Facing February …

Perhaps Peder Mork Monsted’s Evening Glow, 1920 (Danish painter) captures this

Friends and readers,

Let me begin with how I was struck one later afternoon with the winter light. I think winter light can be beautiful. Today is as yet very cold, 27F feels like 13F, late afternoon, near 4 pm (EST). The snow is now scarce but enough to make the landscape picturesque, ground frozen. It’s the whiteness of the light I like so much. I used to have as a motto on my Sylvia I blog (LiveJournal) Emily Dickinson’s famous lines, “There is a certain slant of light/Winter Afternoons … ,” “oppresses, but I do not find it so. It’s no use taking a photo (with my cell phone as that’s all I have for photo-taking) as the camera will never capture the sharp white intensity or glow in which all is seen so clearly. The sky cloudless, in Virginia (maybe not Denmark) ever so light blue.

Some time after New Years’ Eve, I believe I felt something more of a change than I have in a long time, that sometimes I find myself not as afraid as I was to be alive in this world without Jim. I’ve shown myself I am competent enough to do what I need to, what I enjoy, and find I am not in any danger from anyone — as long as I remain solvent. Nine years ago, August 2013 I had such a panic attack as I’ve never felt before I lost my breathe when I began to realize soon Jim would be gone. I am not over nervousness and worry, but the primal fear has receded. I try not to be distressed by remembering basic failures across my life. Unkind caricatures. The best thing is avoid where these have walled me off. When I come up against obtuseness, aggressive impositions and exclusions (especially this stubborn look or a preference for the contentless in some one’s face inferred or seen), just push back gently and turn away. I can live quietly on myself — I admit it would be harder without Izzy’s daily company.

News from Thao: she told me she was pregnant around then, and this past week it was 20 weeks, and she had an ultra-sound (I think it was) and was told it will be a boy. She wants to call him William.

A month has slipt away since then, as time slips away since nearly two years ago, this life avoiding a serious illness from Covid-19 began. Izzy is again working from home, and I am again teaching remotely, and do not intend to go to classes in person until June. I have been out beyond shopping for food and other necessaries twice, with the same friend, to lunch and then a movie. Laura and Rob were here once, briefly, to help me re-plug in my DVD player (luckily all that was wrong was two loose plugs) and Mr Christbel, the handyman-contractor who renovated my porch into a lovely sunroom, will be here on Monday to replace the two toilet seats. And yes I’ve had my hair dyed and cut by Sheila. Two phone calls with my aunt Barbara. But all other socializing has been on the Net (email, FB, twitter, zooms, here on this or other blogs).

I am sometimes very sad as I waken, and only absorbed reading in deeply felt congenial books, reading and writing an email letter to and from my friend each morning, then communication with others, (not always light) chat on FB, twitter, lists, can slowly pulls me out to cheer. Keeping busy with projects, and now again zoom, chores, one must dress, eat, play with cats. The I turn round and it’s later in the afternoon, weather permitting, I walk, and then back to late at night when I block the loss of Jim with movies. Just now immersion, in Foyle’s War and tonight that beautiful first episode of the fourth season of Outlander (from Drums in Autumn), where Jamie and Claire’s love-making reminds me of what we had.

Camping out (sleeping outside the tent!) in North Carolina (Outlander S3, E1)

I am especially fond of chrysanthemums because Jim’s first present to me were 22 yellow chrysanthemums — as I was 22. The first time in years anyone had remembered my birthday. I was especially touched because I knew he had spent money he should not have. These are violet purple and deep dark red. For me there is as much bitterness as gratitude in this memory of this strange person who I let stay with me on the first night we met and then the whole week as my flat mate had not yet arrived, and who in turn suddenly treated me with respect and affection as anything else. He didn’t despise me for generosity. I became aware he had more genuine feeling for another whom he as yet did not know very well than most of the people I’d ever met who might have been said to have known me for a while.

Dark red and violet purple instead of yellow

I don’t think I could survive without this house, our home with all our memories, as my shelter, and the library we created to occupy me. So here are more of the usual things you hear from me:  the end of last month (December into January) immersed in Anne Finch’s worlds and poetry; January, this month it has been first Jane Austen and women’s lack of control over their personal much less real estate property; then continuously for the rest Iris Origo’s deeply intelligent, restrained depths in her books, Christa Wolf’s complexities in hers, Christine Donougher’s chrystal clear easy-to-read translation-edition of Les Miserables, the astonishingly alive profoundly knowledgeable about life and all it takes to survive masterpiece (including retreat) that is Orley Farm yet once again, and I’m seeing so much more this time than last.

The kindly judge and his daughter

Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer, a moving wonderfully frank and tasteful fictionalized biography of E.M. Forster’s homosexual life, from his time in India (a continuation of a fragment of a novel Forster never got very far with).

