The very first day of Spring arrived this week and felt especially festive and exciting after The Covid Winter we’ve all endured. Even though the sun’s rays were weak, we raised our faces to it like the first Snowdrops and breathed in that sweet perfume of damp earth and soft breezes that will soon scent my laundry on the line. Our first walk was purposefully slow and we stopped to examine each bit of colour pressing upwards through the ground, like the pagans we have become. There was also a thrilling, scurrying streak of brown which turned out to be a groundhog who was unsuccessfully trying to camouflage himself by backing into an old tree stump at top speed but seemed to forget that his entire face was still on display and his glassy black eyes carefully swivelled to watch till we had passed. He was, delightful.
This is not intended to be yet another gust of Pollyanna-overload – I only seek to catalogue a few of the things that have helped even a little during these endless days of sad news. I think it was Stephen Colbert, (himself one of these helpful things) who commented recently that he was really looking forward to not hearing the words “another grim milestone” every.single.day. I am also acutely aware how lucky we are to be able to plan and discuss coping strategies – because after all, the luxury of time, companionship and good food are all such individual gifts.
And I get that.
When I was a young child my mind had – and still has – an uncanny but undesirable ability to remember scary, dreadful things just as I was trying to fall asleep. Literally, as I felt myself start to loosen, I would be snapped awake by the image of a grinning, menacing rocking horse that was moving independently (when I was five) or a collage of swirling, terrifying news bytes which happen to be true (last night).
I have been between books for a while now partly because I have a new job which has required a massive learning curve (and I’ve been steadying myself of an evening with the cozy perfection of Nigel Slater’s food writing) and partly, because I recently completed (she said, not without some pride) the entire series of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s non-fictional “novel” series.
Fortified, I then pressed onward with the entire Neapolitan volumes written by the hauntingly hard-to-read, hard-to-put-down, hard-to forget Elena Ferrante whose work I now admire immensely.
These books are like opulent, rich meals – with dessert – and beg to be savored not gorged, since they are certainly not easily digested afterwards. With Knausgaard particularly, it was troubling to decide if I applauded what he was doing (writing frankly about his life without any filter and thus exhibiting a total disregard for anyone else’s feelings) or despised it; however, what intrigued me most were his descriptions of the everyday and the banal which he chronicles from childhood to the present day; the expression of a cashier he might never see again; the certain feel of a day; the outside weather echoing what he felt within himself; his documentation of a parent’s sharp, throwaway, put-down which crushes him.