"Today..."

It was February and I was finishing Heidi Julavits's The Folded Clock on the train home from Philadelphia after a visit to sit with my mother by the side of her dear companion Jim Kilik during his final days in the ICU at Hahnemann. I was all at sixes and sevens: I came across a passage that shocked me with its aptness to my mother's situation, I am not sure if tears were actually rolling down my face or not but I think they probably were, and then somehow I left the ARC on the train and was thwarted in my compulsion to post the passage on my blog!

Heidi is my friend and neighbor and kindly gave me another copy so that I could post this unforgettable passage (it is about why we gossip about other people's relationships - and by now the book is actually out and I could have bought a replacement copy, I have not been on top of things):

The day's tagline was a simple one. One of three things would happen to us: we would stay married, or we would leave, or we would be left. We are in our forties, and this is what our futures have winnowed down to, these three possibilities. The purpose of the stimulating task in which we were involved was to help us figure out how to deal with this clarified future. How, as one man put it, to "best maneuver through the situation."

I don't maneuver. I distill. I distill from the many possible anxieties a primary one. I can imagine that point in time, if my husband and I stay together, and I believe we will, where our future will function like this: every night we'll go to bed wondering who won't be alive in the morning. When we kiss good night, it won't be as we kiss now in our forties. I won't be worrying whether or not I should be more passionate more regularly because if I'm not he might leave me for another woman. I'll be kissing him wondering if we'll never kiss again. I'll be wondering if this is not good night but good-bye. I can imagine, too, that this anxiety is somewhat purifying, because it is so simple, so unavoidable. You believe you can prevent your husband or wife from leaving you for another person--this is one reason we gossip in our forties. But someday we will leave or be left, and it won't be anyone's fault or anyone's choice. There is no available gossip to teach us how to avoid this fate.

The New Yorker also published an excerpt that gives a good feeling for this book's delicate and appealingly irritable treatment of marriage and mortality, and Becca wrote about Julavits and Manguso for the Globe.

Couples and communities

More from Nathaniel Frank on why gay marriage matters.

Homecoming

Very happy to be safely home in New York with little cat Mickey. London was excellent, but extremely tiring; my cousin P.'s wedding was lovely in every respect, but my favorite part was pretty certainly seeing the bride and groom ride on camels down the Kings Road! (Picture courtesy of Georgina.)

Kate Atkinson's new novel is stunningly good, but I am too tired to write more about it now (but read it!); the flight home passed very quickly, too, as I was able to get Mark Billingham's new Thorne book (not out yet in the US) and Mo Hayder's Poppet (which I see now I could have had on US Kindle after all, but it is traditional to acquire a few large-format UK crime-fiction paperbacks at Heathrow), which carried me very nicely through the journey.

Blocked

Minna Proctor on an encounter with Muriel Spark.

Also: Dickens' best novel?

Yokes

Middlemarch, book 5, chapter 48:

When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though from a different cause.  Then she had feared lest her effort at fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot where she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from which she shrank.  Neither law nor the world's opinion compelled her to this - only her husband's nature and her own compassion, only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage.  She saw clearly enough the whole situation, yet she was fettered: she could not smite the stricken soul that entreated hers.

Fine ends

I am fascinated by Eliot, but I do not love her novels like I do those of Austen and Dickens, and it is partly because her sentence-writing seems to me significantly inferior to theirs, even aside from the lovability factor.  Here's my pick from book 2 (chapter 20) - the moral insight is superior to the wording (Adam Bede is my favorite novel of hers, though I think I will reread Deronda this summer also):

The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly disturbing to Mr Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea's words were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could have been impelled to use.  She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity.  She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.  In Mr Casaubon's ear, Dorothea's voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without, they are resisted as cruel and unjust.  We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions -- how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness!  And this cruel outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife -- nay, of a young bride, who, instead of observing his abundant pen scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference.  Here, towards this particular point of the compass, Mr Casaubon had a sensitiveness to match Dorothea's, and an equal quickness to imagine more than the fact.  He had formerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all criticism, -- that which sees vaguely a great many fine ends and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them.

 I might have to put this in the style book - something in these sentences makes me cringe, and yet the observation is extremely striking...

42

This is for Rashmi!

Felicitations!

Caleb and Peter got married!