Eucatastrophe Reader

“There’s a providence that watches over the deserving.”

The Count of Monte Cristo REVIEW

The theme of Alexander Dumas’ epic novel seems to be stated in the following quote from the novel.

“There’s a providence that watches over the deserving.” -M. Morell (Ch 1)

The converse is also true that God does not forget the deeds of the unjust either. Since this is so, the proper attitude to have toward any injustice inflicted on you according to Dumas is to “wait and hope” but if you can find a cave full of gold, then maybe you should regard yourself as an well-funded, divinely appointed, avenging angel.  

We begin the story with a young man beginning his adulthood with a peerless love and promising prospects. Dumas describes Edmond Dantes and his fiancé as “two lovers calm and joyous as if they were the very elect of heaven.” Yeah. That’s a sweet spot to be in in life. Edmond has just been appointed captain of a ship and Mercedes is as radiant a sweetheart as literature can describe. And here, jealousy conspires with unfortunate coincidence to put a dagger in the heart of their dreams. There is another aspirant who wants Dantes’ captaincy and another young man who wants Mercedes. They conspire to frame Edmond for a crime and, as the fates would have it, the person inspecting the evidence has personal cause to send Edmond to a God-forsaken cell in an isolated island prison. When it first begins to dawn on Dantes that he was betrayed, he hints to his prison - brother from a nearby cell, the Abbe Faria, that he would prefer not to know who it was of his acquaintances that did it, knowing that the knowledge would introduce an unquenchable hatred in him.

And it does.

His life, Dantes will later conclude after 14 years of solitary confinement, has a singular meaning henceforward: Justice. And God, he believes, has forged him into the very sword of His retribution by granting Dantes a fortune in hidden treasure after his escape. Imagine how long vengeance would burn if someone stole the love of your life, ended your career, and put you in in a dungeon for something you did not do. Imagine that your fiancé’ marries the bastard that betrayed you (she not knowing what he had done) and then your father dies of starvation as a result. Imagine the three people most responsible for your demise all go on to advance in their careers and fortunes. Imagine you then had a fortune and a conviction that it was to be used to exact revenge.  

And thus it is that the Count of Monte Cristo, as he now calls himself, sets out to inflict retribution on those responsible for his undeserved imprisonment. In his sights are the man who executed the plot and then married his beloved (Fernand Mondego), the man who came up with the scheme as a means of advancing himself to Edmond’s position (Danglars), the man who falsely condemned him in order to protect his own career (Rene de Villefort), the man who knew and said nothing (Gaspard Cadarousse), and possibly Mercedes herself if he comes to conclude that she was complicit.

It is impossible to read The Count of Monte Cristo without feeling for Dantes’ real and lacerating suffering – physical, emotional, and spiritual. The loss of his freedom, his purpose, his love, his reputation, his father, his dignity, and his faith in God bleeds out of every word of Dumas’ description of it.   

“Oh, you do not know what is seventeen months in prison!—seventeen ages rather, especially to a man who, like me, had arrived at the summit of his ambition—to a man, who, like me, was on the point of marrying a woman he adored, who saw an honorable career opened before him, and who loses all in an instant—who sees his prospects destroyed, and is ignorant of the fate of his affianced wife, and whether his aged father be still living! Seventeen months captivity to a sailor accustomed to the boundless ocean, is a worse punishment than human crime ever merited. “

In “this horrible place contained fifty cells,” we are told of the Chateau D’if, “inhabitants were designated by the numbers of their cell, and the unhappy young man was no longer called Edmond Dantes—he was now number 34.”

Dehumanized.

Dante prays for justice from his cell. A high cold star on a winter evening is what he receives in reply. The heavens are slate to him for 14 years.

“Yet in spite of his earnest prayers, Dantes remained a prisoner.”

“Rage supplanted religious fervor. Dantes uttered blasphemies that made his jailer recoil with horror, dashed himself furiously against the walls of his prison, wreaked his anger upon everything, and chiefly upon himself, so that the least thing,—a grain of sand, a straw, or a breath of air that annoyed him, led to paroxysms of fury.”

“He told himself that it was the enmity of man, and not the vengeance of heaven, that had thus plunged him into the deepest misery. He consigned his unknown persecutors to the most horrible tortures he could imagine, and found them all insufficient, because after torture came death, and after death, if not repose, at least the boon of unconsciousness.”

When he finally escapes and acquires the Abbe Faria’s vast treasure trove, he returns as justice incarnate. Methodically, he begins with Caderousse – seeking out information to confirm his suspicions before putting his plans for vengeance into action.

“You will have the goodness to furnish me with the address of both Fernand and Danglars, in order that I may execute Edmond’s last wishes,” he says to Caderousse, pretending to be a priest in search of Edmond’s friends so as to give them a financial gift. Caderousse tells Dantes of the way that Edmond was betrayed by these same friends and suggests that their enrichment over the past two decades is evidence that there is no just God in the universe.

“You are mistaken, my friend,” replies the Abbe [Edmond Dantes in disguise];

 “God may seem sometimes to forget for a time, while his justice reposes, but there always comes a moment when he remembers—and behold—a proof!”

Methodically and strategically and secretly, the Count of Monte Cristo inserts himself into the lives of his intended victims. His objectives do not involve some quick recompence. He intends to slaughter their lives piecemeal and make them suffer. Their businesses, their reputations, their finances, their families, are all objects of his murderous but calculating anger. And any mercy he might feel is “suppressed and killed” (as Henry V puts it in Shakespeare’s play by that name) by his eventual meeting with Mercedes who is every bit the lovliest woman imaginable.  

