Land of Childhood

Claudia Lars, author of Land of Childhood (iUniverse, 2003), has constructed a memoir that evokes all the nostalgia, poignancy, and sheer joy of being a child in her native El Salvador.  It is a warm and beautiful place, a sensual feast for the reader.  Lars is one of the greatest writers to come out of Central America, and this book, along with her fourteen books of poetry, has been enjoyed by generations.  For English language readers, this book, translated by her granddaughter, conveys all the richness and beauty of the land along with a plethora of memorable characters who enrich the story with their presence.  Each one teaches the young Lars (real name, Margarita del Carmen Brannon Vega) about life and its truths.  This edition also includes a helpful glossary.

The book is constructed in vignettes, scenes of daily life in the small villages in the Salvadoran countryside.  Lars is a child of an Irish father and a Salvadoran mother, and her history is steeped in story.  Each vignette expands the narrative until the cataclysmic finale and the end of her childhood.

She opens the book with a meditation on the old family house, the strength of its foundations, its “comfortable simplicity.”  Guests come and go in addition to family members who have various roles to play in governing the land.  Her first character is her grandfather, a “primitive being” in his simple life.  His Indian blood makes him sensitive to those who have less, and he often opens his doors to wandering tribes looking for shelter.  From these guests, Lars learns a lot about life.  It is a peaceful, bucolic existence, with time for beauty and observation.

In juxtaposition to the slower-paced life of the old house is the smoking volcano, the rumblings, the lava-spewing in the distance.  It is a reminder that at the horizon, something is always bubbling and oozing and threatening.  The world is always changing.  For children, though, this is the land of adventures, where every day is summer, and fruits and traditional dishes are plentiful.  Lars learns the medicinal properties of plants and herbs.  She watches her aunts cook and clean and keep the old house going.  She studies her grandparents, the Indian grandfather with the more refined Spanish grandmother, a sort of yin and yang.

Her father is Patrick, an Irishman born in America.  He is restless and was a rebellious child, growing into adulthood sailing around the world on cargo ships.  He fell in love with tropical America, first in Panama, where he was given the title of “bachelor of the street,” and then in El Salvador.

This is a book about how children used to occupy themselves without screens and devices.  Lars has ample time in her young life for wonder and investigation.  She and her playmates find ways to entertain themselves.  She loves books but she also loves nature and beauty.  There are mysteries in her life, questions that will not result in clear answers, but the magic of the moment is appreciated for its own value.  She recounts dozens of stories, like the one where her sister gets her head stuck in a metal, helmet-like soup tureen while they are playing soldiers.  It is a moment of panic, but the episode offers its own logic and lesson.  Since Lars had a hand in the mischief, she sustains a spanking by her grandfather (how would that go over today?), but her sister comes into her room late that night to offer a bouquet of flowers.  “I didn’t want Grandfather to punish you,” she says.  Lars struggles with her pride.  She puts on a brave front and says the punishment did not hurt her.  “Maruca placed her cheek against my lips, silencing my words and, after gently stroking my hair, quietly said good-night.”  No one spoke about the incident in the morning.

Lars does not spare the darker nature of childhood, the bullying, the unfairness of things.  But these are the stumbling blocks on the path to wisdom.  Children must experience the dangers, the near-misses of childhood.  That is the only way to grow up and become an adult.  But this is an idyllic childhood, and the events as described lead to a resounding and frightening conclusion that takes her into adulthood.

Her final vignette is for her mother, a discussion with the dead.  “I want to tell you—my beloved dead mother—words I dared not speak before, but that vibrated in the depths of my secrets like little bubbles of love.  I regret not saying them sooner…Nonetheless, I know that silence, that guardian of dreams and songs, was never a cause for misunderstandings between us.”  Her mother was the tranquil, flexible sounding board for Lars’ more stormy, childish explosions.  She lauds her mother’s patience, and has come to believe that her mother embodied the “land of my first joys.”  Those joys are evident on every page of this memoir.  It is a gorgeous, heartfelt book by a great, underappreciated writer from a small country with big dreams.  It is time to share this book with the world and make it required reading everywhere.

