Light and Momentary

Faith and Fantasy

Periodically I throw up a post that says, "What should I read, friends?" and you tell me. Although I've mostly been reading David Copperfield lately, I had a brief dalliance with Doomsday Book. Initially it was just going to be a quick peek at Doomsday Book -- I'd finished the day's allotment of David Copperfield and was in the mood for something different. It sucked me in completely, though, and I had to finish it before I could return to Victorian England. These are the things I want to remember:

• Willis creates a world in which everyone is irreplaceable -- where people are quirky and flawed and unmistakably themselves. Kivrin goes to the Middle Ages in search of historical data, but she finds a world full of actual people, who love and gripe and suffer and strive and die.
• No matter how far technology progresses, life is fragile, and shorter than we think. Sometimes all we can do is suffer alongside. Sometimes a willingness to be powerless but present is the only gift we can give. Sometimes it's enough.
• Every age has its church ladies, pushing the One Right Way while failing to recognize the many real needs around them. Both Imeyne and Mrs. Gaddson are blinded by their certainty. 
• Love looks for good intentions. I want to remember Kivrin, with her unevenly hacked hair and her filthy blood-smeared clothes, clutching her broken ribs and saying, "He didn't mean to hurt me." I want to remember Roche, seeing God's goodness and provision -- not witchcraft or treachery -- in Kivrin's arrival. 
• The future will never be what we think it is. Willis describes a 2055 with no cell phones, in which an administrator can just disappear for a month, unreachable. This makes me nostalgic for her imagined future.

I read Uprooted months ago, after somebody (Rachel?) recommended it in a comment, and I loved it. I'm not sure why I would have guessed that Naomi Novik was  culturally Jewish and practically agnostic (perhaps because Temeraire seems so skeptical about the Holy Spirit), but that would have been my guess. I was surprised, then, that this book seemed so deeply Catholic. It wasn't just a good yarn (though it certainly was a good yarn); it was full of truth. These thoughts come from the notes I made to myself as I was reading:

• The thing you dread is not the thing you need to dread. Agnieszka spends her childhood in fear of something that will never happen, while failing to see the magnitude of the threat that surrounds her.
• I cannot condense this bit into a tidy bullet point, but the power of truth is woven through the story: the way that truth revealed brings freedom and strength, the painful difficult work of seeing truth clearly, the light and beauty that emerge when one invites truth to make itself known. I can't do justice to the chapter where Agnieszka invokes the power of truth to set her friend free; you should read it for yourself.
• Purification burns. There's another memorable scene in which Agnieszka is purged from the corruption of the Wood; I have spent ten minutes casting about for a way to describe it to you. You'll just have to read it, I'm telling you.

It reminded me a bit of The Magicians (the sheer difficulty of magic) and a bit of Speaker for the Dead (the mysterious trees), but I loved it in a way I did not love those books. It speaks to me of the importance of home -- of standing on your own two feet in a place you love, pushing back against evil, reclaiming it for good.

Parents Behaving Badly

I don't need any kids to get off my lawn today. The problem is their parents.

Tonight was the fifth-grader's choir concert, and it was marred by a mountain of manners mishaps. Although-- I'm starting to think the problem is me. If everybody is doing the stuff that sets my teeth on edge, then clearly my standards are not shared standards.

This is puzzling to me, you guys. If the principal says, "Please turn your cell phones to vibrate," and your phone goes off 5 minutes later as the kids are performing, that's not an outrageous oversight. Sometimes phones make weird noises when you don't expect them to -- no big deal. But if you reply to the text and then it makes the same sound again five minutes later, that raises my eyebrows. And if it keeps making noise every few minutes all through the concert, that seems to me like a situation where you ought to step outside. 

It did not seem like an ought-to-step-outside situation to the woman sitting next to me.

I've known for years that people have different ideas about which kinds of conversations are okay in which venues. I still hate to go to the movies and listen to commentary from nearby adults. (If you are there with a small child who needs a quick explanation or reassurance, then by all means explain and reassure.) My thoughts about movie manners are that you shouldn't disturb other viewers with assertions like "That was cute!" and predictions like "I bet what's going to happen next is that..." But you don't have to spend much time in movie theaters, or choir concerts, to see that my thoughts about manners are far from universal. 

In addition to the woman on my right whose phone kept dinging, I was frustrated because the family behind me kept talking all the way through the performance. "Did you see that?" "Oh, yes, I liked that song." "What did that kid say?" In my mental Politeness Rulebook this is about as courteous as picking your nose at a wedding, but they were far from alone. I think my Politeness Rulebook is an artifact of the last millennium, like a yellowing Emily Post manual replete with guidance on how to address your snail-mail letters to your senator vs. your snail-mail letters to your archbishop, but I am not sure that I really want to buy the revised version.

The last vexing thing was the phones. I know I am in a dwindling minority on this one, but when I am sitting in a dark room watching a performance, I find the glowing screens distracting. I do not know who could possibly want to watch all the video that was recorded at this concert. (It was actually pretty painful viewing it live, because the kids couldn't hear the recorded accompaniment (thanks, chatty parents!) and they were consistently off.) Apparently, though, someone does. Some days I just want to seize the world by the scruff of the neck and say, "People of the 21st century! BE where you ARE! Put DOWN your PHONES and LIVE your life instead of INSTAGRAMMING it." (Probably someone would put that kind of crazy talk on YouTube, where it would spark a comments war between the get-off-my-lawn folks and the Instagram folks.) At the ballet recital last month there was a kid in the row in front of me who pulled out a phone halfway through the performance. He looked to be about 11, and he was done watching the girls twirl on stage. With the phone at arm's length, fully visible to everyone nearby, he started playing a video game in which virtual boxers were punching each other. I waited for his parents to say something; they did not. I leaned forward, and in a quiet but firm voice I said, "Excuse me, I am finding that extremely distracting. Could you put it away now, please?"