“Then,” said Mercedes, “I will lead the way.” Turning towards Monte Cristo, she added, “count, will you oblige me with your arm?” The count almost staggered at these simple words; then he fixed his eyes on Mercedes. It was only a momentary glance, but it seemed to the countess to have lasted for a century, so much was expressed in that one look.”

Dantes does his best to conceal his true identity from her but she sees through his artifices.

“In France eternal friendships are as rare as the custom of dividing bread and salt with one another” he says,

“But,” said the countess, breathlessly, with her eyes fixed on Monte Cristo, whose arm she convulsively pressed with both hands, “we are friends, are we not?”

The count became pale as death, the blood rushed to his heart, and then again rising, dyed his cheeks with crimson; his eyes swam like those of a man suddenly dazzled. “Certainly, we are friends,” he replied; “why should we not be?” The answer was so little like the one Mercedes desired, that she turned away to give vent to a sigh, which sounded more like a groan.”

“Thank you,” she said. And they walked on again. They went the whole length of the garden without uttering a word. “Sir,” suddenly exclaimed the countess, after their walk had continued ten minutes in silence, “is it true that you have seen so much, travelled so far, and suffered so deeply?”

“I have suffered deeply, madame,” answered Monte Cristo.

“But now you are happy?”

“Doubtless,” replied the count, “since no one hears me complain.”

“And your present happiness, has it softened your heart?”

“My present happiness equals my past misery,” said the count.“

““You have no sister—no son—no father?”

“I have no one.”

“How can you exist thus without any one to attach you to life?”

“It is not my fault, madame. At Malta, I loved a young girl, was on the point of marrying her, when war came and carried me away. I thought she loved me well enough to wait for me, and even to remain faithful to my memory. When I returned she was married. This is the history of most men who have passed twenty years of age. Perhaps my heart was weaker than the hearts of most men, and I suffered more than they would have done in my place; that is all.” The countess stopped for a moment, as if gasping for breath. “Yes,” she said, “and you have still preserved this love in your heart—one can only love once—and did you ever see her again?”

“. . . And have you forgiven her for all she has made you suffer?”

“Her,—yes.”

“But only her; do you then still hate those who separated you?”

“I hate them? Not at all; why should I?”

He is not honest with her about just how angry he is. Not even close. “Hate them?” Of course not.

Just because he intends to grind them all into fishbait doesn’t mean that he hates them, right?

Some chapters later, the Count of Monte Cristo has lured Mercedes and Fernand’s son Albert into challenging him to a duel. "What shall I do with Albert?” the count tells his confidante.

“As certainly, Maximilian, as I now press your hand, I shall kill him before ten o'clock to-morrow morning." Morrel, in his turn, took Monte Cristo's hand in both of his, and he shuddered to feel how cold and steady it was.

"Ah, Count," said he, "his father loves him so much!"

"Do not speak to me of that," said Monte Cristo, with the first movement of anger he had betrayed; "I will make him suffer."

And this is where the story gets most interesting. The Count begins to realize that his anger is an untrustworthy guide to delivering divine justice though it be an excellent motivator. He begins to realize that an attempt to inflict appropriate suffering on Fernand and Danglars and Caterousee leads to the inflicting of inappropriate suffering on their innocent and sometimes noble children. In his human ignorance and human frailty, he is unable to make the retribution clean, no matter how hard he tries it is impossible to sterilize vengeance. Justice for Fernand would lead to undeserved death for Albert and undeserved suffering for Mercedes who had no part in the plot and still loves him.

Meeting out justice without inflicting injustice is simply beyond human ability. It may be beyond God’s ability one might suggest.

The Count of Monte Cristo begins to doubt himself and his mission. And what then? For it has been the purpose of his life since his escape. When Mercedes confronts Dantes with the suffering he is inflicting, the Count responds with  an expression of his deep and abiding hatred for Fernand.

"Madame, you are mistaken, they are not misfortunes, -- it is a punishment. It is not I who strike M. de Morcerf; it is providence which punishes him."

"And why do you represent providence?" cried Mercedes. "Why do you remember when it forgets?”

That is the million-dollar question. Why do we remember the wrongs done to us when Providence seems to have forgotten?

Maybe it is because we believe that Providence has forgotten?

“The French did not avenge themselves on the traitor,” Dantes says of Fernand.

“The Spaniards did not shoot the traitor, Ali in his tomb left the traitor unpunished; but I, betrayed, sacrificed, buried, have risen from my tomb, by the grace of God, to punish that man. He sends me for that purpose, and here I am."

The poor woman's head and arms fell; her legs bent under her, and she fell on her knees. "Forgive, Edmond, forgive for my sake, who love you still!"

Is it possible to forgive someone not for the sake of the person who does not deserve it, but because of the mercy of someone else who we love who asks for that forgiveness?

That is the second million-dollar question. “Mercedes, I must revenge myself,” he replies.

“’For I suffered fourteen years, -- fourteen years I wept, I cursed; now I tell you, Mercedes, I must revenge myself.’ The count, fearing to yield to the entreaties of her he had so ardently loved, called his sufferings to the assistance of his hatred. ‘Revenge yourself, then, Edmond,’ cried the poor mother; ‘but let your vengeance fall on the culprits, -- on him, on me, but not on my son!’"

"It is written in the good book," says Monte Cristo,

"that the sins of the fathers shall fall upon their children to the third and fourth generation. Since God himself dictated those words to his prophet, why should I seek to make myself better than God?"

’Have you known what it is to have your father starve to death in your absence?’ cried Monte Cristo, thrusting his hands into his hair; ‘have you seen the woman you loved giving her hand to your rival, while you were perishing at the bottom of a dungeon?’

