The Possessed

A rather dramatic heading, but I sometimes feel like that lately...

There comes a time when mental confusion spreads to the body, and you end up literally at war with yourself. My last two weeks of a hellish ear-infection combined with a come-and-go stomach virus are a perfect example.

But I actually was referring to Elif Batuman's The Possessed, which was recently given to me by a friend as a "must-read for any literature graduate student"--which it is.

I'm not even half way through, but wanted to post a few quick thoughts, just to make myself feel connected again (oh for the the number of thoughts that have slipped through my brain in the past chaotic weeks...). Somehow books often act as the easiest touchstone for writing. Maybe its the academic training.

First, the fascination of the writing style. A montage of vignettes from college life (though I must say, she gets to do far more interesting things than I I ever did as a graduate student), those strangely juxtaposed events that can only be reality. We all have them, but we usually let them remain fragmented and half forgotten in the back of our mind. But somehow Batuman strings them together in a way that the whole becomes more then the sum of its parts. You begin to get intimations of wholeness, of meaning, behind the chaos.

In visual terms, this would be a kind of collage of sketches that somehow interact together to form a coherent whole.

And, just wanted to share a quote that really spoke to me. In regards to her doubts about the value of studying Russian literature, Batuman writes "I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don't get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there" (88-89). I think there is a profound truth there. We get so caught up in the questions of what's right, or what's meaningful. Is painting yet another small still-life of a pear, or an onion, really worth anything? But there is also the fact of love. The things that draw on us enough to connect. And sometimes we have to take the time to pause, breath, and stop ourselves from undermining this more "rare and valuable thing".

Reading this passage this morning, I suddenly vividly remembered a poem I had almost forgotten: PatrickKavanagh's "Innocence"

They laughed at one I loved-

The triangular hill that hung

Under the Big Forth. They said

That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges

Of the little farm and did not know the world.

But I knew that love's doorway to life

Is the same doorway everywhere.

Ashamed of what I loved

I flung her from me and called her a ditch

Although she was smiling at me with violets.

But now I am back in her briary arms

The dew of an Indian Summer lies

On bleached potato-stalks

What age am I?

I do not know what age I am,

I am no mortal age;

I know nothing of women,

Nothing of cities,

I cannot die

Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges

A different time, a different ambiance, a different literature, but I was happy to remember it...