My apologies to regular readers - my computer is sick and being treated for viruses at the local electronic doctor's - such being a topic in itself, but today, another topic and a short one (as this is a borrowed computer and is driving me nuts) from the new book I am reading, "Sojourners" by Marjorie Rawlings.
Best known for her novel, "The Yearling," which was made into a movie years back with, I think, Gary Cooper, " Sojourners" is one of the finest examples of descriptive writing I have ever read. Her mystical love of nature pours through the pages as true and sincere as the most ardent worshiper in a shrine. As I have found with my own novels, such descriptive work affects the rhythm and thus flow of the book, making for a difficult airplane read ,but oh, so beautiful! Meanwhile, her story runs through the mind of a simple and nearly saintly man surrounded by our normal profanities, including a mother who hates him and a brother who he loves, but who has left the 19th century farm in Upstate New York for adventure - and to leave the clinging mother who only loves him. Thus our simple saint is burdened with the cross of a spiteful mother whose comments on him are so nasty as to take your breath away.
Perhaps one of he most interesting study in the book is on the obsession of hatred. The mother was married to a man who became spiteful after his own family cheated him, his spite leading him to rape the mother, causing her to bear her faithful saintly son. We understand the initial feelings, but we are lost as to its persistence. Why, we have to ask, is this woman living in hatred decades after the event, well after her despicable husband has died? And why for a lifetime must she hate the son who was born from this event, even as he has proved himself better than most humans who have ever walked the earth?
Rawlings leads us to understand that it is a product of extreme egotism, of clinging to hate as a way to give one a center of infernal glory that appears to be immortal. And as other flawed people come into the picture, we begin to see that it is not just Amelia, the mother, who suffers from this destructive narcissism, but much of the coming age of modern industrialism which is slowly eroding the old farming way of life. With little mention of religion, she paints a picture in our hero of what life could be - of loving and sharing amid both hard work and beauty - and what most of us have made of it, a mystical cast of beauty that we have reduced by our own ambitions and personal slights to the flat, meaningless gray that often confronts us, that makes us fear sickness and disease and the death of the body and the ego.
All so pointless, we see; amidst the wonder and bounty of America, all such a waste. I for one read on, brought to solemn wonder by her descriptions of spring flowers or wintry sky, and am brought to regret over my own squandering of what I have, and to a hopeful resolution that I might be as open to sky and grace as our hero. I know this will not be - I am too complex and egotistic a man - but I see the possibilities; more than in the character sketches, I see how blinded I can be to the wonder of life in my own little shell; and how limited and clutching this little shell is. I, many of us, do not hate like mother Amelia, but we often repel the good in much the same way, with a regard only to our precious and fragile view of self.
Rawlings brings a sermon to us without the overlay of guilt and the platitudes of the pulpit. Rather, she brings it too us through beauty, and the guilt we find is only of our own recognition. I read her book and think it should be enough to make us all perfect, but of course it is not. The road most of us have is rough and long, lost as we are in our self-determined and often destructive ignorance. We are, then, sojourners, aliens in our own land where nothing abides. But also, if we wish, we are also pilgrims, who at last might see a glimpse of our greater selves in the reflection of the budding willows or the wispy blue sky. FK
Best known for her novel, "The Yearling," which was made into a movie years back with, I think, Gary Cooper, " Sojourners" is one of the finest examples of descriptive writing I have ever read. Her mystical love of nature pours through the pages as true and sincere as the most ardent worshiper in a shrine. As I have found with my own novels, such descriptive work affects the rhythm and thus flow of the book, making for a difficult airplane read ,but oh, so beautiful! Meanwhile, her story runs through the mind of a simple and nearly saintly man surrounded by our normal profanities, including a mother who hates him and a brother who he loves, but who has left the 19th century farm in Upstate New York for adventure - and to leave the clinging mother who only loves him. Thus our simple saint is burdened with the cross of a spiteful mother whose comments on him are so nasty as to take your breath away.
Perhaps one of he most interesting study in the book is on the obsession of hatred. The mother was married to a man who became spiteful after his own family cheated him, his spite leading him to rape the mother, causing her to bear her faithful saintly son. We understand the initial feelings, but we are lost as to its persistence. Why, we have to ask, is this woman living in hatred decades after the event, well after her despicable husband has died? And why for a lifetime must she hate the son who was born from this event, even as he has proved himself better than most humans who have ever walked the earth?
Rawlings leads us to understand that it is a product of extreme egotism, of clinging to hate as a way to give one a center of infernal glory that appears to be immortal. And as other flawed people come into the picture, we begin to see that it is not just Amelia, the mother, who suffers from this destructive narcissism, but much of the coming age of modern industrialism which is slowly eroding the old farming way of life. With little mention of religion, she paints a picture in our hero of what life could be - of loving and sharing amid both hard work and beauty - and what most of us have made of it, a mystical cast of beauty that we have reduced by our own ambitions and personal slights to the flat, meaningless gray that often confronts us, that makes us fear sickness and disease and the death of the body and the ego.
All so pointless, we see; amidst the wonder and bounty of America, all such a waste. I for one read on, brought to solemn wonder by her descriptions of spring flowers or wintry sky, and am brought to regret over my own squandering of what I have, and to a hopeful resolution that I might be as open to sky and grace as our hero. I know this will not be - I am too complex and egotistic a man - but I see the possibilities; more than in the character sketches, I see how blinded I can be to the wonder of life in my own little shell; and how limited and clutching this little shell is. I, many of us, do not hate like mother Amelia, but we often repel the good in much the same way, with a regard only to our precious and fragile view of self.
Rawlings brings a sermon to us without the overlay of guilt and the platitudes of the pulpit. Rather, she brings it too us through beauty, and the guilt we find is only of our own recognition. I read her book and think it should be enough to make us all perfect, but of course it is not. The road most of us have is rough and long, lost as we are in our self-determined and often destructive ignorance. We are, then, sojourners, aliens in our own land where nothing abides. But also, if we wish, we are also pilgrims, who at last might see a glimpse of our greater selves in the reflection of the budding willows or the wispy blue sky. FK
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