December 2024

There were 7 posts published in December 2024 (this is page 1 of 1).

Killers on tape

I finished up Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol yesterday. Actually, I should say that Dead Souls finished itself. The book really does just stop.

From what I’ve been able to gather about Gogol’s fairly contentious relationship with his book, it appears that it was part of a planned trilogy that would mirror Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the main character going through Hell, Purgatory, and finally Heaven. If that’s the case, then I suppose the part of the book that was finished represents a journey through the Inferno.

That could mean that Dead Souls is less of a realistic representation of life in rural Russia in the 19th century than it is a moral allegory. You could look at all the people the main character meets — the ones from whom he’s trying to buy dead souls — as sinners, or people who have made the choice to live a life that is, by Gogol’s standards, sinful. They are (Chichikov included) greedy, wrathful, prideful, and certainly fraudulent.

The end of the published portion of Dead Souls, which may be (I’m not sure on this at all) the beginning of Chichikov’s journey through Purgatory, does have a shift in tone, as Chichikov meets a well to do landowner who is turning a tidy profit with his estate. Chichikov begins to emulate the man, and it may be that he’s moving away from his fraudulent ways and….into a life of ceaseless toil? I don’t know.

You can’t help but wonder what Gogol’s Russian heaven would have been like. Probably not accurate enough for Gogol’s liking, since people say he burned part of the book because it wasn’t holding up to his religious standards.

Sarah and I have a beautiful Bengal named Jolene. (Here she sits, defiant, after being kindly asked not to sit on my laptop.)

Jolene is a lovely cat. Affectionate, vocal, and blind as a bat. While most cats will choose to sit at windows and look at birds, Jolene always goes in for more tactile experiences. She loves boxes and plastic bags, as well as anything sticky — tape, post-it notes, stickers. She can’t get enough of them.

Last night I left about a foot of scotch tape hanging off the corner of a wall in the kitchen, about two feet up, just above cat height. Before bed, I jiggled it around a bit and Jolene came screaming in. “Tape?” she asked. “Did I just hear tape?”

“You sure did! Now kill it,” I commanded. I didn’t, however, show her exactly where it was.

I mostly did this out of curiosity. Would Jolene be able to find the string of scotch tape? It wouldn’t be easy for her, as blind as she is, but Jolene loves tape and there was a good chance she’d hunt it until she found it. And what would she do if she did?

When I went downstairs to make coffee this morning, I noticed that the tape was gone from the wall. It wasn’t long before Jolene came trotting into the kitchen to place a wadded-up ball of spit-covered plastic at my feet.

“Lose something?” Jolene asked haughtily.

Or, more likely, being a generous provider, Jolene was sharing her kill with me.

She sat near the ball of tape, purring contentedly, and I wondered if I’ve ever truly loved anything as much.

My next book will be #567 on the list, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, which I read once (perhaps?) when I was in elementary school.

I know the generalities of the plot, but I don’t remember very much detail. As I recall, though, there was a film adaptation of London’s White Fang staring Ethan Hawke that came out when I was, what, 10? That prompted me to go down a rabbit hole of boy-in-the-woods books like White Fang, Hatchet, and My Side of the Mountain. I think I tackled The Call of the Wild during that same period.

The Call of the Wild isn’t exactly about a boy in the woods — it’s about a dog in the woods — but it’s the same sort of adventure. I’m excited to see if grabs my attention the way Treasure Island did.

Let’s go, nostalgia!

It’s a little dark

My friend Tony and I went to see Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu last night at the Alamo Drafthouse, which is one of those new-style movie theaters that serves food and drinks and has big, comfy chairs. I had been looking forward to Nosferatu since it was first announced ages ago, mostly because I’ve really enjoyed Eggers’ other movies — particularly The VVitch.

Nosferatu was too…dark. I don’t mean in terms of its story or the inherent violence of a vampire movie, but that the movie tries to build tension with copious use of shadows. When it was over, my friend and I both remarked that somebody could make a cut of the movie that was only the scenes in which you couldn’t see anything, and it would probably amount to 15-20 minutes of video.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with making a vampire movie super-dark, but it’s an artistic shot in the foot for Eggers. Here’s a guy who makes amazing compositions with all of his scenes, and half the time the screen is filled with stuff you can’t see. It’s like if Bob Ross were to paint 1/3 of a picture all black. “Let’s have a happy little shadow, maybe with a happy little eldritch being in there. It’s your world!”

