A REASONABLY COHERENT INDIVIDUAL

 7 of 100

29 January 

At least I am reading again. This does not mean that I am able to pay attention and get through one thing at a time. At least I am turning to an actual book more often than the last several months. My book group met on Thursday. I did not manage to get my critical disdain for Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads adequately expressed as Sh mounted a worthy rebuttal to anything I was trying to express. After a while, pressing my points nearly seemed unkind, so I kept my critique to myself. And we picked Zola's Nana for our next book. It has been a few decades since I last read it, so I am looking forward to it.

I went to dinner last night with R & L. Their son J even hung out with us quite a bit, which was extra nice (at 17 he has a busy social life). Unlikely our usual carousing evening, we kept it look key. L was pretty burnt out after her week (she's an architect), and I was so tired from not having slept the night before that I nearly cancelled an hour before my scheduled arrival. We don't see each other that often, so I rallied. Quite lovely and I got home early enough to be able to get up for yoga this morning.

I have been a will-o'-the-wisp today, unable to focus on much of anything save for watching bad tv with Janet. If I get hooked into a cycle of home repair shows, I can get lost for quite a while. And although it was not a particularly nice day, Janet was game for her walk this afternoon. So, there are two of three accomplishments for the day. Perhaps posting will be the third.

I took a bath this afternoon, although that is usually a progress-stopper. I pulled out The Chymical Wedding from the shelf, something I had run across a review for in an old New Yorker and subsequently purchased (several years ago). It's not as if I don't have five or six books "under construction" but I do like to be in the middle of something so that when I finish one I don't have to get into another one; I am already there. Very mythologically based. I had no idea that "the chymical wedding" was something related to the Rosicrucians, another group I know almost nothing about. 

I am not far into it, but I am already enjoying the writing and language, something ABSOLUTELY lacking in Franzen. There is a certain John Fowles, The-Magus,-The-French-Lieutenant's-Woman-vibe here which suits my current mood. This book won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction in 1989 so it is likely not trash. 

"But once you've stepped out on to the wire it seems paltry to think of the net below."

"...escape-artist of the moral universe..."

" 'But such a day . . . . such a day," he sighed. "Time has no business here at all.' "

"Like most of my generation I'd grown up with a dangerous illusion: that once you were adult you were also, by a kind of evolutionary osmosis, a reasonably coherent individual. A person, no less."

— Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding, Jonathan Cape, London, 1989