Beach, lake, mtns, anywhere.
Is that person naked? Whatever.
Vamonos.
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"When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (via dreaminginthedeepsouth) Yes yes yes.
None of my cameras functioned during this vacation, except my damaged iPhone cam.
So I have no pictures of my nephews, my family or my friends or the fish caught, but I have this cloudy picture of my favorite place on Earth from my last day on the beach.
On Housekeeping.
A novel by Marilynne Robinson. A review on the back of this book says that you will want to read it slow, because each sentence is beautiful and you don’t want to miss one, and I found that overwhelmingly true. Some of the passages I marked as I was reading are just three or four words long, valuable little phrases.
And lord it was sad. Reading about a barren western glacial lake when you are sitting next to the perfect blue-green gulf (as of yet, un-oil slicked) makes the setting of the novel even more potently unlivable.
Robinson’s synopsis is this: “Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women.” Yes, and also about the burden of a household— particularly one in the strain of a small mountain town— and how to escape it.
“One day my grandmother must have carried out a basket of sheets to hang in the spring sunlight, […] performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith.” Men are cursory in this book. The actions of women take on significance.
“Old women she had known, first her grandmother and then her mother, rocked on their porches in the evenings and sang sad songs, and did not wish to be spoken to.” I certainly understand a homemaker’s need for silence.
“She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease.”
“Such a separation, I imagined, could indeed lead to loneliness intense enough to make one conspicuous in bus stations.”
“My cold, visceral dread of school I had learned to ignore.” Ha, yeah.
On skipping school repeatedly: “All of this was too dreadful to consider, and every aspect of the situation grew worse with every day that passed, until we began to find a giddy and heavy-hearted pleasure in it. The combined effects of cold, tedium, guilt, loneliness, and dread sharpened our senses wonderfully.” Sounds a bit like winter quarter in Evanston.
“Here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise.” Despite a hate for the word “thus” that editing a certain coworker’s writing has instilled in me, this is one of those beautiful things you don’t want to miss by cruising through this book. Here’s another: “Such delicate improvisations fail.”
“I have often noticed that it is almost intolerable to be looked at, to be watched, when one is idle. When one is idle and alone, the embarrassments of loneliness are almost endlessly compounded.” Explains why people bury themselves in their work.
For a lover of well-crafted prose, this is a great read. Otherwise, it is slow in pace, sad and the material is generally very tough and ordinary and sad.
Luckily, I followed it up with a Michael Crichton beach read that I have finished 500 pages of in about 2 days. Vacation reading is wonderful. A book that’s salty and warped by the surf in my hand on the beach and all my friends and fam is my own personal LOST finale.
Homesick (or beachsick?) googling.
Frankly, Google is genius for reading my mind and putting this together.
