Crossing To Safety by Wallace Stegner

In Perelandra, the most appealing temptation turns the Lady’s desire to give herself into suicide. She was to take the fault for everyone else, become Joan of arc, accept that her gift was so great, so wise, that no one would understand it – which was itself the greatest sacrifice of all.

Charity Lang falls in to that trap. The final movements of Crossing to Safety center on her scramble for control in the face of metastasized stomach cancer.

Greater than faith, greater than hope, is Charity, who believes digging in and leaving no room for naysayers will prevent anything from going contrary to her ideas about it.

The writing is stellar. Stegner is caught between Walden Pond and Delphi, and comes to the conclusion that they aren’t so different after all. I love the shop talk— teaching, poetry, classics, weather, long drives, the overt symbolism of wondering through the dark wood. He has something to say about everything and doesn’t miss the opportunity to say it in a way that makes you feel better for reading his opinion.

But this is still a story – and a tricky one at that. He knows when he says non-fiction is truth telling lies and fiction is a lie telling truth. This novel is fiction set as non-fiction. It aims at the complicated tangle of life at discovers that people are, well, complicated. Is this a lie that comes out as a truth?

Everything is Everything

The imagery is on the nose. He is not hiding – he talks about the serpent in paradise, Paradise Lost, the paradise of their little pond. This is an idiom story. And Charity is the fallen ideal - she is cursed. Her desire is for Sid and she dominates him - to her own grave. Larry sees it, and once he knows the end, he sees it as a factor in every story. Charity tries to make some thing of her husband and as a result makes him impotent.

Like Adam in the garden, he has an option to not take the fruit has wife offers him, but he would rather chose death with her than life dealing with the serpent in her.

It does catch the power of the stories we tell about others. If we lie about others to ourselves, we make a story into them that is not true. We can only hurt them and ourselves. This makes you wonder what kind of story Larry is trying to make his friends be. Or, if giving himself Satan’s view on his friends nakedness in the woods, he is noting that he could be doing the same to their lives’ nakedness.

Tradition

Back to Delphi, Sally seems to symbolize the old tradition, the Greek readers, and she’s the lover that sings Homer. She has to be loved. She’s the old world and thrives there. It is in Larry’s thesis struggles and teaching, and the chasing of tenure that she’s nearly killed, twice. Sid – Thoreau or Adam – whisks her away - also twice. It is only when she is inextricably linked to Larry, where she breathes into, edits, and protects his work, that his writing sings.

Charity parallels the mechanistic modern industrial school as well, driving her husband towards the tenure track and acting as if, when the checklist is finished, it would produce a tenure. That she is wrong seems to show Stegner’s hand a bit on what kind of world they are in.

Sally Beyond the Story

I don’t like this book but I’m resting in the upheaval. Because I think Stegner as Larry is imaginatively constructing their lives like Charity did their days. He settling everything in narrative like Charity did with her list — Down to every declared image and defined connection. Sally cannot be crushed by it because she’s outside and beyond it; she is the editor here. She receives Larry’s work and sends it back to him to improve. She did not fix it. Charity never received her husband‘s work. It’s always her idea, her measuring stick with a crack over the knuckles when Sid stepped out of line.

These are two well matched women and in my earlier analogy of the larger woman providing the mead for everyone else to drink, it seems obvious everyone is drinking Charity’s Kool-aide until they are in Italy free. Then all the Italians adore Sally, and resonate with her.

Or these are two small ladies loving in a wider world where they provide their own cup to whoever is around and it is either life or death.

In the end Charity drinks her own brew and sees clearly what she has done.

I will keep this novel, and even follow my husband around the house to read the long road trip after summer term aloud, but the ending makes me sick.

Further Up and Further In

Tharpe, Twyla. Keep It Moving Ch. 3. End

"If you lift the weight, your reward is more weight. The weight does not transform, you do.