‘No,’ interrupted Mercedes, ‘but I have seen him whom I loved on the point of murdering my son.’ Mercedes uttered these words with such deep anguish, with an accent of such intense despair, that Monte Cristo could not restrain a sob. The lion was daunted; the avenger was conquered. ‘What do you ask of me?’ said he, -- ‘your son's life? Well, he shall live!’ Mercedes uttered a cry which made the tears start from Monte Cristo's eyes; but these tears disappeared almost instantaneously, for, doubtless, God had sent some angel to collect them -- far more precious were they in his eyes than the richest pearls of Guzerat and Ophir.”

It is a powerful moment. Dantes calls off the dogs of his own vengeance. His reward is the gratitude of Mercedes.

“Oh, I repeat it, Edmond; what you have just done is beautiful -- it is grand; it is sublime."

Is that reward enough to compensate him for the loss of his desired retribution?

That is the third million-dollar question.

Dantes goes on to confront those who had so wounded him. But he takes no more revenge on them. He simply confronts them with the searing truth of what they did and makes them feel the gravity of their crimes. He still believes himself to be chosen by God for this work. But he is less sure that he knows just what the punishments should be.

“I was but an agent, led on by an invisible and offended Deity,” he says to Mercedes,

“who chose not to withhold the fatal blow that I was destined to hurl. I take that God to witness, at whose feet I have prostrated myself daily for the last ten years, that I would have sacrificed my life to you, and with my life the projects that were indissolubly linked with it. But—and I say it with some pride, Mercedes—God needed me, and I lived. Examine the past and the present, and endeavor to dive into futurity, and then say whether I am not a divine instrument.”

It is difficult to know if there is greater joy to be found in being merciful than in getting revenge. I cannot say that I have much experience with the later. It seems to me that Alexander Dumas book is about trying to find a difficult balance between the two.

I cannot say that I have found it. Or maybe even seriously looked.

Question for Comment: How do you determine when to demand restitution of revenge and when not to when you yourself are wounded by someone.

"You’re either sun burnt, sleep deprived, or seasick and after a few days there’s hallucinations."

Adrift REVIEW

“Got caught in a storm. Wound up stranded. Went through hard times. Managed to survive and get back home.” Sounds like the plot line to a gazillion movies from Robinson Crusoe to Swiss Family Robinson to Lord of the Flies to Castaway to Perfect Storm.  But I should like to say that the film Adrift is deeper than that. I found it to be as much about the process of embarking on a voyage of love as much as embarking on a voyage in a boat. We see the two main characters meet, become acquainted, fall in love, make a commitment, navigate differences, embark on a common mission, bond, work together, face a hardship, support each other in adversity, deal with pain and loss, grieve, and move on.

I recommend the movie to all those yet to successfully complete this journey. It helps if you like sailing. And if you are galeophobic, you need not fear that this movie will traumatize you as it turns out to be shark-free.

Question for Comment:  If you and the love of your life were stranded together on a motor-less, sail-less boat in the middle of the Pacific, how likely would it be that your relationship would survive as long as you did?

"I am not a man. But neither am I a wolf."

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle REVIEW

This film was surprisingly good and definitely worth the expenditure to make I think. It is not simply a different version of the exact same story told in previous versions. One misses listening to the bear Baghira singing “Bare Necessities” and King Louis riffing “I Wanna Be Like You” but the benefits of the retelling are worth it.

Mowgli, like Tarzan, is left behind by deceased parents and is raised in the wild. In Mowgli’s case, he is raised by wolves rather than gorillas, but the outcome is the same for both. As tarzan and Mowgli make their way into adulthood and try to find their place within their respective communities, they are “handicapped” by their advantages and disadvantages relative to their peers. They are not, as it were, bred for the environments they have been placed in. In Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle Mowgli the pre-teen desperately wants to be one of the wolf “brothers” and a contributor to his pack but he aspires to be a wolf in vain. He is, as his name indicates, a “man-cub” – a hyphenated member of an unhyphenated community. He neither belongs to the pack nor the village and feels himself unable to successfully assimilate into either.

If you are a person that belongs neither to the family, faith, or fortune that you were born into on the one hand or the folks, fireside, or fellowship you aspire to on the other, you will appreciate this movie and the suffering that poor Mowgli endures throughout.  In the end, it will be important that he has connections to both worlds. Those competing influences split him apart but fashion within him the tools he needs in the end. I am reminded of Robert Frost’s experience of being a poet working a chicken farm in New Hampshire and wondering if he could ever be either a good poet or a good chicken farmer while trying to be both and then eventually finding that the two “selves” could be assimilated into a life beneficial to both. (Poetry could pay for his farms. Farmers could supply the material for his poems).

Rudyard Kipling was born in India (no doubt not unlike Mowgli was basically “born” in the jungle). His mother, they say was a fascinating woman and “dullness and Mrs Kipling could not exist in the same room.” His parents referred to themselves as “Anglo-Indians” just as Mowgli is referred to a “man-cub.” Having had several cousins born in Africa, I can somewhat understand the sentiment. As someone raised in a strong “Brethren” denominational tradition who went off to study and work in more liberal universities, even more so. Kipling was sent home to England at the age of five to be “socialized” and returned to India at the age of 16 to be re-socialized again. It is no wonder that he creates a character in The Jungle Book who is so identity confused.

I will just say that the film and the actor who plays Mowgli capture the pain of the “bi-belonging” person to a tee. I think I just invented that word.

Question for Comment: Have you ever found yourself caught between two communities who both believed you were better off in the other?

To the Thawing Wind

To the Thawing Wind REVIEW

An ode is a poem written to an object that leads to some revelation. (See John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. People have written odes to belt sanders,  fish, and spoons. Robert Frost’s “Ode to the Thawing Wind” thus follows a long tradition dating back centuries.  

