My notes on The Iliad, Book I, from line 240-315

All book and line numbers from the Fagles translation of Homer, the Penguin paperback addition (ISBN 0-14-044592-7);

Hera sends Athena down to tell Achille's to check his rage and he reponds, "'I must-/ when the two of you hand down commands, Goddess,/ a man submits though his heart breaks with fury'"(1,252-254). Achilles offers this as a moral pronouncement and a piece of strategy. Further defining the Gods and the relationship possible between mortal and immortal, he offers, "'If a man obeys the gods/They're quick to hear his prayers'"(I, 255-256).

Then, Achille's continues his scathing verbal attack on Agamemnon. He accuses him of cowardice and of being a parasite on his troops and people. He suggests that their is a crucial tie between a king and the quality of his subjects, that there is a father/child relationship, and that a bad king leads to a worthless citizenry. He calls Agamemnon a "King who devours his people! Worthless husks, the men you rule!'"(I, 270). The Lattimore translation at the Chicago Homer suggests the relationship works in the reverse: "King who feeds on your people since you rule nonentities'"(1, l.231). As I read this, Agamemnon feeds on his people because they let him. By this particular reading, Achille's speech is really incendiary and can be seen as openly subversive.

Achilles then swears an oath, using a sceptre to seal the oath. He uses the sceptre to illustrate the nature of the division that he's about to vow. The sceptre is a branch from a tree. Just as it will never bloom again, having been severed from the tree that gave it life, so will Achilles, the branch, fail to blossom for Agamemnon, his former trunk. Or, that would seem to be the straightforward reading. Maybe Achilles is suggesting a more subversive reading, suggesting that it is Agamemnon who is the branch to Achille's crucial, foundational trunk?

Hector's first mention, as man-killing Hector at line 285.

We have Agamemnon the king and the chief warrior Achilles now sitting across from each other, opposed and smoldering. Enter Nestor, who is an old, wise, politic mediator, "the man of winning words, the clear speaker of Pylos/ Sweeter than haney from his tongue the voice flowed on and on "(I, 291-292). Here is one of the first instances in the book indicating all the important and various role voice and vocal sound play throughout the book. Nestor is wise; the content of his words is worth listening to, but he's aided in passing them along by the sound of them.

Nestor first tells everyone to cool it and to think about how this bickering only helps and bucks up their enemies. Then, he invokes his age. He begins to tell of older heroes. He tells stories. He invokes legendary times when he "'fresh out of Pylos'"(314) fought alongside heros who took on "'Shaggy Centaurs, wild brutes of the mountains-/They hacked them down terrible, deadly work'"(I, 312-313).

Notes on The Iliad: Book One to l. 264

In the opening lines, the poet raises the complex play between mortal and immortal agency. He begins with Achille's rage and its consequences, and seems to assign blame to Achille's for those consequences. Yet, then he quickly deflects it, ending the long sentence detailing Achille's rage and it's consequences with the simple phrase, "And the will of Zeus was moving toward its end"(I,6).

The action ensues with Agamemnon's insult to Apollo. Wronged by Agammenon, Chryses prays to Apollo for vengence against the Greek leader and Agammenon hears him. A human, comic touch in Apollo's response to Chryses' prayer. Apollo comes down from Olympus "storming at hear...The arrows clanged at his back as the god quaked with rage"(I, 51-53). Apollo sends terrible disease to the Acheans. Another immortal, Hera then gets involved. Witnessing the disease wrought devastation around him, Achille's calls a meeting. But, he does so after "the impulse seized him" and that impulse is courtesy of Hera.   

In the opening sequence, we also get a glimpse of the poem's ambiguous relation to the Greek leader, Agamemmnon. He comes across as flawed, mean, petty and weak with his peremptory dismissal of Apollo's priest, Chryses.  His foibles are further exposed when the seer Calchas, called on to explain why Apollo is mad at them and how he might be appeased, agrees to do so but only if Achille's promises he will protect him from Agamemnon's anger.

Achille's response to Calchas  is filled with insults, implicit and explicit. When Calchas seeks protection if he speaks, he only makes oblique reference to the fact that he's afraid of Agamemnon. Achille's plays along, telling him that he will guarantee his safety, even against Agamemnon if that is whom Calchas refers to. In making his own reference to Agamemnon, Achille's questions the legitimacy of Agamemnon's authority. He promises to protect Calchas from any angry Achean who might be offended and attack Calchas, "even if you mean /Agamemnon here who now claims to be, by far/ the best of the Acheans"(I, 107-108).

Next, confronted with why Apollo is angry, Agamemnon is willing to make it right if someone will give him one of their own women won as spoils. Achilles points out that, without any new booty about, the only way this could be accomplished is by someone's being forced to give back a spoil, a war-gift. This constitues a breach of decorum. Petty, Agamemnon suspects that Achille's is ultimately just out "to cheat me"(I,154). At this point, Achille's takes off the verbal gloves, and declares, "Shameless-/armored in shamelessness-always shrewed with greed"(I, 174-175).

Achille's has overstepped. Agamemnon declares that he will send Chryseis back to her father and take Achille's Briseis in return, and explains, "So you can learn just how much greater I am than you/And the next man up may shrink from matching words with me, from hoping to rival Agamemnon strength for strength"(I, 219-222). At this point, the author of this epic has gone to great lengths to undermine the authority and character of Agamemnon. This is clearly an imperfect human being.

Achille's is enraged by Agamemnon's plan. He is on the brink of attacking his leader until the goddess Athena intervenes at the behest of Hera; these two always seem to act in tandem, with Hera seeming to harbor the agency and Athena serving as her weapon/tool/agent of choice. In a way, she is the counterpart in this quality to Ares who seems to never initiate action unless called upon by other gods.  The gods intervene in various direct and indirect, clear and obscured ways in the action. In this case, she comes down so that only Achille's can see her begs him to not attack. She promises future rewards. Achilles complies but doesn't curb his tongue, addressing Agamemnon as "Staggering drunk, with your dog's eyes, your fawn's heart!"(I, 264).

The ways Margaret's mind turns in Howards End

There's something unique and attractive about the way Margaret Schlegel thinks in E.M. Forster's Howards End.

Her thinking is clearly driven by impulses. But, almost as if she does a careful, rational survey of her impulses before deciding upon the one that calls strongest. When considering how to respond to Mrs. Wilcox's visit to Wickham Place, she sits by a sleeping Tibby and "Her mind darted from impulse to impulse, and finally marshalled them all in review"(56). Forster's sentence captures the unique combination of instinct and reason that characterizes Margaret's decision making.

