Description of the Morning

After spending all weekend at a soccer tournament (it was extravagantly sunny and everyone enjoyed being outside), it seemed like Monday morning came awfully early. And we've been running ever since. Eleanor had an event Monday night. Walker had an event Tuesday night. I'd like to ask their schools if they could think of some better reward for doing well than having to give up most of an evening to get dressed up and sit through a long and stuffy awards ceremony. At the one last night, the mayor gave a speech. Even though he promised to be brief, he indulged in an endless reverie about how Abraham Lincoln failed at things but persevered, which really didn't seem to me to fit the occasion. As someone who has specialized in teaching first-year college students for much of the past three decades, I have a pretty good idea that American students don't have to persevere to do well in school. Most of the kids who were getting awards have never had to work very hard at anything.

So morning came very early again today. Going back to school seems like an anti-climax to the kids, and making up an exam for tomorrow seems like something I can put off until the afternoon. I feel like one of the characters in Jonathan Swift's poem "Description of the Morning":

Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach
Appearing, showed the ruddy morn's approach.
Now Betty from her master's bed had flown,
And softly stole to discompose her own;
The slip-shod 'prentice from his master's door
Had pared the dirt and sprinkled round the floor.
Now Moll had whirled her mop with dext'rous airs,
Prepared to scrub the entry and the stairs.
The youth with broomy stumps began to trace
The kennel-edge, where wheels had worn the place.
The small-coal man was heard with cadence deep,
Till drowned in shriller notes of chimney-sweep:
Duns at his lordship's gate began to meet;
And brickdust Moll had screamed through half the street.
The turnkey now his flock returning sees,
Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees:
The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands,
And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands.

I always think of the "Who Will Buy?" scene from the musical Oliver! when the description of all the voices begins with the coal man. Yep, instead of birdsong, it's the kind of morning that begins with a sales pitch. Rather than a fresh, new start, the morning seems like more of the same. We have had enough of the school year. Have you?

Morning has broken

We're in the second week of our adjustment to daylight savings time, so you think I'd be getting used to waking up and going out in the dark again (just when it was starting to get light about the time I wake up). But it's raining this morning, so it's even more dark than usual.

As I was driving home in the dark from driving my kids to school, I found myself thinking about Jonathan Swift's poem "Description of the Morning" and Philip Larkin's "Aubade," with their sneering references to the traditional feeling of waking up in the morning to a new, fresh start (like Oliver in the musical, at the window of his luxurious bedroom in the morning after he has been rescued from Fagin). Any reluctance to face the day in traditional aubades is a reluctance to leave the warm bed with your lover still in it, like in Romeo and Juliet's "lark or nightingale" scene or John Donne's poem "The Sun Rising." But in "Description of the Morning," the servant-girl "Betty from her master's bed had flown,/ And softly stole to discompose her own," and Larkin's speaker is rising to regret "the love not given."

This kind of feeling seems to me to be appropriate on the day that the Disney movie Enchanted comes out on DVD. Instead of Cinderella singing to the mice and the birds, the princess in Enchanted has to sing to the animals available to her--rats, pigeons, and cockroaches.

Well, today you have to get up and put on whatever clothes you can stand to wear again (unless you can whip up something made from curtains), because already

telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Valentine's day quotations

These are some of my favorite quotations about love. Why they're heavy on the eighteenth century and must begin and end with Oscar Wilde is not a mystery to those who know me well!

"Men always want to be a woman's first love - What (women) like is to be a man's last romance." - Oscar Wilde

"For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is." - Diane Ackerman

"In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire." -Jonathan Swift

"Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures." -Samuel Johnson

"To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it." - Samuel Butler

"Who, being loved, is poor?" - Oscar Wilde

"What will survive of us is love." -Philip Larkin

"Nothing in this world is single, all things by laws divine in one spirit mix and mingle; why not I with thine?" - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always." - Dante Alighieri

"The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable." - Victor Hugo

"A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendships, all the enjoyment of sense and reason - and indeed all the sweets of life." - Joseph Addison

"When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation." -Samuel Johnson

"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." -Mark Twain

"Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building." -Oscar Wilde

I cleaned the bathrooms for my family for Valentine's day. Now that's love.

Madness

When I see a movie based on a book, like Harry Potter or even Wuthering Heights (I just saw the Juliette Binoche/Ralph Fiennes one, and it is a little jarring to see Voldemort as Heathcliff), I often see things that the book doesn't spell out, and that's nice. So much of Cathy and Heathcliff's love is non-verbal. And it's fun to see the magical objects in Hogworts, the Burrow, and Diagon Alley. My imagination doesn't always flesh out every detail I read, so I like seeing how other people imagine the events in these books. That's also why I will occasionally read a horror book, like The Vampire Lestat (which I loved) but will never see the movie. I'm quite content with my limited imagination where things like monsters are concerned. I'm not quite the ideal audience for Alfred Hitchcock, who said that the monster you don't see can be much scarier than any monster he could put on the screen. On the other hand, I am an ideal audience for most movies and plays, because my suspension of disbelief is so great. If the story becomes real to me, I am almost entirely uncritical of special effects and the like. But I get an uneasy feeling in almost any kind of amusement park. Yes, I had a good time at Disneyland when we went to California, and I wouldn't want it to be less sanitized and packaged than it is; that's part of the fun. But at some level, it's slightly disturbing for most adults, or it should be.

Think about what Jonathan Swift says in "A Digression Concerning Madness" towards the end of A Tale of a Tub: "For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. And first, with relation to the mind or understanding, 'tis manifest what mighty advantages fiction has over truth; and the reason is just at our elbow, because imagination can build nobler scenes, and produce more wonderful revolutions than fortune or nature will be at expense to furnish. Nor is mankind so much to blame in his choice thus determining him, if we consider that the debate merely lies between things past and things conceived; and so the question is only this--whether things that have place in the imagination, may not as properly be said to exist, as those that are seated in the memory, which may be justly held in the affirmative, and very much to the advantage of the former, since this is acknowledged to be the womb of things, and the other allowed to be no more than the grave. Again, if we take this definition of happiness, and examine it with reference to the senses, it will be acknowledged wonderfully adapt. How fading and insipid do all objects accost us, that are not conveyed in the vehicle of delusion? How shrunk is everything, as it appears in the glass of nature? So that if it were not for the assistance of artificial mediums, false lights, refracted angles, varnish, and tinsel, there would be a mighty level in the felicity and enjoyments of mortal men.

After that first flush of reality, when you emerge from a book or a movie or even Disneyland, and you find that your own life has less exciting car chases and no soundtrack (unless you already have your earbuds in), usually you start to shake off some of what you've just been shown so you can reassert what you actually think about good and evil or love and death. As my daughter says, Peter Jackson's pictures of what many of the characters in The Lord of the Rings look like have supplanted her own, but his balrog has failed. Her picture of the balrog is too different from the movie version. And that shows her a different road from the one that leads to madness.