A-Z

I had a particularly sociable day yesterday. It began with a funeral.

Greeters A+B, seated at a table with a list of names, took ours. Person C ushered us to a hall where chairs were spread out in pairs like little islands on a sea of blue tile. We chatted with friends S+T and S(2) came and found us, in his suit. It was his dad’s death we were helping mourn so hugs were exchanged.

After the powerpoint of pictures to music, there was the funeral mass. At the exchange of peace, we waved gentle hand motions to strangers E, F, H. After the songs sung through masks, we exchanged happy hellos with Christian’s retired colleague, G.

We went home to get to eating lunch, where, having been locked out of the house and having been forced to spend time outside in the serendipitous weather, we reunited with our children and our daughter’s two friends, M + V.

Plans were drawn up for the afternoon. I took the girls back to V’s house and chatted with V’s mom, M(2). I dropped off a glass cake pan at J’s house where she made me a turmeric latte, where we drank it outside in the warmth of the sun-soaked deck on cool wicker chairs while her kids L+M(3) played around us in the yard. Her husband, D, came home. More chitchatting ensued before I left to bring my youngest to a birthday party.

Since I missed the turn onto a street called Beaverhill, I was four minutes late and only rushed greetings were exchanged with the organizing mom L(2). Then I went to pick up my daughter at her friend’s house where her dad, J and I talked about dog-ownership. If dogs counted in contact tracing, there would have been two to add to this list, besides my own… Midnight had a cone, Piper sniffed at my pant legs and purse.

When it was time to pick up the youngest from his festive activities at an indoor gym, I exchanged a few words with waiting mothers W and X and crinkle-eyes that now passes for a smile with Y.

Tuesday, barring any surprises, my contacts will extend only to people as they live on paper.

Over-preparing

I used to think being prepared was a good quality to have. Someone’s kids would be unhappy and I would shake my head (inwardly only of course) and think… they didn’t prepare enough. ‘Cause, I confess, I was pretty good at being prepared with kids: snacks, drinks, entertainment, favourable time of day, amount of stimulation, after-activity plans.

I used to think this sort of planning was brilliant! But then, two people have made cases to the contrary: first, Ellen Hendriksen on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, who, 25 minutes into the episode talks about three aspects of social anxiety - perfectionism, attention as a spotlight, and safety behaviours. The safety behaviours “essentially what that is, is its any action that we take to try to “save ourselves”. It’s like a life preserver that actually holds us underwater. We think it’s going to save us, but really, it sinks us. So these are all the actions we take to compensate when we feel anxious. So we might over-explain, if we think we offended someone, we might write a nine paragraph explanatory e-mail saying what we really meant. We might over-prepare! If we’re feeling anxious about a presentation, we might rehearse it 25 times. We might be overly-friendly and put triple exclamation points at the end of sentences in our e-mails. (…) We might point out flaws.” (This last one is about using self-deprecation in order to elicit a reassuring response.)

She argues that safety behaviours “get the credit for the worst-case scenario not happening.” And scary as it might be, dropping these safety behaviours leads to a feeling of ease and freedom.

Second, George Saunders. At one point in A Swim In a Pond In The Rain, Saunders compares a writer who follows a pattern to someone who brings index cards on a date. “So, why the index cards on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date’s eyes because we don’t believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer.
”Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.”

So yes, preparation is fine, but, with time, building confidence in yourself is better!

Collecting

Let’s gather a collection of trees, shall we? On my daily walks, they are landscape markers, so familiar as to be near-friends.

Here are the curved-trunk ones:

And here is this one, with circles in its bark and a bridge between its branches.

Here are trees that lean toward each other and cross and I walk under, like a dancer under a bridging of hands :

Here are trees that grow mushrooms and something mysterious under their coat of bark:

Here is a tree that has succumbed to the beavers’ months-long project.

And here are trees that make me think of lovers.

Here is a tree festooned with a vine, like a garland, or a scarf…

Steps to a cement sidewalk

Getting a new cement sidewalk is an investment that requires proportional dissatisfaction with the existing state of walking surface and perhaps this is best summarized by the following picture:

If some detail were to be added it would be this: once upon a time, it used to rain in Winnipeg to the extent that the city had a certain reputation for mosquitoes. All this rain made the little circle paving stones a somewhat romantic path to and from the garage, even if, come winter, they were impossible to shovel. The rain ceased, and grass retreated like a receding hairline so that the circular paving stones seemed to float like forlorn islands in a sea of dirt… occasionally mud. So, this year, fed up entirely, we called a cement company for a quote and penciled-in the end of August for the beginning of work. We subsequently learned that getting a cement sidewalk involves a number of steps, the first of which is the digging.

After the digging come the forms.

Sometimes the plan needs modification because the little island of grass that Enzo likes sleeping on has too tight a curve for the form builder. Besides, he thinks it looks weird.

Once that little snafu gets cleared up, gravel is laid, packed and watered.

Then comes rebar, like artwork. In the course of all this, the dog escapes a handful of times.