Ultimately, she comes to choices by holding a conversation between her impulses and her reason. When she suspects Mr. Wilcox's invitation to look at the Ducie Street house is driven  by his romantic interest in her, she doubts her suspicion. She asks herself, "If he liked her, if he had manoeuvred to get her to Simpson's, might this be a manoeuvre to get her to Lond, and result in an offer of marriage?" As the narration proceeds, we learn that the preceding question is not mererly the narrator's recapitulation of what Margaret is thinking. It is the very question she puts to herself, and "She put it to herself as indelicately as possible, in the hope that her brain would cry, 'Rubbish, you're a self-conscious fool!' But her brain only tingled a little and was silent"(134).

Yet, when she comes to choices, she holds them at a humble arm's distance. In part, I think Forster aligns this type of mental posture as one more symptom of the Schlegels' general rootlessness. Yet, there's something attractive in the way she almost self-consciously courts doubt, especially in contrast to the Wilcox certainty. She tells Mr. Wilcox "'I don't believe in auras, and think Theosophy's only a halfway-house-'" and frowning Mr. Wilcox, thinking her incapable of certainty, finishes her sentence, "'-Yet there may e something in it all the same,'"(132). Margaret corrects him, "'Not even that. I may be halfway in the wrong direction. I can't explain. I don't believe in all these fads, and yet I don't like saying that I don't believe in them'"(132).

Never sin against affection: notes on Howards End

In Howards End, Forster continually works his themes by examining and expanding on phrasesa and words: balance, beauty, planning, the seen/unseen, proportion, the inner life, and confession to name some. Affection is a word that plays a prominent role in developing Forster's ideas. It is central to what moves and keeps the book and the Schlegels whole and moving forward.

Affection is positioned as the Schlegel's religion and saving grace. Meg grows concerned about Helen's behavior, her reticence, the formal tone of her letters and her unwillingness to meet in London. Unable to figure out how to proceed, she approaches Henry for a solution. As a practical man of business and science, he asks whether Helen has ever behaved similarly in the past. Meg takes offense and, annoyed, informs him "'You know quite well that Helen never sins against affection'"(240, Penguin 2000).

To sin against affection is to turn agains those feelings of tenderness and care that spring from shared objects and experiences. Such ties spring in part from nature, from sharing the times and places circumstances impose. In addition, such ties are given birth and are sustained through conscious effort and nurture. Once formed, to violate these binding feelings is to sin, to go against something sacred and beautiful.

Meg herself violates those feelings when she goes along with Mr. Wilcox's plan to abduct Helen and send her to a doctor. In part through loyalty to her husband, in part because she believes it to be the practical thing to do, Meg becomes part of the plan to "ambush" Helen. However, when she fully comes to realize what she's done, she rejects the plan and all practical considerations and sides with Helen. These contradictory and sudden swings in mood, belief and impulse are central to Margaret's character and central to Forster's notions as to proper thinking and feeling. Always, one thinks by doing, by going first to one position and then reverting to a contradictory position when the original one grows untenable or distasteful. As Meg begins to tell Mrs. Wilcox, "'Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed, and a deadlock-gracious me, I've started preaching!'"

When confronted by Helen, Meg quickly renounces Mr. Wilcox and his ways as given expression by his plans for Helen. Confronted by her sister, the ties of affection well up and Meg realizes they trump what might be the right and proper thing to do. Resisting her husband's arguments and entreaties, she tells him and his men to go away and that she will deal with Helen on her own. She declares, "'It all turns on affection now....Affection. Don't you see?...Surely you see. I like Helen very much, you not so much...And affection when reciprocated, gives rights'"(248).

Yet, affection proves an imperfect binding agent. In their time apart, they have grown apart. Sharing different lives and circumstances, they now occupy different places in the social order and their thinking and possibilities have diverged in significant ways. Meg realizes "Something had come between them. Perhaps it was society, which henceforward would exclude Helen. Perhaps it was a third life, already potent as a spirit. They could find no meeting-place. Both suffered acutely and were not comforted by the knowledge that affection survived"(252).

For Forster, affection springs from contact, from sharing time and place. It grows with the amount of time and place shared and it is threatened by physical separation.  For eight months, the two sisters have lived lives apart and a distance has grown between them. Different paths and places have changed them and the affection built on past selves is no longer as strong. However, it proves strong enough. Ten or so minutes together, in Howards End and among the furniture of their childhood home, ends up drawing them back closer together.

I love the way Forster sketches out what amounts to an almost mechanical etiology of affection. The renewal and rebirth of the affection between the sisters almost could be seen as springing from the family furniture which the two sisters suddenly find themselves among. Each piece tells them a part of their shared history, their shared story. The stories and the memories call them back to each other and restore the affectionate ties in no time at all. The sisters quickly come to "the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things. Explanations and appeals had failed; they had tried for a common meeting-ground, and had only made each other unhappy. And all the time their salvation was lying round them-the past sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future, with laughter and the voices of children"(255).

Home as the territory of certainty: more notes on Kevin Power's "The Yellow Birds"

Private Bartle, the protagonist of Kevin Power's The Yellow Birds, returns from Iraq having lost his faith. Not his faith in God or any particular religion, but the belief that the world makes sense, observes an order, has a meaning we might get at. He says, "At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance. Order became an accident of observation"(32-33).  He and his fellow soldiers spend a lot of time trying to look at he carnage around them and to draw sense and comfort from it. When a comrade dies, they see it as confirmation that they are less likely to. They imagine they are too small and insignificant to get killed. In hindsight, with a costly wisdom, Bartle realizes, "we were wrong. Our biggest error was thinking that it mattered what we thought"(13). Visiting a cathedral in Germany on his way back, he thinks he "could have picked up a handful of dirt from the street outsie, some wax from a candle on the alterpiece, ash from the incense as it swung past. I could have wrung it out, hoping I might find an essential thing that would give meaning to this place or that time. I did not. Certainty had surrendered all its territory in my mind"(60).

As Bartle is flying back to Richmond, from his one year tour, he has a moment where a thought slowly crawls across that attention of his consciousness. He begins to think, 'I want to go.....,' but he can't complete the thought for a moment. Only after a few seconds does the word "home" cross his mind. Although he doesn't quite know consciously what to make of this funny delay in the expression of his desire, it points to the fact that Bartle will have a hard, maybe impossible, time coming home. It doesn't exist as it did.

Home is a place of certainty. It is a center that lends you all your frames of references. It is where you have family and friends who love you and lend you a sense of your own significance. You matter because you matter to your loved ones, all the people back home. But, if the idea of certainty and significance have been blown away, torn from one like a limb, it is also hard to re-establish the authenticity, or truth, of home.