In the poem, Frost personifies a spring warm front and asks a favor of it. Or rather, two favors. The first favor involves bring Spring back to frozen nature and the second request is to drive the barricaded poet out into that nature.

To the Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go; Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

Frost is asking for some outside force to intrude into his monastic isolation and force him from the contemplation of words to the experience of the thing itself. One could imagine a contemporary petition made in a similar vein to “unplug the blogger’s computer” or better yet, shut his electricity right off – or to set the novel-readers bookshelves on fire and drive him out into the world of living humans where he can participate in his own life’s plotline.

Question for Comment: What makes you make the effort to experience life rather than settle for watching it?

"I just wanted to know you better, Mum."

The Distant Hours REVIEW

Kate Morton seems to like to write about family secrets.

Here is how her novel begins:

“It started with a letter. A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey. I think about it sometimes, that mailbag: of the hundreds of love letters, grocery bills, birthday cards, notes from children to their parents, that lay together, swelling and sighing as their thwarted messages whispered in the dark. Waiting, waiting, for someone to realize they were there. For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.

Forgive me, I’m being romantic — a habit I acquired from the years spent reading 19th century novels with a torch when my parents thought I was asleep. What I mean to say is that it’s odd to think that if Arthur Tyrell had been a little more responsible, if he hadn’t had one too many rum toddies that Christmas Eve in 1941 and gone home and fallen into a drunken slumber instead of finishing his mail delivery, if the bag hadn’t been tucked in his attic and hidden until his death some 50 years later when one of his daughters unearthed it and called the Daily Mail, the whole thing might have turned out differently. For my mum, for me, and especially for Juniper Blythe.”

In an interview that the author gave about the book, she was asked if she had ever found a letter that opened up a secret in her own family. “I wish!” Morton responded,

“In some part I suspect that’s why I’m drawn to writing about confessions and lost letters, secret diaries and all those wonderful sorts of things – because it hasn’t happened to me (yet – I haven’t given up hope!). All families have secrets, though, and I drew on one of my family’s for The Forgotten Garden. It concerned a secret love affair and an illegitimate child, and there were once letters that had passed between the lovers (one of whom was fighting in the Great War). The letters survived longer than the lovers but unfortunately were all burned some years ago in the hopes that no one would ever learn their secrets.”

https://katemorton.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Distant-Hours-reading-group-notes.pdf

But Morton’s novels are not just about family secrets. They are about the process of uncovering them. They are about children seeking answers to the riddles their parents have left them with. Both the Morton novels I have read now start with an adult daughter asking of something her mother did, “Why did she do that?”

“Perhaps children are never really interested in who their parents were before they were born,” one of her characters says, “not unless something particular happens to shine a light on the past.”

In The Distant Hours, the main character Edith Birtchill asks her mother a simple question and when her mother fails to tell the truth, Edie asks for an explanation. Her mom starts to hide information “and with that, the familiar veil came down between us and I knew the conversation was over” Edith says. She describes her mother later as “a locked vault.”

 “Writing it down now, I’m a little disappointed in myself. But everyone’s an expert with the virtue of hindsight and it’s easy to wonder why I didn’t go looking, now that I know what there was to find. And I’m not a complete dolt. Mum and I met for tea a few days later and, although I failed again to mention my changed circumstances, I did ask her about the contents of the letter. She waved the question away and said it wasn’t important, little more than a greeting; that her reaction had been brought on by surprise and nothing more. I didn’t know then that my mum is a good liar or I might have had reason to doubt her, to question further or to take special notice of her body language. You don’t though, do you? Your instinct is usually to believe what people tell you, particularly people you know well, family, those you trust; at least mine is. Or was.

And so I forgot for a time about Milderhurst Castle and Mum’s evacuation and even the odd fact that I’d never heard her speak of it before. It was easy enough to explain away; most things are if you try hard enough.”

But once the question had been asked, like the “the mudman” himself, secrets rise to the surface. [the character of “the mudman” in a story central to this novel is a scary figure that crawls out of a mote to terrorize a child in her dreams.]

Edith finds herself drawn to the story of what happened to her mother. Her curiosity overtakes her desire to respect her mother’s privacy. It is the sort of person she is.

“I blame what happened next on the door. The one right across the hall from me, a mere three feet away. I love doors. All of them, without exception. Doors lead to things and I’ve never met one I haven’t wanted to open. All the same, if that door hadn’t been so old and decorative, so decidedly closed, if a thread of light hadn’t positioned itself with such wretched temptation across its middle, highlighting the keyhole and its intriguing key, perhaps I might have stood a chance; remained, twiddling my thumbs, until Percy came to collect me. But it was and I didn’t; I maintain that I simply couldn’t. Sometimes you can tell just by looking at a door that there’s something interesting behind it.”

And thus it is that she “discovers” her mother’s attempted cover-up.

“I knew then what I’d suspected all along. Mum had been lying when she told me Juniper’s message was little more than a greeting, just as she’d lied about our visit to Milderhurst. But why? What had happened between Mum and Juniper Blythe?”

Nothing like a good thesis question to keep you reading a novel to the bitter last page.

“The proposition was just so terribly sad – an entire life spoiled in an evening – and it filled me with questions.”

