Mid-summer, Journey’s End

I’m making a habit of buying cut flowers each week from whatever supermarkets I go to and putting them in the dining room as cheering, lovely, emblems of pleasure

Maggie Smith of her widowhood: “it seems a bit pointless, going on on one’s own, and not having someone to share it with” — some of what I’m feeling is me missing my friend and companion, the support and comfort of my life, how he was able to make me laugh ….

Friends and readers,

I suppose you know that after all the pandemic is far from over. Izzy has happily returned to work in her office (the library at the Pentagon) five days a week, and the world is again filling with people and cars coming and going day and evening; the two OLLIs I teach and attend classes at are going to be a mix of hybrid, in person and online in fall. But with far too many people (some 40 to 80% in some states) refusing to get vaccinated or doing it ever so slowly, the delta variant has spread and the numbers of people in the US becoming ill has risen even alarmingly, though thus far it’s the unvaccinated who are going to hospital and dying. This is a ridiculous choice these people are making, but nonetheless they are making it. Plus outside the richer countries, a huge proportion of people remain unvaccinated. As long as this is the situation, all of us are in danger from Delta and new mutations/variants, which could be even more easily transmissible and lethal.

I should admit I don’t trust any US medical establishment — and this deep background is part of why US people don’t come forward for shots. I guess I don’t trust them to be on my side — Laura says my attitude towards hospitals especially reminds her of Black Americans. I was thrown (not literally) out a hospital when I was 9 after the people there did stop a hemorrhage because my father hadn’t any insurance. The procedure was over and maybe an hour had gone by. I remember the incident myself — my father begged them to let me stay; if they’d wait until 9 am when banks opened he’d get out the $200 (at the time no small sum) and bring it to the hospital. They really put me out on the street. They did call a cab — now nice of them my father always said. Then I had a hemorrhage … My life was saved after another traumatic trip, just.

I do trust Dr Wiltz but he is not the person who would do procedures or vaccinate (that I did as it is so minor a thing – a jab). I can’t change my insurance as I could get nothing near as good — everything is covered, only small co-pays for visits (and sometimes now with medicare none at all) and for drugs. One time I didn’t understand what a barium enema was and when I was on the table and got it, I tried to get off, and the people held me down (they really did) and tied me there, and then poured this horrible stuff into my cavity. I screamed and they didn’t care. When they were done, I said to them if I knew them personally I’d never forgive them. That I knew sending a letter of complaint would do me no good. Since then I am very careful before I accede to anything. Once I remember thinking to myself I should not have come in here for this appt because the doctor was talking of how she had to send me to hospital — as if I had no will to say no. I told her I wouldn’t go and began to get off the dolly. I don’t remember what happened after that but I didn’t go to any hospital. I’m in charge of me.

I call this Journey’s End because that phrase is the one that leaps to mind as I think about how I feel about my life just now. Sure I have done some good and satisfying work, work I enjoyed doing this summer: my two courses, Novels of Longing and Colonialist Writing (see also Caryl Phillips), and this past Monday a good talk on Trollope’s “Malachi’s Cove,” and Henry Herbert’s film adaptation of it went over very well. (I will be putting it up and linking it in before the next few days.) This fall I will “do” Trollope’s The Prime Minister with a few political essays by 19th century women writers. I’ve thought of Wollf’s Cassandra and Four Essays (the Trojan war seen by a woman usually dismissed as a nut-case) and Eve Figes’s Seven Ages of Women (another reversal perspective) and now I’ve thought of a good course for next spring, one I’ll enjoy very much: Anglo-Indian Novels: the Raj, aftermath and diaspora (Forster’s A Passage to India, Scott’s Jewel in the Crown, Jhabvala’s Heat & Dust, with their wonderful movie adaptations.  My paper-talk for the coming EC/ASECS will be “A Woman and Her Box,” how the battered box a woman carried her life’s identity around in as so many had no control over any private space (I’ll use Amanda Vickery’s work).   I’m to have lunch out with a friend this Friday, perhaps go with another friend (I can’t go without her as she must do the driving or I would go alone) to hear and see Renee Fleming and the National Symphony Orchestra at Wolf Trap (!) August 6th (I’m sure I’ll love the show) … I’m reading books and watching movies for sheer pleasure: David Nicholls’ Us.

