RANSACK AND RAMBLE

What is it about stuff? About possessions? About having objects? I really don't understand.

As I am digging deeply into my boxes of aforementioned stuff, there are many moments of the pleasure of viewing, say, some of my vintage linens. I am glad I have them. But what do I think they say about me? Why do I need so many of them? I understand why I have lots of books and (lots and lots) of CDs although I plan to spend some time examining that, too.

I am dismayed by the accumulation and yet I am not ready to part with it, dispose of it. But I feel I need to.

Still working through Proust. That likely adds to some convoluted thinking. I think it his writing is amazing, but his analysis of Swann's mind and heart is daunting in the complicated detail.

I liked this:

"How often we sacrifice the fulfillment of a possible happiness to our impatience for an immediate pleasure."

Nearly always? A corollary to the "road to hell is paved with good intentions."

That was a bit of an aside. There is something brewing and stewing in me. I am not depressed or particularly down. Maybe this is the midlife crisis my cousin Dan thinks I am having ... the change of life. Well, yeah. I hope so. I need to change my life. I am working to change my life.

I feel that I am ransacking myself to find some thought or memory that will make all of this, my (and I do mean) so-called life. I am going through my belongings and my penchants for possessions to ... what? Free myself? Understand myself?

TRAPS AND BRANCHES

Tut! Tut! It's the dangerous time of the day. The kitties are circling, singing their siren song of afternoon nap. The bed looks awfully comfortable over there, what with the grey weather and all. I thought I would see if I could power through for a while with some writing.

The stout-hearted and smart women's reading group is tackling Proust as I have mentioned before. My reading progress is fine, although it ought to be as I have read this part of Proust several times. Me being me, I can't just go straight-ahead and read, of course, so I pulled an ancillary Proust volume off my shelf, Phyllis Rose's The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. I haven't gotten very far, but I did enjoy this observation:

"Cardinal Newman, in his earnest Victorian autobiography describes the awful moment of realizing, from a look at himself in a mirror, that he was a monophysite. Whatever a monophysite was, clearly it horrified Cardinal Newman to be one. It was something he ha never expected to turn into, any more than I had expected to become Cornelia Otis Skinner or Gregor Samsa had expected to become a bug. We work so hard to avoid moral pitfalls, professional debasements, intellectual fallacies, only to find ourselves metamorphosed, as we could have never predicted, into alien beings. We are caught at the foot by traps we overlook while keeping branches away from our eyes."


I find myself trying to see myself through others' eyes all the time. And I try to see myself through my eyes, too. Both are difficult. If I dearly had anything in mind as I sashayed forth in life, I am quite certain that this, the this I am currently living, was not it.

Ms. Rose is correct in her metaphor; I was far busier dodging the branches and howling at the moon and stars than I was paying attention to what road my feet were on. I sallied  on will and blind determination. And the curs-ed sense of Romance that plagues me to this minute.

I cannot fully articulate what I mean by Romanticism. And I'm trying. This wikipedia definition is certainly part of it:

"The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the mores of contemporary society."

Okay, back after finishing a book, drinking a cup of coffee, and researching Northrop Frye and Marcel Proust, again. This is getting long and have I come to the point yet?
No? The point is that my "rose-colored glasses," sense of adventure, and irrational belief that everything's gonna be all right have landed me at age 57 and, although things could be much much worse, everything is NOT all right. Not whining, not complaining, not helpless, not hopeless. Just telling you where I am. And asking myself why.