boxes inside boxes

Russian dolls, those little dolls within dolls fascinate our imagination. The big doll is the momma of the next doll and the next one and the next one. Like her, I am the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of a woman I don't know at all. Sons are the babies to the fathers who were once sons, babies who had fathers who were born babies.

Stories are stories within stories within stories; and no character was born in a vacuum. We do not live our own lives. We are always taking care of our historical mothers and fathers, having fights with siblings we don't even know. Enjoying the manna of a world more mysterious than the pictures outside our windows.

Literature is a source of inspiration and reflection for people. My friends are those who love a good story. Who doesn't love a good story?

Reading allows us to make sense and unsense of our lives. We do this well: making sense or making unsense of that sense. We identify with the lives of fictional characters. Sometimes their intelligence or wisdom guide us. Sometimes we are awed by the authors who write these stories. All of it is part of why we read.

Who are we not to wonder about our lives and making sense of them? What else are we supposed to do?
Paul Harding won a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel last year. Tinkers enlightens and entertains in equal measure. It's a short book so I read only five or ten pages before bed each night, without fail, to make it last. I am nudged forward by George's imminent death, 8 days away, as the story begins. He processes his life, making final connections between himself and his father before he steps into eternity. Both tinkers, these men sell the miscellaneous and the precious, thread, twine, tobacco to men and women before our time. We don't have their lives, but George and Howard, son and father, are as knowable as our own families since their story is not only theirs.

I'm finding gems like this: O, Senator, drop your trousers! Loosen your cravat! Eschew your spats and step into that shallow, teeming world of mayflies and dragonflies and frogs' eyes staring eye-to-eye with your own, and the silty bottom. Cease your filibuster against the world God gave you.

Have you ever noticed yourself engineering a filibuster against the world? Or thinking that you must stop the filibuster someone else has against the world?

Reading an interview of Harding, I fell harder for the novel because he admires Emerson, Whitman, Melville. If you know me, you know how I swoon at their mention. (Who does that for you? Who has you swoon and wonder and buzz?)

Intensity and honesty are two requirements for literature (and people) for me. Highlighting was necessary here:

The distance between Howard and his house lengthened and, as it did, segregated him from his life as if it were time. The smell of the wood oil and kerosene from the wagon made him think of the rooms and stairways he already knew he would never enter again and he realized that what he sat upon, the swaying cart full of products for cleaning, scrubbing, patching, organizing, maintaining domestic life, was a house. I am perched on a house, he thought. He thought, God let us perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own work. God hear me weep because I let myself think all is well if I am fully stocked with both colors of shoe shine and beeswax for the wooden tables, sea sponge and steel wool for dirty dishes. God hear me weep as I fill out receipts for tin buckets, and slip hooch into coat pockets for cash, and tell people about my whip-smart sons and beautiful daughters. God know my shame as I push my mule to exhaustion, even after the moon and Venus have risen to preside over the owls and mice, because I am not going back to my family---my wife, my children---because my wife's silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving. *from Paul Harding's Tinkers

Mesmorizing is the way Harding collapses boundaries between time and space. Readers are tempted by the way these lives mirror our own. What happened when and how does it influence us? My great, great, great grandfather, who was he? A man as parched by his marriage as Howard? Probably not, but I love the idea that I am living parts of his life that influence me in ways I cannot know. His mysterious hand tinkers in my life, and ah yes, this is life and I give up eschewing and filibustering against it.

Thank you Paul Harding.