notes on a 2017 essay idea thing "Reading Novels, A Moral Playground" or summin

Spent the last year looking for moral seriousness. Reading not for big ideas, but for small ones, and for people--the point of the character novel. Eliot, Austen, and even Galsworthy. David Brooks. William Deresiewicz's "A Jane Austen Education." William James of course. Anthony Trollope.

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"[Austen's] genius began with the recognition that such lives as hers were very eventful indeed--that every life is eventful, if only you know how to look at it She did not think that her existence was quiet or trivial or boring; she thought it was delightful and enthralling, and she wanted us to see that our own are, too. She understood that what fills our days should fill our hearts, and what fills our hearts should fill our novels." (Deresiewicz 27)

"To pay attention to "minute particulars" is to notice your life as it passes, before it passes." (31)

"...novels--which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices." (99)

"But [Mansfield Park's] most important word of all was "useful." "It is not in fine preaching only," Edmund told Mary, "that a good clergyman will be useful in his parish." Henry had sense enough to put "usefulness" next to "heroism" (the "glory" of usefulness, no less) in his admiration of William Price. Lady Bertram...it was the worst thing that Austen could say about her--"never thought of being useful to anybody."....Usefulness--seeing what people need and helping them get it--is support and compassion....Love, I saw, is a verb, not just a noun--an effort, not just another precious feeling." (157-58)

"Duty, exertion, resignation, and ultimately, happiness..." (160) Austen's ideals

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Reading in 2018

1/14 Better by Atul Gawande
1/29 Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
3/20 Subtle Bodies, Normal Rush
4/6 Being Mortal Atul Gawande
4/7 Gratitude, Oliver Saks
5/2 Losing Mum and Pup, Christopher Buckley
5/26 Atonement, Ian McEwan
6/1 Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
7/2 Complications, Atul Gawande
7/17 How Fiction Works, James Wood
7/20 The Prime Minister, Anthony Trollope
8/2 The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan
8/? A Slight Trick of the Mind, Mitch Cullen
11/19 Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
12/14 A Study in Scarlet, A. Conan Doyle
12/22 Spy of the First Person, Sam Shepard
12/29 When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi
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P'tok! Actually one less on the board than last year! I met Chris in October or November (and started a new job in my local ER) so that may have distracted towards the end of the year but otherwise more classes and more distractions to work around. No regrets though, rather a fabulous year. Healthy doses of Gawande here, much ado about the Art of Dying on this list, and other meditations on aging well. A list of a young person trying to read Wisdom onto her own soul or something. What larks, as my friend says. What larks, indeed. Try better in 2010 Laura!

Please Be Useful: Draft and Ideas so Far

I began in literature. You get into literature because this is where the big questions are solved. This is where life and death are treated with attention, beauty, dignity, bravery. Mortality is faced in the pages of Tolstoy. Self-knowledge and love found in George Eliot and Jane Austen. Humanity and second chances in Dickens. Vanities wrested away to be mirrored to you in the unfathomable depths of Melville. Quiet fires in Brontë, political machinations in Trollope; it would all be found in literature. This was my Real. Four years of college, and then a surprise acceptance into Rice University’s Phd program: I’d already made it.  

And then one summer my mother needed me: she was home alone, in pain, and I was thirty minutes away. I had spent a rare night in town after drinking with friends. I had just woken up in the afternoon and everyone else was at work. I didn’t call an ambulance because she wasn’t dying, but this was the first time I ever saw my mother crippled by something, and I just didn’t understand. She had recently undergone pelvic mesh surgery, and days later--slow days of apparent progress--intense waves of pain suddenly brought her back down.

What was I to do? This wasn’t in Dickens.

I drove to her as fast as I dared, helped her into my dusty Ford Escape, and drove another thirty minutes to the local hospital where she worked as an RN in Radiology. She was withdrawn and pale, but per her instructions we visited the internal medicine doctor instead of beelining for the ER. I was useless. Waiting and waiting and being wheeled here and there and finally to the radiology waiting room for an outpatient scan. She was pale, cold, weak, and shivering in pain. It was awful. Waiting. I felt completely out of my depth. I remember the absurdity of attempting to maneuver her wheelchair into a registration room--eyes tight with pain, body wracked over itself. We were going to answer questions they already had answers to. But all I knew to do was fall in line. I knew no shortcuts, or inside tracks. I could not advocate because I had no knowledge.

Mom saved herself, barely able to operate her own cell phone, but managing somehow to call her coworker. I just remember her saying “Come get me.” It was the same plea that got me to pick her up, and yet I had made no difference in her pain. But now help came. He swooped in, made eye contact with me and I saw myself, impotent and perhaps a bit in the way. Brian pulled her from registration (“You can take care of this, can’t you?”) and off they went. I stayed in the little room to confirm her birthday, her insurance, her address, her emergency contact. The little banalities you don’t care about when you’re on the patient side of medicine.

Somehow later I was standing over my mother who already looked better. Warm blankets piled over her form, now blessedly allowed to lay down in some patient prep room. They had made room for her because they could. Why hadn’t I asked for a warm blanket forty minutes ago? Why hadn’t I tried to track down her coworkers? Why hadn’t I taken care of my own mother?

She was seemingly swept to the CT table, the whole team working as a team. On 3, 1 2 3, and everybody moves with purpose because everybody had a job to do. Had I ever walked like that in my life? I noticed things I never had before. I remember crying like a child during the scan. My mother wasn’t dying, but she was in pain and I had done nothing about it. CT images appeared but I didn’t know what they meant. These tears were for my mother, but they were also for my own impotence.

