Stuff read recently

Some nights, I mostly only have the energy to read. But at least I'm reading, I guess.


I re-started "Adam Bede" a while back after not getting very far into it and then losing the thread of the story. (It's actually a couple different stories - the Bede family, Dinah Morris' story, the Poyser's story, Rev. Irwine's story - that interweave in each other).  So far, Adam Bede seems to be the hero of the piece. (I say "seems to," because there are too many books - most of them more modern than this one - where a character who seems promising turns out to be a scoundrel. (Or, heh, a "rascal" - some movie I was watching in dubbed form on one of the networks had a character apparently calling another character an "a**hole" and they overdubbed it as "rascal," which is now what I think of someone when they really irritate me in a jerky way - "Oh, he's being a 'rascal'")

Anyway. Adam is a good, steady, hardworking young man. His father, who is a drunkard, gives him a certain amount of trouble because Adam often winds up doing both his work and his father's.

Relatively early in the novel (so it's not REALLY a spoiler), the troublesome father drowns in the flooded stream when he is coming home from the pub. Of course that upsets the family, even though the father has been somewhat of a wastrel and a problem.

But now, after Adam has had a chance to sleep (after a sleepless night when he had to finish some of his father's work, and then the day after the discovery of his father's body) and he heads back to work, and makes the comment:

"There's nothing but what's bearable as long as a man can work," he said to himself; "the natur o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot."

Yes, that seems true to me. How many times have I said I like knitting or making quilts because I understand how the materials work, and they don't change? And as a kid in school, one of the reasons I like math was, as Adam notes, the square of four is always sixteen (unless you change the rules in some way, like a different base system). What I find so frustrating about human interaction some times is that people behave in unpredictable and sometimes (to me at least) baffling ways.

Another truth in that statement: that having something to work on, does take you out of yourself (or "give you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot.") I know someone who, very shortly after suddenly losing their spouse, went right back to work. Lots of people who knew this person were aghast: how could they do it? But I understood: working is not sitting at home thinking about what happened. It is some semblance of normality in a world that's had its bottom drop out of it. I would probably do the same as this person were I in their place.

I also read a short article in "Real Simple." As I commented on Twitter, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit to reading this magazine, for two reasons - first, because it seems aimed at people whose lives are FAR more together than mine is and who actually have it figured out. And second, it's such a bizarre mix of conspicuous consumption (clothes that are close to half my take-home pay for a month) and mild environmental exhortations (the ubiquitous comments about recycling bins, which assumes every community has recycling with easy access to it*)  that it does give one a bit of cognitive dissonance.

(*We have recycling but you have to take your recyclables either to campus or to the main location in order to do it. I don't recycle *everything* I could because my house would quickly assume the appearance of the Collier brothers' apartment, but I do recycle some things. I'd be more prone to do more if we had curbside pickup, but I don't see that coming any time soon.)

But anyway. The article is by Andrew Doerr and is called "Costume Drama." In short, he recounts the story of a childhood Halloween where he was invited to a party with costume contest. Coming from a family not all that unlike mine (but much more so, apparently), where everything possible was home-made, young Andrew attempted a knight's costume. He had a grand vision of how scary and cool he would look as "the black knight." But of course, it doesn't live up to his vision (and it gets ruined because a rainstorm comes up on the way to the party). And he realizes, while at the party (and oh, how I remember that feeling - of having had an idea that seemed great, and it still seemed great while I was doing whatever it was, and it was only when someone else looked at it that I realized it was terrible) that his costume was terrible and a mess (and he winds up winning some kind of pity-prize like "most original.")

And in the last part, he brings it forward to adult life - his adult life, as a writer, and notes: "Even on my best days, I just manage to cobble together the failures of many other days and assemble an imitation of the original vision." And he later notes that "every songwriter, architect, actress, painter, chef, choreographer, teacher, and dreamer has been afraid her project would cave in" and also notes that most people who create "has wondered if the gods are snickering at her from somewhere just above the rims of the clouds."

And, I don't know. How do you go back - can you go back - and recapture that childhood feeling of "This is good!" (the knight's costume before the rainstorm and the judgmental eyes of the other kids, in their store-bought costumes). Because that's what's necessary to be able to create: not being afraid to fail. (I think I've ALWAYS been afraid to fail. Now, as much as ever, because I see "failing" at something being as much about "but I wasted so much time now on something that didn't pan out" as it is about the perceived humiliation of having failed at something).

I don't know. I'm struggling with a manuscript right now that all of my inner critics say isn't possibly good enough and doesn't possibly have enough meaningful results to be worth submitting. And most of the pattern-ideas I've had over the past few years have been forgotten or pushed aside as impractical, and "if it doesn't turn out and you have to rip it back, you'll have wasted all that time"

But yeah. The whole feeling-on-the-brink-of-failing thing is familiar, and the not being able to make whatever you do be as good as you envisioned it in your head is a familiar feeling.