My Hesitant Light
I have discovered that it’s difficult for me to concentrate on serious books these days, and it’s hard to focus on writing, and I’m even getting lazy about my walks. This worries me because there is a Calvinist voice in my head that is forever warning me not to waste time, not to get fat, not to backslide. I feel that I should be learning a new skill–maybe a language, maybe knitting, maybe art–or improving the world in some way. I have a friend who is almost done writing her third novel, and I can barely muster a blog post.
Monte arches an eyebrow when I tell him my latest online library loan: an audiobook of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I love the book, and often quote it. It’s elevating and inspiring, and this seems to be the right time to re-read it. Escapist fluff won’t do.
“Escapist fluff is exactly what you need,” Monte tells me. “This is not the time for self-improvement. This is a time for distraction. Relaxing. Getting by. Laying low. Surviving. Stop trying so hard.”
But I’m nothing if not trying.
My daughter, an avid reader since her kindergarten days, confesses that she too is having trouble tackling heavy reading material and has had to alter her literary diet, choosing stories that don’t demand too much of her. She is currently enjoying Cormoran Strike, the detective crime series by J.K. Rowling, written under a pseudonym. I remember my daughter’s long ago addiction to Agatha Christie. “Is it like that?” I ask.
“A little bit,” she replies. “Maybe you should re-read something you really enjoyed as a kid. What was the first book you got lost in?”
Jane Eyre comes to mind. “Then re-read Jane Eyre,” she suggests.
“And have a glass of wine with it,” adds her husband.
“And stop trying to turn this into a boot camp for intellectual and physical betterment,” says Monte.
Words by John O’Donohue, beneath whose wings I have often found comfort, seem fitting here:
“This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.”
It’s raining today. The world beyond the window pane looks like an Impressionist painting in shades of green and yellow, everything dripping and melting and blurring together, including the days and the hours. We don’t know quite where we are, or what we should be doing, and I am too readily scrubbed by doubt.
Last night I dreamed (inexplicably) about a white pearl ring that I used to wear when I was a teen-ager. This morning I found the ring among my baubles and put it on my finger. It fits snugly, but it fits. As if by magic, random memories came to me of things done by the hand of the girl who wore this ring, like making candles from melted paraffin poured into a coffee can, with a string as a wick. And frying marbles until they cracked, to be used as pendants for necklaces. And piecing together chains of folded chewing gum wrappers, the height of the boyfriends we had or wished for.
I emailed my old high school friend Josephine and asked her if she remembered any of this, because that’s something we do in this strange new time: we write to friends from all across our lives, or call them. (Well, actually, I’ve always done that, but it seems to be more common now, and that’s a nice thing that I hope will endure.) Anyway, I haven’t heard back from Jo yet, but I also remembered sitting with her beneath the oak tree outside my family’s Long Island house, pondering life’s mysteries and wonders. And I remembered reading Jane Eyre on a summer day while leaning against the trunk of that very oak, and discovering that a book could take me away.
I’m the same girl as I was then; the same light shines in my heart, and it’s adequate, at least for now. So enough with the striving...that’s the message today. I realize I’m missing something by constantly looking beyond.
Picture me instead sipping wine on the couch with an open copy of Jane Eyre on my lap, gracefully stagnating, maybe even deteriorating. And may I suggest that you grant yourself whatever version of indulgence appeals to you. Stay safe.