When I find myself learning new things (an excellent course in early Black history in the USA – devastating), I think how useless that a 75 year old woman should at long last understand what Black people have gone through and still do (in 1672 a law was passed in Virginia making “casual killing” of a “negro” legal if he or she is enslaved and resists any command; and two days ago several police thugs broke into someone’s flat in Minnesota and murdered a Black man under a blanket who sought to protect himself). What can I do to help but in my teaching do books that teach what life is for real, and compassion.

I don’t remember if I told you that I invented a course for the 6 week summer session of OLLI at Mason, which I am scheduled to do in person, and it was okayed yesterday. I will not forget to dwell on what husbands were allowed to do wives — incarcerate them — until the mid-20th century.

Sensation and Gothic Novels, Then and Now

In this course we will read Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White (4 weeks) and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, a post-text gothic novel for RLStevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the novella retells story from a POV of the housemaid (2). We will discuss what is a sensation, what a gothic novel, and how both evolved out of the Victorian era: what are their characteristics? how do these overlap & contrast; how do the genres differ. Many movies and plays have been adapted from Collins’s and Stevenson’s novels; we’ll discuss some of these, and I’ll ask the class to see the latest (I think brilliant) BBC 2018 Woman in White serial, featuring Jessie Buckley, scriptwriter Fiona Seres; and Stephen Frear’s 1996 film of the same title, featuring John Malkovich, Julia Roberts, scriptwriter Christopher Hampton

More abilities are falling from me. I go slower, I can’t exercise as well as I used to — while I do these calisthenics (sit-ups, pull-ups, stretches, bike-ride in place) each morning, I listen to Pandora, the channels are Nancy Griffith, Joan Baez. EmmyLou Harris and Willie Nelson. James Taylor. A new favorite are the songs of John Prine (who died of covid). , I must drive with real care, my chest hurts now and again. I do want to study Virginia Woolf far more — every few weeks or so I join in on a two hour sessions on a novel by Virginia Woolf. There I have to remember not to talk unless I’ve recently read the book that is under discussion — or I make a fool out of myself, just a bit. That book I’ve wanted to write has its piles of books on 20th century women writers and readers waiting for me. I’ll see how many years I have. I’ve no notion of having to publish it. I could be content with blogs too.

Better political news than usual: the Bidens have adopted a cat, lucky creature, a girl, called Willow

Here she is, getting used to the place

She is two and said to be a farm working cat — this makes her more able to adjust to new and changing surroundings. She has been around other kinds of animals for a start. Why she would fit right in with the animals in All Creatures Great and Small. The charming story as told to and reported on Yahoo.

So, having provided just a few links, and offered no particular analysis of book or movie in itself, instead I go full circle from where I began the blog: with two passages of winter’s light and snow’s beauty as it first comes down. First, from Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, “Among the Fells,” rapt mood capturing his heroines’ walk through Swindale Fell in Westmoreland:

It was a delicious afternoon for a winter’s walk. The air was clear and cold, but not actually frosty. The ground beneath their feet was dry, and the sky, though not bright, had that appearance of enduring weather which gives no foreboding of rain. There is a special winter’s light, which is very clear though devoid of all brilliancy,—through which every object strikes upon the eye with well-marked lines, and under which almost all forms of nature seem graceful to the sight if not actually beautiful. But there is a certain melancholy which ever accompanies it. It is the light of the afternoon, and gives token of the speedy coming of the early twilight. It tells of the shortness of the day, and contains even in its clearness a promise of the gloom of night. It is absolute light, but it seems to contain the darkness which is to follow it. I do not know that it is ever to be seen and felt so plainly as on the wide moorland, where the eye stretches away over miles, and sees at the world’s end the faint low lines of distant clouds settling themselves upon the horizon. Such was the light of this Christmas afternoon

Then, Virginia Woolf, The Years, 1913:

It was January. Snow was falling; snow had fallen all day. The sky spread like a grey goose’s wing from which feathers were falling all over England. The sky was nothing but a flurry of falling flakes. Lanes were levelled; hollows filled; the snow clogged the streams; obscured windows, and lay wedged against doors. There was a faint murmur in the air, a slight crepitation, as if the air itself were turning to snow; otherwise all was silent, save when a sheep coughed, snow flopped from a branch, or slipped in an avalanche down some roof in London. Now and again a shaft of light spread slowly across the sky as a car drove through the muffled roads. But as the night wore on, snow covered the wheel ruts; softened to nothingness the marks of the traffic, and coated monuments, palaces and statues with a thick vestment of snow.

Izzy took this photo of our neighborhood this January during one snow day

Now here’s our house right around Christmas, early one morning, before dawn has broken

Ellen

A PS: movie review of Deux or Two of Us

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