The Snake Pit

Mary Jane Ward began a movement in America to examine mental health facilities’ far from adequate care.  Her novel, The Snake Pit (The Library of America, 2021), did for those imprisoned in these facilities what Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, did for the meat-packing industry.  Her work influenced generations of writers who came after, including two who wrote the most famous novels of mental illness, Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar, and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  In its newest incarnation, the 75^th anniversary edition published by The Library of America with an afterword by Larry Lockridge, readers once again have the chance to immerse themselves in the frightening world of this autobiographical novel complete with a Reader’s Guide and documents from the notable film version of the book in 1948 starring Olivia de Havilland.

Virginia is the central figure and narrator of the novel.  Other characters are shadowy ghosts on the stage of multiple wards.  Each is distinct in behavior and attributes, but they are not fully developed characters.  They flit in the shadows.  Their indistinctness is a hallmark of Virginia’s view, one clouded by shock therapy and drug-induced lethargy.  Larry Lockridge writes in the afterword that “In someone for whom the center doesn’t hold, other people…are insubstantial and disappearing.”  Even Robert, Virginia’s long-suffering husband is “shadowy.”  In consultation with the doctors, he is Virginia’s advocate, but we get only fragments of his life outside of the institution.  What is he up to?  Is he her advocate, or is he colluding with the doctors?

The book shifts the narrative with Virginia sometimes speaking in first person, sometimes in second or third person, often within a single paragraph.  Her mental state is constantly in flux, and her illness makes her an unreliable narrator.  Occasionally, she confuses her thoughts with her vocalization—is she speaking aloud or just thinking in her head?  The interior monologue might have been voiced or not; her shattering realizations about her condition may be limiting her speech or allowing her to speak all too candidly.  She is locked in the confusion of mental suffering, merging back and forth from clear light and a shadowy netherworld.  For the first fifty pages of the novel, she is unsure where she is:  a hospital, a school?  Only in a moment of clarity does she realize she is in a ward of “women who were insane and she was one of them.”

In this place, the patients wear the soiled rejected clothing of previous patients.  Virginia’s coat has a stain that appears to be vomit.  She asks for her things, her clothes, her glasses, but she is repeatedly denied.  When she is given her glasses, it is a reward she is told she has earned.  The patients have few rights, few privileges, no privacy, and little comfort.  They are treated like animals by the staff; the good nurse is an exception, never the rule.  Every evening, patients are forced to drink paraldehyde, a hypnotic with a strong odor that lingers in their pores and permeates the wards.  Each patient is assigned a job.  Virginia must mop the floor but continually confuses the wet, dirty mop with the clean, dry one.  She is too addled by her illness and treatment to remember which is which.  The patients must line up to use the toilet booths.  These are wooden closets with no toilet seats, toilet paper that must be requested from a nurse, and no privacy.  Virginia is literally afraid of falling in.  Time becomes fragmented in this surreal environment, and she is no longer sure when she arrived at Juniper Hill.  Often these gaps in memory are the result of electro-shock therapy.

Virginia empathizes with her fellow inmates in their shared plight, even as they take cigarettes and food from her.  She progresses from one ward to another, eventually landing in Ward One.  Is this the last stage before she is set free?  She is moved yet again to another ward.  Nothing is clear except that she is a prisoner.

One patient Virginia connects with is Gloria, a friend and companion.  But in the shifting of patients between wards, she loses track of Gloria until towards the end of the novel when she encounters her on the hospital grounds. She is changed, a gruesome shadow of the person she was.

In treatments and daily existence, the patients hope the nightmare will soon be over.  But the suffering feels endless, a prison of one’s worst fears.  Virginia comes to believe that “You could say anything here so long as you did not say the truth.”  The patients try to act and say what they think their custodians want to hear just to be set free.  Their efforts fail.

