It's been a while

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.