I have prided myself on trying to tell the truth about myself insofar as this is possible in a public media. Yes I might have two decades left of life, I will probably be here for the rest of this year.

Still I’m in the coda of my life. I am finding this second summer harder — for I am still in partial quarantine. I asked the doctor if I should return to swimming, and he suggested caution: just swim laps, keep away from people, wear a mask. I then faced the truth I don’t enjoy swimming any more: my arms are so weak I can’t go far, the water is cold, the building inside to me pure functionality, dank in the pool area, the water cold — a lot of trouble to wash afterwards. I would get as much exercise, probably more by walking in the evening. I feel like I did that first summer Jim died. For seven summers I did have no one to travel anywhere with or go out the way Jim and I used to (we would wander on long walks in the later evening), but I could drive at night & went to Wolf Trap and the Kennedy Center, with a friend (who has died since too) in Old Town, and going to classes helped enormously. Zooms are rewarding but something is missing I do need. Starting 2nd summer each August I took trips w/Road Scholar, which were to UK (Scotland, Lake District, Cornwall), 2019 Calais by the beach w/daughters. Nothing this year. Strain bad. Heat loathsome so stay inside w/air conditioning & cats.

Laura and Izzy this summer …

That’s part of why I’m feeling this way. But also I’ve faced I haven’t got what it takes to do the travel research to do a book any more — I never did. Never knew how to negotiate (Jim did that for my Trollope on the Net book with Hambledon Press); I experience intense anxiety attacks when in new places or liminal experiences, the expense would be very high (because library hours in some places so limited). And I can’t conquer the Word writing program. Laura came over and I tried but this second week I find I’m forgetting what to do all over again. So I can’t composite documents on Chicago Manual style.   I must just take pleasure in learning, teaching about it, sharing on the Net (blogging). I could try a book if I find some ability that enables me to teach suddenly vanishes — for several abilities are involved and I know how these suddenly disappear. I do miss going out at night regularly; I realize that when and if the later afternoon evening parties held at the OLLI at AU begin I won’t be able to go because I’d be driving back in the dark. I also have to hope that Politics and Prose keeps up online classes for evenings/nights. Another related sad truth I’ve faced is I often don’t enjoy the zoom classes at either P&P or the OLLIs: it’s a much less educated and much less serious audience they aim at. My own courses are the less common serious literature courses at both OLLIs (especially the one at Mason).

I’m also tiring of some of these zooms. At OLLI at Mason the default setting or “norm” in their minds is often a TV show — the webinar where you meet and talk to no one. These power-presentations themselves a substitute for real thought. At the conferences the compliments given to all talkers (“amazing” and “fantastically wonderful” talk) are embarrassing. This term I dropped out of all the courses at OLLI at Mason I had signed up for. To be fair, I did have two very good ones at the OLLI at AU in June (one on federalism by a very intelligent man and the other on the Reconstruction period in the US), and each Thursday Maria Frawley on Middlemarch is just an inspiration to me. My spirits soar as I listen to her talk with such a generous ethical approach, bringing out the language patterns and depths of thought in the book, and prompting from the people in the class deeply reciprocal responses. This past Saturday just a beautiful and moving discussion of Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer with Alison Hennegan as teacher from Cambridge: I don’t care for the book that much, but what she had to say about it and later the conversation over lesbian literature was moving, truthful, just took me out of myself into another realm of recognition, and renewal.

