Week in Seven Words #512

This covers the week of 11/10/19 - 11/16/19.

advice
"Just try to be a good person," he says to the group. "Don't compare yourself to others."

background
As we watch a movie that's hollow and pointless, the night hums around us.

berries
The berries are enticing. They grow in tight, glistening bunches on the deep green leaves. "Don't eat any," one mother tells her kid. "Only the ones we give you. The ones we give you are safe."

popcorn
We share a bag of popcorn in a courtyard enclosed by bricks.

relaxing
The trees part, and I find a bench streaked with sunlight.

restart
Many resolutions amount to futile gestures and relapses. (Oh, well. Try again.)

unexpectedly
A delightful surprise left in my bag: a bar of 88 percent dark chocolate.

Fraught Parent-Child Relationships in Daniel Deronda

Like other novels by George Eliot, Daniel Deronda is dense and rich. Eliot has an exquisite sensitivity to the inner life of her characters and the way they're struggling with or making sense of their place in their society and culture.

Three of the characters (Daniel, Gwendolen, and Mirah) struggle to find a place for themselves in the world. For different reasons, they're not at home in their own lives. Parent-child relationships are a key reason they feel lost or are experiencing a crisis.

Gwendolen isn't a likable character, but she's rendered sympathetic by Eliot, especially as the novel unfolds, and she begins to question who she is and how she can ever learn to be good. She's raised out in the country in a respectable family that's fallen on hard times. The most influential adults in her life are her mother and uncle. Her mother, who seems to have known only unhappiness in marriage, clings to Gwendolen, and often Gwendolen needs to be a mother to her. Her uncle is short-sighted in some ways and fails as an adequate father figure for her.

Week in Seven Words #332

borne
Walking the length of a massive bridge on foot. Car fumes, heat, and over-the-shoulder glances to check for bikers bearing down. A pause now and then to stare at the river spreading undisturbed in a blue haze.

fitting
Some of the steps are even. Others are ragged stone stitched together with grass.

irregular
A trail threading through tall grass. It wears a patchy coat of sunlight.

marrow
Shortening a conversation with someone who likes to pour fear into my bones.

offset
Planning and leading the hike takes a new kind of confidence, and I like that I can pull it off. I tend to brood about everything that can go wrong in any situation. To some extent, it's useful, but not when the thoughts become paralyzing.

serene
By the river, there's music from decades ago and greasy food and cooler air. Shade on overhung paths and peace for the soul.

synopsis
She asks me what the book I'm reading is about. How do I explain it to a kid? (Or to anyone, in a few seconds.) It's about people making bad decisions and receiving bad advice. Plus, someone doesn't know who his real parents are. And another person doesn't much like a man she's encouraged to marry. And...

Six Short Stories About Different States of Mind

Title: The Balloon of William Fuerst
Author: Lowell B. Komie
Where I Read It: Legal Fictions

A short, funny story but one with a familiar pang in it, the feeling of life getting wasted on triviality. The main character is an attorney who starts to hear air escaping from his ears - "a hiss of all the useless acts." He imagines his head is a balloon, with air leaking out. How does he think he can fix the problem, without leaving a job he feels trapped in? Maybe helium is the answer! If nothing else, at least he'll sound like a new person...

Title: Bitter Grounds
Author: Neil Gaiman
Where I Read It: Fragile Things

Before reading "Bitter Grounds," I hadn't come across any zombie fic that interested me. But this story is further proof that it's never the subject matter that's the problem, but the way it's handled. Any topic can be written about in an interesting way.

This isn't a typical zombie fic. There are no rotting corpses staggering around - no brain-eating, post-apocalyptic monsters. It's more a confusing and fascinating story of escape and loss of identity, of blurred boundaries between people and between the living and the dead. It begins with a man who can't deal with his life anymore:

"In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving."