Bartle certainly doesn't feel it. At some point, in Iraq, he has lost his faith and his feeling of home. He can no longer imagine himself at home as he was. As he and his mother cross the James on a bridge into Richmond, he doesn't recall how he spent his youthful days on the river but instead sees himself as a soldier and imagines how he would navigate along its shore in the face of a hostile enemy. When he finally enters the room he grew up in, he's afraid to remove his army gear. As he removes it piece by piece, he fears "disappearing." He adjust slowly to being home. He stands in his room and is surrounded by a world of familiar smells and sounds but now "it was all filler. The noise, the  sound, they existed  just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home"(111). 

Land of the Brave: Bravery in Powers The Yellow Birds and Tim O'Brien's If I Die

In the past week or so I've been reading Kevin Power's The Yellow Birds, a novel offering a private's experience of the Iraq War and Tim O'Brien's memoir of his time serving in the infantry in Vietnam.
The two perspectives differ greatly on the whole idea of bravery.

Inspired by a brave platoon leader, O'Brien is very interested in the idea and spends a good portion of a chapter trying to define the concept. He even draws in Plato to suggest that bravery is not simply courage in the face of danger. It requires that one show courage in the face of danger for the purposes of trying to accomplish something good or just. Moreover, it can't be courage born of ignorance; the brave person must be fully aware of the dangers and risks he's facing down. Anything short of this is a questionable bravery.

O'Brien finds that bravery in Vietnam was rare simply because so many soldiers practiced various types of blinkering or ignorance. He's not faulting them for it, but according to O'Brien, "When we walked through the sultry villes and sluggish sullen land...the mass of men...talked little about dying...Death was taboo...Fear was taboo. It could be mentioned, of course, but it had to be accompanied with a shrug and a grin and obvious resignation. All this took the meaning out of courage."

Later, he revises this assessment and suggest that the average man sometimes acts bravely and at other times acts cowardly depending on the circumstances. He concludes, "the men who do well on average, perhaps with one moment of glory, those men are brave." Still, he singles out his brave platoon leader, Johansen, as demonstrating an exalted form of courage and this demonstration of courage redeemed the war and gave him something to fight for, to strive for.

Power's Private Bartle is much less interested in bravery, as either an idea or a redeeming goal. He too is intrigued by a brave commander, Lieutenant Sterling, who is a combat-hardened soldier's soldier that Bartle admires and fears. Bartle says, "I wasn't sure he wasn't crazy, but I trusted that he was brave. And I now know the extent of Sterling's bravery. It was narrowly focused, but it was pure and unadulterated. It was a kind of elemental self-sacrifice, free of ideology, free of logic"(43). O'Brien would dismiss this as a sham bravery, but Bartle is fascinated by it. Ultimately, Sterling proves to be crazy and brutal and this leads Bartle and the reader to question the idea of bravery offered in so many war narratives.

Telling war stories: thinking about Kevin Power's "The Yellow Birds" and Tim O'Brien's "If I Die in a Combat Zone"

After finishing Kevin Power's novel set in the Iraq war,The Yellow Birds, I recalled having bought and never read Tim O'Brien's memoir of combat in Vietnam, If I Die In a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. Maybe it was that both use Army drill songs for titles that drew me to recall and pick up O'Brien's book. I don't know. But, I decided to read O'Brien's memoir in the hopes of better understanding Power's novel.

The two books converse with each other. While nominally a novel, Power's book has a whiff of memoir about it. The author bio on the jacket informs that Powers "served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar." Power's story of the fictional infantry man John Bartle takes place at that time and place. Despite the fact that Powers has clearly not intended this as a memoir, he really does seem to want to offer some kind of witness to his experience. Or, to offer Bartle as an unwilling witness forced to tell a story he'd rather not tell. 

Both soldiers are careful to hedge their stories with caveats and warnings. O'Brien confesses, "I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows,  from one who's been there and come back," but he realize that to draw this or any other such large lesson from the war is not "right." He writes, "Now, war ended, all I'm left with are simple, unprofound scraps of truth" and ends asking: "Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?"(31).

Power's Bartle too is unable to draw pattern or meaning from his experience.  Imprisoned after the war for crimes committed during it, he marks his cell walls everytime he remembers an incident from the war,  "thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks into a story that made sense." Later, he realizes "the marks could not be assembled into any kind of pattern. They were fixed in place. Connecting them would be wrong. They fell where they had fallen"(216-217).

Bartle is not a young man prone to reflection or philosophy. He seems to be telling his story only to himself. On the other hand, O'Brien is clearly writing a book as a witness to what he saw as a combat soldier during his year long stint in Vietnam in 1969. In distinction to Bartle, both before and during his year of war, the young O'Brien is obsessed with the justice of his war, why he is there and should he be there. He spends a great deal of time trying to define courage and whether he displays it.

But, like Bartle, O'Brien seems reluctant to see pattern and meaning in his war experience. His experience leads him to suspect that only people who have never experienced war look for meaning there. Bartle is truly adverse to drawing meaning from his time in Iraq; O'Brien claims to feel the same but he is much more apt to occasionally try to draw some redeeming value from his time in Vietnam.

He modestly and maybe disingenously offers his book as something far less. He asks, "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories." As both books make clear, war stories tell truths that call into question the very idea of truth.

Anita Desai's The Artist of Disappearance

I've been reading and re-reading Anita Desai's trio of novellas, The Artist of Disappearance all summer and now into the fall. I've read them distractedly on a train, between tours while volunteering as docent at local historic homes, while waiting for my oil to be changed. I've never been able to read any of these novellas straight through, in one sitting. They are not exactly page-turners. But, strangely enough, they stick with you and I find myself thinking about them when I go out and walk or while sitting at a light.

They are all sad stories about creating and beauty. Coming as they do at the end of Desai's long and distinguished career as a writer, they have a special heft and poignancy.

Tonight's post is on the first story in the collection, The Museum of Final Journeys which features a nameless and unremarkable narrator, a petty and mean-spirited young man who has taken up a minor government post in the remotes of modern India. He is bored and lonely and his unhappiness gets spent on contempt for the poor locals whom he serves as judge and record keeper. His father and Uncles had regaled him with adventure stories of their own time as government officials in the provinces, but he finds his own experience to be something else entirely. Then, at the point of apathy, he hears of a mythic museum on one of the local plantations, and, shortly after, an elderly, obsequious man, whom the narrator describes as a "clerical creature," appears at his gate seeking help for a large, mysterious museum.

The clerical creature's request comes wrapped in a story that the official finds long. As his ancestors before him, the clerical creature (hereafter the clerk) has worked all of his life as the caretaker of a large plantation that has been falling apart over the years and now is nearly in ruins. At one point, in hopes of averting catastrophe, the master of the plantation married a rich, cultured young bride. They have a child together but the master dies shortly after the child is born.