This request, I am certain, plopped me right onto somebody else's list of rude parents. (But it worked.) Discuss: is the world going downhill, or is the world going downhill? Do these parents and their kids need to get off your lawn today, or do you have a friendly welcoming sort of lawn? What's in your personal Politeness Rulebook that seems archaic to the rest of the world?

Today's the day!

It's David Copperfield time!

Chapters 1-4 will introduce you to the wax doll who meets and marries a waxwork man. (I remembered Davy's mother fondly, as someone innocently inveigled, but today her vanity and shortsightedness pulled me up short.) They will introduce you, with capital-F Foreshadowing, to Emily of Yarmouth. And they will introduce you to Peggotty of the bursting buttons and tender heart. I am wondering if her rocket-launched buttons will pop up again, like Sloppy's in Our Mutual Friend.

There's lots I don't remember about this book. On the first page David Copperfield is born in the caul. I thought to myself, "I can't believe I didn't remember that! I always notice babies born in the caul, ever since Joe was born in the caul!" It dawned on me: the last time I read this book, there was no Joe.

At the end of chapter 4 our hero is jolting off to boarding school. What fate awaits him there? Join the read-along and see for yourself!

An update

Oh my goodness, friends, that was a rough rough finals week at the end of a rough rough semester. But the semester is over, and the women's retreat is over (it was lovely), and I am grateful. Now I am turning my attention to the rather alarming fact that an optimistic winter version of me signed us up for a triathlon. It takes place a month from Thursday, and I am SO not ready.

I'm not worried about the bike/run components. It's a sprint triathlon, and I know that I can (barring injury or acts of God) bike 20km and run 5km without being last or puking. The swim is another story. I'm not a good swimmer.

Another day I might tell you the story of how I got to be a bad swimmer (condensed version: learned late, too nearsighted to feel confident in the water, and then a sort of swimmer's Matthew Effect kicked in and I forgot the things I used to know). I reached adulthood able to swim on my back and do a little-old-lady head-out-of-water breaststroke, but I could not -- I mean I just could not -- sequence breathing and stroke.

So. Slowly, miserably, I taught myself how to breaststroke like a middle-aged lady instead of a little old lady. Over time it stopped being miserable and became -- who knew? -- comfortable. I could breaststroke forever -- except that I was breaststroking at the speed of a glacier with its brakes on. 

Even more slowly and miserably, I have been teaching myself freestyle. I went to one adult swim lesson, where they told me to stop lifting my head up. This advice allowed me to take a few breaths without an attack of panic-flailing, but three breaths will not actually get a person through a triathlon swim course. P-a-i-n-s-t-a-k-i-n-g-l-y, I have been nibbling away at my resistance. The first time I swam a length of freestyle -- now that I am in the middle of this sentence I do not want to finish it, to tell you how distressed I was at the end. I gave myself permission to swim bits and pieces of freestyle lengths, and slowly I've been stitching them together. I suppose it is progress that I can swim a length of freestyle without panic or flailing.

A length of freestyle will not get a person through a triathlon swim course either.

I swam on Sunday and felt thoroughly discouraged afterward. I headed to the hot tub to settle myself down and plopped in across from this hulking guy with an Ironman tattoo. "When did you finish your Ironman?" I asked him. "The first one?" he said. "About 15 years ago." 

He told me that he started from zero as a swimmer -- that he had to learn as an adult, and then 18 months later he finished his first Ironman. (That's a 2.4-mile swim. Two-point-four miles.) He said the key is to stay out of your own way -- to choose to disregard the voice in your head that says "I can't I can't I can't I can't."

That voice is very loud in my own particular head.

This afternoon, once my grades were submitted and my email inbox was emptied, I watched a video on breaststroke technique. I went to the pool and tried out some of the things it showed me, and I swam my half-mile 20% faster than the last time. This is still really slow, but it feels like progress. It occurred to me in the water that my cute little swim skirt is creating drag, and I should probably suck it up and get something different. I kept going, pounding away at the freestyle fear. I still kind of hate it, but I definitely hate it less than I did last week.

I'm feeling a little shy about posting this, but I'm throwing it up there anyway. If you have resources to recommend (Bearing? Swimmermom?) I'm all ears.

Summer reading plans amid wintry temps

Who's up for a David Copperfield read-along?? You know you want to!

I have finals week coming up here, and I'm in the middle of the fourth book of the Barsetshire Chronicles. Hm...I'm trying to decide how quickly I can realistically finish Framley Parsonage and I'm thinking that a week is about right. (I did not know when I decided to read all of the Barsetshire Chronicles that book 6 is something like 900 pages long. That's a lot of Barsetshire doings right there, my friends.) 

How about this: I propose a David Copperfield read-along that starts ten days from now, on May 11. Three weeks is just the right pace for one of the big fat Dickens novels: you can knock it out in 35-40 pages per day, which means that you don't have to abandon the rest of your responsibilities but you also don't forget who Betsey Trotwood was. (Oops, I called her Betsey Trotter in the first version of that sentence. Can you tell I haven't read David Copperfield since 2000?)

It goes without saying that there's no pressure to finish the book in three weeks. I'll be blogging it as I go, but I'll be careful about spoilers. If you've never read it, you totally should -- it's the best* Dickens novel.

*I say this today. I can never decide whether it's really truly better than Bleak House and Pickwick Papers.

Who's in?