About Her From Afar

Imbued in weekend.  I wake up at four in the morning whether I want to or not and go into my study and read until I drift off to sleep again.  And when I stir open again and the day has broke, I relish the one thing I can do well without my contact lenses in; read clearly what’s right in front of me.  Out on the porch as the morning clouds shift off to the west, I can sit in a swivel chair and just read.  Read for hours, uninterrupted. 

Last night I’d made it through the introduction and a few pages of Nella Larsen’s “Passing,”  before oblivion pulled me off.  This morning I read the first chapter there in the predawn dark and repeated the dreamy segue.  With dawn I was on the porch with my microwaved coffee from yesterday and my grapefruit juice cut with soda water and I surrendered myself for the foreseeable to Ms. Larsen’s remarkably textured, writing.

Clare Kendry is sensual and sympathetic and has our favor until it becomes clear she is, as the world she lives in demands, is helplessly opportunistic, self admittedly so.  Irene Redfield, the Ms. Larsen (and Helga Crane) stand-in is pulled into actions that she can’t control and we understand and believe as she is excited to see Clare in the flesh and welcomes her into things she wouldn’t have thought to include Clare into had she simply been thinking about her from afar.  When I read the literature of this period and confront the uncategorically racist loathing of the white characters, I am pulled back to the commentary of certain great aunts and uncles and various older personages I'd known who hated otherness with ferocious certitude.  The ignorant certitude learned as truisms from the generation before them, the generation of Jack Bellew, Clare’s foolish husband. 

It was fine read.  The morning got humid.  I could take off my sweater fast enough.  I admired Ms. Larsen for how much I cared about Irene.  The moment she realizes there is an intimate problem with Clare, has such a light touch and the effect is thunderous.  And though I didn’t necessarily know I’d read it straight through I quickly decided to.  This is what I’ve been working all week for.

Saturday, 08/01/20