Reading...Reading...

Reading is my vice. If I’m not writing or drawing or making smoothies for lunch or walking Bisou, I’m reclining on cushions, reading. I’m not proud of this. Even though I mostly read what the culture considers “good” books, and reading is supposed to engage the mind more actively than watching TV, I know I should read less. 

I read to get away from the vicissitudes of daily life, from worries about the future, and above all I read to get a break from what Jung called the endless “circumambulation of the self.” And I read for company--the company of the author, whose voice reaches me across space and time and opens doors to worlds that I would otherwise never know. Sometimes, when bits of those worlds turn out to be almost exact replicas of bits of my own world, I feel a shock of recognition, and the author and I become fast friends. 

I especially like it if my author friend has published many books, so that I can spend months in her company. I fell in love with Iris Murdoch’s mind, and with the way she invents enormously intelligent characters who are at the same time enormously foolish. Luckily for me, she wrote 26 novels. I felt bereft when I reached the final one (Jackson’s Dilemma, written as she began her decline into dementia), so I read them all again. A year or so later, missing her company, I went back for a third reading. 

Then there is Anthony Trollope, who wrote 47 novels on his daily train commute to his job with the British postal service. I don’t think I’ve read them all yet, but I’m almost there. Trollope’s characters, unlike those of his contemporary, Dickens, are never wholly saints or sinners, but complicated mixtures of both. I don’t know whether Trollope was a good man, but I don’t see how anyone so fully in sympathy with humans in all their imperfections could be anything but kind. 

I am not a fiction writer, yet certain novelists teach me to write. At the moment, I’m reading my way through Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series (25 novels), in the order in which they were written. I care very little about who murdered whom, or how the endearing Wexford solved the crime. But I am agog at Rendell’s rendering of physical detail. She tells us how every character, no matter how minor, looks, speaks, and is dressed; how houses are furnished, from wallpaper to floor coverings; how gardens bloom or wither in various seasons. And she’s wonderful on weather, especially rain, as one would guess, given her nationality. How did she manage, as she built her complicated edifice of scenes and clues, to have the mental space and imagination to write all those descriptions? 

And then there are the writers who make me laugh, to whom I devoutly give thanks every time I open one of their books. I read them mostly for therapy, since I’m not sure that it’s possible to learn to write humor (it’s either in your DNA, or it isn’t). At difficult points in my life you can calculate my distress levels by the number of P.G. Wodehouse novels and short-story collections on my bedside table. 

Aided and abetted in my vice by my Kindle, which can waft almost any book in the world to me in the middle of the night in the middle of a blizzard, I read my life away. My electronic library contains 496 volumes, safely stored where they never need dusting. 

At night, lying in bed Kindle in hand, I tell myself that I should turn off the light and go to sleep. True, reading is good for writers, but it can also replace writing, and that is a danger for me. And I think about Cervantes’ warning, in Don Quixote, against other dangers of excessive reading. Enamored of novels of chivalry, Don Quixote sold his land to buy books, and spent day and night reading volume after volume. Eventually, Cervantes tells us, “as a result of too much reading and not enough sleep, his brain dried up, and he went mad.” 

I’m not there yet, but some days my brain does feel a little “dry,” and I worry that I might end up like my compatriot Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

Little Phobias

 The pandemic is abating, the world is slowly opening up, and for almost everyone this is great news. But for hermits, introverts, highly sensitive persons, and molluscoid types like me, the news is mixed. Yes, it's good to be able to buy a loaf of bread at the store without putting my life at risk. And it's good to know that I could, if I wanted to, have a professional cut the hair that, in the words of the musical, has grown "down to here, down to there, down to where it stops by itself."

But for those who identify at least in part with oysters, clams, and mussels, the quarantine brought definite advantages. As everything became forbidden, a delicious freedom invaded our lives. It was lovely to wake up day after day, month after month, without commitments to clutter our mental horizon. It was a relief to be spared the responsibility of making decisions about social obligations. Pascal said, "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone." Now we had permission to do just that.

But not everything was rosy in my pandemic retreat. After a while, the shell inside which I huddled began to feel constricting. I was brought up to believe that intelligent people are never bored ("Think!" my father would advise whenever I complained that there was nothing to do). Nevertheless, there was a limit to the amount of entertainment available within the walls of my cranium. What Jung called "the circumambulation of the self" was starting to make me queasy. 

Even more distressing, I noticed that, during the rare in-person conversations in which I engaged, I was losing the ability to respond quickly to what was coming out of other people's mouths. Words escaped me at hitherto unseen rates. I would get tangled in the thickets of a relative clause and be unable to find my way out again. 

I needed outside stimulation. I longed to feel the wayward breezes of other people's ideas. My mental gears groaned for the oil of human contact. Inside my clamshell, my legs were cramping; my chest was tightening; I was stifling. I had all the symptoms of claustrophobia.

Of course, my shell was not a prison cell. Within reason, I was allowed a certain amount of freedom. Well-masked and distanced, I could walk the icy roads with a friend. I could make brief excursions to the grocery store. I could even get in the car and head for the wide open spaces. But as the pandemic wore on, I became reluctant to do any of these things. Rather than fetch that loaf of bread, I would make do with the ancient tortilla discovered at the bottom of the freezer. It was too much effort to make myself heard and understood from behind my double masks, so I took fewer walks with friends. And I avoided car trips except when compelled by an urgent need that Amazon could not fulfill.

Along with claustrophobia, I also had agoraphobia.