What has caused Virginia’s breakdown that leads to her incarceration?  The answers come in fragments of Virginia’s shattered psyche.  A fiancé who died, Robert’s best friend:  did her substitute marriage to Robert lead to her downfall?  Was the death of Gordon Timberlake the cause of the psychic implosion?  Her treatment fails to get to the bottom of the situation.  Virginia must try to heal herself.

Ward has some beautiful writing in all of this darkness.  One night finds Virginia gazing at the night sky.  “And the stars had been shining for the first time since last February.  You can go along for weeks maybe months without thinking about the stars,” she says.  “They are there, on clear nights, and you can look at them and say there is the Big Dipper.  You may, if you are not in a hurry, hunt for the Pleiades; but you do not think much about the stars.  They are always there.”

Virginia was a published novelist before her hospitalization, but when she is finally allowed pen, paper, and a typewriter, she can only imitate others:  Hemingway and O. Henry.  She has lost her own words in a kind of internal aphasia.  She ponders the edge of the abyss upon which she stands, asking, “was there a time when you saw, as if at the end of a dark hallway, the light of the outside, a time when you knew you hung at a balance and that such a little push, one way or another, would determine your life?”

Mary Jane Ward’s summation of the plight of the mentally ill is so precise, so spot on.  They are excluded from a world “in which sanity was taken for granted.  In the world outside, people longed desperately to be millionaires, movie actors, club presidents and even…novelists.”  Virginia was somebody once, and she can only hope to return to that life again.  For now, though, she is trapped in the snake pit.  Ward includes the source for her title:  “Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back into sanity.”  Virginia has been thrown into such a pit of vipers, but the shock is her discovery that she could get well.

In such bleak darkness, hope.

 

Time

Art courtesy of Dreamstimes

“Wonder is the source of our desire for knowledge.”                                                     Aristotle

Time is passing.  We know this.  We feel it in our bones.  We hear it in the work of great artists like Shakespeare.  Whenever I give a workshop on time management, the room, virtual or physical, is packed to the rafters.  Students want to know—how does one manage time?  How does one fit all of life into a twenty-four-hour day?

The bottom line:  we don’t manage time; we manage ourselves.  As Carlo Rovelli and Alan Lightman tell us in recent books, time is not constant and is not what it seems.  Time is part of “that vast nocturnal and star-studded ocean of all that we don’t know,” according to Rovelli.

 

In his book, The Order of Time (Riverhead Books, 2018), Rovelli presents the theoretical physics of time and the universe.  He is the head of the Quantum Gravity group at the Centre de Physique Theorique of Aix-Marseille University.  He begins his book with a simple fact:  time passes faster in the mountains than at sea level.  When the Apollo astronauts returned to Earth, they were older than the colleagues they left behind.  This difference might be measured in nanoseconds, but it is there nonetheless.

We do not need to go back to the past to find accelerated aging among astronauts.  A recent study utilizing Scott and Mark Kelly, twin brothers who are also astronauts, revealed that after a year in space, Scott was older than his Earth-bound sibling.  However, after the mission, he quickly reverted back to match Mark.  It took eight months.

Rovelli makes a key point that time bends with gravity or lack thereof.  The closer one gets to Earth, all processes, including aging, are slower.  If one were to travel to the edge of a black hole, the apotheosis of gravitational pull, time would appear to stand still.  Large masses, like planets, slow down time in their vicinity.  This leads to Rovelli’s next point:  planets far away have their own time.  However, it is more than just gravity.  Light travels to us at 186,000 miles per second.  If we were to look across the galaxy at a planet four-light years away from us, what we see through the lens of the telescope would be what happened four years ago.  The way time behaves on that planet would add an additional wrinkle to the scenario.  And this is not just a phenomenon of space; even across the room, we see the person waving at us nanoseconds after the wave because it takes time for the light to reach our eye and the messages to be sent to the brain, and only then is there recognition, and we wave back.