Then, the glorious day of cement-pouring arrives and your son, who loves construction and imagines himself growing up to be a construction worker, comes home and asks you to tell him all about it. “There’s not much to say…” you apologetically reply… The truck was on the street and the crew brought in cement a wheel-barrow-full at a time, while you hid out in the basement doing work and staying out of the way, mostly because you’re shy.

A day later, lines are cut and the day after that, the forms are taken off.

Then Christian makes a run to the greenhouse for dirt and sod and the sidewalk is made to look like it was always there.

We both congratulate ourselves for hiring professionals.

Friday report

The end of the week always feels celebratory even when it is mundane. Newsletters come in to my e-mail with roundups and I sit in the glow of my desk lamp to read through a few. So far, Ann Friedman had me read an essay by Nereya Otieno and Otieno had me listen to a song titled “Too Many Birds”.

I texted Christian earlier today, before running errands and asked if he preferred Waffles with Roasted Applesauce or Pasta with Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter. “Pasta!” he answered. These meals are simple and we love them.

Christian is laying sod, the kids will be put to bed, the laundry taken out of the dryer, the dog put in his crate, a drink poured and then we’ll settle and watch Netflix and go to bed.

History

It’s funny how we talk about events… My mother-in-law, who turns 84 this week, will say “Never have I seen this before in all my 84 years” or “Never have I heard of this before, and I’m 84 years old!” and we’ll laugh and marvel at the marvellous, or sigh and bemoan the unpleasant.

I always feel a little depressed when someone says that history repeats itself… I take issue with the generalization, because I’m halfway to being an accredited historian and historians, you know, talk about nuance, and parse details, and debate causes of things.

This exchange on the most recent episode of Terrible Thanks for Asking, felt heartening. The podcast host, Nora, talked about Covid-19:  “And I think back to like, March 2020, how absolutely freaked out the kids were. We're doing all these things for the first time and we believe that there's no precedent. We kept saying “unprecedented times.” And one of the most soothing slash reassuring parts of the book, too, was that nothing is truly unprecedented, even while it is new to us, if that makes sense. Everything's a repeat of a repeat, even when we're like, “I've never seen it before. I've never seen it before.”

To which John Green answered:

“Yeah. And we've never seen it before. And I think that's important to acknowledge. But humanity has seen it before, especially when it comes to infectious disease. And I wanted to write about that, I mean, partly because I'm obsessed with infectious disease, but partly like even before the pandemic. But I wanted to write about infectious disease, in part because I wanted to look at the ways that people have responded to it in the past as a way of understanding how we're responding to it now. How did people respond to cholera in the 19th century? Well, they responded by marginalizing the already marginalized. They responded by blaming outsiders. They responded by getting angry about public health measures and quarantines. But they also responded with extraordinary generosity and real deep, profound solidarity. And seeing both those narratives be able to coexist in history helped me feel like both those narratives can also coexist for me now. Like, I can be upset with the way that we've responded to COVID-19 and the way that the pandemic is much worse than it had to be, while also really celebrating and and feeling the solidarity that people have expressed and the ways that we've understood ourselves to be bound up in each other, even when we're forced to be apart.”

(I love how TTFA offers transcripts of their podcasts!)

It reminds me of this line I read in Claire Messud’s book Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: “It’s all already happened, somewhere, in some way. It’s all there to be retrieved. Each generation is unique, to be sure, as is each individual: and our concatenation of challenges is new in its particular configuration and in its intensity. But if we pause and listen to history and literature, we’ll find, as Louise Glück puts it in “October”, ‘you are not alone, / the poem said / in the dark tunnel.‘”

Reading list: Two books by Henry Green

How to begin: From an article in The New Yorker, “The Henry Green novel—typically portraying failures of love and understanding, and noisy with the vernacular of industrialists and Cockneys, landowners and servants—was terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction, as reflected in those flighty gerund titles.”

Favourite quotes from Loving:

“So it came about next afternoon that Charley and Edith had drawn up deep leather armchairs of purple in the Red Library. A ledge of more purple leather on the fender supported Raunce’s heels next his you-and-me in a gold Worcester cup and saucer. Pointed French windows were open onto the lawn about which peacocks stood pat in the dry as though enchanted. A light summer air played in from over massed geraniums, toyed with Edith’s curls a trifle. Between the books and walls were covered cool in green silk. But she seemed to have no thought of the draught.” (p 141)

“It’s so hard for my generation to talk to yours about the things one really feels.” (p 203)

Favourite quotes from Doting:

“… a juggler walked on the small stage.
”The man started with three billiard balls. He flung one up and caught it. He flung it up again then sent a second ball to chase the first. In no time he had three, fountaining from out his hands. And he did not stop at that. He introduced, he insinuated one at a time, one more after another, and threw the exact inches higher each time to give six, seven balls room until, to no applause, he had a dozen chasing themselves up then down into his two lazy-seeming hands, each ball so precisely placed that it could be thought to follow grooves in violet air.” (p 7)

“‘The fact is’ he explained with calm ‘the minute one begins a discussion of mutual troubles or miseries, it invariably becomes a kind of fierce competition as to who, in effect, is the worse off.’” (p 52)