Natural disaster and human self-sabotage

There's a heartless avalanche or tidal wave or desert, and within that monster of creation Jim Shepard places his poor humans fighting like hell against that which brings healing.

There's fear of pain and exposure coupled with knowledge of something better as a result. The fear wins out again and again even when it's quite clear that without productive pain you've only death and sorrow.

Helplessness against furious nature without, helplessness against neurotic nature within.

First:

"Hey," the dog said. "There's a shitstorm of biblical proportions headed your way." "Please. I'm busy," the man said.

And later:

Bishop Prudentius of Troyes wrote in his annals that in the ninth century the whole of the country was devoured by the sea; all the settlements disappeared, and the water was higher than the dunes. In the Saint Felix Flood, North Beveland was completely swept away. In the All Saints' Flood, the entire coast was inundated between Flanders and Germany. In 1717 a dike collapse killed fourteen thousand on Christmas night.

Shortly after:

At each stage in the transfer of assets, financial advisors or bank officers have asked if my wife's name would be on the account as well. She still has no idea it exists. It means that I now have a secret net worth more than triple my family's. What am I up to? Your guess is as good as mine.

Finally:

We modeled risk management for our son when instead we could have embraced the freefall of that astonishing Here, this is yours to hold. We told each other I think I know when we should've said Lead me farther through your amazing, astonishing interior.

I doubt Shepard thinks in such terms, but it leaves me thinking on Eliot's wounded surgeon.

Jim Shepard, "The Netherlands Lives with Water," You Think That's Bad (New York: Knopf, 2011).

I intended to read a few pages of Gilead to calm my soul after a remarkably unpleasant close. Instead I finished that wonderful book.

---

"...there is an absolute disjunction between our Father's love and our deserving. Still, when I see this same disjunction between human parents and children, it always irritates me a little. (I know you will be and I hope you are an excellent man, and I will love you absolutely if you are not.)"

"These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice."

"It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. So they get themselves into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike."

"In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable--which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same customs, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

---

Yet I am not calmed.

That isn't quite true. I feel peace, but my mind is unprepared for sleep. Which is a problem, as I work again in less than six hours.

The person who owned the book before irritates me. He–I've decided, based on hand-writing and prejudice, that it's a guy–underlines only dry, factual plot points and descriptions.

"though he's twenty-six and six three."

"Yet in his time Rabbit was famous through the county..."

"...in the town of Mt. Judge, suburb of the city of Brewer, fifth largest city in Pennsylvania."

"...in his own line of work, which is demonstrating a kitchen gadget in several five-and-dime stores around Brewer."

Meanwhile, beauty, humor, and poignance pass by unremarked, unnoticed.

The opening paragraph of rabbit, run felt like the first warm afternoon in March, in Michigan.

Pechorin, Hero of Our Time

I have a guest post over at the Imaginative Conservative on Mihail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time--more specifically, on Pechorin, the titular character.

I gather that the title character, Pechorin, is or was something of a Holden Caulfield in Russia--the character with whom moody adolescents identify when they wish to cast their hormonal immaturity as the existential crisis of a Complex Personality. Even though, and also because, he is essentially a fool and a brute dressed up as a fatalist, Pechorin fascinates me.

Pechorin the modern hero: undaunted by fear but not, of course, noble or genuinely courageous; witty and provocative; competent; equally skilled in entertaining either the ladies of society or the soldiers when he fancies; following no fancy or standard but his own; wealthy, skilled, and widely read.

He is, as I say, modernly heroic, or is it heroically modern?--which is to say that pervading all his aforementioned qualities is a pathetic and empty windbag. He ruins lives on a whim and then bemoans, seemingly without irony, the cruel fate that has made him a home-wrecker. He is Jimmy McNulty (of HBO's The Wire), serving nothing and no one but himself, and when his appetites earn him the fury of others, he asks, "...**** did I do?"

Read the rest.