“Had it been guilt that took her [Edith’s mom] back to the castle and then drove her away again before we passed through the gates? It was possible. And if it were true would certainly explain her distress. It might also account for why she’d kept the whole thing secret in the first place. For it was the secrecy as much as the mystery that struck me then. I don’t believe in an obligation of full disclosure, yet in this case I couldn’t shake off the sense that I’d been lied to. More than that: that I was somehow affected directly. Something sat in my mother’s past, something she’d made every attempt to hide, and it refused to stay there. An action, a decision, a mere moment, perhaps, when she was just a girl; something that had cast its shadow, long and dark, into Mum’s present, and therefore right across mine too. And, not just because I was nosy, not just because I was coming to empathize so strongly with Juniper Blythe, but because in some way that was difficult to explain, this secret had come to represent a lifetime’s distance between my mother and me – I needed to know what had happened.”

But how to go about it in the face of her mother’s stony silence?

“I was sunk then by the sense that I knew everything and nothing of the person sitting next to me. The woman in whose body I had grown and whose house I’d been raised was in some vital ways a stranger to me; I’d gone thirty years without ascribing her any more dimension than the paper dollies I’d played with as a girl, with the pasted-on smiles and the folding-tab dresses.”

‘Mum?’

‘Hmm?’

‘How did you and Dad meet?’

A simple question for any daughter to ask her mother. And what could possibly be the reason for not answering forthrightly? Enter her mother’s sister, Rita who still has a box of her sister’s letters she believes that Edith should read. Looking at the box, Edie is forced to decide if she wants to know enough to investigate.

“This was the moment, I suppose, when I might have done things differently. Two roads forked away from me and I could have followed either. After the merest hesitation, I lifted the lid and pulled the envelopes from within, noticing as I leafed through that they were arranged carefully by date. “

She finds them irresistible.

“Letters are special like that. Conversations waft away the moment they’ve been had, but the written word prevails. Those letters were little time travellers; fifty years they’d lain patiently in their box, waiting for me to find them.”

And once she has, the feeling of guilt for having done so.

“At the sight of all those envelopes, details of the night before came rushing back and I was hit by the sudden, clear-light-of-day guilt of someone who’d glutted on a feast of fat and sugar and someone else’s secrets.”

She determines to confess what she has done.

“There is no kind way of telling someone you’ve been peeking through the keyhole at them” Edie says.

“Mum looked as if she’d been struck. She spoke quietly, a quaver in her voice: ‘You read them? You read my letters?’

I swallowed; nodded jerkily.

‘How could you, Edith? These are private.’

All my earlier justifications dissolved like flecks of tissue in the rain. Shame made my eyes water so that everything seemed bleached, including Mum’s face. Colour had dissolved from her skin, leaving only a splatter of small freckles across her nose so that she looked like her thirteen-year-old self. ‘I just… I wanted to know.’

‘It’s none of your business to know,’ Mum hissed. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’ She seized the box, clutched it tightly to her chest, and after a moment’s indecision hurried towards the door.

‘But it does,’ I said to myself, then louder, my voice trembling, ‘you lied to me.’

I wonder who the reader sides with in this argument?

Edie responds to her mother’s resistance with even more curiosity. If old letters will not suffice to unravel the mystery, maybe meeting real people will.

“I needed to find Thomas Cavill. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Mum wasn’t going to talk to me, Juniper couldn’t; he was the key, the answer to everything lay at his feet and I needed to know more about him.”

 “Links were being made, I could feel them,” Edie says.

Towards the end of the novel, Edie has a conversation with a woman whose mother had been involved in her mother’s life as a young woman. The two have the following revealing exchange,

“’Parents and their secrets, eh?’”

“Mrs Bird smiled at me as I arrived at her side. ‘They can surprise us, can’t they, our parents? The things they got up to before we were born.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Almost like they were real people once.’”

“‘There comes a time in the lives of all children, I expect, when the shutters are lifted and they become aware that their parents are not immune to the worst of human frailties. That they are not invincible. That sometimes they will do things to suit themselves, to feed their own monsters.”

It is not my intention here to ruin the entire plot by telling you what happened in Mildhurst castle that stormy night that changed the fates and fortunes of the Blythe sisters for the rest of their lives. That will be my secret. You know where to go to buy the book.

Edie never really does get the entire story. Only the readers do. Which is good because as we are told in the novel’s later pages, “A person without a closed bracket could never rest.”

Question for Comment: If one of your parents had a secret that was still impacting you would you want to know it? What would you do if you asked them and they would not tell you?

"An Effort. An Essay of Love"

Too Anxious for Rivers by Robert Frost REVIEW

“Too Anxious for Rivers" reminds me of a number of Robert Frost poems. It deals with the mystery of where we all came from (like “The Woodpile”) and where it could all be going (like “After Apple Picking”). In “The Woodpile” Frost finds a cord of stacked wood in the swamp decaying and wonders where it came from. In “After Apple Picking” Frost wonders if the final sleep is a short one or a long one. Here in “Too Anxious for Rivers” Frost is looking at a torrential river and noticing that its origin is only hearsay and its destination is beyond the scope of his vision.

Look down the long valley and there stands a mountain
That someone has said is the end of the world.
Then what of this river that having arisen
Must find where to pour itself into and empty?

The deficiencies of Frost’s vision into the past and the future is compensated by an overabundance of observation about what is in front of him. Where life comes from may be a legend. Where it may be going may be a mystery, but life is certainly going on all around us with a vengeance.

“I never saw so much swift water run cloudless.”

In other words, there is a lot of life in the world, all apparently without a cause (river is raging’ not a cloud in the sky). And here is where Frost’s poetic eye shifts from the outward to the inward and he reflects on things internal.

“Oh, I have been often too anxious for rivers
To leave it to them to get out of their valleys.
The truth is the river flows into the canyon
Of Ceasing-to Question-What-Doesn’t-Concern-Us,
As sooner or later we have to cease somewhere.
No place to get lost like too far in the distance.
It may be a mercy the dark closes round us
So broodingly soon in every direction.