A good movie, though, and one that I’ll watch again when it comes to streaming.

Nikolai Gogol probably would have loved Nosferatu. (Slick transition!) When reading about some of his other works written before Dead Souls, I came across a short story called “The Nose,” which is about a nose that leaves a man’s face and goes off to start a life of its own. There are a few different PDF versions you can find.

Dead Souls doesn’t seem to have any of that same magical realism, but there is something fairly macabre about a man going around the countryside buying dead people. So far, that’s been the entirety of the story. Chichikov (the main character) bounces from estate to estate, meeting a bunch of colorful characters who enter the narrative and disappear just as quickly, never to be heard from again.

What’s impressing me is how funny it is. I rarely expect 100+ year-old novels to be truly humorous, but Dead Souls sure is. I laughed aloud when one of Chichikov’s “business partners” got arrested after blatantly cheating at checkers.

Gogol himself was also a strange bird. From what I understand, he didn’t just not finish Dead Souls, he seemingly burned part of it in a fit of religious fervor. He had a “spiritual awakening” toward the end of his life, became an ascetic, starved himself, and then said, “This book isn’t serving God!” Then he tossed part of his manuscript into the fireplace and promptly died. (Or did he?)

That may be a lot of talk, though. We really don’t know that much about Gogol’s personal life. He never married, was horrible at lectures, and apparently had a fear of being buried alive.

It’s said that, when Gogol was exhumed to be re-buried in a graveyard for fancy people, they found his body lying on its side in the coffin. Is it possible that Gogol was actually still breathing when they put him in the ground?

Or was he, perhaps…Nosferatu!

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

I had a tough time meeting my reading goal yesterday. Being on winter break can really throw me for a loop, and any productive habits I have developed are likely to get tossed out the window in favor of bumbling around the house, eating junk food, and taking frequent naps.

I try not to be too hard on myself about it, but I do feel that midwestern yearning to be busy all the time, which mostly just amounts to my feeling guilty about eating carrot cake in bed at 2 in the afternoon.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (#378 on the list) has been entertaining so far, but is steeped in the quirks of Russian literature that make it difficult for modern readers to approach. The story follows a guy named “Chichikov” as he travels around the countryside buying up “dead souls.” This might sound like the plot to a bit of bizarre magical realism, but really it’s a satire of Russian bureaucracy. Chichikov, the hero, is running a scam.

In the early/mid 19th century, landowners in Russia also owned the serfs who worked their land. The government would tax the landowners based on how many serfs (“souls”) they owned, but the census that counted those serfs was taken infrequently, and if a serf died during the interim, the government wouldn’t list them as dead until the next census was taken. Thus, it was possible for landowners to be forced to pay taxes on their dead workers.

Chichikov, hoping to make a quick buck, realizes this and goes around asking landowners if they’ll sell him their “dead souls,” or the rights to those serfs who are deceased but still listed on the census. Practically, Chichikov will own nothing, but on paper he’ll have hundreds of serfs.

Landowners are, most frequently, glad to be rid of their “dead souls,” because it means they have to pay fewer taxes. A few, though, try to make Chichikov pay through the nose.

What’s the endgame of this gambit? Well, Chichikov plans to take the deeds he has to these serfs and secure a loan against them, after which he will disappear with the cash. When the bank tries to recoup their losses, they’ll find they now own nothing but a bunch of corpses.

I would be excited to find out if the plan works, but nobody knows how it ends. Nikolai Gogol died before he could finish Dead Souls. The copy I have just sort of…quits in Part 2.

Why did anyone bother to publish an unfinished novel? Gogol was just that popular, I suppose. If anyone found an unfinished work by, say, Charles Dickens after he died, there’s no doubt that they’d publish it, climax or no. And, as a matter of fact, Dickens’ last novel — The Mystery of Edwin Drood — was published in its unfinished state.

I’m not a huge fan of this practice. That is to say, I’d much rather read books that have an ending, but what can you do?

Dead Souls is entertaining so far, and it’s strange to think that people think of this as a “realistic depiction” of life in rural Russia. Some of the characters are so over-the-top it’s hard not to think of them as absurdist.

