4/19/23

 Wednesday, April 19, 2023

In bed around 10:30, up at 7 in a brain fog,, half-dreaming of Dad and his friend Art in Florida.  38℉, high of 45℉, 0.15" of rain expected today, E wind at 14 mph, gusts up to 30 mph, wind chills from 29 to 38℉ today, sunrose at 6:03, sunset at 7:39,  13+35.

VA this morning.  Pelvic floor muscle therapy with Jennifer Garrison.  I found out she's been at Zablocki for 15 years and started the pelvic floor program 12 years ago.  She's 39 years old, which surprised me.  I might have thought 29.  We discussed the childcare challenge in the U.S., which was the topic of a WUWM program I listened to on the way to Zablocki.  I confessed that it made me angry to compare the U.S. to Denmark, e.g.  I didn't bring up the basic reason for the big differences, i.e., relative ethnic/racial homogeneity in Denmark vs. heterogeneity in the U.S., especially Blacks.

Lila has captivated me.  It's the 3rd consecutive novel of the Gilead set if 4 that I have read and each has captured my attention more than the preceding one(s).  I have such a sense of intimacy with the main characters, starting with John Ames, then on to Glory Boughton and her brother Jack, and now Lila Dahl Ames.  I omit Robert Boughton because, although he is Ames' best friend and Glory and Jack's father, he seems less complex than the others and more dogmatic.  Loneliness is a major theme in the novels and Jack and Lila are the loneliest of the characters.  Lila's loneliness, her untrusting, wary nature, is easier to understand than Jack's.  She is the 'non-victim' of a kidnapping, who lived a life with her loving kidnapper, always on the run, wary of everyone.  Robinson creates quite a vivid sense of the hardscrabble lives of itinerant farm workers during the 1930s, usually on the road moving from farm to farm, town to town, looking for work, homeless and often hungry.

The relationship between Lila and John Ames seems so unlikely that it could be a 'jump the shark' feature of the novel, but it somehow works.  Who can explain how some couples come together, especially those who seem most unlikely as life partners?  I suspect it was precisely her oddness, her aloneness, her poverty that attracted John Ames' attention to her in the first place, seeing her sitting by herself in the last pew in his church on Pentecost Sunday.  She wasn't a part of his congregation, nor of the community in which they all lived, and as it turned out, she was profoundly different from those regular members of his community.  Lila was attracted to him because he also was so very different from her and from the migrant farmhands she grew up and lived with, and especially from her protector/kidnapper Doll.  Doll was cynical; 'the old man' was the opposite.  Doll was always 'on the run' and hiding herself; 'the old man' was as settled in Gilead as he could be, having lived 74 of his 76 years there, son and grandson of Congregationalist pastors.  Plus, 'the old man' seemed to be kind and caring (and tall and good-looking.)  It's not so unthinkable that they should be pulled toward each other.  Perhaps most significantly, they were both lonely and thirsting for love.  And they were both meditative and contemplative [not sure exactly of the line between meditation and contemplation]; they were both thinkers, though on different planes.  Interestingly, Ames made a point of NOT thinking about issues that were troubling to his religious faith, issues like hellfire and damnation, why Christ's 'saving message' comes to some and not to others, etc.  Lila chews on those troubling questions, using them as a reason NOT to get sucked into the 'pie in the sky bye and bye' preached by preachers to get fools to give them money.  

The novels are all philosophical and theological with not a whole lot of plot in terms of action, but a whole lot of cerebration and emotion.  Deus absconditus, Deus reconditus stuff.

How could it be that none of it mattered? It was most of what happened. But if it did matter, how could the world go on the way it did when there were so many people living the same and worse? Poor was nothing, tired and hungry were nothing. But people only trying to get by, and no respect for them at all, even the wind soiling them. No matter how proud and hard they were, the wind making their faces run with tears. That was existence, and why didn’t it roar and wrench itself apart like the storm it must be, if so much of existence is all that bitterness and fear? Even now, thinking of the man who called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her? It would be nothing. What if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning. The quiet of the world was terrible to her, like mockery. She had hoped to put an end to these thoughts, but they returned to her, and she returned to them.

The Murdeers at the White House Farm.  We watch this docudrama on HBOMax last night and tonnight.  It was the story of a mass murder of a family in Essex, England, by an adopted son in the family.  It reminded one, at least a bit,  of the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina.  Cold-blooded murdrs of family members, including 2 children.