“Perhaps these questions without answers are not worth stressing over,” Frost seems to be saying. “There must have been a beginning. There must be an ending. Maybe we do not need to know anything else and it is a mercy to us that we do not know?" This launches the poem into a comparison between scientific ways of knowing and mystical ways of knowing.

The world as we know is an elephant’s howdah;
The elephant stands on the back of a turtle;
The turtle in turn on a rock in the ocean.
And how much longer a story has science
Before she must put out the light on the children
And tell them the rest of the story is dreaming?
‘You children may dream it and tell it tomorrow.’

Whether you are a mythology teacher or an astrophysics teacher or a philosophy teacher, in the end, you have as much assurance about these things as a child’s dream can give. Maybe, Frost suggests, the ancient philosophers were right. Maybe we once knew the answers to these questions of
“woods, lovely, dark, and deep” and have to wait to remember.  

Time was we were molten, time was we were vapor.
What set us on fire and what set us revolving,
Lucretius the Epicurean might tell us
‘Twas something we knew all about to begin with
And needn’t have fared into space like his master
To find ‘twas the effort, the essay of love.

Frost concludes his poem with veiled agnosticism combined with a hint at what his own hope is. Maybe the Roman writer Lucretius’ theory will suffice in the absence of ocular proof? Maybe life is here because of some combination of actualized intention and articulate affection – what folks in my theological camp would call, “intelligent design”?

There is a song by Iris Dement entitled “Let the Mystery Be” that captures what I think Frost may be trying to say.

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say once you're gone you're gone forever
And some say you're gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
If in sinful ways you lack

Some say that they're comin' back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory
And I ain't saying it ain't a fact
But I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory
And I don't like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
But I choose to let the mystery be

Everybody is wondering what and where they they all came from
Everybody is worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me

I think I'll just let the mystery be
I think I'll just let the mystery be

Question for Comment: Do you see life as “an essay of love”? Something structured resulting from thoughtful kindness? Or is it a "tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury"? 

“. . . and then she made the decision that would prove fateful to them all."

The Secret Keeper REVIEW

“. . . and then she made the decision that would prove fateful to them all. “Come on,” she said . . . Let’s go back inside.”

“There was a part of her that wanted to scream - “No,” to curl up in a ball and weep for the things she'd lost, for everything in her life that hadn't turned out the way she'd hoped, but she wouldn't do that. She couldn't.”

Kate Morton’s books (I use the plural even though I am only a few pages into my second one) seem to have a Thomas Hardy-like fixation on how momentary fate combined with young adult decisions can control a whole life’s destiny. Her characters understand that that there are wounds that you endure in life when some “better life” is marred by some unfortunate – on the surface, innocent event – like a letter not being mailed when it should have or a schedule that did not permit for a five minute resolution to a misunderstanding. A war can do it to you as well. There can be, as she puts it, “a physical ache” when you realize that you can “never go back.”  

Morton also seems to like to explore the ways the lives of parents before they have children cast a long shadow into those children’s lives. “Perhaps children are never really interested in who their parents were before they were born,” she says in her book, The Distant Hours, “not unless something particular happens to shine a light on the past.” Sometimes people, like the characters in her books, get intrigued enough to go exploring those parental lives. But honestly, it is easy to see why many people do not take this adventure as they will have no control over what they find.

In the Secret Keeper, 16-year-old Laurel Nicholson is sitting in a tree near her family’s home in 1961 doing a bit of sulking when a man comes down the road. Laurel’s mother comes out of the house with Laurel’s baby brother and the man approaches. Suddenly, the knife that Laurel’s mother – her dear beloved mother – was bringing out to cut a birthday cake – flashes. And Laurel watches as her mother stabs the stranger in the middle of the road and kills him.

Here is how Morton describes the scene as it unfolds:

“The whole scene has an expectant charged feeling like a theater stage in the moments before the actors walk out from the wings. When every possibility stretches ahead and fate has not been sealed by circumstance, and then - ”

It will take Lauren a whole lifetime and us an entire novel to find out just what happened and why. The book is full of regrets about the past and about the family secrets that are embedded into all our lives by these stories that our parents and grand parents and great grandparents wrote with their decisions. It seems odd but, I think we all assume that if anything important happened before us, our parents would tell us . . . and we cannot imagine them lying. In all of those life stories, there were moments - moments infused with meaning for those who experienced them and those of us who still feel their influence.

“There were moments, Lauren solemnly believed, in which a person reaches a crossroads, when something happened, out of the blue, to change the course of life’s events.”

As this story unfolds (I will not spoil the plot), its characters, Dorothy Smitham, Jimmy Metcalf, Vivien Longmeyer, Katie the guardian, Henry Jenkins, Kitty, Jimmy’s father, and a total stranger who finds a misplaced letter and mails it - all bring their peculiar stories to the potluck for fate to cook with. Fifty years later, as Dorothy Nicholson is about to die, she is still not explaining what happened on that hot summer day. But her daughter Laurel has decided that she cannot wait no longer. She intends to investigate this “great unspoken event in the family’s history.”

The investigation takes a winding path that is well worth walking yourself. It involves marriages never meant to be, marriages that never got to be, and marriages that were blessed to be. It involves mis-understandings, rich dowagers, senile fathers, abusive husbands, jealous lovers, and German bombs falling on London all to keep it interesting. And in the end, the pieces kaleidoscope together.

“All this time, Laurel realized, this whole search she’d been on, had been driven by a yearning need to know that her happy family, her entire childhood, the way her mother and father had looked at one another with such rare abiding love, was not a lie. And, now she did. Her chest ached with a complex blend of burning love, and awe, and yes, finally, acceptance. ‘I love you, Ma,’ she whispered, close by Dorothy’s ear, feeling, as she did, the end to her quest. ‘And I forgive you, too.’”

