The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

I came back from France thinking that Wallace Stevens, lover of things French and Floridian, might have a poem that would provide a good opening for me to share some of the experiences of what my daughter calls our "French adventure," but I haven't come up with one yet. Instead, I got stuck on one that seems to me related to my recent post about funding for public libraries in Ohio and a post over at Linus's Blanket about whether blog reviewers should add disclaimers to their reviews, in that it's about finding truth--about finding some truth calmly, on your own, in the quiet of a summer night:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Reading only books that you think you agree with--because of disclaimers or reviews or anything else--can lead to increasing narrow-mindedness. Our country is getting fragmented enough without people trying to read only the books that they already agree with. I’d like to see more people read books that challenge some of their beliefs. In fact, I guess that will have to be my summer reading challenge. I'll go out and find a book that I suspect I don't agree with, read it, and report back to you all before September.

Join me in this challenge? It doesn't even have to be a whole book--an essay would do nicely.

Update: For those of you who don't want to read non-fiction this summer, you could choose something outside your usual comfort zone--a new genre, or a classic author if you usually read new fiction. Here are a few suggestions:

Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale--for a look at what theocracy could look like in the U.S.
Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer--to remind yourself what it's like to be frustrated with dating and marriage rituals
Buckley's Boomsday--to decide if you should worry about whether you'll ever be able to retire
Kaufman's The Laramie Project--an explosion of the excuse that "this sort of thing doesn't happen here"
Hughart's Bridge of Birds--a good story that isn't all it seems
Ozeki's All Over Creation--if you don't know much about modern agriculture
Orwell's 1984 and then Doctorow's Little Brother--if you think safety can be more important than freedom
Anderson's Feed--if you spend much time in front of a screen
Miller's Death of a Salesman or Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath--for company in economic misery

Sometimes It's Important to Take a Stand

The Booking Through Thursday question (Have you ever been put off an author’s books after reading a biography of them? Or the reverse - a biography has made you love an author more?) has continued to stir up a controversy that I helped to begin, however inadvertently, with a comment about why I will no longer buy books by Orson Scott Card on Maw Books Blog. If I had been thinking at all, I probably wouldn't have left the initial comment, because I didn't realize that the blog author is a Mormon, as Card is. But now that I have spoken without thinking, I find myself in the position of having to take a stand, and I'll do it without any more apology to Natasha, who seems to be a lovely person, because I don't think that all Mormons spread hate of homosexuals any more than I believe all Roman Catholics are from big families or all Muslims are terrorists.

As I've said in several places (Hey, Lady, Watcha Readin'? for example), I'm usually not aware of an author's views, and it wouldn't make any difference to my enjoyment of their fiction if I were. But I do have issues I feel strongly about, and I think anyone who has a public forum, however small, is obligated to speak out about issues they see as wrong, lest they perpetuate that wrongness by failing to object. The most horrifying examples of perpetuating evil by failing to speak out against it are the Germans who managed not to notice the concentration camps in their country, and the slaveowners who thought it was enough not to mistreat their own slaves, while the neighbors' slaves were suffering untold (literally) agonies. A more recent example of the dangers of thinking that the "live and let live" philosophy is enough is Matthew Shepard's 1998 murder (see my post on that here).

I can't imagine being "put off an author's books after reading a biography of them." Not reading is never the answer! But financially supporting an author I disagree with so vehemently--and who is so public in his support of what I consider evil--is not something I want anyone to do. Even though his books are wonderful. Read them, but get them from the library.

Decade Passed

A decade ago, my brother, who has lived in Texas much of his adult life, told me a joke about "Paper Bag Pete," in which a man walks into an empty bar and asks where everyone is.
The bartender answers "gone to the hangin'."
"Who are they hanging?" asks the man.
"Paper Bag Pete," says the bartender.
"Why do they call him that?"
"Because he wears a paper hat, paper shirt, paper tie, and paper pants."
"So what are they hanging him for?"
"Rustlin'."
The really funny thing about this joke is that few of the people I've told it to in Ohio get it! They don't know what rustling is (stealing cattle). So I wonder if that's the reason why Per Petterson, in his novel Out Stealing Horses, feels the need to explain to the modern audience that "stealing horses, that was the worst thing of all. We knew about the law west of Pecos, we had read the cowboy magazines....with that law there was no mercy. If you were caught, it was straight up in a tree with a rope round your neck; rough hemp against the tender flesh...."

The narrator of Out Stealing Horses is a sixty-seven-year-old man, Trond, who intersperses what happens to him in the present with what happened to him the summer he was fifteen. There's no great revelation, though; he's realizing the ways that summer shaped him and deciding what his life means. It's a dreamy story, in some ways:

We smelled the horse droppings and the wet boggy moss and the sweet, sharp, all-pervading odour of something greater than ourselves and beyond our comprehension; of the forest, which just went on and on to the north and into Sweden and over to Finland and further on the whole way to Siberia, and you could get lost in this forest and a hundred people go searching for weeks without a chance of finding you, and why should that be so bad, I wondered, to get lost here? But I did not know then how serious that thought was.

The reason the thought is serious is because, as the novel goes on, we learn that one of the things that happened when Trond was fifteen, in the summer of 1948, is that he found out his father worked to resist the Nazis, taking things and people across the border to Sweden through that immense forest. The code phrase was "we're going out stealing horses."

