Blogging and Patience

I was thinking about the crazy tangle of string our lives resemble. They're not the clean, arrow-straight trajectories from place to place, or event to event, we like to imagine. They are, in fact, more like a labyrinth that appears to wind back on itself indefinitely, until we finally shuffle off our mortal coil. Even then, I'm guessing the pressure of uncompleted tasks will loom right until the end. And if we want to take a broader bird's eye view of human life where individuals are part of a greater whole, our descendants will pick up the slack and keep going. 

Two brothers named John-Roger and Peter Macmillan wrote a book named 'You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought.' They remind readers that we aren't ever finished with ourselves, and never will be. 'We've yet to meet a person who has said for any length of time, "I'm done."' 

Wherever we find ourselves is the goal of some former moment in our lives. I love the end of hiking trails, where there is always something like a lookout with a lovely kiosk on a high peak with an amazing view. Yet in life as a whole, when we arrive, there is always more path snaking away in the distance which we didn't notice before. The Macmillan brothers have a blunt way of reminding us to enjoy the journey and stop pining for the destination. 'If you don't have fun getting there, you probably won't have much fun there. Your fun muscles will have atrophied.' 

Point taken.  

Like many others, I've suffered from the impatience of wanting tasks and projects to be finished. Done and dusted, ticked off, ready to put out into the world for feedback. Whether it's writing a book, article or assignment, decorating a room, driving to a destination or cleaning the kitchen after tea, my favourite stage of the proceedings is 'Over and Done With'. An unfinished feeling hanging over my head isn't one I've ever been fond of. It's sticky, unsettling, and hard to shake off. But what if the very nature of life means we can never completely shake it off?

I'm trying to make peace with this sense of unease. And I've decided part of the benefit of keeping this blog is that it's never finished. Sure, any number of individual posts get churned out, but there are always new ideas to write, fresh books to read, photos to snap and ideas to record. I've no idea what future posts and updates are going to look like. And I guess that's how it should be. Maybe it's good for us to have some open-ended hobby to remind us that life may be more of a curly scramble with no clear end in sight, than a clearly marked hiking trail.

I really like a growing-older meme I once saw. 'They tell me I'm over the hill, but I can't remember ever being at the top.' I'm taking this specific reflection as a pause along the way to peer out at the view I can see, and stop and reflect. Then I'll be off again with my book chat, lists and challenges.

How about you? What are you in the middle of, for I know there is always something.  

(This might be a good moment to mention the new Follow.It button in my toolbar, in case you're inclined to wish for notifications of this blog's updates in your emails. The old system bit the dust, and we bloggers were forced to search for something new to enable followers to keep being informed when we share new content. Hence, the delightfully straightforward Follow.It. You won't miss a post, and on the other hand, you won't receive any non-post related material. Win win.)    

'Crusoe's Daughter' by Jane Gardam

In 1904, when she was six, Polly Flint went to live with her two holy aunts at the yellow house by the marsh -- so close to the sea that it seemed to toss like a ship, so isolated that she might have been marooned on an island. And there she stayed for eighty-one years while the century raged around her, while lamplight and Victorian order became chaos and nuclear dread. Crusoe's Daughter, ambitious, moving and wholly original, is her story.

MY THOUGHTS:

This was a core syllabus book from my first year of English at Uni. I didn't remember much about it, except that we were set to read it alongside the famous classic it was drawn from; Robinson Crusoe. When I saw it at a second hand bookshop, I really wanted to remember what it was all about, and whether or not I enjoyed it. 

In 1904, a compliant six-year-old named Polly Flint is taken to a lonely yellow house near the sea to live with her two spinster aunts, bleak Aunt Mary and gentle Aunt Frances. Also under the roof is their maid Charlotte, whose smile always appears false, and Mrs Woods, a dour widow whose presence Polly can never quite figure out. 

As she grows older, it dawns on Polly that she's being brought up in the shadow of an extinct time period. Mary and Frances live as if hazy Victorian mores have made a massive stamp on them. While the world is evolving into the 20th century, vague values of a different era are still trying to be cranked to life beneath their roof, although nobody seems to realise that's the case. It gradually dawns on Polly that if she'd been a boy, money might have been forked out for an education and profession. As it is, the aunts raise her in a vacuum where nothing happens, but seem to think they've done perfectly right by her. 

Polly has access to her dead grandfather's library, and bonds with Daniel Defoe's character Robinson Crusoe as her ultimate hero of all time, even though others including Dickens (and me!) find him dry and dull. Crusoe's appeal to Polly is not his sexless, white masculine status, but his existence on an island of his own, knowing that his only way to survive is to declare it's God's will. She adopts him as her spiritual counterpart and derives a lot of comfort from their mutual isolation; Crusoe's being his location and Polly's being her life in general. She invests so much into Crusoe that in her later years, she invents literary projects of her own just to feel as if she's doing something to fill her days. 

At one stage, Polly visits the Thwaites (sort of extended family) who run a commune for arty, intellectual people. Lady Celia Thwaite believes her mission in life is to help geniuses, which she does by providing this turf for them to veg out, doing Polly knows not what. Nearly live the wealthy Zeit family who laughs at aestheticism and find the commune amusing. Polly observes them all, and rather than making judgments one way or another, she makes quiet, dry observations which the reader can assess if we want to take the trouble. Or we may choose to simply accept what we see, as Polly does. Her most common statement is, 'Yes, I see.' All through the story, although people either put each other on pedestals or cut each other down, Polly just observes. 

The commentary on the nature of different relationships and the proper pecking order happens through this sort of observation. For example, the stately aunts decide to make their maid, Charlotte, a cup of tea after a grievous loss, but need her to rouse herself to set a fire before they can do so!

Polly has a few brushes with romance. There's Paul Treece, a promising young literary talent from a modest farming background, and his Uni chum, the pleasant but inscrutable Theo Zeit. Polly unrestrainedly gives her heart to one of them, but realises she had no idea what he was thinking, if he ever did himself. (Yeah, what was he thinking?!)

Jane Gardam's skill with the pen kept wanting to make me read more. The aspects of a person's appearance or character she chooses to highlight through Polly's eyes are so fresh and unique. Her evocation of the First World War and its effect on the poor soldiers is stunning. And she's able to make characters who appear for just a few pages seem super interesting and revealing. 

My 1988 read didn't make me want to go straight off to hunt for more Jane Gardam titles, but my 2020 read has. Still, I don't envy my teenage self, for having to write something academic about such elusive, sensual writing. It's a will-o'-the-wisp of a book, if ever one was, and I'll bet I didn't get very far. But I really enjoyed it. 

🌟🌟🌟🌟½