Perhaps there is no way to get to that moment before we die if we do not start asking questions while the clues still exist.

Question for Comment: How does the story of your parents lives before you came along affect you today? Or is it just best not to know?

“She decided to put a tourniquet on the past for once and for all.”

Second Glance REVIEW

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult is a story full of contrivances but gives us characters we can relate to – even if some of them are ghosts. Aimee, Az, Shelby, Ethan, Lucy, Eli, Leah: all of the characters have to deal with disappointment and loss.

“Regret hung from the hem of everyone's lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some point or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thing humans had in common. Taken this way, Ross didn't feel quite so alone. Trapped in your whirlpool of what might have been, you might not be able to drag yourself out - but you could be saved by someone else who reached in.”

A good deal of the book is based on the actual history of the Vermont eugenics movement, a subject well covered in Nancy Gallagher’s book, Breeding Better Vermonters.  Ghosts from that time period are haunting the lives of the people of the fictional town of Comtoosic, Vermont - near Burlington when a real estate developer seeks to build a mall on Abenaki land. The main character, Ross, is a ghost hunter, called in to find and perhaps dispose of the ghosts that are holding up the building project. Ross has his own agenda though. He is trying to find evidence that it might still be possible to connect with his former wife, fatally killed in a car crash. His search for ghosts turns real when he meets the ghost of a long dead Abenaki woman and his story and her story become intertwined.

Second Glances is all about how we recover from trauma – personal trauma, family trauma, or racial trauma. How do we recover from the loss of something that either might have been or should have been? How do we recover from a poor decision? An accident? An act of injustice? racial discrimination? Or any life event or person or prejudice that shoves us out of the train car of the life we were “supposed to have”? Throughout the novel, Ross deals with his regrets and the loss of his wife. His sister Shelby deals with her son Ethan’s rare genetic disease. Az Thompson deals with the suicide of his daughter. And so on.   

The following are some representative lines:

“If he [Ross] inhaled deeply. It had been nearly a decade since Ross had felt this. . . . He had been looking for the ghost of a woman for so long it was unsettling to find himself fascinated by one sitting right beside him.”

“She decided to put a tourniquet on the past for once and for all.”

 “For years had he been looking for the answers to Amy’s death. Only recently had he learned that he had been asking the wrong question. Before you can grab onto something else, you had to let go.”

“Most of the time when Ross thought about his life he imagined living it alone. The very concept of a family did not appear to be in the cards for him . . . He was not commitment shy or unattractive … but whenever he tried to give his heart away, he found himself holding it out to a person who was no longer there.”

“Losing a child was something you kept coming back to like the hole in your gum when you lost a tooth or a scar you’d worry with your fingertips, a disfigurement that you felt over and over.”

“I think he [Ross] is lost and that is a circumstance that only lasts until you are found by someone else.”

 “What he would have liked now is five minutes in the past – five minutes to talk to Meredith Oliver . . . “

As I said, the book has its share of contrivances and you have to suspend your critical faculties to enjoy the ride, what with the constant reminder that the ghost of Comtoosic are making their presence known. But on the whole, the feelings expressed by people caught in the vortex of losses they cannot recover from occurs to this reader anyway, as real enough.

Question for Comment: Is it possible to “put a tourniquet on the past?”

"The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more."

Only Love REVIEW

E ’l lampeggiar dell’angelico riso
Che solean far in terra un paradiso,
Poca polvere son, che nulla sente.
Ed io pur vivo; onde mi doglio e sdegno,
Rimaso senza ’l lume ch’amai tanto,
In gran fortuna e ’n disarmato legno.
Or sia qui fine al mio amoroso canto:
Secca è la vena dell’usato ingegno,
E la cetera mia rivolta in pianto.*

• From Petrarch’s Sonnets for Laura

Only Love, starring Marissa Tomaei, Rob Morrow, and Mathilda May is a melodramatic film based on the book by the same name by Erich Segal. Two young doctors on a medical mission in Africa fall in love but are separated by a cruel trick of fate and a malignantly controlling parent. It is a case of a relationship being ended abruptly when the feelings compelling it do not end at all. Like separating a child from a mother’s womb without separating the umbilical cord or taking off an arm without severing the nerves that connect it.

They are irrevocably separated and yet the love between them remains unaltered as they both slowly entwine themselves in new lives with new partners (she quickly, he ever so very very slowly). He finds that he can no longer play piano. His music seems to be gone. He seems incapable of moving on.

Fifteen years later, they re-enter each other’s lives as she comes to his hospital for treatments for a brain tumor. She has two teenage boys. He has two teenage step-daughters. She the wife of a successful businessman. He the husband of a music teacher at Juliard. Ever so slowly, as they work through the medical issues related to her tumor, the pain of their separation works itself to the surface like rocks in a Vermont farm field.

“Have you remembered me Matthew?”

He pulls out the ring she gave him. He has attached it to a key chain that he has carried with him in his pocket and his heart.

Her husband wonders if it is difficult seeing him again. “There aren’t those sorts of feelings Nico,” she says, “I am only another patient.” They both are good people – wondering how much they can afford to say about what lies so close to the surface it must be hidden. At one point during the treatment, they share a meal together and she shares a line of poetry written by the Romantic era poet, William Wordsworth.  

“The music in my heart I bore long after it was heard no more.”

The line comes from the poem, “The Solitary Reaper”

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;—
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

“Poets always speak best for us, don’t they?” she says quietly, “Damn them.”