Georgia for your health

I spent the morning reading a bit more about Robert Louis Stevenson, who, it turns out, moved to Samoa due to chronic health problems. It seems to me that it was a common thing in the past to suggest that people suffering from bronchitis or other respiratory infections were told to go someplace else “for their health.” Not only did Stevenson live in Samoa for his health, he also spent time living in France.

Imagine! Your doctor pulls a thermometer out from under your tongue, looks at it, sighs, and says, “You’d better move to Paris.” He says it “Pair-ee.”

The nineteenth century really was a different world. Seriously, though, when did doctors stop telling people to get some “sea air” or “more sun?” And was that all quackery, or does it actually help sick people to move half-way across the globe? I wish doctors still did that. “You’ve got a cold. Here’s some heroin and a ticket to Hawaii.“

With the healthcare system we have in America, though, your GP would probably tell you to go somewhere shitty, like Texas. Or Georgia.

Now that I’ve finished up Treasure Island, I’ll be switching gears a bit and tackling a seminal work of Russian literature, Dead Souls by Nokolai Gogol.

This is a book that I know next-to-nothing about, and I’m looking forward to “going in blind.” I can already guess that I’m going to get confused by the characters’ names — Russian names all sort-of blend together when I read Russian novels, and this book has been described as “Dickensian,” which means there’s going to be a britzka-load of characters.

Still. Russian literature has always been surprising. When I read The Brothers Karamazov way back in the day, I was amazed at both the humor and the characterization. I’ve always had a bit of a preconception that Russian literature is as dry and bland and a frozen parsnip, but there’s always something that winds up amazing me.

I hope Dead Souls does the same.

Mornings for the past few days have been filled with dense fog and unearthly quiet. The days between Christmas and New Years are a kind of temporal limbo, and I’m afraid its affect the weather patterns.

Home is the sailor…

Here’s a poem called “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky,
    Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
    And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
    Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
    And the hunter home from the hill.

If you think that’s morbid: The poem is also the epitaph on his grave stone where he lies buried on a mountainside in Samoa. It honestly reads as if he wrote it specifically for the purpose, doesn’t it? Like he knew he was going to die and thought, “Better have some fire-ass lyrics ready!”

Here’s what his grave looks like:

If you had to write a poem for your tombstone, what sort of poem would it be?

Reading Treasure Island (#870 on the list) has been an absolute treat so far. A lot of the books I’m going to be tackling for this project aren’t what you’d call “fun.” Some of them, I know, are going to be a lot more like “work” than the actual work I do. (Looking at you, Proust!)

Treasure Island is a straight-up adventure story, though, and I’ve honestly wanted to keep the story rolling, staying up late in some instances to listen to it. I feel…young again (?) when I’m tucked into bed listening to the adventures of young Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver.

I’ve been both reading a physical copy of the book and listening to the audiobook version, which is something I’ve been doing a lot of with books I’ve read recently. I mostly listen to audiobooks when I’m falling asleep, or, as happens with stark regularity, when I randomly wake up at 3 AM and can’t get back to sleep.

I kind of enjoy reading in multiple formats. I particularly like it when I wake up in the morning and find out how many “pages” I listened to at night — it gives me a strange sense of accomplishment.

I’ll never understand people who don’t like audiobooks or say that listening to audiobooks is not “reading,” but I know they exist. The argument seems to be that media aren’t interchangeable and can’t be labeled as “reading,” which is just semantics. I wonder if the clown who wrote that article thinks reading in “braille” doesn’t count because you don’t use your eyes?

Like many people probably told Robert Louis Stevenson towards the end of his life, “That’s a strange hill to die on.”

“Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tsu

I’ve never understood the idiom, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Book covers have a lot of useful information on them: there’s a synopsis, author information, maybe some helpful photos that’ll key you into the genre — one of the fundamental goals of a book cover is to help you judge whether or not you want to read that book.

The gist of the saying is that what’s inside matters more than what’s on the outside, but you can’t dismiss the elements of a book that aren’t related to its words. You’ve got to think about the whole package, including the cover.

When I was picking out the copy of “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tsu (#30 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die) that I was going to use, one of my primary concerns was the way the book felt. It had to be something that felt good in my hand, something sturdy with a little bit of give to it, something elegant and yet robust. There’s no easy way to describe the way a good book feels when you hold it, but you know the feeling when it strikes you.