The novel is not about Trond's father, though, so it's only incidentally about his anti-Nazi activities. It's about the last summer Trond saw his father. The last time he saw him, he'd just gotten onto a bus:

"and then the bus moved in a big semicircle out to the road. I pressed my nose against the glass and gazed into the cloud of dust slowly rising outside and hiding my father in a whirl of grey and brown, and I did everything you are supposed to do in a situation like that, in such a scene; I rose quickly and ran down the gangway between the seats to the last row and jumped up on it knees first and placed my hands on the window and stared up the rroad until the shop and the oak tree and my father had vanished round a bend, and all this as if I had been thoroughly rehearsed in the film we have seen so often, where the fateful farewell is the crucial event and the lives of the protagonists are changed forever and take off in directions that are unexpected and not always nice, and the whole cinema audience knows just how it will turn out. And some cover their mouths with their hands, and some sit chewing their handkerchief with tears running down their cheeks, and some swallow in vain to get ride of the lump in their throat while they squint at the screen dissolving into a jumble of colours, and others again are in such a fury they almost get up and leave because they have experienced something like this in their own life which they have never forgiven, and one of those jumps up from his seat in the dark and shouts:
'You damn prick!' at the figure under the oak tree now showing against the back of his head, and he does it on behalf of himself and on behalf of me, and I do thank him for his support. But the point is that I did not know how things would turn out that day. No-one had told me! And there was no way I could know what lay behind the scene I myself had just been through."

The novel does reveal more of what lay behind that scene. Trond realizes that he's like his father, and that "what I was most afraid of in this world was to be the man in Magritte's painting who looking at himself in the mirror sees only the back of his own head, again and again." When his daughter tracks him down, though, Trond sees more of what his actions in the world mean, and how reading Dickens can show him how to be "the hero of my own life" at last.

Looking back on the decades of your own life can give you some perspective on how far you've come. Harriet tagged me for another meme, and the first question is "What was I doing 10 years ago?" I was trying to commute 40 minutes each way and teach two composition classes in the morning Monday through Thursday while 5-year-old Eleanor was in preschool and 2-year-old Walker was at a babysitter's house with 3 other children. I was also dealing with both kids' childhood asthma and what turned out to be Eleanor's enlarged adenoids that caused her to get sinus infections every time she caught a cold. I was carpooling Eleanor and 4 of her friends from preschool to afternoon kindergarten, and playing with Walker in the afternoon, because he didn't nap after his first year of life. It was 1998, and I was so busy that the newspaper headlines about Matthew Shepard in October didn't really penetrate my consciousness. (It was 2003 before I read the play The Laramie Project and started finding out what I'd missed in the fog of young motherhood.) A decade ago I wasn't yet taking my kids to our town's Memorial Day parade, but we did go to the local Ice Cream Festival held on that weekend every year.

So what am I doing in this decade? Five things on my to-do list for today are:
1. As a student employer, I have to attend a meeting about student employment at the college where I'm underemployed.
2. Take Eleanor the clarinet she forgot to take with her this morning, ask the band teacher about a missing tape she turned in, and go to the office to find out about her schedule for next year and when she can take the test-out option for a newly required "technology" course that she doesn't need, as there are only two dates listed during the summer and she can't make either of them.
3. Ask the middle school about Walker's schedule, and make sure the special courses he has signed up for won't knock him out of any of his other gifted classes, as happened to his older sister in 8th grade (he benefits from her experience).
4. Order a birthday present for Ron.
5. Find a place for the paint and varnish I've been using, so that I can begin cleaning up the deck and garage for Ron's birthday party and then a farewell party for one of his co-workers who is moving away.

Favorite snacks? I eat anything except turnips. When I read about food, I want some of it, especially when I read Peter Mayle's Provence books or anything by M.F. K. Fisher.

What I would do if I were a billionaire? I'd travel. I'd go to every country in the world and take all my friends and relatives who want to go. In between trips I'd find a place to read books and swim in the ocean. When I read about a worthy cause, I'd contribute.

What are all the places I have lived? Madison, WI, Nagadoches, TX, Cape Girardeau, MO, Conway, AR, Middletown, RI, Pensacola, FL, Laurel, MD and Mount Vernon, OH.

People I want to know more about? Anyone who thinks that some perspective on the past decade would help them move forward at this point in their lives. And sometimes, moving forward just means you get more of the jokes.

The American project

I saw a wonderful performance of The Laramie Project at Kenyon in January. It made good use of a very small space, and the space for the audience was also limited, so I wasn't able to convince my friends who are less ardently in support of gay rights to come and see it. But my kids came, and they were rapt. It's a talky play, so this was quite an achievement for the students who directed, acted, and put up the entire production.

Now, I've seen this play before, several times. Early on, after the events of October, 1998 (Matthew Shepard's murder), the performance had a searching quality. The focus was on how such a thing could happen. The words of the Roman Catholic Priest, Father Roger Schmit, were the most important part of the play: "What did we as a society do to teach you that?"

At Otterbein College in the winter of 2002, I saw a very good performance of the play which put the spotlight (literally) on personal responsibility for hate. The most memorable part of that performance was when the character of Zubaida, in her muslim headscarf, was suddenly revealed in a seat on one edge of the audience, concluding her speech with "We are like this. We ARE like this. WE are LIKE this."

In the years since the play was first performed and discussed, Americans have learned more about the biological basis for homosexuality, passed one hate crime law (May 2007), pointed out to each other that churches who teach homophobia use biblical passages out of context (particularly Leviticus), and seen Fred Phelps go from protesting at the funerals of Americans who were homosexual to protesting at the funerals of American soldiers who died in Iraq.

The most memorable moment of the January performance at Kenyon was (as noted in the student newspaper) when the student playing Fred Phelps stands on a ladder trying to shout his messages of hate over an increasing number of voices singing "Amazing Grace." It seems to me that interpretive options for the performance of The Laramie Project have narrowed in the years since the play's first performance. What we're left with today is what all Americans have learned since 2001: "the magnitude with which some people hate" and the importance of taking some kind of stand against it (even if it's only taking your kids to see this play).