Catching up . . .

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale

It has been so long since I updated this blog, due to a combination of computer failure and motivation failure, that I have forgotten most of what I meant to say about this book. To remind myself what I thought, I went back to see what pages were dogeared, and found only one. Not surprisingly, it was the most meta passage in the book:

"This is a reconsctruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it."

Atwood's narrator further bemoans the difficulty of ever communicating events as they really happened. No matter what, our stories are always many times removed from reality--and perhaps removed the furthest by our own capacity to edit.

I myself am fascinated by this phenomenon, though unlike Atwood's narrator, I don't regret the fact. I relish my editorial post in this life--the trick is not to believe your own story, to be cognizant of its inherent falsehood. The future is a lie. It will never happen. It is fine to lie alone in our beds and write stories about it, but we must never make the mistake of believing those stories, building expectations or anxieties. The past, too, may well have never happened. It most certainly did not happen the way we remember it. We lay in our solitude and return, replay, regret, but it is never more than an illusion projected onto a cloud.

Which brings me to:

Robert Schwartz: Courageous Souls

Recommended to me by my dear friend 주협, this book did not disappoint. The above reminders inspired by Atwood, are an especially appropriate framework in which to discuss it for two reasons: firstly, the central idea is that our stories are one step further removed from reality than Atwood implied: that every event upon which our stories were based is in fact an expression of something unseen, something that happened before we were born even. The way in which the author outlines that idea is rather involved, and I will not go into it here. He does a good job of outlining it, but it is important to remember that this too, is just a story. It is a story about stories, in fact, about how we construct and conceal them. It is helpful, and even healing to read, but it would be a mistake to take it as reality.

C.S. Forester: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower

I can't find a single dogeared page in this book, so I guess there was no particular passage that I wanted to remember or quote verbatim. Instead, I want to read every other volume in the series. It was fresh and engaging, serious without being ponderous, exactly the sort of thing I should read more of.