A Posting We Will Go...

I too, gentle commentator, am off to vacation, and one that has no elements of work within it, and books they shall accompany me for my reading pleasure!

Well said Madame M, with your “treasures and paper and ink windows to the soul.” And you are probably right usually about the books one sees in a book lover’s home being particular treasures. But at least this book lover would also have to admit that sometimes it’s because he’s woefully behind in reading the books and determining their worthiness! :)

“Pit stops to refuel” showcases the way we Americans sell ourselves short. Perpetual motion and activity machines we too often can be. At the end of the day (let alone the week, month, year, or decade), what has it gotten us? Too often, just processing our way through life with a few treasured experiences along the way if we are lucky, but mostly slogging through “great gray heaps of trash” (John Gardner, although he was referring to what it takes to find a good book). Yet it is our cultural self-imprisonment that we see no way through, around, or out. Surely there is real balance between Protestant work-ethic/Puritan sacrifice and what might appear to be sloth and goalless dithering.

An outstanding point about authors’ effects, and the effects of good written work. There is much in the world that happens without our knowing how, but the forces of the universe do often seem to come together to effect certain things.

I thought Henry was awesome! The world needs a lot of people like him!

Juliet’s musings about Dawsey could be echoed by men as well, although perhaps not as articulately or as in-depth. The sexes do have their troubles reading each other’s non-verbal signals when they are subtle, or when they could be interpreted in many ways!

Drift back into my windbaggery? My good Madame, here I thought I was acquiring proper scrivening manners, only to find out that succinct and pithy are not exactly what are desired! LOL

Very well, then. No one needs to request a professor to “hold forth” more than once or twice! :)

Let’s continue with some snippets from the book:

“You’re not going to throw off Miss McKenna’s little girl because of that, are you?” Don’t you love that type, depth, and yet simplicity of expression? We rarely have that here, at least anymore.

“If you call being human collaboration.” Indeed. Wouldn’t we transcend our differences more if we had that idea? Wouldn’t we be less susceptible to twisting by ideologues, to be being worked into a violent frenzy for some nationalist, religious, or other cultural sentiment?

“Maybe I was about to find out what’s on the other side of that silence.” Ah, yes, Juliet. The quiet, the mysterious, the wondering, the attraction!

I thought it was so appropriate when Sidney tells Juliet the obvious: that Elizabeth should be the center of the book. How often we need the perspective of others, to bounce things off of them, to find someone who looks at the world a little differently or a bit broader.

Will Thisbee’s wanting to know of Juliet which of the two “I’d marry if I were I man, which I wasn’t.” :) I thought her advice so appropriate: “If you have to ask, generally neither.” The “Miss X will bore you to tears, and Miss Y will nag you to death,” was just the dark chocolate homemade frosting on the ultra-moist cake! (and how men dread in nearly equal measure both those Miss X and Miss Y fates!).

“One must go at cooking slowly.” Certainly correct in my case. Four tries before my cherubs could pronounce a cake of mine edible! :)

“She’s off her feed.” What an exquisitely Islander way of saying she has little to no interest in food.

And Mark’s dismissive behavior, all about what he wanted and not interested at all in what interested Juliet? “He wasn’t the least bit interested in the Island, or the Occupation, or Elizabeth, or what I’d been doing since I arrived—didn’t ask a single question about it.” Take note lovers, of the warning signs of self-centeredness and perhaps arrogance or worse! They are often there to notice if the gooey messy relationship-slag has not melted your senses away! Even when you don’t have an outright sociopath on your hands, if you’ve got someone like Mark, you’ve got someone who is going to make you hurt and suck your essence dry. Refuse and get away! Chances of reform are probably less than 1 in a 1000! (Actually, I shouldn’t even have optimistically estimated even that high; lovers are notorious for thinking “I/we’re different; we’ll beat the odds.” Sure you will sug!)

Remy’s need—verbalized by her nurse—to be around cheerful people to heal: Good medicine there! Part of what makes us sick is surely being who saps us, who diminishes us. We don’t seem to notice at the time enough though,what effect it is having on us physically, nor the spiritual and emotional tie-ins from it to our physical health.

I thought Remy’s words about Elizabeth’s standing up to the overseer were doubly complex, or maybe I only thought they SHOULD have been doubly complex. “It would have been better for her not to have such a heart.”
“Yes, but worse for the rest of us,” Juliet thought.
And yet I felt that it could also be the case that it would have been better for the rest of them that Elizabeth not have such a heart, as they missed her so, and yet had she not had such a heart, they would not have missed her so…
Such good writing, or perhaps just fortuitous, to get one to think and ponder, and re-imagine and re-postulate…
Or perhaps the prof is just off his brain juice and not seeing plainly. :)

On another subject: We are living through the great erasure. The veterans of World War II age and die in droves now. The day is not far off when they will be gone. Their collective shared experience is already fading. It is not the recording of it that is fading all that much. It is the focus, the valuing. It is the way of things for that to happen. Veterans from the dawn of civilization have usually endured the same fate. We humans are brief mortals. Even if we didn’t chew up our mortality, which we usually assuredly do, our time is so brief, our focus so our own, that the now gets nearly all our focus, and what is left is given over to the future. The past, with its hard teachings and ready references, becomes lost first in spirit, and then in forgetfulness. We do not ask enough, probe enough, inquire enough of those who have gone before us while they are still with us, and most especially not those who have experienced momentous and grand things as both individuals and cultures. “Every time an old person dies, it is like a library is burning,” Alex Haley once said.

I reflected on that in reading the many instances the authors inserted into the book about the war, the occupation, the interaction, the hardships, the sacrifices, the horrors, the kindnesses, the adaptations, the endurance.

But that doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the book. Talented these authors are, to insert these vignettes, these painful human stories, and yet take away little to nothing of the delightfulness of the book. Indeed, perhaps those are one of the many reasons the reading of it is so enjoyable!

More to say, but vacation calls! Will post more when I return!