In pop culture, Star Trek, in all its iterations, is where most people encounter the narrative concept of time travel.  The original series began with the voice of Captain Kirk defining the ship’s mission:  five years to explore the galaxy.  But on a five-year journey to the stars, that means five Earth years.  On other planets in other systems, time might be faster or slower.  So an interstellar traveler might return after five years but be 100 years older or five minutes older.  We exist in our own bubble of time corresponding to Earth time.  The rest of the universe moves to its own dance party.  The conclusion is clear:  time is not a constant and not a reliable measure across the galaxy.  The whole question of when, meaning time, is more about where, as in location.  Location and gravity determine time.

Aristotle was the first to ask about the nature of time.  His conclusion was that time is the measurement of change and things change constantly.  Rovelli draws the line between Aristotle’s work and Sir Isaac Newton, who believed time was an entity that runs even when nothing happens.  In the end, what we know is that time is not definitive.  In fact, past, present and future are not clearly delineated in the equations of the universe.  Rovelli brings his thesis home like this:  “the entire evolution of science would suggest that the best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not permanence.  Not of being, but of becoming.”  And all of it seems to be moving toward entropy.  Clean laundry starts becoming soiled the minute it leaves the dryer.  A clean house will become dusty again.  It is the law of the universe.  Rovelli says Einstein questioned the concept of past, present and future.  Those designations might only be a persistent illusion.

To read Rovelli is to be both reassured that there is an order to the universe, and to be greatly disturbed at the immense size and complexity that eludes total understanding.  Late in the book, he quotes Hugo von Hofmannsthal:  “Everything slips through our fingers.  All that we seek to hold on to dissolves.  Everything vanishes, like mists and dreams…”

 

Alan Lightman is an American physicist who is both a scientist and a brilliant writer.  His book, Probably Impossibilities (Pantheon Books, 2021), dovetails nicely with Rovelli’s work.  He subscribes to the idea that the universe is moving toward entropy, and he discusses time’s arrow, the “forward direction of time is determined by the movement of order to disorder.”  However, Lightman leaves room for the metaphysical in his study of the cosmos.  He brings to the table the story of his own out-of-body experience where life is “a brief flicker in the vast chasm of time.”   He goes on to write that, “My fleeting sensation included infinite space.  Without body or mind, I was somehow floating in the gargantuan stretch of space, far beyond the solar system and even the galaxy, space stretched on and on.”  He sees in this fever dream himself as a “tiny speck, insignificant,” a sensation that is both “liberating and terrifying” for him.

Lightman emphasizes that we are all composed of atoms.  Our minds are collections of atoms “fated to disassemble and dissolve” at the end of our days.  Yet after we are gone, we remain.  Our atomic components continue on to mix with other atoms and form new life, new structures, always renewing and rejuvenating the universe.  However, our consciousness ends.  Because of that, he has chosen to live in such a way “as to maximize my pleasure and minimize my pain.”  Science becomes life philosophy, and that the value of Lightman’s work in this book.  It is not just science, but a humanist view.  He breaks this down into two schools of thought: the Mechanists who believe that we are made up of processes subject to the laws of chemistry, physics and biology; and Vitalists who recognize a special quality of life, a spiritual force beyond analysis or explanation.  This, then, is the soul, or pneuma, as the Greeks named it, meaning “breath” or “wind.”  It is for the combination of science and spirit that I seek out Lightman.  His work is transcendent and deeply moving for his humanity.  I am comforted by the fact that everyone who has ever lived still remains present at an atomic level.  We are part of everything there is, and in a sense, our atoms are immortal even if our consciousness is not.

This does not stop Lightman from questioning where the dead are now.  This explanation of atoms free-floating through space-time does not assuage his sorrow and longing for those he has lost.  On many days and on many roads, he finds it hard to fathom that they no longer exist and he can no longer communicate with them.  Life is a dream, really, and Lightman cites no less an authority than Emerson:  “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to the illusion.”

This is the dilemma of conscious beings:  we must witness and reflect on the spectacle of existence, even as our own light fades and consciousness dissolves.  This is human truth, but Lightman does not neglect his science.  If space goes on and on to infinity, he posits, there should be an infinite number of copies of us out there.  “Because even a situation of minuscule probability,” he writes, “like the creation of a particular individual’s exact arrangement of atoms—when multiplied by an infinite number of trials, repeats itself an infinite number of times.”

