The Things that Exist Independently of Oneself

[We all know how I'm the Grand Poobah of Escapism, right? Call it self-medication, or putting your head in the sand, or just not being able to deal with your stuff, but I have 101 strategies to do anything other than that which I should be doing. It's not just procrastination; it's negating in my head the importance of the task. Mostly, it's the beginning of the chore I have trouble with; like many of you, I'm guessing, once they're under way, even tiresome or tedious tasks aren't as bad as we've made them out to be. You've got momentum on your side, if nothing else.]

[One of my less harmful escapes is to reread the fifty-odd books I consider "my favorites." It's likely that I churn through at least part of all of them between twice a year and once every three years. (Fifty's a wild guess; I have no idea how many there are, and the list grows and shrinks.) Many of them are old friends, without the possibility of surprise, but still holding emotional and intellectual resonance in their familiarity. In others, I discover things (insights, turns of phrase, plot details) that I missed or don't remember from previous readings.]

[They cover quite a range, too, from an Australian children's novel I don't remember ever not owning, to my Constitutional Law textbook. An atlas here, a famous meditation on the history of sex there (as with algebra, my brain's finally grown enough to handle Foucault!), and a couple of graphic novels over in the corner. Some of the authors' philosophies affected me greatly at fifteen or twenty-one or thirty, and now I've parted ways with them. I read them again anyway, arguing silently with dead white men. Some are juvenile, outdated, valuable to me for secret reasons, and on more than a few, the binding's going to hell. I have most of them with me, but a few are still at my parents'.]

[As not-so-bad a pastime as this is, it's still an escape or an avoidance. Now that I don't have cable, have lent the TV to Leah and Arthur, and have internet access only at work, I read books more than ever. Newspapers? Maybe once or twice a week. Magazines? Rarely; I think the Vanity Fair with Nicole Kidman on the cover was the first mag not of a certain genre I'd bought in close to a year. Though I do read plenty of new lit, and roam as always over the Web, I spend a lot of time in my apartment these days with books that are more about my past than about my future.]

[A few books, however, are so rich that they will always contain new surprises, so I'm not ashamed of going back to them. One standout is A Moment's Liberty, the abridged diaries of Virginia Woolf in secondhand paperback. John bought it, intending to get into V.W. the way he does get into things, but I absconded. Woolf for me is Mrs. Dalloway (and The Hours), book and film forms; the haughty avant garde of the Bloomsbury set; Bloomsbury itself, which I stalked in fits and starts during the three annual London trips; feminism, insanity, writing that broke new ground, and the idea that revolutionary things can come from roots in the Establishment. The editor (who married a relative of V.W.'s) says the diaries are as much a literary accomplishment as her novels and essays. Well, she would say that as the editor. They're definitely easier to read.]

[The diaries have held my attention these last few days (along with work; anxiety about work ending and what's next; and maybe a new guy - think a skinnier, shorter Owen Wilson, more fey than O. and a bit of a gay hippy - who presented midsummer possibilities last night), and are doing their usual job of surprising me. The following are quotes from 1923 and '24, none of which I remember reading and absorbing before yesterday:]

"The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror."
[True, as they say, that.]

[On a friend's complaint that his wife deceived him in a way he thought he couldn't forgive:]
"But he concealed some essentials; how he had treated her, so as to foster lies."
[I've seen this happen a few times. I've also seen it used as an excuse for additional, unfostered lying.]

"There is something maniacal in masculine vanity."

"...one must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now, this is very hard for young women to do." [And for some men whom many consider to be no longer young, V-Dub. - Ed.] "Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to Leonard, I never have to make the effort."
[I found that last sentence especially breathtaking, and find it difficult to imagine. Clearly, there's lots of spadework in singledom left for me.]

[With this kind of enlightenment and relief in her own selfhood and in her marriage, she still killed herself. Yes, mental illness, for which the consolation of philosophy isn't enough. Damn it.]

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