By the Sea — Sara Sittig (Scapes) – a favorite picture for me, one which expresses what I feel somehow

Would I be happier if I had a “boyfriend” (the word seems so silly)? I’ve dated sort of four men thus far and none attracted me physically or I didn’t attract them — anyway no one made any move to kiss me — except the first (a fifth early on) and he distressed me by trying to start sexual interaction. I felt ashamed, thinking of Jim — it was actually that first year Jim had died. Two of them were mensplaining to me, condescending and worse yet, correcting me for my outlook on life — how dare I be an atheist? or pessimistic? Far from enjoying conversation with these people, I was repressed and irritated. The man I partly accompanied to Cornwall was irritated by me because he felt I could see he’d have a better time mixing with the general crowd who began to leave us alone — and he was reactionary politically. I would not want to lose Izzy and I would were a man to move in — and I wouldn’t want anyone to break my 30 years’ pattern (with Jim doing his pattern) of reading and writing for most of my hours.

I also just don’t fit in American values or norms. I find with the one girlfriend I see she dominates me because I can’t think of an intermediate level of language to tell her to stop trying to get me to do things I don’t want to do, or think things I don’t think at all (all very conservative, demanding of aggression) — I’ve now been told that this slowness of response and inability to be nuanced is part of the spectrum. Of course I did know that but didn’t think of speed, or intuitive uptake as part of this. I went to have “cocktails” with the new Iranian woman friend I’ve made in this neighborhood. Two other women there whose conversation was so stupid and at times racist that I found myself remembering Austen writing of how one needs children to make a conversation go: we had their three dogs. I had dressed up for it

I am trying to think of a study plan I could follow inbetween teaching, reading with others on listservs and for teaching, writing reviews (in a few days I will return to Anne Finch and women’s poetry and the later 17th century into the 18th). Thus far what I’ve fitted in is reading Italian an hour each day. I have been so enjoying and getting so much more out of Ferrante’s Those who Leave and Those who Stay the second time round (now I see it as deeply realistic with Lenu at the center, and I marvel at how she behaves to her husband whom she seems not to love anything like I loved Jim, am startled and appalled at the fascism and political and economic life of Naples so I wonder if she hid her identity from whoever is the source of these characters). I sit with Storia de chi fugge edi chi resta in front of me on my desk. The English translation to one side as a crib; my Italian dictionary and verb book on the other. My French is better than my Italian and I would have far less need of an English copy for a crib but find I’m more allured by my Italian books than my French ones. I did choose Italian (not French) Renaissance women poets to translate. But it would take such time to bring back my ability to read Italian without a crib so am trying to get myself back without the intermediate steps and hope an hour a day consistently will do the trick.

So I’m finding there is almost no comparison between the lightness of the English and sense of dense intense meaning, passion, suggestion, and sheer syntactical interconnections in the Italian. I love the vocabulary in Italian which brings to mind far other metaphoric connections than the simple English barer plain words. I am wondering if after all Ann Goldstein is one of those translators who deliberately modernizes and makes more accessible the texts she translates. I would have thought that not necessary with a contemporary one but now I’m thinking maybe just as much. Goldstein offers very poor commentary on the novels in every group talk I’ve heard — ideas like the first book is the best. Thus Ferrante’s Italian is not being truly represented. There is much less need to defend Ferrante as an important Italian writer (woman) when you are in the Italian. She is so much better in the original — in fact she is not plain in her language at all. If and when a third season of Italian TV resumes the serial here in the US, I’ll pay for HBO Max to see it.

I’ve managed about ten pages or so after three days. And my desire is to do a French book by a woman, a good memoir next.

I’m at Journey’s End and thus how can I offer you valuable thought from my life. I can do as I’ve done, write literary and film criticism from the heart as filler but I’ve not had the spirit to do that here these past three weeks, too tired at night, too exhausted the next day after blogging, giving of myself. I’m going slower and finish less books and movies and put that matter on my two other blogs, Ellen & Jim Have a Blog, Two, and Reveries Under the Sign of Austen. So my dear friends who have been reading this blog for at least 10 years now, this is why I write so infrequently and telling you this, explaining this to you is why I have written this blog.

The latest flowering bushes in my front garden. I’m watering them twice a day during this dreadful hot time.

Ellen