At Barnes & Noble (the only local bookstore that had any copies of Tao), I was able to find four or five different editions. They were all slim — the book is not long — and had a variety of covers and weights of paper. Some were flimsy, some were sturdy. Some were glossy, some were matte. I collected them all and took the small stack of books to the Starbucks in the back of the store, ordered a latte, and sat down to inspect each one.

Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
Mastering yourself is true power.
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

I felt silly doing so. There’s something inherently funny about a middle-class white guy getting into an ancient Chinese philosophy, and there’s something ironic about doing so in a corporate coffee shop in the back of a corporate bookstore. That didn’t bother me, though. You’ve got to find silly, frivolous things to do with your time. Things that would baffle an outside observer, things that you can’t account for. A certain percentage of your life ought to be spent on a figurative trampoline, bouncing pointlessly for the sheer enjoyment of the act. In my case, I like to sit down in coffee shops and read translations of books whose first lines essentially tell you that you won’t understand what you’re reading.

Flipping through each of the editions of the “Tao Te Ching,” I noticed there were some fairly stark differences in their translation. This is not only because the text was originally written in 2,500 year-old Classical Chinese, but because many of the phrases and ideas don’t have one-to-one English equivalents. “Tao” is typically translated as way or path, even though the actual word is something more ephemeral, but every book had stark differences on a line-by-line basis. Were they accurate? Did the meaning change based on who had translated that particular text?

I read a lot of translated works and have thought about this question frequently, ultimately deciding that it doesn’t matter one bit. One can never know — it’s best just to judge the translation on its own merits and don’t fall into the rabbit hole of, “Was this correctly translated?” Meaning is lost in translation, but new meaning is also constructed, and (short of mastering both languages) you’ll never understand how.

The text upon which I settled was a small paperback edition with a black cover featuring a rocky outcropping in front of a foggy forest scene. I picked it because I liked its wording of the first chapter, and also because the paper was the right weight. It was the kind of book I could see myself annotating with a pen in the early morning when I was taking a train to work, underlining passages that I would ponder while looking at the countryside speeding by.

(I should point out that this image only exists in my mind. In Nebraska, trains haul corn or coal and little else. There are maybe a handful of passenger trains in this state, but they are kept more for novelty than practicality.)

Each of the chapters of the “Tao Te Ching” reads like an instructional poem, as if part of a poetry collection meant to teach you how to live a life of virtue. (This, in fact, is not far from how it was originally used.) The meanings of the poems, however, are quite elusive.

Here’s how it starts:

ONE

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

If that seems confusing, don’t worry — you’re not alone in your confusion. It’s meant to be confounding. The first line points out that you can’t express the Tao (“way”) in words. In a certain sense, it’s saying that you won’t learn about the Tao by reading a book. You can only live the Tao; it’s an experience, not words.

My reading of the “Tao Te Ching” was not a quick one. I’d been feeling pretty overwhelmed with the amount of work I had taken on over the past few months, so I’d decided to incorporate a little bit of meditation into my daily routine. Nothing too fancy or time-consuming; I meditated each morning for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Was it helpful? I think so. I’ve gotten better at noticing times when I’m feeling anxious and have been able to ground myself. Reading the “Tao Te Ching” was a part of this practice, and I’d read a few chapters every day before work.

I also visited websites that offered interpretation of the Tao. While I would read each chapter and try to form my own understanding, it was helpful to be given some context. This website, I thought, was one of the most useful, offering chapter-by-chapter analysis and a clear “reading” of each section.

I also listened to a Taoist podcast called, “What’s This Tao All About?” Mostly, I listened to it while walking home from work or taking strolls through my neighborhood.

While I was walking, a troubling thought entered my mind.

Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.
― Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching

I was worried that the whole thing was a scam. There are a lot of “self-help” philosophies out there that try to sell you on the idea that there’s something wrong with you and reading a book can fix it. While I don’t believe that Lao Tsu is a 2,500 year-old shyster, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that his philosophy has been co-opted by people who just want to sell books and videos and online subscriptions.

People who are looking for some sort of spiritual awakening are often vulnerable, and vulnerable people are easy to take advantage of. So are travelers, and you’ve got to watch out for fraudsters the same way you’d watch out for bears if you went hiking in the wilds of Wyoming.

