A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Louisa May Alcott’s Moods, which may be the first book that I’ve read, certainly the first nineteenth-century novel, where the main lesson is “Don’t make important romantic decisions on the basis of abstract moral values.”

Sylvia marries a man who has every possible virtue one could want in a husband, except that of being the man she loves, and despite all his excellences she never grows to love him. And none of it would have happened in the first place if the man Sylvia actually loved had the guts to break his own prior engagement cleanly, rather than trying to be “fair” to a woman he no longer loved by giving her a year to reform her character.

It may be an exaggeration to say that “All’s fair in love and war,” but I do think that in love more than perhaps anywhere else, one has the right - maybe even the moral imperative - to be unfair and selfish and insist on pleasing oneself. No matter how deserving someone may be, if you don’t love them you don’t love them, and it’s better to acknowledge that fact and break up rather than drag the relationship along hoping that someday you’ll love them like they deserve. You don’t love them like they deserve. Let them go.

What I’m Reading Now

Patricia Storace’s Dinner with Persephone, because someone mentioned it on The Toast (did you see The Toast is closing? THE TOAST IS CLOSING, LIFE AS WE KNOW IT IS OVER) and the title made me think it would be a whimsically charming travelogue about Greece.

It is not whimsically charming. It is sad and wistful, and I’m not sure what it’s wistful for, which is really worse than being wistful for something in particular, and I’m also not sure if Greece is just a sad country or if Storace is a sad person who carries her sadness with her like a turtle carries its shell.

It reminds me of Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, because Weiner gets his grumpiness all over everywhere he visits. It’s a completely accidental manifesto about how the real journey to happiness is internal, because otherwise you just drag your unhappy carcass all over the face of the globe and are sad there instead of at home.

(Actually I think this is not always true, and that there are circumstances where moving away from a bad situation can help make someone much happier. But if the bad situation is “being a born Eeyore,” then moving is not going to help much.)

I’m also reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and it is a light and frothy relief after the the rest of this week’s sadness-drenched reading.

I can’t believe I’m saying that about a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel. I have always had a prejudice against Hawthorne because (1) we read The Scarlet Letter in tenth grade English, (2) he wrote letters whining about the “hordes of scribbling women,” deriding their work because he envied their sales, and (3) he was totally mean to Herman Melville, who thought he had made a BFF only to discover that Nathaniel Hawthorne was actually a withholding bastard with no more feeling in his heart than an iceberg.

Actually (3) is probably unfair, because it’s not like Hawthorne signed up for this BFF thing only to back out; he just had a nice chat with Melville on a hillside one time, and Melville got WAY too excited about finally finding a friend who understood.

Melville: Soulmates?
Hawthorne: Uh, we could exchange letters once a month maybe, how about that?
Melville: SOULMATES.
Hawthorne: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN, I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m going to give Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye another go. The first time I got it on the same day as I got three other holds, and something had to give, so back The Long Goodbye went.