One day, he drives and just keeps on driving, with no particular destination or purpose. And then starts to move between different identities. Through circumstances described in the story, he steps into the shoes of an anthropology professor invited to give a talk in New Orleans about tales of undead Haitian coffee girls. Nothing in this story is as it seems, and by the end, you have to wonder who is this man, and who has he met along the way? Not sure if this is a nightmare, or if he's ripped through the fragile tissues that life's made of.

Nonfiction Book of the Month: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Written by a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, it's a book that will change your life.

I'll just leave an excerpt here:

As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Worth Watching: About Schmidt (2002)

Title: About Schmidt
Director: Alexander Payne
Language: English
Rating: R

Who is Warren Schmidt and why does he have reason to despair?

Early on, we watch Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) at his retirement party. His best friend makes a toast and tells Warren that a man can be proud if he looks back on his life and sees a loving family, good friends, and meaningful work. And while, on the surface, Warren seems to lay claim to that legacy, it isn't long before he realizes that his life is empty. His years of work in insurance are irrelevant to the young man succeeding him on the job. He's disconnected from the community and from friends. Now that he's at home with his wife all day, he realizes that she's virtually a stranger. And though he thinks with fondness of their one daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), all of his fond thoughts center on her as a young girl. The adult Jeannie is a stranger to him as well.

Worth Watching: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Title: Lars and the Real Girl
Director: Craig Gillespie
Language: English
Rating: PG-13

In Lars and the Real Girl, Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) buys a sex doll but doesn't use it for sex. The doll, named Bianca, is fully clothed and gets treated with care. Lars courts her chastely, takes her around town, and introduces her to people as if she's real; he even gives her an interesting back story. Instead of functioning as a sex toy, the doll becomes his way of working through a deep-seated inability to connect with real people.

From Wikipedia, Fair use, Link

I can hear some of you going, "Okkkaaaay..." and backing away slowly. So let me give you some background on Lars. His mother died giving birth to him. He grew up with a distant father and with an older brother, Gus (Paul Schneider), who left home as soon as he could. Now Gus is married to the warm and lovely Karin (Emily Mortimer), and the two are expecting a child. Lars lives near them physically, but keeps his distance emotionally. Though he can't articulate his fears, he is deeply afraid of people's unpredictability and mortality. He also doesn't respond well to physical touch.

How do people react to Lars and Bianca? After some initial hesitation, the townspeople play along with Lars's delusion and let him heal through it. Although Gus's first impulse is to have his younger brother committed to a mental hospital, he's dissuaded from this course of action by my favorite character in the movie, Dr. Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), who combines cool understanding and warm compassion in her role as the town's medical doctor and psychologist.

Delusions can have their own logic and reveal something real and meaningful about the people experiencing them. And people reveal a lot about themselves in the way they respond to another person's psychological difficulties. Gus's initial desire to have his brother committed stems less from concern than from embarrassment and, more deeply, guilt and personal shame.

Is it realistic, the way the other people in the community come to support Lars and treat Bianca as a town mascot? Such widespread acceptance is rare, but not impossible. Read this article, which discusses the influence of social environment on people's ability to cope with mental illness. Ostracizing and isolating people with psychological problems makes them much worse off, but unfortunately that's what we usually do in our culture. The approach taken in Lars and the Real Girl might be more conducive to healing.

The movie is funny too. It shows the absurdity of the situation, but treats the characters with kindness. I also like how Lars uses a doll to work through his issues, instead of using a real life woman as a personal crutch or savior. He has a love interest in the movie - Margo (Kelli Garner), a colleague at work who seems to like him too, in a shy way. But on some level he realizes, even in the midst of his emotional disconnection, that he's not yet ready for a real relationship with her or with anyone except Bianca. And even Bianca starts to show signs of independence as the movie progresses, proving herself to be less pliant than she appears.

A Room with a View: "the real and the pretended"

The characters have a strange quality in E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. Sometimes they come across as real and deep; other times they seem to be made of colorful tissue paper.

