Impersonal or Divine

My but Beryl Markham can write.  Yes, it helps to have great material.  If you’re experience-hoard involves trans Serengeti bi-plane flying, and wild boar hunts with Massai as a thirteen year-old, you’ve got a good sack to pull from.  But you still need to make the verbs act and adorn nouns with adjectives artfully.  You still need to leave out most of it and let the spaces speak amidst the pith.  I’ve read it all before, years ago and I was there shaking my head this morning, reading one of the tales aloud to my daughter, amazed by her stories and her craftswomanship.  

Every hour or two I get nervous and I need to check if the hurricane has made landfall in Florida.  It hasn’t. It will.  Their tomorrow morning.  Their tomorrow afternoon.  It’s going up the west coast of the state, rather than the east.  Hurricanes can change direction.  And Miami is spared.  Naples will get hit.  Wrath from somewhere.  Science doesn’t personify nature that way.  Christians do personify God that way.  Impersonal or divine there is something destructive moving. 

Pierre is sick of his wife.  Tolstoy once again captures a human moment lays it out for examination like a still life in “War and Peace.”  Pierre’s wife’s societal navigations are categorically well received. He knows though, that despite all the fawning, people do over her, she is still a bit of dingbat.  Why are people so struck with her?  She’s cultivating a two-dimensional mystery that seems to bemuse the rest of St. Petersburg but leaves Pierre flummoxed:  She is shallow, doesn’t everyone else notice?

Literature reminds us to be clear.  Reminds us to be brave.  Reminds us of our connectivity to everyone else.  Thirteen-year old girls can stare down lions.  Then I can as well, in my mind’s Serengeti.  Pierre flashes lucid with self-recognition, human and accessible. 

Monday, 09/11/17