P-town

Lately I'm realizing that I need a novel in my life to be truly happy. To be reading one, that is. The longer I go without reading a novel, the more depressed I become about everything: the uncertainty of adulthood, money, the health care crisis, the war, politics, etc. It's as if the beauty starts fading, or maybe drifting further away from me, the way an object tossed into the waves starts moving further and further into the ocean until you can't see it anymore. And then I start reading again and come across a passage like this one:


18. MY MOTHER NEVER FELL OUT OF LOVE WITH MY FATHER

She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being only the known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head, you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.


And then I'm like, Oh yeah, right, you just needed a book. Don't forget again.

So anyway, I finished History of Love, which was sweet. Then I read Everything is Illuminated, which was so-so, difficult to finish. Now I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale, which is frightening and discomforting, and definitely the most terrifying dystopian novel I have read (much worse than 1984). I think any woman conscious of gender oppression has visualized and feared such a scenario; Atwood has simply given it breath and life and context and a whole lot of sadness.

At the used bookstore in P-town -- a cute little thing, tiny wooden shack -- I bought a Hopkins book, but also Housekeeping and Ada (Nabokov). The latter is a vintage paperback with a strangely over-the-top description on the back. The first sentence:

Ardis Hall -- the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis -- this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principle part is staged in dream-bright America -- for are not American childhood memories comparable to Vineland-bron caravellas, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams?

Hmm, I suppose so?

Anyway, I've written one poem since I've gotten here. I'm going to try to do some revising today. Mostly I've just been exploring the little town, checking out the library and the beach and the stores, and "meeting" people. The weather is gorgeous; I really missed autumn in New England. I also really missed Cabot cheese, which is much better than Tillamook.