Vicariously

I got completely caught up in Hurricane Milton for some reason. I blame TikTok. Hurricane Helene shared the same name as my daughter’s, my friend blamed a windy day on it but it was only after it had passed that I learned of it. Milton was on my “For You” page before it even hit land and an influencer pointing to the dropping levels of a river backing-up endeared me to her by dint of compelling explanations and windswept hair. I followed her, refreshed the feed for hourly updates, went to bed with a prayer for Floridians (what a lovely name for residents… anyone from Saskatchewan would be jealous), and woke up wondering how they fared.

I walked the dog in the morning and the air in Winnipeg was completely still. Not calm-before-the-storm still. Just regular still. It was odd to feel the contrast be so stark, perhaps because my mind was a little drunk on vicariously living through someone else’s storm.

It is thrilling to live in a time when we can peak through a window onto people’s lives and be transported to a different reality. It’s a great distraction to spend some time poking around another person’s story. Recently I’ve been interested in the camping adventures of Fiona Macbain for example. Or when a link lead me to Jodi Ettenberg’s newsletter, I got caught up in reading about a lumbar puncture that lead to a big life change. I’m grateful in a way to be able to continue to discover people whose writing inspires me, just as, so many years ago, I felt inspired by those “dawn of blogging” bloggers… Petite Anglaise, Dooce, Mighty Girl… so many.

In the penultimate episode of “Nobody Wants This” when the Jewish mother is talking, about to tell a story, Noah, her son, turns to his girlfriend Joanne and says “There’s always a moral.”

I feel like I’m always looking for a moral. Like my writing has a dreadful subconscious gravitational pull toward moral, and I’m constantly fighting against it. Thwack, thwack, thwack. No moral. This makes for incredibly short paragraphs, like a person being curt, because were you to prod them more, words would tumble out everywhere in a cascade. What a mess. This section could end, would normally end there, at “so many…” because I like avoiding the longer thoughts underpinning the blithe observation.

Still, there should be a point. I think it’s there, in the allusion to windows, the image that is so compelling it is also a brand, the inference being both possibility and voyeurism. I catch myself feeling a little guilty for this sudden preoccupation for someone unrelated to me, and for using the thing that enables it.

I recently read Martin Luther King’s Nobel Lecture delivered in December 1964. It’s such a beautiful speech. I didn’t know it was so beautiful. My heart swelling aside, there’s a paragraph which begins:

We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say “We must not wage war.” It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.

And King refers to the story of the Argonauts in which Ulysses gets Orpheus to sing because, King explains, Orpheus’ melodies were sweeter than the Sirens’ and thus they saved themselves more intelligently from the Sirens’ lure. He applies this analogy to war and peace:

So we must fix our vision not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but upon the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war.

If the analogy can be made between such far ends of a spectrum as positive influence, Orpheus and peace on the one hand and Sirens, war and negative paths on the other, a far humbler application can be made here. It is that all kinds of valid fears and true horror stories can indeed be managed with fences of rules and warning tut-tuts, of giving in to feelings of shame and vaguely resolving to be better. But deep down I believe it is both more challenging and more rewarding to nourish the “positive affirmation” of values.

I’m endlessly buoyed by people who do so and who are generous enough to write about it. Or who make videos. (I have only to think of the organist Anna Lapwood on TikTok to be infected by her smile and exuberance!)

There was a moment there when my preferred influencer had no hurricane updates on her feed. Had her windows shattered? Was that other person’s concerns about high-rises and hurricanes right? Was the wifi out from night to morning? No… none of that. My dear influencer had been sleeping. And good on her!

If I’m to conclude this mini-essay, it’s with that almost comical juxtaposition… a body that needs sleep, a mind that’s tirelessly curious. Governing both is a soul, a heart, a thing that can elevate the physical sleeping and eating and moving to resting and nourishing and caring. To contrast the Sirens’ call of mere distraction with an admiration and gratitude for the creativity that allows me to share in someone else’s life, and the value in that. I do not delude myself by thinking this will solve big problems, you need King for that. But I think that just as much as anybody else, I need to be reminded that joy is a flame whose benefits radiate outward.

How to begin: When I feel my enthusiasm flagging for a book, I Google "What's so great about [the book's title]" and often find someone's appreciation provides new encouragement to keep going. This Ted-Ed video by Sam Slote, on the subject of Ulysses, is excellent.

A few quotes:

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of a rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable. (p 533)

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood.

What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow? (p 789)

Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and afterwards seconded by the father? Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.

With what success had he attempted direct instruction? She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest, comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated with error.

Further thoughts: Ulysses is everywhere. I smiled when listening to Orwell's Roses in which Solnit quotes a letter he wrote to a girlfriend beginning with "Have you read Ulysses yet?" I don't read the books on this list in order to analyze them too closely. (There's How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton in PDF format for that!) I read them to see what I notice. I like how Francine Prose writes "to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another (...) will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art." And so, while there are many guides to help with reading Ulysses, (including a map drawn by Nabokov) I prefered just jumping in and letting the experience wash over me.