Early in the morning, I open the front door. It’s one of the first things I do. The fresh air is the ensoulment of the day; the day doesn’t start without it. I stand outside, and I breathe deeply. I listen for songbirds, and I gauge the clouds. The temp is 14˚C. I debate long sleeves for the first time in weeks.
I feel something like gratitude in the first moments of the day. I shouldn’t qualify; it simply is gratitude. I just can’t name exactly what I’m grateful for. I could say, “everything”. I could say, “for seeing another morning”. I think of the old prayer, “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” I have been kept for another day. Maybe that’s enough.
I’m thinking there’s more. There’s the quality of things once taken for granted. It’s the air itself, refreshing and life-sustaining, that satisfies. When a youth enjoys the fresh air, the fresh air is a thing made wonderful by his or her attention. It hardly matters that the air was fresh before he or she came along. An older person has become more the grateful witness to a wonderful world. Every thing is discovered; every scene is entered in medias res.
By afternoon, the shape of things is set. The day is ripe. I’ve breathed the air. I’ve converted my time into good little achievements, and bad ones, too. I have an accounting to make.
It seems to me that the other side of the coin we call gratitude is a quality we call forgiveness. These terms I find slippery, so forgive the frequent qualifiers. Feeling blessed can come hand in hand with feeling unworthy, at least for some of us. Letting go is more than releasing. It’s acceptance, and it’s living with the things and people that don’t please. Forgiveness is not a process of getting rid of things, but a process of settling in with them. It makes a richer, rather than an emptier, more sanitized, existence.
The day has become populated by small thoughts and events. They are all with me as I sit on the terrace outside under the white, humid sky. The neighbourhood is quiet, even as it hums with all the thoughts and activities of the neighbours. We live with each other; we live with all our deeds together.
I’m thinking each quality loses definition without the other. The forgiving person understands and feels gratitude. The ingrate is stingy with forgiveness. World views built on power collapse in on themselves on this very point. Master races do not forgive. At best, they tolerate, look past, give calculated pardons. At worst, they turn to violence as a way to cleanse the world of what can not be accepted.
Thursday, July 28, 2022
Monday, July 25, 2022
Last week’s heat wave has had aftershocks. Temps reached 30 again, and I was helpless. I could do little but nurse my humidity headache. I think I caught a pinch of Little Ren’s stomach virus. It’s funny how quickly we are brought low, made helpless.
We thought we had ridden the heat wave fairly masterfully. It had been predicted that we would have two bad days. The first day would be less intense. So we were up early and off to the beach. It was mid-July; all of us were finally on holiday.
It was perfect. The beach was crowded, but we arrived early and staked out a perfect spot on the sand. We waded into an unusually calm sea. The girls can’t swim yet, but they are not afraid to jump into the shallow waves. We ran back through the hot sand to our blanket. We were gone before the mid-afternoon rush.
The second day was the rough one, with temperatures reaching almost to 40. But we were forewarned, and we implemented every survival strategy. We had soft drinks in the fridge. We inflated the pool for the kids. We had placed two fans in opposite corners. We started the day early, and we surrendered all ambition in the afternoon, finding our places in the house to rest.
The aftershocks have caught us unprepared. We had plans, and we over-exerted. We didn’t drink enough water. We struggled to sleep at night. Because there were no headlines about the temperatures, we worked one more hour than we should have in front of the computer on the table set in the strong sun. Suddenly, we were dizzy and nauseated.
I’m a student of human behaviours on the street. I think all immigrants are. It’s a survival mechanism. The hottest days don’t bring out our better angels. I am no different. I study the change in myself. The heat drains my energy, and I have less patience with the people around me. It’s better to stay at home. It’s a reminder that hatred is a relapse. It’s the layer you find beneath fatigue.
Tuesday, July 05, 2022
“Her brother was not handsome; no, when they first saw him, he was absolutely plain, black and plain; but still he was a gentleman, with a pleasing address.”
It’s a fun introduction to a character. The passage is from “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen. I started in on Austen recently, part of an enthusiasm for eighteenth-century literature that was sparked by my fling with Alexander Pope. No: now that I think of it, I had a brief crush on Joseph Addison before Pope. I’m a fickle reader, with so little time for dedicated reading this spring.
Of course, Austen wrote in the nineteenth century, but she wrote during that very retrograde period we call Napoleonic. Her voice owed much to the classical style of the previous century. She was hardly a Romantic.
When I started in on “Mansfield Park”, I had to change gears a bit. There’s something very specific to Austen. I felt at first like I was reading a legal contract. That’s the crisp and precise air of the eighteenth century’s rationalism. Human beings may be irrational, but there was no reason to be anything but rational in describing their irrationality.
I noticed, especially when I contrasted Austen’s work with novels written only a generation or two later, that Austen was very sparing with description. Her prose is overwhelmingly dialogue or narrative, and her stories are driven by the pendulum swing between them. Put another way, we learn about characters through what they say and what they do. That’s what makes the passage above about Henry Crawford stand out. We know right away that this character is special, and that his character has particular importance to the plot.
Consider the rest of the passage, and note that we still do not get free-standing description, but we must see him through the estimation of others: “The second meeting proved him not so very plain; he was plain, to be sure, but when he had so much countenance, and his teeth were so good, and he was so well made, that one soon forgot he was plain; and after a third interview, after dining in company with him at the parsonage, he was no longer allowed to be called so by any body. He was, in fact, the most agreeable young man the sisters had ever known, and they were equally delighted with him.”