Three years later I am standing in the same CT room as that day, but I’m wearing scrubs. It’s a stroke protocol and while the patient is being moved from the EMS cot to the CT table, I take a blood sugar just before the technologist begins the scan. This patient has been in the ER less than ten minutes and diagnostic imaging may be leading them down a road of definitive care. I get to watch the images flash on the screen. Perhaps today we see something glaring. I have a slightly more confident gait. I now sometimes move with purpose, even if only to crouch down to explain to a patient who I am and what my interaction with them will be that day. Sometimes they are in tears of pain, sometimes they are impatient and annoyed, sometimes confused, often a little scared.

Messing about with Neruda

So I love this Neruda sonnet (XVII):

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

 I was sitting with a patient at work who was sleeping, so I had a pen and paper nearby--this little piece of foolery came out:

Neruda told me he did not love me.

But then said he did love me but like a plant in the dark. And also that it was a secret, and we weren’t going to talk about it. 

But I think he also said I smelt good, all of which felt weird. 

But everybody shivered unconsciously and with obvious pleasure, so there are worse things, I guess, than being loved like a ficus in an ill-lit room.

(12/8/17)

Reading in 2017

Reading- and Writing-wise I slowed down in 2017 because it was a year of shifting foci.

1/1 In Chancery, John Galsworthy (1920)
1/10 American Philosophy: A Love Story, John Kaag (2016)
1/30 A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz (2011)
3/29 To Let, John Galsworthy (1921)
4/1 Bartleby the Scrivner, Herman Melville (1853)
4/15 Rustication, Charles Palliser (2004)
5/18 Harry Potter and Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling [reread] (1997)
5/20 Alpha Docs: The Making of a Cardiologist, Daniel Munoz (2015)
5/21 HP and the Chamber of Secrets, Rowling [reread] (1998)
5/29 Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev (1862)
6/1 HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Rowline [reread] (1999)
8/17 HP and the Goblet of Fire, Rowling [reread] (2000)
8/28 The Children Act, Ian McEwan (2014)
9/3 Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton (1934)
10/2 The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt (2013)
10/22 The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard (1997)
10/24 Doubt: A Parable, John Patrick Shanley (2004)
12/20 Last Bus to Woodstock, Colin Dexter (1975)


My EMT course had began in January; I was certified in June. I took a cardiology course that summer (thus the surprisingly enjoyable Munoz memoir). I also had ridealongs July-August before taking a fantastic vacation to Colorado with my pops and sister. I was employed as an Emergency Department Tech in October on night shift--still adjusting to the sleep patterns. A good year, but hoping for even better productivity and career insight for 2018. I also had a pretty good workout routine in 2017 which needs to be reestablished. Entering a serious relationship has given me new priorities as well. Is this what "adulting" means? Having more fun now than I was at 20 in some ways, even with less alcohol and social life. Things feel richer.

I'll end this update post with a quote from The Forsyte Saga, about a character whose personal philosophy had been "To be kind and keep your end up--there's nothing else in it" (Galsworthy 801). After Young Jolyon's death, his son Jon reflects on Jolyon's legacy: his life, his work as a painter, the loves he left behind:

Jon came to have a curiously increased respect for his father [Jolyon]. The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into something really individual was disclosed by these researches. There was a great mass of work with a rare continuity of growth in depth and reach of vision. Nothing certainly went very deep, or reached very high--but such as the work was, it was thorough, conscientious, and complete. And, remembering his father's utter absence of 'sides or self-assertion, the chaffing humility with which he had always spoken of this own efforts, ever calling himself 'an amateur,' Jon could not help feeling he had never really known his father. To take himself seriously, yet never bore others by letting them know that he did so, seemed to have been his ruling principle. (Galsworthy, Oxford 812-813)

I suppose my only misstep here is to let others know through this blog that I do try to take myself seriously. But--thank goodness--not too many besides myself actually review these entries. Keep it close.

What did I read (and finish and record) in 2016?

Jan 5.  The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood.
Jan 9.  Purity, Jonathan Franzen
Jan 14. A Thousand Naked Strangers, Kevin Hazzard
Jan 25. The Taming of a Shrew, Shakespeare
Feb. 2 Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare
Feb. 15 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare
Mar. 6  The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly
June 3 The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen
June 20 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
June 26 Euphoria, Lily King
June 26 The Flick, Annie Baker
July 8 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
July 10 The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard
Sept 3 The Quincunx, Charles Palliser (781 dense pages)
Oct 11 The Man of Property, vol 1 Forsyte Sage, John Galsworthy
Oct 28 Silas Marner, George Eliot
Nov 2 The Testament of Mary, Colm Toibin

Tenui musam metitamur avena

Or, "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal." Ref. in Richardson's biography of William James, p.59. Coined by Sydney Smith, a founding editor of The Edinburgh Review. 

From Richardson:

"Smith was an ardent believer in the association of ideas, in the notion, first given its full form by David Hartley, that "complex mental phenomena are formed from simple elements derived ultimately from sensation." The belief that everything mental has a physical explanation and origin--one of the rocks on which positivism is built--is put forward by Smith by way of an attack on metaphysics, " word of dire sound and horrible import," says Smith. "A great philosopher," he says, "may sit in his study and deny the existence of matter: but if he takes a walk in the street he must take care to leave his theory behind him."