The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  Snow coming down steadily.  Yesterday's 30 inches or so now joined by today's one-inch-per-hour.  We'll be close to four feet by afternoon.  So much for yesterday's back-breaking driveway shoveling/car clearing.  I'll be out again once it tapers off, using my ka-nees as much as possible; then likely drawing a very hot bath.  The plow trucks do not work on Sundays--so we're likely in for the day.

The reading list this month--as I've cleared away some things and given myself license to make a "community" of the books and authors drawing me in, silencing (or at least quieting) the concerned voices crying misanthrope!--has been long and various.   It is a time for simultaneity, apparently--partly because a few in the mix are 500 pages-plus, and I want to move through them steadily while also connecting elsewhere.  Something like deeply enjoying an intense, needy friend, but not wanting to allow that friend the sole short-term domination she might require--life is short, there is much to read.  Your commitment to that friend is life-long, anyway--which is ultimately really what she needs.

Proust--Swann's Way--is one of those hefty, long-term commitments.  We're about four weeks and 300 pages in.  It's evening reading, somehow.  The Brothers Karamazov is another in this category. I started over a year ago, put it away, and am back into it with FMD.  An essay on Dostoevsky by the late David Foster Wallace, from his essay collection Consider the Lobster, adds fuel to the resolve to finish.  Balzac's Pere Goriot (inspired by Proust) is one I'm listening to on DVD, during commutes to and from the city and on my ipod (while shoveling, walking the dog, etc.).  Moments of Being, a collection of memoir-essays by Virginia Woolf, given to me as a gift and awful lovely and sad.  As yet uncracked--and due back to the library in two weeks--is Rose Tremain's novel The Road Home.

In poetry, over coffee in the morning, sometimes just before sleep: Rilke (the Galway Kinnell translation), Kinnell (his first three collections collected together, along with The Book of Nightmares), Denise Levertov's This Great Unknowing, and Jane Kenyon's Otherwise.

Somewhat "central" in all this readingabout is Paul Elie's The Life You Safe May Be Your Own, a kind of quadrography of the lives of Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy--ardent Catholics and artists all.  Each living a kind of monastic existence, even if not literally (except for Merton).  The title of Day's autobiography--The Long Loneliness--rather than that of O'Connor's short story, may have been an equally apt title for the book.  The book pushes 500 pages, I wasn't sure (during the first 100 pages) that Elie's style or his vision for the thematic/personal web among these four would keep me engaged; at p. 280, I'm hooked the way one is hooked by a good novel.  Here are four writers who, you could say,  gave themselves license to make a community of the books and authors that drew them in, silencing (or at least quieting), the concerned voices crying misanthrope!--with compelling results, i.e. an honest and deep and, yes, often painful, life in letters.