Here’s what I know. A life that gives the body its due is a happy life. Yes, your life is grim. Your markers for success involve exhaustion. The promise of decline around every corner. The threat of injury hovers over you. I used to believe it was a satisfying life in spite of these drawbacks. Now I know its because of them. You’ve got to make your obstacles into your collaborators."

In Reading: Early June

Consider This by Karen Glass

Because of this book I can narrate Mason’s first five points comfortably which is unique. For the Children’s Sake either doesn’t work that way or didn’t stick as well.

To wit —

Children are born persons. They are complete and whole at birth, not a tabula rasa or the fruit of utter wickedness - their blood does not make them good or hopeless.

We have authority and they must obey, but it can not be through manipulation of fear or love, or amplifying one characteristic to the detriment of others. So we have the world they live in, their habits, and the feast of ideas.

I like this one more than Know and Tell which is application and example oriented. Handbook was in the name.

On the whole the Consider This is enlarging my reading list and I’m having a hard time accepting that I won’t read every book I want to before I die. It makes me want to cry, probably because I am pregnant.

But that brings me to

Boece by Boethius; Translated by Chaucer

I’ve mentioned before, Chaucer is in the family.  I’m trying to read him on the reg to keep the wisdom of my forefathers at the forefront.

It is in Old English, but I have technically been exposed to Boethius before (and Chaucer), so while slow going it is good to think from a Roman and OE perspective in one go.

Boethius has wept, been followed down the dark paths of death by the Muses. Then a lady of great size and stature, with a young face and an old countenance showed up. Now that I have read The Princess and the Goblin, it is like meeting Irene’s huge great grandmother in an Ostrogoth prison cell. Keeping my eyes peeled for pigeons.

The good lady runs off the many faced muses like flock of pestering mermaids, telling Boethius he needs nourishing of reason.

She ruffles her dress embroidered with Pi in the hem and Tau at the top border separated by seven degrees with ladders intertwined. She bears small books and a scepter.

Then she settles at the farthest corner of his mattress and begins to speak his own sorrows.

All I remember from the first time around is Lady Wisdom, the impending rack, and betrayal - and wrangling loose papers because we didn’t have copies or were just reading excerpts. The dear adventures of my early Omnibus days.

I’m insinuating that he sees the Nine Muses as natural enemies of or an impediment to Wisdom or the Seven Liberal Arts (guessing at the symbols on her dress). That would be Platonic - the search for the unmediated form - instead of seeing the muses as the means by which we can draw near the higher ideals. He loved PlatoTime will tell.

Lewis’s Signature Classics: Mere Christianity

I don’t think I have read a physical copy and while I know I have listened to it a couple times I don’t remember more than the Lord, Liar or Lunatic argument.

He just talked about Freud and gave him way too much credit for knowing what he was talking about in his own sphere. But he did call him for talking out of turn about language.

Jane Austen: Mansfield Park

Have you ever read this as a commentary on education? All the slights to Fanny center on it, all the differences determined between her and her cousins come down to it, and there is significant time spent on it.

For Maria and Julia : The kind of education chosen philosophically is applied without parental tuning to the virtue of the child. They know the kings and queen,planets, and dates. They are trained in courtesy to the point of refined artlessness and their Aunt Norris convinces them they are faultless. There father provides, but takes no interest.

Fanny enters the scene knowing how to work, how to read, and with the humble conviction of her own shortcomings. Edmund directs her free reading, she takes history with the others, and she improves herself. Edmund, in a sign of the rector he would become, notes Fanny’s need for intentional kindness.

It is really a lovely set up and I like Jane more for it. Seeing the whole thing as an educational commentary turns Edmund from a surrogate father to a teacher in the old style. In fact he probably was treating Fanny as he had been treated and done first at Eaton then at Oxford. The model of both schools had - to my understanding - a degree of students directing younger students - everyone studying under another towards the goal of becoming lettered.

Further Up and Further In.