In celebration of the book

I’m having a bowl of ice cream and getting around to the editorals about nine o’clock tonight when I notice this one written for the Washington Post by James Billington, the librarian of Congress. It is an article in defense…even celebration…of the book. Everything is going digital, the book business is in transition, and 140 character messages are destroying, as Billington says, the basic unit of civilized discourse – the sentence.

This is why we celebrate books.

I haven’t written for this blog in a long time. There hasn’t been much to say about the publication of The Given Self and I’ve thought I ought to sum up the experience and call it a day. I never did much of what I started out to do: examine that experience. I’m not going to do it tonight.

Writing a book and having a book in the public milieu is an experience that goes far beyond what happens with the publisher, editor, printer, media.

The Given Self just saved me from sinking into a depression. Yes, I was getting depressed, and damn it, I did not want to. I wanted so badly to talk myself out of it, to snap out of it, to meditate out of it. It wasn’t supposed to be happening. By God, I was going to get myself under control. I even tried books on positive thinking, the kind of books I’ve often accused of being a plague on literary culture. Following this advice, I looked myself in the eyes in the mirror and told myself that I am beautiful and healthy and peaceful. It felt as much like a lie as anything I’d ever spoken, but I was ready to try anything.

Then for some unknown reason I read my own words:

You have the right to feel what you feel.

I read my own website where I named a whole unknown group of us to be “people in transition.” I described, or quoted my book describing some of the symptoms of this transition…like feeling fragile, weak and weepy or as if you’re getting Alzheimer’s. I read my own words describing what a violence it is when we are told not to feel what we feel.

Suddenly, I had to see myself as perpetrating that violence, and I had to stop.

Okay, I also talked to a friend who asked me, “Do you realize how hard you’re being on yourself?”

I am convinced that we writers write for ourselves (just as readers read for themselves). It is a strange paradox, but it seems that even those who write the positive thinking books, write them for themselves. We write because we need to tell ourselves something. We write because we’re challenged to find the light even and especially in the dark. And we put what we write “out there” because we just know there’s someone else fumbling around in the same darkness.

And that is why books, traditional or not, digital or on paper, continue to need to be celebrated.

The busting out day is here

I can feel a short wick inside myself. Sitting on the loveseat in the dark is not helping. It only really works when I don’t reach for coffee and when my knees don’t protest and when the mouse doesn’t scuttle off the arm of the couch and lie with it’s red-lighted underbelly blinking under the window – so far away that I have to get up for it. I close my eyes. Breathe. I need a shower.

I wait a lot. I wait until a proper time to take my shower so that if it wakes Henry it’s not too early, and so that it’s not too late to interfere with the schedules of those who have to get somewhere. I postpone vacuuming until no one is home if I can, same with washing the floor. Housework is not an easy thing to do with people about. When no one is home I least want to do it but I enjoy it most. I putter. Work at my own pace. Feel as if I’m tending my home rather than picking up after everyone else.

I just read that a ‘green’ initiative has a lot of janitors coming off the night shift and doing their work during the day. I wonder how that’s going to turn out. Will they vacuum at lunch hour? An hour before people get there? Pull the wastebaskets out from beneath peoples’ desks while they’re sitting at them? Will they be happier? Relieved to be working days, or will they miss the quiet nights and the ease of an un-peopled space? Will they learn to wait or will they become little dictators, mother-like in their instructions: Don’t leave your half-eaten apple on your desk unless you want it tossed, set your garbage can out or empty it yourself, don’t take your bathroom break at 10:30 – it’ll be closed for cleaning.

I wonder if janitors will feel more like janitors when they work days and have to plan their work around the schedules and habits of others. Will they feel more a part of the team and move valued, or like an irritating “other” whose work is an undervalued inconvenience? Will they chafe at feeling more invisible than they did when they moved about in the dark, or will they try to be invisible?

And will there be follow-up articles some day that track the progress of the change? Will it only be in the transition that it is hard – like so many other matters confronted as our many and varied jobs shift away from the roles that once contained them and leave the feelings and new actions that come of the container busting?

Waiting isn’t the worst thing in the whole scenario of doing our own janitorial tasks or awaiting our own transitions. The sky lightens while you wait.

As Henry says, “The day is here.”