The clerical creature assumed the responsibility for the young widow and for making sure the prized child, the heir, has everything. Yet, while the child grows, the estate continues to decline. Although money is hard to come by, the mother and the caretaker work to supply the needs and wants of the beloved child. Eventually, the child grows up, goes off to school in England, earns a degree in law. Everyone expects the beloved child will return and restore the glory of the estate. But, after returning for a short stint, he leaves his heartbroken mother and the caretaker behind and heads out for points unknown never to return.

Not that he doesn't think of home. Shortly after leaving, the son begins to send crates back home with all kinds of beautiful and exotic objects. He continues the practice for years, and the objects start to really accumulate.  Nobody quite knows what to make or do with these objects. Eventually, the mother and caretaker decide to build a museum to house them and the museum grows into a substantial and much talked about collection. At this point, the government official asks if he can see the collection and the caretaker tells him that nothing would make him happier. He has come to the official in hopes that he can enlist the power and wealth of the estate to preserve and secure the museum.

There is a lot of mystery surrounding the whole affair. The official can never quite determine what's happened to the son or the mother. Eventually, intrigued, the official agrees to visit the museum.

The museum proves to be worth the trip. It is truly an astounding collection of objects from every corner of the globe. The clerk takes the official through room after room of amazing objects; rooms filled with miniatures, rooms of kimonos and fans, rooms full of fine rugs, masks, footwear. The official marvels at it all, and asks "What kind of traveller had this been who desired and acquired the stuff of other people's lands and lives? Why did he?"

The official's amazement and curiosity soon turns to anxiety. It's all a bit overwhelming.The objects seem pitiful; full of craft and expression, they remain disquietingly mute. Outside their home and time, one would need to bring knowledge to get them to speak. And, each comes from a particular, distinct time and place. The collection seems less an assemblage of objects that communicate beauty and emotion and more a serious of things making impossible and insistent demands.

The official fears that if he takes on the challenge of preserving this collection, his life will be that of a grave-keeper. He notes "whole worlds were encrypted here and I looked to my guide for elucidation but he only gave a slight shrug as if to say: what does it matter? The young master collected them and that was what made them precious." The official realizes he's being enlisted in a futile effort to keep alive a memory.

We never do find out why the young master left never to return; it's not even clear whether the clerk, despite his long service and deep attachment to the family knows why he left to never return. Nor do we ever find out exactly how the mother explains her son's abandonment. We never know to what extent the objects come to take his place. It is a place that is never filled. We do learn that the mother has left the estate for good herself, leaving it and the museum in the hands of the caretaker. But, we don't know if this move was precipitated by resignation or simply by old age. Did the mother eventually realize that the objects can't cover the loss of her son? We do realize that the caretaker has not resigned himself to the son's having left. If he's not exactly expecting him home, he still can't give up on the idea. In a way, caring for the objects comes to replace caring for the son and family. But, he can't do it alone, and the official isn't interested in helping him in his quixotic quest.

"Something Happened": The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Writing this piece about Kevin Powers novel The Yellow Birds, I realized that I didn't know the first name of the narrator and center of the book, Private Bartle. I don't think that's because Power necessarily intended Bartle as an everyman. In fact, Private Bartle would be offended by such meaning-making gestures, or attempts at propaganda. Private Bartle's narration is an act of witness, told after the fact, after his time in Iraq. Something has happened, but Bartle needs to...get to that in the right way. Bartle's story isn't intended or presented as a lesson, or to make a point. And, that might be the beginning of a peace.

John Bartle (first mention of that name comes on page 44) almost seems to wander into the war; or, maybe he's wandering when it stalks him. He begins his story by telling of how "the war tried to kill us in the spring. ....While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dar. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."

Bartle is a twenty-one year old at the start of his memory. Dominated by the war, all of his memories seems to begin in 2003.  At this point, he's been in the army two years and is Fort Dix waiting to be deployed to Iraq. At Dix, he meets Daniel Murphy, an eighteen year old raw recruit whom he adopts. When he meets Murphy, Bartle thinks about what he'll say about himself and finds a disquieting blank. He thinks," I'd been in the army a couple of years. It had been good to me, more or less, a place to disappear. I kept my head down and did as i was told. Nobody expected much of me, and I hadn't asked for much in return." Bartle likes the army because it has conferred a type of freedom upon him. Soon after enlisting, he realizes, "never have to make a decision again."

Of course, this doesn't prove true entirely or how to explain his friendship with Murphy. In his telling, in his memory, Bartle downplays his part in that. He downplays his part in much of what happens. As Bartle recalls, one day at Dix, Murphy simply appeared next to him in formation, says hello and Bartle gets chewed out for talking out of turn. Capping off his account of their first meeting, Bartle summarizes, There is nothing else to be said. Something happened. I meet Murph."

Murphy as infantryman is a bit over-his-head. His and Bartle's seargent, Sterling, basically asks Bartle to keep an eye on him. Without really making a real conscious decision, Bartle agrees. He further cements his bond to the slightly spacey eighteen year old from rural Virginia when he promises his mother, LaDonna Murphy, that he'll look after her son. He tells her, "'Of course,'" while thinking "Sure, sure...Now you reassure me and I'll go back and go to bed." This promiseso casually entered proves to change him dramatically.

Bartle proves incapable of helping Murphy, incapable of figuring out how he was supposed to, and incapable of forgetting Murphy or forgiving himself. Murphy's death forces him to recall the war in an obsessive way and yet he is never able to gain any answers or perspective. By the end, this almost seems an act of memory pursued to destroy the notion of answers and patterns, to mock the idea of certainty as the refuge of people who have never experienced a war, nor seen the worst of man.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

After a terrible epidemic basically wipes out human-kind in North America, two men, Hig and Bangley, forge a hardscrabble existence at a county airport in the shadow of the Rockies in Peter Heller's first novel, The Dog Stars.

An odd couple drawn together for safety and by circumstance, Hig and Bangley spend most of their days securing their turf, patrolling their perimeter from, as Hig with understatement puts it, "intruders." Hig and Bangley are a team; Hig does most the recon, Bangley does most of the killiing. Hig does his his recon flying a 1956 Cessna 182, which he calls the beast, over about a thirty square mile tract.  Bangley does his part using the veritable arsenal of weapons which he came with. When, he showed up out of the blue one day in an old truck.Hig is our narrator, or journaler, and supplies precious little in the way of background on either himself or Bangley. Heller is after a ground-zero situation.

The intruders who come to Hig and Bangley's doorsetp are desperate, fierce and scary people who seem intent on killing and taking. After the contagion, civilization has all but collapsed and mankind has returned to a primitive, every man for himself state.  Of course, in all cases, neither the reader nor Hig can be sure of the intruders intentions or whether they are uniformily predatory. When others intrude on the little homestead Hig and Bangley have established,  Bangley, ("a mean gun nut" according to Hig) ensures that he and Hig shoot first and never ask any questions later. Although, homestead might be the wrong word. Hig sleeps outside a house, under the stars, claiming not to want to be trapped by a likely target for marauders. Hig has doubts but never lets those get in the way of the killing, in part because he's afraid he might be next if he were to argue for practicing a bit more discrimination.