The world of the book is also divided in two. On the one hand there's passion, nature, and honest conversation: rare moments when people speak their mind or know themselves (or realize what they could be). On the other there are petty social conventions, which get in the way of truth and beauty. The book opens with two Englishwomen - Lucy Honeychurch and her older, poorer relation, Charlotte Bartlett - traveling in Italy. Instead of experiencing Italy with all of their heart and mind, they're wearing culturally approved blinkers. They're saddled with guidebooks that tell them what's beautiful and worth seeing and what isn't. They're burdened with the company of narrow-minded pedants and opinionated bores who need to make sure everyone thinks and talks and acts in the correct way. Charlotte herself seems to be one of those bores, but by the end of the book you'll get a long sad glimpse into her that shows you what she might have been.


In the course of the book Lucy will choose between two men that represent the division running through the book: George Emerson and Cecil Vyse (just by their names, guess which one is a prig). George is poetry and passion and troubled moods; Cecil has no concept of real intimacy but cuts a good-looking smart figure.

Lucy has grown up in a society where she's often had to deny or excuse her thoughts and feelings, to the point where her own voice is lost in her mind among others. Playing piano - not in the conventional accomplished way of women her age, but with real soul and understanding - is one consistent way she expresses herself where her words fail her. Conversations communicate very little that's genuine or clear.

On the whole I felt detached from the characters. I wasn't walking among them; they were on a stage, and I was watching them from different places in the audience (sometimes needing binoculars). Where the book really leapt out and grabbed me were in isolated passages, here and there, beautifully written and sharing some insight into human nature and society.

The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy's first aim was to defeat herself... The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

(I'm adding this post to the list of Classics Club Challenge books.)

Extracts: A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

Don't you see there isn't any real progress... there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us - our own little mirage that we think is the future.

A Raisin in the Sun is a wonderful play, one of the best I've read in a while. Lorraine Hansberry shows how people define themselves and strive for their dreams; in progressing towards what they hope will be a better life, they discover new sources of strength in themselves but also risk self-destruction and undermining others. The play ends on a mix of good spirits and foreboding; the Younger family haven't had it easy up until that point, and they have frightening circumstances to deal with in the future, but they're still alive, fighting with one other and against the world.

Meet the Youngers
The Youngers are a black family living in Chicago's South Side in the years after World War II. The patriarch of the family, Big Walter, has passed away, and his material legacy is an insurance check worth 10,000 dollars - a boon to his family, who have long wanted to get out of their airless, lightless hole of an apartment.

There are six of them: Lena (Mama), Big Walter's widow and the matriarch of the family; their adult children, Walter Lee and Beneatha; and Walter Lee's wife, Ruth, and son, Travis.

Walter Lee is a chauffeur, and both Lena and Ruth work as domestic servants, cooking and cleaning in white people's homes. Unlike Walter Lee, it's apparent that Lena and Ruth don't stop working when they get home; with some help from Beneatha, they take care of all the chores in their apartment, while Walter Lee spends time with his friends, shooting the breeze and cooking up grand business schemes. Beneatha (who at a low point in the play speaks the words excerpted at the start of the post) is a college student, a first for her family. In the course of the play she's also wooed by two very different men - George Murchison and Joseph Asagai - each representing a certain kind of future for her, should she choose one of them.

Dreams deferred, denied, or achieved
Everyone in the Younger family has a dream they want to realize. For Beneatha it's becoming a doctor, and for Walter Lee it's running his own business as a bigshot executive. Lena's primary goal is to move to a real house, something Ruth longs for as well. The only affordable neighborhood within an easy distance of their workplaces in the city is a suburb where only white families live.

Personal flaws and family tension could keep their dreams from materializing. Hansberry might have gone the route of having the family be on the same page, united by the same beliefs and outlook as they fight for a better life, but instead she wrote them as messy and real. Walter Lee fights a good deal with his sister about the man she should marry, and with Lena about what to do with the 10,000 dollars; he wants a chance to be his own boss, and if Beneath got to go to college, why can't he have his opportunity to develop himself?

