Elizabeth Berg's The Year of Pleasures is one I regretted spending money on. I know, Berg is a wonderful author. I especially loved her The Pull of the Moon.
The title and cover sold me the book and it started out so well. The dust jacket says that the book "is about acknowledging the solace found in ordinary things: a warm bath, good food, the beauty of nature, music, friends, and art."
It's probably just me, at this stage of my life, but the book didn't live up to that statement and I put the book aside three pages before the ending and moved on to an old Isabel Dalhousie book, The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith.
While I've never been able to get into some other of McCall Smith's series, like The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the philosopher from Edinburgh, Isabel Dalhousie, is always balm to my spirits. And I particularly like her love of W. H. Auden.
I thought that love would last for ever, I was wrong that line of Auden's that contained a truth about everything, not just love. And we had to act as if things were not going to end, because if we did not, then we would do so little in life. People still planted oak trees and created gardens, which they might not do with quite the same enthusiasm, or would not do at all, if they stopped to think of the brevity of life.
In a nutshell, at this point in my life, the philosophy of that paragraph is part of what excites me about each day of my senior years, even during a pandemic.
When I saw that McCall Smith had written a small book on Auden, What W. H. Auden Can Do For You, I had to get it. I took down my big book of Auden poetry, turning back and forth between the two as I read the little book.
After reading again Auden's "Funeral Blues", that always saddens the reader, I read what McCall Smith wrote about it and "September 1, 1939" that was brought to wide attention after 9/11.
Auden in general speaks to the more mature mind, but the raw sorrow and sense of loss that the poem conveys spoke to a young audience that had probably never heard of him.
He's speaking here of the young people, and not so young, who first heard the lines of "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and A Funeral.
And the same might be said of "September 1, 1939," another poem that touched the public imagination so vividly. That poem was photocopied and faxed around New York in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade towers.
I was so moved by something McCall Smith wrote near the end of this book that I have to include it here as a reassurance to myself that while we are increasingly reminded that we are citizens of the world that we still can and surely should cherish and pass on to our children and their children the unique culture of our own region.
Preserving the human scale of our lives in the face of the onslaught of globalization and its bland culture cannot be achieved by legislative fiat. The declared cultural policy of states may be to protect or enhance local culture--France does that, as does Canada, to an extent--but such measures sometimes seem to be no more than putting of a finger in a dike of a near-universal popular culture. It is very difficult to protect ourselves from fast-food chains or standardized coffee bars; it is equally difficult to keep fragile or threatened cultures alive in the face of blandishments of powerful offerings from far away. Many people today lead cultural lives that are rendered shallow because the things that have been authentic to their particular place are overshadowed by things made or done for them elsewhere, a long way from where they are, and having no ties to their past. That may be largely inevitable, given technological change, but it involves the loss of possibilities of feeling and belonging and fosters a consequent impoverishment of spirit. We can restore the power of the local by resisting the claims of those forces that would take away from us our control of our local lives. It is not particularly easy, but victories can be achieved against impersonal agencies, against empires even, by people asserting the value of what is local to them and taking back the power to control it.
That's a long quote from Alexander McCall Smith's What Auden Can Do For You, but struck me as so important when I see those of us in the United States being herded into a homogenized people, with even regional dialects fading away. I hope we won't all be molded into one smiling programed American prototype much as a Data from Star Trek.
Thank you to any who have read this long and probably boring book post. I bet you're glad I have comments turned off on my blog! These posts are probably self-indulgent but reducing my screen time on my phone by 50% this last week, mainly from not looking at Facebook has given me time to actually do something with all the books stuffed with post-it notes in my office. Back on my shelves they go when I finish another book post!
My next book post will be about some of what I call my Nursery Food books that I've turned to when that is all I could handle in my bedtime reading.