The marauders who come are equal parts pathetic and frightening. There is "a young girl, a scarecrow" with a pocketknife who tries to ambush him from behind only to be mowed down by Bangley. There are scary bands of primitively armed men, anywhere from six to eight, usually large and fierce. Think pirates. These bands would potentially present problems if any were ever as well-armed as Bangley. This is definitely a book that the NRA will love.

Hig and Bangley's relationship is a strained one. Misanthropic Bangley seems to relish the killing. Its almost as if this bleak, isolated and red-in-tooth and claw world is a dream set-up for him. Hig on the other hand is less well adjusted to his existence and still feels some need to exercise his  humanity. Every once in a while, initially unbeknownst to Bangley, he makes calls on a large Mennonite family ten miles south of them. The family is suffering from "the blood," a blood disease that arose in response to the flu that annihilated the vast majority of people.

When Bangley finds out that Hig is doing this, he argues, "you want to get this far and die of the blood?" Beginning to question his survivor's good fortune, Hig thinks "This Far. Bangley and Jasper [Hig's dog] and a low fat diet."

Heller's novel is a philosophical one, begging several questions the question; what makes life worth-living? Can you imagine a case when too much would be taken away? What would be that case? How does one go forward after disasters that seem to strip all worth away?

As the book begins, Hig has been eking it out with Bangley at the airport for almost nine years. His daily routine seems to require a great deal of mental and emotional effort. Memory can't be indulged; for the most part, Hig avoids thinking about his comfortable life before the plague and the wife and child-to-be he lost in it. Occasionally, he goes off with Jasper and hunts and fishes, although much of the game is gone. The beauty he sees in nature now only confuses him in the face of all the senseless disaster he's lived through. He asks Bangley, "if he ever thought there was anything more than this, than just surviving day to day. Recon, fixing the plane, growing the five vegetables, trapping a rabbit. Like what are we waiting for?"

Yet, he persists, going forward powered by a slender hope. At one point, he asks himself, "Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn't come for months?" He's assumed a posture of hope in the hopes it will create a bit of magic.

Waiting with hope eventually wears then and he decides a desperate acts is in order. Spurred by a mysterious radio signal he received from Grand Junction three years before, he decides to get in his plane and fly there, despite the fact that he's not sure what he'll find or whether he'll find gas he can use to fly back to Bangley and his "home." He needs more and he's willing to risk all to find it.

Predictably and improbably, he finds a woman, Cima. And, of course, she's not only sane, but sweet, smart and fantastic looking. He also discovers where the call from Grand Junction came from, but what was a source of hope proves to have sprung from something considerably bleaker. But, all this is the rest of the story, and I won't spoil it.  Regarding the probability of there being a lovely, sane, smart women wandering out in the wasteland....maybe I just don't recognize the possibilities that lie in even the bleakest situations.

The opening of the book is better than the questing journey outward that dominates it's close. The way the two men craft a life and manufacture a reason for being out of the thinnest air is fascinating. The rest of the story seems contrived. Heller creates a situation that poses some really interesting questions, he puts his characters in a box, but then takes the easy way out and gives them an unrealistic way out. I'll leave it there to spare those who might want to read the book.

It's a page-turner. For the most part, Heller writes in a spare, elliptical style. As a character, Hig is a bit of a mess; he's gone through hell and back but is still, at heart, an all-American dude. He is sensitive, attuned to nature, super-handy, a great outdoorsman. He is also literary: when he makes one final trip to the house he'd shared with Melissa, it's to retrieve a volume of William Stafford poems. He's great company, but sometimes he doesn't convince or add up. He tends to gush at points, and some of his thoughts seem kind of like FB posts, self-involved recitations of likes and dislikes. He seems to sometimes veer suddenly between the macho and the maudlin

Still, the book asks the big questions and begins to answer some of them. What are our reason for being? How resilient are they? And, the book presents a welcome view of nature as an ambivalent force. Hig is clearly enamored by the outdoors, but can he see it quite the same way after nature, in the form of a bug, basically strips him of all he possesses? I wish Heller had delved into this area a bit more. And, if nothing else, the death of Jasper the dog will strike a chord with any animal lover.

Hanna Pylvainen's We Sinners

Aiming to convince her to leave her church, Tiina Rovaniemi's boyfriend Matthew tells her "You know, the best thing about the church is your family, and the worst thing about our family is the church"(102). While Tiina easily recognizes the truth of Matthew's words, she also realizes it will never be simple for her to separate the two.

The confluence of faith and family is at heart of Hanna Pylvainen's, We Sinners. The eleven short stories in the collection tell of Tiina's family, the Finnish-American Rovaniemi clan, made up of her, her mom and dad and eight siblings. Eleven stories, eleven members, although not every member narrates a story.

The Rovaniemi's are Laestadians, members of the Laestadian church. As rebellious daughter Uppu explains to a boyfriend, "It's a kind of Lutheranism where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal Lutherans"(154). It is a strict church in some regards; drinking, dancing, movies, popular movies, TV are all heavilly frowned upon. As is any type of birth-control; the Rovaniemi's are a large family and the married children who remain in the church also launch large families. Yet, according to the head of the clan, Warren Rovaniemi, who ministers at the church on weekends while pulling down a check as an accountant to earn a living, "Once you had the heart of a believer...the restrictions weren't restrictions at all- it was simply what your conscience told you to do and not to do"(158). Beyond this, Laestadianism is a church built upon forgiveness. It recognizes man is a sinner and the core of it's service is to foster forgiveness.

The Rovaniemi's simple faith offers peace and forgiveness, and builds remarkable characters. It cements them as a family. Yet, for all it's strengths and simple beauties, it is a severe faith. It is a faith, and, by it's nature, everyone struggle with it.

It seems especially a challenge for the children growing up in a late 20th century suburb of Detroit. For one, the rules of the church make them lead quite different lives from those of their peers. Nobody they know has such a large family. Nobody they know is forbidden from going to the movies. They all feel an urge to escape both at times. And, doubt creeps into the faith of all.

However, escape is not an easy passage, and although yearned for at times, when it comes to the point, it is hard to make the leap away from faith. When his wife asks what he does all day at work as an accountant, Warren Rovaniemi glibly tells her "I figure out the difference between what things seem to cost and what things really cost"(30). The Rovaniemi children all fear what leaving the church will really cost.

