It’s been
more than two months since my last entry. This was due to a chain reaction of
circumstances – a heavy period at work, followed by a possibly-not-unconnected
bout of illness, followed by another heavy period at work trying to catch up
following sick-leave, and culminating with a life-changing event, the
anticipation of which I have touched upon in previous entries. But I am NOT
ready to tackle that in a blog yet.
I started this blog in a slightly less hectic season work-wise, and was quite surprised at myself for managing nearly two months’ worth of regular entries. Then I lost momentum, and was not even sure whether I would pick it up again – there novelty of blogging, especially when one remains entirely unread, wears thin after a while.
One thing a
period of illness allows me, is the leisure time to read. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a keen reader, and have real
difficulties putting a fiction book aside once started. Thus I can rarely allow
myself the luxury, except on long journeys by public transport (alone, not with
a toddler) or when sufficiently ill to lack the energy to do pretty much
anything else. Thus recent acute bronchitis meant I could indulge in a fair few
novels (it was not a long illness, but I can read pretty fast). I would like to
share a few thoughts about the most thought-provoking of these books, and the
reflections they induced concerning the subject of this blog. Of course my
indulgent meanderings cannot do justice to the power and skill of these novels
(I can only say that you would be much better spending your time reading these
books than some inane online blog).
I read The House of the Spirits by Isabel
Allende, telling the story of four generations of a Chilean landowning family,
encompassing issues of poverty, class conflict, political unrest and fascist
oppression, with a poetic dose of spirituality and the supernatural. I read Inés of My Soul, also by Isabel Allende,
about the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Chile and the horrendous suffering
and bloodshed involved on both sides. I read The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, which tells the interweaving
stories of several characters set in London
during, and immediately following, World War 2.
These books
are cracking good yarns, with amazing plots and effective prose. All these
books include vivid and moving depictions of shocking cruelty and suffering
inflicted by humans on other humans. They also tell stories of survival, of the
strength and resilience of which humans are capable in situations of
immense difficulty and suffering. All these books are fiction, and yet draw on
historical events so closely, that the experiences described clearly reflect
real experiences lived by people of those places and times.
This
reading experience once more brought home to me the abstract and indulgent
nature of the concerns that supposedly drive this blog. If death is potentially
around every immediate corner, and every day is a fight for survival – as it
must have been for many during the Blitz, during times of military persecution
and fascist rule, during the Spanish conquest and all other episodes of
aggressive colonialism – then a person has no space to fret about the potential
fate of the entire human race and planet Earth. Generalised ecological and
economic worries are luxuries
afforded only to those who are not battling significant, immediate personal
hardship.
I also have
the luxury of wondering if/when the collapse of the current economic and
ecological systems will bring about human suffering of the immediate, intense
nature of some of the scenarios depicted in these books. It may well already
being doing so in ways of which I am shamefully ignorant.
Makes you
realise how lucky you are.