So now, as gates fly open and the peoples rejoice, all I feel is conflict. Caught between the desire to burst out of my clamshell, and fear of the outside world, I am an apprehensive, undecided, spineless mollusc.

I know what you're supposed to do about phobias: you desensitize yourself gradually. If you're scared of spiders, you start by looking at pictures of them. Then you observe a live one at a distance. Gradually you get closer and closer, until you turn into one of those people who trap spiders under a glass and deposit them outdoors, murmuring endearments. Following that model, and now that the weather is easing, I should lengthen my walks, take longer drives, maybe actually go somewhere I want to go (but where?).

It will take time and effort to get rid of my fears, but it will be worth it, I tell myself--that is, unless the dreaded variants take off and I have to scuttle back into my clamshell. My emotional life is starting to resemble the game of whack-a-mole: claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and now, the mother of all phobias: the fear of uncertainty. But I'll probably just have to learn to live with that one.

The Mule, the Plow, and the Pen

In the menagerie that usually crowds my dreams—lions and tigers starving in the basement, neglected goats and chickens multiplying in filthy outbuildings, a German Shepherd whom no one’s remembered to feed—mules had never appeared. But the other night, as the first serious snow of the year fell outside my window, there she was, my first dream mule. 

I spent my childhood summers around mules. In the Catalan countryside, before the arrival of tractors, people worked the land with horses, mules, and plows that were almost identical to the ones introduced by the Romans two millennia ago. Since my grandfather was a vet, mules were often brought to him for injections and minor surgeries, which I was allowed to watch from the safety of the dining room window. Mules were popular with the local peasants, who found them to be sturdier than horses, less flighty, and better able to navigate difficult terrain. According to my grandmother, in past centuries the pope himself rode around Vatican City on a white mule—the first pope-mobile.

But I didn’t much like mules. I preferred the little gray donkeys, with their velvety faces and enormous eyes, that trotted daintily on the dusty roads, carrying a load of grass for the rabbits and, often, a black-clad peasant grandmother as well. And even the humblest cart horse was more elegantly proportioned than a mule, whose skinny tail and long ears seemed all wrong for its big, sleek body. 

Not having thought about mules for years, I was surprised when one showed up in my dream. She was brought to me by an old Vermonter who announced that he was going to plow the lawn in front of my cottage so I could make a vegetable garden. The plow to which he had hitched the mule was like the ones I remembered from my childhood. It had wooden handles, and the share—the part that digs into the earth—had a sharp metal point and flaring sides. 

I could barely contain my glee. Not only was I going to have a garden again, but one made by a mule! I didn’t care that she was a dull brown, run-of-the-mill mule. I found her charming, and the archaic plow she dragged connected me to the generations of peasants lurking in my DNA. I was going to grow kale and chard and garlic and those slender Japanese eggplants, and cook and eat them the way God intended. And who knew--once I had a garden, could chickens and goats be far behind? 

That was obviously the wish-fulfillment aspect of the dream, in which I got to have my old close-to-the-earth life back. But if, according to Jung, both the old Vermonter and the mule represent parts of me, the meaning becomes less clear. I can easily see myself as an old Vermonter wanting to make a garden, but as a mule? Mules are neither dashing nor adorable. They are strong, hard-working, reliable and mostly boring. 

The dream mule, however, had come not only on a delightful mission, but a subversive one: tearing up the sterile expanse of grass in front of my cottage and replacing it with something nourishing and meaningful. In real life, of course, this would not be allowed in the retirement community in which I live, even if it is a Vermont retirement community. But the dream mule and the old Vermonter clearly believed that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. (That is totally not the waking me, who tends to get permission and then ask forgiveness just in case.) 

If I am both the old Vermonter and the mule, though, am I also the lawn? I ask because the mule’s job is to plow under all that boring conventional grass and make possible the growth of vitamin-rich, life-enhancing veggies. Did I mention that the Roman plow has a sharp point and flaring sides, not unlike the nib of a pen? Not that I actually write with a pen….

 

Basement Felines

In the basement of my psyche there are cats. Big ones: two lionesses and a tiger. They are a sorry-looking trio, so thin that you can see their ribs and hip bones under their dull and patchy fur. Night and day they pace in the dark, roaring. They are starving, and it’s my fault: I’m too scared to feed them.

Periodically I crack the door open and peer down the stairs at them, and their stench, like a thousand dirty litter boxes, makes me gasp. I need to change their bedding, but that would mean going down there.

What are two lionesses and a tiger doing in my basement? I put them there, in a fit of insanity, because I wanted the thrill of having these wild, fierce, unpredictable creatures under my roof. What was I thinking? Now I’m stuck with them.

What if they escape? They will surely hunt down and kill the first moving thing they see, maybe somebody’s dog, or one of the neighbors. All the same, I cannot keep them here, to slowly starve to death.

Maybe I could lure them into the car and release them in some faraway wilderness, but to do that I’d have to get close to them. The only responsible thing would be to call the authorities, but which authorities? The zoo? The fire department? The police? The police will come with their guns drawn, and shoot the poor cats. I don’t think I could stand that. Or, the cats might jump on a policeman or firefighter or zoo keeper—someone with a spouse and little kids at home—and eat them. I couldn’t live with the guilt if that happened.

Either way, whether the cats kill or are killed, I will surely be questioned, and held responsible. The embarrassment will be appalling. People will think I’m crazy, or criminal, or both. But things can’t go on like this. Somehow, I must get rid of these animals.

In the basement of my psyche, there are cats….