How does one price the gift of forgiveness and love. The family practices an imperfect but sincere and beautiful love founded on a daily, constant, seeking and granting of forgiveness. The mother, Pirjo Rovaniemi, tells one of her seven daughters' suitors, Jonas Chan, that her children "are the best of me...They are the best thing I ever did with my life"(171). And, the children feel the love and practice between themselves seeking and granting forgiveness. The family knits its members into something both maddening and large, alive and vibrant. When the Rovaniemi's leave Jonas Chan's high school graduation party, "they left behind a backyard of quiet that no one could fill again. He felt it again, the largeness of them, at Uppu's graduation, though then the entire churh showed, every room filled, even the stairs, even the porch, forty or fifty little kids running about, a few babies lying on blankets atop the living room rug, waiving their limbs like beetles on their backs"(167).

The situation is not easy. All the members of the family have doubts. When Warren suspects he is going to be chosen to minister to the congregation, he quickly dismisses his suspicions; surely, God knowing him as the particularly wrathful and  sinful creature he knows himself, He will never allow such a thing to happen. It does, although Pylvainen never makes us privy to the internal doubts such a series of events must have occasioned. Several of the siblings leave the church, unable to sustain the faith and not willing to fake it, despite the fact that it creates a barrier between themselves and their believing kin. Their honesty speaks to their respect for the faith of their family. Even the most devout member of the siblings, Brita is subject to a particulary dark night in her soul when she nearly dies after delivering her last child. Nobody simply leaves.

Never simply preaching one way or another, Pylvainen has done a superb and nuanced job of capturing the strengths and weaknesses of living a strict, non-mainstream faith. This is far from a screed opposed. If anything, it leaves me, a struggling believer who grew up in a rather normal, small nuclear household, envious of the Rovaniemi children. Their family and faith has offered them a certainty and happiness that is lacking for many. When son Nels experiments with alcohol in college, he eventually has a moment when he pulls back and realizes he is about to lose something if he continues to indulge in such sinful behavior. Nels "sat in the back of the lecture hall and wondered about all the people sitting there, bored, trying to figure out who they had a chance with. He felt bad for them, for the limits of their experiences, for the fragility and infrequency of their happiness. They did not even known, he thought, the kind of happiness they wanted"(74).

The comforts of shared honesty; notes on Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles

The earth slows in Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles, days and nights lengthen, birds die, insects flourish, tides grow,  vegetation begins to fail, cultivation requires huge amounts of energy, the magnetic fields begin to fail and the sun's radiation begins pouring into the western United States. Amidst this slowly unfolding catastrophe, middle-schooler Julia is attempting to navigate puberty, first love and the collapse of her parents' marriage.

Early on in the book, while the ramifications of the earth's slowing have yet to become clear, the tone of the book is lighthearted, bouyed by a young girl's perspective. It grows darker as the consequences of the slowing pile up over the course of a year. Over that calendar year, Julia ages many years. She loses the sunshine of her earlier self.

The year of the slowing is a year of loss. For Julia, it is a year of losing things she never knew she had till they disappeared. Julia laments, "We were worse off, most of us, than we had been before. Some grew sick, some depressed. A great many marriages dissolved under the stress. Billions of dollars had drained from the markets. And we were missing certainother valuables too: our way of life, our peace of mind, our faith"(175).

In part, the adults and children around her cope by denying; by continuing to try and live as they did before. Soon, they decide that they will live by clock time, even if this means that many days they rise and work and go to bed in the dark and on other days the reverse. This general, widespread denial is almost invisible since so many are participating. And, seeing as there is little that can be done to reverse the earth's slowing, perhaps it is an understandable response. Some can't abide the denial and decide that they will live by the sun, or by real time, and many of these folks form outsider colonies in the desert.

All the big psychological dramas unfolding in the face of the earth's slowing are also played out in the smaller domestic sphere of Julia's family. Echoing the denials and lies of those wishing to ignore the earth's slowing, Julia's parents also participate in lies to hide the dissolution of their marriage and assuage their guilt with indirect acts of love. Julia's father has started an affair with the neighbor woman and Julia has learned of it. She witnesses her father's infidelities, his lies, his guilt. She suffers all this knowledge silently alone.

One episode reworks the novel's concerns with denial, lying and it's uses. When her mother suffers a fainting spell behind the wheel of a car and hits a bystander, she remains groggy when she comes to and is not clear as to whether the bystander is alive or dead as he's carted off to the hospital. However, Julia, who remains aware throughout doubts it. Her doubts are confirmed when she overhears her father take the call from the hospital informing him that the man died. She's shocked to learn her father, in a desparate and guilty stab at doing his wife a kindness, has told her mother that the man survived and will be fine. She discovers that the "lie improved everything." Before her mother had been in the doldrums and depressed, but quickly regains some vitality and bounce. The family gets together and has a fancy dinner; "we sat on the deck in the sunshine, food filling our bellies. I wish I recalled more nights like that one...my mother was happy, her conscience clear and I knew I'd never tell"(162). Julia learns at home the comforts a lie can supply for a time.

But grief always returns; loss is inevitable and often sudden and unpredictable. As her parents fall into their separate, estranging miseries, Julia begins to rely more and more on her first crush and boyfriend, Seth Moreno. Seth has recently lost his mother to cancer and Julia feels "he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief." Julia finally confides her father's infidelities to Seth. He shares her outrage and a better, more honest and lasting comfort is achieved.

Karen Walker Thompson's Age of Miracles

Middle-school, puberty are not fondly remembered by many. Imagine going through it while the world, i.e. the earth, seems to be slowly coming to the end. This is the premise of Karen Walker Thompson's  novel, The Age of Miracles. It is both wacky and profound and all's told with a grace and a deceptive simplicity.

At the start of the book, without anyone's noticing at first, the world starts spinning a bit slower day by day, adding minutes to each day and night. Eventually, unspecified "authorities" notice and on a normal seeming Saturday an announcement is made. As you might suspect, this causes certain changes leading many to panic. Birds start dying off en masse, tides advance a bit further inland, gravity increases forcing everyone, from ball-players to pilots to adjust, serotonin levels increase releasing inhibitions prompting impulsive behaviors......And, ultimately, as the days and night grow longer, the ability to grow food on earth grows imperiled. All this "Big Stuff" is happening and Thompson tells about it from the eyes of a middle-school age girl, Julia.

For Julia, all the big-picture, apocalyptic changes are on her radar. But, so are all of what we normally think of as the "small-picture" events: her best friend growing apart from her, other friends growing boy-crazy, her body slow development, her crush on Seth, and, most worrisome to her, the growing cracks in her parent's marriage. These small picture changes and dramas keep happening, and the characters in the book are really good at ignoring the catastrophe unfolding and getting wrapped up in the everyday and the dramas of their lives. Maybe this is a function of the slow speed of the catastrophe. Undoubtedly it is also a form of denial.

