4 Recent Reads
I wrote a post 10 thousand years ago titled, The Antidote, where I quoted David Whyte:
““…the antidote to exhaustion is not rest. It’s wholeheartedness.””
It turns out that I need that post very much these days. I’ve been thinking a lot about exhaustion and how we don’t even know how tired we are when we’re in the fog of it. For a while articles were popping up seemingly out of nowhere for me….like “Why do some people feel tired all the time?” on the BBC.
I keep having the scene from Jane Austen’s Emma arise in my mind: “I am fatigued; but it is not the sort of fatigue—quick walking will refresh me.—Miss Woodhouse, we all know at times what it is to be wearied in spirits. Mine, I confess, are exhausted. The greatest kindness you can shew me, will be to let me have my own way, and only say that I am gone when it is necessary.”
So like Jane Fairfax, let’s begin by quick walking, and by that I mean, straggling (beautiful word, that). I’ve been wanting to read Tanis MacDonald’s book, Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, for ages. But just like food has been weird these last few years, so has reading for me. For quite a while my reading was more often re-reading. And then lately, it’s erupted, so that I read four books just last week. May that appetite continue.
I like how near the beginning she says that she’s suspicious of the oft quoted latin phrase “solvitur ambulando” or “it is solved by walking.” MacDonald talks about all the books written in particular by white men on the subject, but notes that there are fewer by women like her, “a woman with a demanding trauma brain, more than a decade of chronic pain, an intense need for solitude and whose adventures are small.” She says that her book is “about imperfect walking in imperfect situations: sometimes dangerous, sometimes defiant, sometimes just trying to get down the street.” She asks, “What if walking is as much a problem as it is a pleasure? And what if that problem could become a pleasure if we walk with it?”
In one of the essays, “Take Daily,” MacDonald talks about that moment at the beginning of the pandemic when those teaching had to swiftly move to online. Her students appreciate how she takes care of them. In retrospect she says, “I only wish I had taken better care of myself.” She talks about how she tells a colleague at a later point that she had “cracked up over the summer.” She says, “I developed a crack in my world view” and that maybe it was “better to crack up than to break down.” And it’s the walking that “helps to balance the unbearable, and this balance is delicate.” I really appreciate the existence of this book. It says so much and adds so eloquently and elegantly and feistily to the literature of walking. At one point, MacDonald asks, what would happen if the energy released from our “walking feet” and “swinging arms” “took the form of light.” And that just stopped me in my tracks. What if??
Exhausted by Anna Katharina Schaffner is subtitled An A-Z for the Weary and in the intro she suggests that the reader partake of one letter of the alphabet per day. I did pretty much binge the book, but I know I’ll read it again, more slowly as per instructions.
Honestly this book is worth it for the intro alone, which references burnout, chronic stress, work, being depleted. She talks about how the “structures in which we are embedded are making us ill.” She wants to help us overcome depletion and exhaustion so that we may replenish and free up “our energy so that we can consciously choose how to use it.” She quotes Josh Cohen who says that burnout is “a small apocalypse of the soul.” She quotes Anna Helen Petersen who says, that burnout happens “when the distance between the ideal and the possible lived reality becomes too much to bear.”
I liked that she knows our burnout is tied to “the stories we tell about our exhaustion” and that these matter because “they shape our experience of it and the actions we take to counter it.” She believes in drawing on “mixed mental arts” to combat our fatigue — coming at it through the “healing power of philosophical reflections and historical and sociological insights.” Our exhaustion, in the end, is a thing that might protect us — it may cause us to change our lives for the better, or to at the very least compel us to regroup, reflect.
The letter B for burnout is a must read, imho. It’s so real. Some of the other letters stand for things like: capitalism, energy, failure, ghosts, joy, life-cost, memento mori…etc….you can see why this book speaks to me….
One Woman Show by Christine Coulson has got a gimmick and it will either delight you or be completely off-putting is my guess. The author IRL spent 25 years at the Metropolitan Museum as a writer, her final project there being to write the wall labels for the British galleries. The novel is written in wall labels, then, mainly about the eccentric and privileged porcelain figure-like Kitty Whitaker and her various marriages. The reader will reflect on who gets to label our lives, how our story is told, and who curates the narrative after the fact. We think we glean so much from the labels in a room of art, but we have to wonder about who is writing them and what their motivations are. What is the story of the one who writes the labels and what is their relationship with those who curate the art? After reading One Woman Show, I’m full of questions…and isn’t that a sign that the author has given us something valuable?
The novel seems rather simple and straightforward, but will take the reader on a path of reveries well after the book is set aside.
The final book I read last week is The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy. For ages, people have said to me, you MUST read Levy, which always puts me off. And I’m almost always sorry when, stubbornly, I haven’t listened sooner to my reader-pusher friends. They were correct about Levy anyway, at least so far, for me. I chose this as my first Levy because of the title. Because the cost of living, literally, is a huge subject for me at the moment, and I’m sure for so many of us.
I picked this book up knowing very little about the author, her other books, her circumstances. It was published in 2018. It’s a memoir of sorts. That I knew. “It was futile to try to fit an old life into a new life.” The book comes at a time of change, in her case divorce, moving houses. She says, “I was thinking clearly, lucidly; the move up the hill and the new situation had freed something that had been trapped and stifled.” She says “I became physically strong at fifty, just as my bones were supposed to be losing their strength. I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.”
Oof. Wow. She paraphrases Adrienne Rich, when she says that “when we stop lying we create the possibility for more truth.” And isn’t that where a whole bunch of our energy goes, too, these days? One of her friends asks her (and I have said something similar many times these last few years about myself), “I am not really that great a person, but I’m not the worst catch either. Do you agree?” and yes, “I said that I did agree.” In fact, I myself will tell anyone who will listen, that I am not that great, but also, I’m not THAT bad. I’m not that bad. Also, not great. You know? I wouldn’t even begin to have the kind of energy that let me believe I was really great. No indeed. I am too fatigued for that?
So, there you have it. Four books that called to me last week, and that seem to talk to each other in a lot of ways. But isn’t this always what happens when you press a few books against each other, they speak differently, or spark, and even sometimes land differently because of the other thoughts they’re rubbing against or with, sidelong.
Are any of these of interest to you? Let me know in the comments :) if you have the energy. And yah, no worries if not. I get it. I really get it.
The Books:
Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female by Tania MacDonald
One Woman Show by Christine Coulson
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
Exhausted by Anna Katharine Schaffner
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