Alan Lightman is a scientist, a physicist, and man who deals daily with star dust and the laws of thermodynamics.  Yet, he is also a man, lying in a hammock, pondering the stars.  Every book he writes is a winner, and this one is no exception.  Following up on his book, Searching For Stars on an Island in Maine (Vintage, 2019), Probably Impossibilities again explores the plight of a human being in the universe.  Along with Carlo Rovelli, the two books give us the science and the humanity, and we are richer for the journey.

A Friday Night Return

AP Photo / Bloomsburg Press Enterprise, Jimmy May

Years ago, there were Friday night football games, the marching band, cheerleaders, the smoke from hamburgers grilling out back of the snack bar, and that was the end to another busy week in the fall of the year.  Now, I hear echoes through the trees of the marching band and the roar of the crowd at my old high school just a few blocks away from my apartment.  High school football and smoke in the air:  nothing changes but everything.

“Notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind,” reads my blog tagline.  Well, I’ve been overwhelmed by all the life lessons lately, frantically scribbling away in journals and notebooks but not for publication.  What is this life?  What will happen next?  I could only ask my notebooks.  I wanted answers, and until I found them, I did not feel I had the courage to speak.  I had forgotten the prime directive of my own teaching philosophy:  the questions are more important than the answers.  The answers will always exist, but if one does not ask the right questions, the answers will never be found.

The last few years have been a crisis of faith for everyone.  Most of us were left to ponder:  where are we going?  Is the spirit of America dead?  What if we discover that the spirit has always been dead, that “all men are created equal” are just pretty words?  Maybe there is no equality and no justice, no liberty and no allowance for freedom.  Or, that we are slaves to our fears, our prejudices, our narcissism.  To the immigrant yearning for a better life we offer only the whip or the gun.  We sow the seeds of violence and celebrate the bloody harvest.  We are unwilling to reach out a hand to those in despair.  That is what we have become, a nation armed to the teeth against the Other.  A people too selfish and narcissistic to see we are all dreamers; we are all here in search of a better life.

We should be striving for a more perfect union.  Perfection may be unattainable, but like most sentences, in that one, the verb is the heart of the matter:  striving.  To paraphrase King, we may not get there in our lifetimes.  We may never get there, but we continue striving.  Always.

“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain,” goes the lament.  Depression is the black dog that follows us home and threatens never to leave.  Anxiety wakes us in the middle of the night and disturbs our vague and restless dreams.  “I grow old…I grow old.”  We do and we are.  We are old before our time.  “Would it have been worth it after all, would it have been worthwhile, after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels; after the tea cups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—and this, and so much more?”

America is a colder place:  700,000 of us are gone from this autumnal world.  Where do we go from here?  The only answer, the best answer I have, is onward, while the ghosts flow in and around each of us and fall behind.  We try to carry some essence of them with us but it is like trying to transport the ocean to the desert with only our cupped hands.  It is too much to carry.  It is a futile enterprise on the way down to our own dusty deaths.

Yet, there is hope.  There is life and there is what remains.  We are more resilient than we know.

At the dawn of the new year, my grand-niece was born.  Charlotte Ileana, named for that patron saint of English literature, Charlotte Bronte.  I have watched Charlie discover her world.  In her face, I see my niece, her husband, his family, and my lost father-in-law.  She has not dared to eat a peach, as Eliot writes in his poem, but she did try mango the other night with hilarious results.  Mango and the world are her frontiers in these early days of her life.

So it is time to pick up that thread that connects us.  The thread always seems ready to snap.  Our humanity is always in danger of fading away.  But this is life and this is us, and we are striving to bring about that most American of dreams:  a more perfect union.  That is the only struggle that matters now.

This is a time for wonder:  “Do I dare disturb the universe?”  We have no choice because we are alive and among the living.

As for the blog, look for more notes on books, culture, and the life of the mind.  If I find a few answers in the smoke and fire of daily life, I’ll post those too.  “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…”  Onward!