In part, the necessities of life demand a certain level of denial. Soon after noting the slowing, citizens in California are asked to order their lives by clock time for the smooth functioning of society. When Julia and her classmates return to thier floodlit school one Monday morning in the middle of a long night, They are "told to disregard the bells, now rogue, the whole ell system having come unhooked from time"(43).

 Julia and those around her become increasingly conscious of how dependent they were on the earth's ancient and unnoticed movements. The earth's regularity, its seemingly eternal consistency has instilled  a certain child-like faith that the world is tailored to their needs and wants. Like a child become aware of their parent as a separate being, they experience a profound loss. Thompson's Julia observes "It's hard to believe that there was a time in this country-not so long ago-when thick almanacs were printed every year and listed, among other facts, the precise clock time of every single sunrise and every single sunset a year in advance. I think we lost someting else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things"(96).

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl is a missing girl mystery on the surface. On the afternoon of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunn gets a call at the bar he owns. A neighbor reports that his front door is wide open. Nick goes home to discover that his wife, Amy Dunn, to whom he is not so happily married, is not home. She appears to have left in a hurry; an iron atop an ironing board has been left on, the living room shows signs of a struggle. Immediately, the police become convinced of foul play and Nick becomes the prime suspect, despite the fact that Flynn has pretty much clued us in that Nick is....not a likely suspect. Soon though, a whole host of mysterious and terribly incriminating evidence starts popping up that pretty much points to him, not only the likely, but the obvious suspect.

As the police pursue their case, as Nick tries to make sense of his world as it starts quickly falling apart, we are taken through his and her recollections of the Dunn's marriage. The mystery at the heart of the book is puzzling, but the Dunn's marriage is truly more confounding. There marriage truly is a hell. Neither can stand the other but neither can stand to leave. Very quickly, the reader not only want to know what happened to Amy, but also how  and why this couple ever married. What were they thinking?

Actually, the mystery only deepens the further back Nick and Amy go. In the early days, their relationship seems a wonderful union. Later, Nick claims, "I'd fallen in love with Amy becausee I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. ..I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive"(214). Amy's recollection glows similarly: "[Nick] was the first naturally happy person I met who was my equal. He was brilliant and gorgeous and funny and charming and charmed...I thought we would be the most perfect union: the happiest couple around"(224). And, for a while they are.

Five years on though and all has gone to hell. They become the couple who only stay together because neither can give up the game of besting, torturing the other. And, yet, while Nick is the chief suspect and tons of evidence points to him as the person responsible for Amy's disappearance, Flynn leads us to believe otherwise. So....what' happened to Amy?

If you read this, make an effort not to skip ahead. There are certain structural features, chapter headings, that will begin to give away what has happened. Regardless though, Flynn has contrived a plot that should surprise any reader. And, it's hard to rush through this book since the writing, the detail on the characters, the dialogue, the quips and descriptions are so original and consistently funny. You want to know what happened but you don't want to miss a line of Flynn's fabulous, funny, inventive writing.

Alif, the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Every once in a while you read a book that impresses you a great deal upon reading but which leaves you a little underwhelmed in retrospect. Such was G. Willow Wilson's promising and often enchanting Alif the Unseen, a love story mixed up with a good guys/bad guys adventure chase story. Both unfolding in marvelous, unreal places, the online world and the Empty Quarter, a mythic no-man's land  home to the Djinn, mysterious, mercurial spirits mentioned in the Koran as a third creation between the angels and man.

Alif, the main character is, a very real, mixed-blood (Indian and Arab) twenty-something living in frustration with his mother in a backward, unnamed Persian Gulf emirate. He passes his days online and, not of pure Arab bloodscratches out an income of sorts by providing firewalls and encryption to various digital discontents intent on keeping hidden from their State's security apparatus.

In his free-time, he strikes up a romance with a wealthy, upper-class young woman, Intistar he meets in a dissident chat room. Love blooms till her parents insist on her marrying a suitor who comes seeking her hand, a man high-up in the emirate's digital security system, whom the Emirate's hacker community has tagged with the comic-worthy monicker, "the Hand." While she's content to face the reality of her parent's demands, Alif has a tantrum and creates a program to shield himself from Intistar online. Intistar manages to contact him one last time via Alif's neighbor, Dina, a serious young muslim girl from Egypt who holds a candle for the unwitting Alif.

Intistar contacts him to deliver a book, The Alf Yeom, to Alif. It is a mysterious collection of stories, like the One Hundred and One Nights. Alif quickly learns it is an ancient, powerful and much wanted book. In particular, Intistar's husband to be covet's the book and immediately puts the Emirate's security service to work to locate Alif and the book. And, although he's primarily interested in Intistar because of the book, he nevertheless is jealous of Alif and looks to stick him in a prison and starve him to death.

Alif is forced to go on the lam with Dinah who gets swept up into his predicament by accident. Their escape takes them on a wild journey across a variety of digital and spiritual realms, from back-alleys in the Old Quarter of the city where they meet the sinister, mercurial and supernaturally powerful Vikram the Vampire, to immaterial planes where the Djinn make their home, to a mosque in the heart of the city where they encounter Imam Bilal, the voice of a wise Islam. All prove no match for The Hand, and Alif finds himself locked away like the Count of Monte Cristo, starving in the dark without hope, till.....

The mysteriously peers from her author photo bedecked in a veil and the veil is a central preoccupation of the book. Wilson attempts to reconstruct it's meaning by presenting the veil as an instrument of power, a piece of clothing that affords woman a species of privacy and anonymity, the power to observe without being observed. The veil confers a power and pleasure on a par with that conferred by the anonymity of the web. Poor and foreign, Dinah picks up her veil as a class statement, defying her parent's hopes that she will eventually be able to go into high-priced servitude with a wealthy sheikh's family. Not for her.

Although Alif is the central character of the book and the action is instigated by him, Dinah is the book's soul. She is a religious person, but capable of surprises, of tremendous strength and daring. The ostensibly more modern Alif is indeed the drearier, more predictable character. Indeed, as Wilson is at pains to point out, we are all "programmed" by our culture and it is up to us to inject code from elsewhere, to write into that programming some fuzzy logic if we wish to grow and be more. Dinah is there to teach this to Alif. Yet, I'm not sure that Wilson manages to fully pull this off. This is meant to be the education of the digital, non-spiritual Alif by the girl-wonder Dinah and the Imam Bilal.While Alif grows, the nature of that growth is murky: he comes to realize that surfaces are just that, that much lies beyond and behind what is visible to the eye, that one can never pay enough attention, that ritual and routine are necessary to our happiness? I guess. And, he comes to some of this but I'm not clear as to how that reflects Dinah or her brand of Islam.