Walter Lee and Ruth's marriage also goes through a lot of strain. Ruth doesn't have Beneatha's booksmarts or Lena's central position in the family, but it's a testament to Hansberry's writing skills that instead of being a sidelined two-dimensional figure she's distinct, given good lines, a dry wit and a complex character, and made to confront her own difficult choices. As for Lena, she looks at her kids with love and pride and, at times, incomprehension. Of those in the younger generation, Ruth (the aptly named daughter-in-law), is the only one who consistently connects with her.

On top of all the intrafamilial conflict, there are people in their community who would resent their move to a better home, taking it as a sign that the Younger family doesn't know "their place." The one neighbor we do see, Mrs. Johnson, is a riot - a funny portrait of a woman who tries to pass off her nosiness and envy as sincere concern. There are also other people in their community who would more actively undermine their attempts to realize their dream.

And finally there's the all-white neighborhood they want to move to. The neighborhood association sends a representative to try to dissuade them from coming to live there; in a morbidly funny moment, Beneatha refers to him as the "Welcoming Committee," a joke taken up by Ruth and Walter Lee:

Mama: What he want?
Ruth: (In the same mood as Beneath and Walter) To welcome you, honey.
Walter: He said they can't hardly wait. He said the one thing they don't have, that they just dying to have out there, is a fine family of fine colored people!

Lorraine Hansberry's own parents fought racial residential segregation in the northern U.S. (read about the Supreme Court Case, Hansberry vs. Lee) and she knew first hand how violent the situation could get, with black families getting fire-bombed out of their homes, attacked by mobs, and worse.

What is progress?
Returning to the excerpt at the top of the post - is progress an illusion? It's fitting that Beneatha makes this pessimistic pronouncement, as someone who's still figuring out her identity.

On the one hand she's the first college-educated person in her family and wants to be a doctor. But if she marries could she still pursue a career in medicine? (Her brother is leaning on her to marry George Murchison, who would be least likely to support her career.) So what is her identity, her role in the family and society at large, meant to be? And what options are available to her as a black woman who wants to go into medicine? She isn't expected to take charge of her family; for better or worse, Lena comes to expect that of Walter Lee, not necessarily because he has good judgment but because he's the man of the house. With her education and career aspirations Beneatha finds herself in an unprecedented position in her family.

Across the generations, the Younger family has progressed out of slavery, then out of the South, to live in their own apartment and to send one family member to college. Even when the "Welcoming Committee" representative from the white neighborhood comes to speak with them, he doesn't threaten them outright, as Beneatha puts it:

Oh - Mama - they don't do it like that any more. He talked Brotherhood. He said everybody ought to learn how to sit down and hate each other with good Christian fellowship.

Progress seems to work uphill, with backsliding and resistance for every bit of ground gained. The newer generations - Walter Lee and Beneatha - are building off of the sacrifices of their parents and forebears in different ways, while also fighting certain battles all over again: not what previous generations fought against - not slavery and not the southern Ku Klux Klan specifically - but against similar forces, in new shapes and forms. They also fight to understand who they are and where they belong in society, and to understand how the legacy of their parents and ancestors affects them; they absorb it, honor it, chafe against it, turn to it sometimes for guidance and mock or ignore it otherwise. The sum total of Big Walter's legacy - along with what Lena has imparted to her kids - is more than 10,000 dollars.

Any push for progress requires risk. Sometimes the desire for a better life is so consuming that it blinds people to potential dangers as they work impatiently towards it. Then again, focusing too much on the dangers keeps people where they are, relatively safe but also miserable and diminished.

Why haven't we seen more of Hansberry?
In addition to being very active in the Civil Rights movement, Lorraine Hansberry made history in theater with A Raisin in the Sun, becoming the youngest American playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Tragically her life was cut short, at age 34, by pancreatic cancer.

-------------

I read The Modern Library edition of A Raisin in the Sun; it's also the first work I'm writing up for the Classics Club Challenge (you can find the link to the challenge post in the Reading Lists tab at the top of the page as well).