A bright morning, but cool. And now, on the deck outside my bedroom window, sit two fat planters, one packed with herbs, the other seeded with various greens: mesclun mix, arugula, chard, red kale. I am inordinately pleased. I guess that's what happens when an elegist relinquishes her 40 acres . . . she can't stop staring at two containers of dirt.
Later today the boy and I will drive north into the land of mud and sodden snow and roaring woodstoves and dirty boots and black skies. Later today I may bring myself to open the folder of my uncle's papers that my father gave me a few days ago.
I have been slowly reading Marilynne Robinson's novel Home, slowly re-reading Tolstoy's War and Peace, slowly copying out Carruth's Sleeping Beauty. I have been talking to editors about both of my poetry manuscripts. I have been editing a book about censorship, and mulling over the poetry workshop I'm scheduled to teach in May, and prepping for the Frost Place conference. I have been sweeping floors and washing clothes. I have been criss-crossing the highways of New England and New York. I have been listening to baseball games, to a podcast about Grace Kelly, to birdsong, to the songs of Bob Marley, to the chatter of my son. I have been walking up steep hills in the sun and the rain.
"Place is the now / which is eternal. And we are passing on." --Hayden Carruth, "Vermont"
4 comments:
Good luck with the papers, Dawn. "...out of history into history and the awful responsibility of time." - R. Penn Warren, All The King's Men
I happen to have found this: http://dlpotter.blogspot.com/2009/07/im-gearing-myself-for-company-today.html and wonder how anyone manages to reread novels (and so many of them) when I barely make it through one go-round. But I have been on a Russian tear, having just read _Resurrection_ (Tolstoy), _Crime and Punishment_ (Dostoevsky), _Oblomov_ (Goncharov), and _Fathers and Sons_ (Turgenev) in quick succession (not to mention a bit of Yevgeny Zamyatin and and Maxim Gorky), and am now stalled out at the beginning of Part 3 of _Brothers Karamazov_. A copy of this last title fell into my possession as a boy, and I was never able to manage even a few pages. As an old man I have a bit more stamina than I did then, at least when health cooperates...
_War and Peace_ is out there on the horizon for me: I've never read it and hope to one day, but probably not soon. _Anna Karenina_ I did manage to read when still quite young, but am ashamed to say it made no lasting impression whatever and I forget what I felt at the time. I may _owe_ that a reread before attempting _War and Peace_. (Are you reading the original Garnett translation or one that has been updated, I wonder?)
I'm reading the Garnett translation because I have an attachment to it as an old companion, but I think the recent one is supposed to be very good. I love Tolstoy a great deal but have never been able to get excited about Dostoevsky. It's funny: some people are exactly the opposite. And I don't know what to say about the process of rereading novels, except that it's just part of my life, like breathing is. The novels I reread seem almost like parents, or old lovers, or even children. I just need them around me.
I wrote a book about this fixation: The Vagabond's Bookshelf.
It's certainly a habit I hope to cultivate (rereading), and your descriptions are inspirational. I've heard about the Tolstoy/Dostoevsky dichotomy (without feeling it myself). For me the novels act almost as a consoling force, though society seems to be moving toward a place in which you would not imagine a professor "bark[ing]": “Pay attention! Think of _War and Peace_, the end of the book! That’s what matters!”
Post a Comment