Still, there's plenty here to keep one's attention and I loved the blending of old and new. It seems important to have modern, imaginative forward thinking voices who maintain a healthy respect for traditions. Wilson seems at pains to keep all of this together, most likely to the displeasure of many, and it seems chary to criticize.

Leadership?

I saw this interesting quote from Joel Ewanick who was head of marketing for GM up till Sunday when he was given the heave- ho. In what I presume was an earlier interview cited in an article in the WSJ, he confessed to being polarizing and adds:

"One of my jobs is to make sure people don't relax, to keep the tension high....I don't mean to hurt people, but everything matters now and we have to be great."

So, I like the notion of people not relaxing or getting slack. I agree that if you are doing anything well, everything matters and you need to convey that to all stakeholders. And, you should always try to be great. Does this invariably lead to tension and hurting feelings? I know it's easy to simply say no, it doens't have to lead to those things but I wonder. And, maybe it doesn't have to lead to those things, but there is a big cost to pursuing greatness without inducing tension and hurting feelings.

Of course, Mr. Ewanick was basically let go from GM, only two years after being hired by the firm. They pulled, or better, stole him from Nissan where he'd been working all of six weeks when GM called. That's not nice, or loyal.

George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

This weekend, I finished George Eliot's Mill on the Floss. I've read a lot and am not genuinely surprised by many endings but this one caught me off guard. Not only Maggie's death in the flood, which feels like a death-sentence delivered, but the abrupt and sudden way Eliot delivers the final scenes. Certainly it is forecast, but...I only saw the forecasting in retrospect.

And, Eliot finishing off Maggie at the end seems to me akin to the way horror films often harm, mutilate and kill the promiscous girl. Not that Maggie is promiscous, but clearly she is a person whose passionate nature drives her to impulsive actions destabilizing to the norms of her time? Certainly, Eliot doesn't kill her off to punish her. Instead, it almost seems to be an attempt to punish the reading public of her time. By taking the narrative turn she does at the end, Eliot is asking her public where is a woman like Maggie to go and make a life for herself after what she's done? She's conceding that her powers can't imagine a life forward for a woman like Maggie in the world of which she's part/apart. Maggie's death at Eliot's hands also seems a mercy killing.

Eliot is an outsider. She clearly looks at her fellow men and women and suspects they have been lessened in some manner from their true natures. Their souls have been starved in some fashion and the lives they lead are dreary shadows of the lives of which they are capable. She's never explicit on the forces which have accomplished this de-naturing nor is it ever clear what the world would look like if men and women stayed in closer touch with their imaginative, passionate and feeling natures, as Maggie has.

Feeling and passion are portrayed as natural but potentially dangerous forces, like the river which figures so prominently in the novel. Given this formulation, the question that informs the novel is how does one stay in touch with one's feelings and passion without being destroyed by them. The question is crucial because, for Eliot, to be human is to be passionate and to have strong feelings which enlarge and empower.

Eliot uses the mill of the book's title to serve as a metaphor to elaborate the question of a human being's proper relation to his or her feeling, for achieving a proper relation to the strong natural force of our feelings. By virtue of it's proximity to the river, a strong natural force, the mill is able to harness the power of the river to achieve an essential function. But, being close to the river, in touch with the river is dangerous on those occasions when the river runs "too high." Then, one is liable to be destroyed by the river.

The metaphor is an interesting one. No matter what you do, eventually a season will come when a river runs to high and the mill will suffer by virtue of being a mill and near the river. It isn't really a question of if but when? And, if the mill serves as an emblem of the proper and authentic relation between a human and his or her feeling, it is easy to wonder whether all deep feelers like Maggie, all people who stay near their feelings and harness their power, are eventually going to be doomed eventually when their feelings, like a river, one day achieve an inevitable flood stage.

Relationships built on verbs

It's funny how sometimes you come across an idea that seems kind of unique, intriguing and well expressed and then....you come across the same idea equally well-expressed in another forum. Four days ago, I read an interesting piece by Chris Suellentrop in the NYT about the way owning a dog delivers the same kind of satisfactions yielded by a well-loved video game, Joystick or Leash, It's All About Love.

In defining the satisfactions of dog ownership (and those satisfactions basically are similar to the satisfactions that come with cats), Mr. Suellentrop writes:

"Sometimes Wookiee and I look at each other, heads cocked, unable to express our feelings for the other except through simple actions performed routinely, year upon year upon year: retracing the same blocks of our neighborhood each morning, playing fetch (shhhhh, illegally) in the park in the early evening, falling asleep with our sides touching, to warm ourselves in the air-conditioned night. The characters are unremarkable. The setting is ordinary. The action is dull. But like all games, owning a dog is about the quiet magic of doing. The love comes from the doing."

Relationships defined, established and sustained by the sharing of actions. The character, personality, or inner being of the other party to the relationship is not nearly as important. Shared actions come first and cement the bond? Interesting, I thought.

At lunch Saturday, I read an excerpt in the New Yorker of Zadie Smith's new novel, NW which I eagerly await. It details the friendship of two childhood friends, Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake. Getting at the same idea as Suellentrop, Smith writes:

"It had never occrured to Keisha Blake that her friend Leah Hanwell was in possession of a particular type of personality. As with most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. Leah Hanwell was a person willing and available to do a variety of things that Keisha Blake was willing and available to do. Together they ran, jumped, danced, sang, bathed, colored-in, rode bikes, pushed a Valentine under Nathan Bogle's door, read magazines, shared chips, sneaked a cigarette, read Cheryl's diary, wrote the wowrd "FUCK" on the first page of a Bible, tried to get "The Exorcist" out of the video shop, watched a prostitute or a loose woman or a girl just crazy in love suck someone off in a phone box, found Cheryl's weed, found Cheyl's vodka, shaved ....."

Colm Toibin on Fiction

From Colm Toibin's op-ed piece in the New York Times July 15, 2012:


"The world that fiction comes from is fragile. It melts into insignificance against the universe of what is clear and visible and known. It persists because it is based on the power of cadence and rhythm in language and these are mysterious and hard to defeat and keep in their place. The difference between fact and fiction is like the difference between land and water.

What occurs as I walk in the town now is nothing much. It is all strange and distant, as well as oddly familiar. What happens, however, when I remember my mother, wearing a red coat, leaving our house in the town on a morning in the winter of 1968, going to work, walking along John Street, Court Street, down Friary Hill, along Friary Place and then across the bottom of Castle Hill toward Slaney Place and across the bridge into Templeshannon, is powerful and compelling. It brings with it a sort of music and a strange need. A need to write down what is happening in her mind and to give that writing a rhythm and asound that will come from the nervous system rather than the mind, and will, ideally resonate with the nervous system of anyone who reads it."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/what-is-real-is-imagined/