What a life in literature can do...

I am procrastinating. As in, I'm a real pro at it. The one day a week I don't have to march to a schedule is Saturday (usually), and frankly, I'm enjoying sitting in my flannel nightgown and having coffee. Yes, I have a long to-do list, but right now, I'm dwelling. Pellet stove on, slippers on. I am a house-mouse in a lot of ways. 

I also have no papers to grade (okay, there are four "leftovers" but I'll get those done). I am going to clean the house and do the laundry and get groceries today. Tomorrow, I'll go to church (I'm reading), then bake and put out the solar Christmas lights. My soul needs rest. 

I'm still refraining from commenting on socials about the national mash-up between The Hunger Games and Mad Max. When I woke up this morning, I immediately thought, hey, Vonnegut covered this a while back in his short story, "Harrison Bergeron." As is usually the case, my brain builds schema by turning to a lifetime spent in literature. When my mother told me that I had better get a teaching license because "no one can make a living just reading books," she was partially right-- but I have managed to make a life doing just that-- and I'm grateful for every teacher, every book, every play and poem and tract I've read. It gives me a means of mental and emotional survival. 

This is a gift I have given myself, and I hope to impart to the kids I teach. Unfortunately, this current generation (and many of their parents) have relegated reading anything at all to the dust heap; if it's not on Tik Tok, it doesn't exist. This is troubling. During the Dark Ages, it's said that the Irish saved civilization. Well, educated monks did-- they kept copies of seminal texts from all over the known world, and from all ages, hidden in monastery libraries. Then, when it was safe, they travelled all over, bringing the learning of the past to the far reaches of what they knew the world to be. Yes, this is complicated, since they also brought along Christianity and often forced it on people, but the whole point is, someone (several someones) valued learning, kept it safe, and then shared it widely. Like the "hobos" in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, too-- another frighteningly prescient work of literature that shows the erosion of what we would call "civilization" through almost impermeable apathy. Machines do everything, and possessing books will get you burned alive. Ideas= confusion, and no one wants to be confused. Just entertained. Interactive wall-televisions, ear-radios, and fragmented thinking... o wait, here we are. The hobos, the disenfranchised intellectuals, must memorize whole books, and keep repeating them, so something will be preserved for the after-times. 

The book ends with a devastating mushroom cloud. And no one, except the hobos, even knows or cares what the war is about. Earlier in the text, the main character, Montag, takes the risk to recite Arnold's "Dover Beach" to a group of his wife's friends, and they are disturbed by it-- not just by him actually having a physical book, but the words affect them deeply, though they have no idea why. And it's this sense of unease that makes them turn on him. He made them, for a short space of time, unhappy. 

When I witnessed on the television the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11, the final stanza of "Dover Beach" popped into my head; I had no words of my own to make any sort of sense of the horror I was seeing. Thank goodness I had words I could borrow: 

"...for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night."

While I still don't have any words I am comfortable sharing right now about much of what we are seeing unspooling in real time on the news, I can turn to literature for wisdom and comfort. The words of the past can help me forge a path forward. 

Have a good Saturday, and read something!

C