The flat-affective veneer of the doctor-patient relationship thaws and real questions must now be asked and answered. Though she has come for treatments for brain tumors, the real reason she has come is to resolve a bleeding artery of the heart that had been left uncauterized. “Did you forgive me Matthew?” she asks plaintively, “Please. Did you? Did you forgive me in time?”

The treatments do not go well.

“No matter how many years go by,” she says, “Some feelings don’t change. Try as I might, some feelings don’t stop.”

“Will you play again?” she asks him as she passes away, her husband off on a business trip.  

He throws the ring into the river and goes home. The film ends as he finds his wife playing her cello in the music room. He sits down and plays the piano to accompany her. The first time he has played since his heart had been broken all those years before. We are left to believe that death has now made it possible for him to move on. But not all are so lucky.

Some people in his condition suffer from Petrarch’s disease forever.

Question for Comment: Was Petrarch responsible for the pain he felt so many decades after Laura died?  

* And the soft lightning of the angelic smile
That changed this earth to some celestial isle,—
Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows.
And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn,
Left dark without the light I loved in vain,
Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn;
Dead is the source of all my amorous strain,
Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn,
And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.

"My proof of being not unbounded."

The Beech by Robert Frost REVIEW

The book of poetry that this poem was published in was entitled “A Witness Tree.” Beech was one of two introductory poems to the book. You might say that it is a declaration of what the book is or what Frost the poet is. The principle metaphor he is using is the “witness tree” -  typically, a tree identified by a surveyor as unique enough to stand as a permanent marker to identify where the corner of a piece of property is. The surveyor might build a cairn of stones around an iron bar to serve as the exact spot but would then reference that spot to a particular tree nearby. This made it easy to spot the rough location of the marker and it made it impossible for anyone to gain ground by moving the bar and pile of stones.

You might say that the witness tree might not stand on any certain spot but it will get you close enough that you can find that spot yourself without much effort. And you can bank on it not to move around and leave any confusion as to where the lines are drawn. Everything else may be relative but not the witness tree. All in all the witness tree serves the same role as a good poet.

 Where my imaginary line
Bends square in woods an iron spine
And pile of real rocks have been founded.
And off this corner in the wild,
Where these are driven in and piled,
One tree, by being deeply wounded,
Has been impressed as Witness Tree
And made commit to memory
My proof of being not unbounded.
Thus truth's established and borne out,
Though circumstanced with dark and doubt
Though by a world of doubt surrounded.

This is a poem where the rhyming scheme may matter to the message (I often wonder if it always does in a Frost poem). If you look closely, you will see a pattern:

Line
Spine

Founded

Wild
Piled

Wounded

Tree
Memory

Unbounded

Out
Doubt

Surrounded

What strikes you is that word “wounded.” It looks like it should rhyme with the other words in the pattern (founded, unbounded, and surrounded) but even though it has the same spelling, it does not rhyme. You almost want to make it rhyme so that the poem will sound right. But you know that “wounded” is not the past tense of wound and would not make sense in the poem if it were. The word has to be “wounded” [woond-ed] – something scarred – something injured – something less than whole and healthy. And there it is – the wrong word smack dab in the middle of the poem. Doesn't this dumb poet know that "wounded" does not sound like "bounded?" you want to ask. "Doesn't he read his own poetry out loud?" 

Just so is the poem itself scarred by this word. There is something wrong with it and it draws your attention to it. Just like the tree in the poem would. It has a slash in it that the surveyors left so that you would know exactly what tree they were talking about in their deeds. “That tree there!” “The one with the blaze cut into it!” “The wounded one!” The poem is imperfect and that is somehow important.  

There is another feature to this poem that works on you but only under the surface of your consciousness if you are not paying close attention. Frost uses a number of words that have associations to books.

The word “line” as in a “line of text.”
The word “spine” as in “the spine of a book.”
The word “impress” from the same root as “press.”
The word “proof” – a word used to describe the first run of a book used to find errors before publishing.
The word “unbounded” as in a “book binding.”  

Perhaps, and I cannot say for sure, Frost is suggesting that this book of poetry itself is a witness tree. And maybe it too is flawed. Maybe it too is not what it his previous books of poetry were but is still serving its role of being a marker to the whereabouts of truth - Something that gets you close enough to truth to find it yourself perhaps.

Was the book scarred? One might argue that it was. It had a few great poems in it but you won’t find many poems that people would recognize as Robert Frost's. The line “My proof of being not unbounded” strikes me as relevant here. There is a complicated double negative in the line. Something bounded is limited. Something unbounded is not limited. Something “not unbounded” is thus back to being limited. It is a complicated phrase but to me, it speaks to me of Frost struggling with his artistic self. “This book of poems” he may be saying is evidence (proof) that I am not everything I once was. That my talent has its limits or has been compromised by the wounds I have experienced. Maybe it is proof that I have always been limited."

Maybe the truth is that life wounds us and makes it difficult to achieve our potential? I don’t know if Frost though of his work as “wounded” but . . .

But we do know that the poet himself was wounded when he assembled it. In the four years before he published this book, he had lost his daughter, his wife, and his son (the later to suicide). He had fallen into a deep depression. He dedicates A Witness Tree to Kay Morrison his secretary.  

“I owe everything in the world to her” Frost once told Louis Mertins,

“She found me in the gutter, hopeless, sick, run down. She bundled me up and carted me to her home and cared for me like a child, sick child. Without her I would be in my grave. If I have done anything since I came out of the hospital, it is all due to her.”

Maybe every prophet or poet truly worth listening to has been wounded at some point. I know I sure have.

Question for Comment: Can you think of a time where a piece of art (a novel, a painting, a poem, a piece of music, a sculpture, a photograph, etc.) got you close enough to truth that you could see it?