Because of all the fun, I had little time for reading and writing, but I did finish a few books surprisingly. The best of them was Rumer Godden's Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, which was my book club pick. It was so, so, so good. I didn't want it to end, and if I wasn't playing catch up right now, I'd pick up another Rumer Godden book and read it all the way through. Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy covers some of the same territory as the beloved In this House of Brede, but with a very different twist. Elizabeth Fanshawe, aka Lise, aka Sr. Marie Lise, enters the convent after having been an orphan, a prostitute, a brothel madame and a jailbird. The story is told backwards and forwards, so details are revealed slowly, just as they are when you get to know any close friend. And that's how you feel at the end of the book, as if Sister is your friend. You feel her pain and her love. I admit, I found it hard to understand how she could love her antagonist Vivi as much as she did, but that is a part the reader accepts as the story goes on. Love is inexplicable in so many ways, especially parental love, which forgives everything, much the way that Sr. Marie Lise did for Vivi.
Rumer Godden's writing is so clear and free from showiness and sentimentality. Her writing for children might be a little too sweet, but her novels always surprise me with how much I enjoy them.I handed this one to my dad, and he loved it, too - proof that it is not too feminine. And it was an overwhelming success at book club.
We almost picked another Rumer Godden book for November, but instead we read The Great Divorce, another C. S. Lewis book. I misled one of my book club friends by suggesting Evelyn Waugh's Helena which has been on my shelf for ages, but I started it and kept envisioning British people in togas. Called her back, and said let's stick with Lewis, even though this is our fourth Lewis for book club in three years. He doesn't disappoint, either; even though his allegories aren't books that I push into other people's hands and say, "here, read this," I always enjoy them and feel the prick of conscience when he reveals the sins of the ghosts at the anteroom of Heaven. I wish I had finished it before I talked about purgatory in CRE on All Souls Day (using my usual explanation of it being a place where we get washed and dressed up for the big party in Heaven. Our priest described it as a long plane ride to paradise.) And here Lewis has it as a grey, dreary place where souls get on a bus to be offered the opportunity to reject their sins and join the souls in Heaven where reality is more real. This grey place becomes Hell when sinners reject the offer of grace. I meant to write up a schema before book club about what the sins the ghosts represented- the ones I remember are intellectual sin, the sin of making an idol out of a child, the sin of pride, of desiring fame, of vanity, of materialism. Only the sinner with the lizard (lust?) is able to reject his sin and leave purgatory/hell behind. Lewis suggests that purgatory becomes hell when sinners fail to let go of their sins even when confronted with the beauty of Heaven and welcomed by a guide who tries to help them see the errors in their attitudes. The narrator, a Dante figure, watches these sinners reject offers of salvation over and over before he wakes up and is compelled to share his vision. The memorable line about "Those who say to God "Thy will be done' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done'" reminds us of the danger of loving ourselves and our pleasures and pursuits more than God and neighbor. Humbling.
I also read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood for the first time. The professor who taught the nature writing class before me assigned this to her students. I have never really been a science fiction fan or an Atwood reader, and am glad I didn't follow the syllabus of this fellow professor and assign in. This dystopian future novel follows the movements and meanderings of the last human being left living, as far as he knows, after a disaster caused by an infection in a future in which bioengineering is creating new species and eliminating aging. Oryx and Crake are the two people who mean the most to the main character, who is sort of a simpering, unlikable person. An unlikable narrator is always a big hurdle for me in a book. Atwood's future where scientists live in compounds and invent crossed species and anti-aging pills and other ways to manipulate pleasure and the avoidance of pain is another sort of warning different from Lewis's and somewhat compelling - particularly the addictions to drugs and pornography that the people in this society resort to. Overall the story seemed underdeveloped - I'd probably have to read the rest of the books in the MaddAdam series to really understand, but I just don't care about the narrator, whose name I can't even remember right now, and it didn't really seem related to "Nature Writing" enough - even though it is a future divorced from nature and reality - to spend time with.
I also picked up Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when I grabbed the Atwood book because I've never read it. It was more entertaining science fiction than Oryx and Crake, but I set it down and forgot to read it again until I got the email from the library about it being due. I can understand why it is a cult favorite, but skimming it was good enough for me to say, ok, I don't need to spend any more time with this.
Meanwhile, I'm still diving back into Walden as I read over papers. I'm working my way through Lawrence Buell's critical work The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, but I'm afraid I didn't succeed in helping many students understand Thoreau's project. They write that he goes to woods to find himself over and over. I'm not sure they see the value of trying to discover principles of living and living in accordance with them -- Thoreau isn't asking "Who am I" but "How do I live." I went back over that, but the idea of "finding myself" is strongly rooted. My two favorite student essays so far have been one response paper about the costs of a college education vs. the free education Thoreau receives in the woods and another about the way a student from a rural area feels stressed at her urban school, but finds peace in the woods - a well-written reflection. I find myself most convicted by his defense of living simply, free to have time for reading, observing, and visiting, probably because like most parents, I find myself stretched in so many directions. The New Republic and the New Yorker published a couple of entertaining essays from 2015 defending and defaming Thoreau: found here and here.
Now I need to find something new to read.
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