JANUARY 7, SATURDAY

READING 2

One reason that I stopped reading even as I continued to buy books I wanted to read was because when given a choice I preferred to write than to read. The reason I read so much when I was young was I was brand new in the world and wanted to discover what was here and reading was the way to do it. But at some point writing became a way of discovering the world and my response to that became my preferred way of exploring. For 40 years I have written in a journal daily, sometimes 2000 words, often 5000 words or more. I’ve never kept track but the computer keeps track for me. For long periods a wrote 20 single spaced pages a day, maybe 7000 pages a year. When I wrote by hand in long yellow legal pads this would leave quite a stack at the end of the year. These went into boxes too though over the years most of these were lost one way or another. But by the mid 80’s when I got my first Microsoft PC Jr, with almost no memory, I was hooked. Finally I could write as much as I wanted without having to take up any storage space. And of course before floppy disks and through little hard disks and then through portable hard drives I could write and take up no storage space. I first realized, and then I didn’t care, that floppy disks corrode and so does every kind of storage. They were all turning to dust. I didn’t care, I kept on writing. I never looked back, never even checked to see if anything was still there. I wasn’t interested in what I had written and no one else was, and if they were it was too late.

Writing for me was like jogging, the process of feeling my way along was pleasureable and still is. Most joggers don’t record every walk, they jog because they like jogging. I write because I like writing. I enjoy it more when I don’t share it than when I do because I don’t need to censor myself or please anyone. I am free to write whatever I want. I don’t have a goal, I don’t know where I am going, which is happening tonight as well, I am just exploring why I read and why I write and the words come out of me from somewhere as they do with everyone in the conversations that fill restaurants, the chatter of human beings when they are in groups. We all like talking. I just like writing.

So this brings me back to Elizabeth Strout and Lucy By The Sea. Lucy By The Sea is an ebook which cost $1.99 on Bookbnb. I didn’t looked at the publishing date but it all takes place during the isolation of the pandemic so it certainly isn’t out of date.

Digital books take no space at all. In fact all the books I supposedly own are stored on a huge Amazon computer somewhere and I just download a book whenever I want it. The computer keeps track of what page I am on even if I don’t come back for months.

But the odd thing is that since I started buying ebooks on Kindle I have started to read again. I have no idea why. Many people say they only like reading printed books, but apparently I only like reading digital books. But another reason could be simply that I have so much free time now and reading is a pleasureable thing to so. So last night when I couldn’t sleep I read Lucy By The Sea for an hour, and then at 2 a.m. when I couldn’t sleep I read for another hour since it doesn’t matter when I get up in the morning.

But for a person who read novels for years, didn’t read novels for years, and then started reading again when ebooks came along I admit that I missed out on a great deal. But since I’ve been buying ebooks for the last ten years I have a huge selection to read from. So I have choice wherever I am, I have a thousand books always with me.

That brings me back to Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy By The Sea so much. The story takes place during the pandemic when William, Lucy Barton’s former husband and a scientist insists on saving her life and their two daughters by taking them all out of New York and Lucy to a cottage on the sea in Maine. In this enforced isolation William and Lucy can meet people outside, masked and distanced, unable to escape each other have to face their past and their present. The book is one long conversation.

I think it is presence of the the narrator, Lucy, that I like so much as she apparently feels her way through the world in an almost aimless way, in the way people often speak in everyday conversations, as if she is speaking to a friend without knowing where she is going, just saying what comes off the top of her head. She combines this with observations on the trees, or flowers and whether the sun is shining and the sound of waves, seeming to respond to nature around her simply because responses cross her mind, not because they are particularly relevant. This apparent artlessness makes her story seem very realistic. I feel as if I am not listening to a story but simply getting to know her, feeling real empathy as if I am sitting beside her, actually more than that, feeling as if I am within her, feeling the world as she does. This feeling of intense empathy, which she also feels for the other characters makes simply feeling along with her very comforting. As I sit here alone in the dark I feel warm and just want to listen in.

I certainly am not speed reading, even if I could. Instead I want to bathe in her warm presence.

Of course this is a story with events, very intense and significant ones. But it doesn’t feel as if the author has dreamed them up, but that they are just the normal crises of every day life, things that happen to ordinary people things that women talk about on a breakfast out and try and figure out, relationships, divorces, family tensions, illness.

Yet while the big events see ordinary and usual it is the small things, the way William doesn’t listen well to her or dismisses Lucy’s anxieties or the small things that like Lucy’s premonitions, portents or supplications to her imagined mother, the loving one.

To tell you the truth I am having a problem in identifying exactly why I like being in the presence of Elizabeth Strout so much. I am guessing many people lose interest in this kind of meandering story and can’t identify why I do. But I do. And I am very glad that I am reading again and pleased that I can sit with Lucy.