Years ago, when I was backpacking through Cambodia, I had a similar feeling — a feeling that I was about to get scammed. My friend and I had just arrived in Siem Reap on a bus from the Vietnamese border, and it had been a horrible ride; passengers were tucked into seats like Tetris pieces, our legs jammed against the seats in front of us, our bags stored practically on top of us.

When the doors of the bus opened, we tumbled out of the vehicle and the driver shouted, “Jenga!” My friend and I did our best to stretch away the soreness while we looked around this new city.

While it isn’t always the case, you can generally tell how wealthy a country is by how clean its streets are. Only wealthy parts of the world bother to keep gutters clean; poor countries don’t hire cleaners to look after something as frivolous as the side of a road — they need that money for more important matters. By that rubric, Cambodia was not a wealthy place. The streets were lined with red dust and garbage, greasy and unkempt. We were dropped off in a parking lot on the side of a highway, and it was filled with tuk tuk drivers who were calling out to us. By name.

“Toad, hey!” they called. “Toad, you need a ride!” They weren’t asking.

We were quick to realize that the company through which we’d purchased bus tickets had likely called ahead to let others know the names of the passengers who would be arriving. The tuk tuk guys were trying to sell us rides, hoping that their use of our names would oblige use to ride with them. It was a tactic that preyed upon travelers who were insecure, unsure of how to proceed once they’d arrived.

While I was angry about it, this is just something that happens when you travel. People will take advantage of you in small ways, trying to sell you kitschy garbage, overcharging you at restaurants, leading you into obvious tourist traps where “art students” try to sell you paintings. In the worst cases, they will try to steal from you or (very, very rarely) abduct you. It’s something that you just have to accept, something that you have to prepare for and be wary of.

In our case, we did end up taking a ride on one of the predatory tuk tuks. The bumpy trip was only about $8, and it saved us having to walk two miles to our hostel.

Plus — and this is important — we were relatively wealthy people and the locals treat you well if you play along. Siem Reap is a tourist town; a lot of people there make their living selling tuk tuk rides, food, and drinks. There’s no use in angering a bunch of people who only want a few bucks.

While I had the sense that Taoism (or pseudo-Taoism) could be somewhat scammy, the tell-tale sign of a scam never seemed to materialize. In other words, there never came a point when anyone asked me for my credit card number. Sure, the podcasts I listened to asked for donations, but most small-scale podcasts do that. And the websites that are about Taoism all look like they were optimized for Netscape Navigator and certainly don’t ask you to subscribe.

The Taoist teachings you find in the “Tao Te Ching” are fairly difficult to parse. They all read like poetic parables that focus on juxtaposition and contradiction — paradoxical elements abound, and the overall message is about quitting the struggle. You’re advised to be like water, not to resist, not to seek wealth. Just be.

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everyone will respect you.
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Tomorrow is going to happen whether you break your back trying or not, so what’s the use in breaking your back? Things will work themselves out; they have throughout all of history.

“They’re basically advocating for laziness,” I told Sarah. “‘Action through inaction,’ that sort of thing.”

“I can get behind that,” Sarah said.

“I mean…yeah. There is something satisfying about a philosophy that tells you not to worry so much and not to constantly try to improve.” Or, at least, after a semester of extremely hard work, it feels good to have a philosophy that tells you to take a break.

Hence it is said:
The bright path seems dim;
Going forward seems like retreat;
The easy way seems hard;
The highest Virtue seems empty
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

All of this, though, is completely at odds with the way most Americans live their lives. We are an awful bunch of try-hards, each of us hell-bent on “self-improvement.” Even as I read about Taoism, I constantly thought about how I could use this to become a better person. I pictured myself with a shaved head, perhaps wearing robes, perhaps walking through a jungle or a rock garden. I’d be a whole new man, a man to whom stress was a forgotten dream.

That won’t happen, of course. Even if I wanted to change, to become a full-fledged Taoist, I think the community I live in is fundamentally opposed to the transformation. It’d be like an ice cube spontaneously forming in the middle of a hot tub — theoretically possible, but utterly unlikely.

Still, there’s a side of me that longs for it. It’s the same side of me that will occasionally listen to a lecture by Alan Watts and dream of becoming a monk. One of those ascetics in wilds of Tibet, or perhaps Japan, who do walking meditation and only eat what people give them. I wonder if those kinds of monks are allowed to read books. They probably don’t get to go to Barnes & Noble, but there certainly can’t be teachings that go against libraries.

When those monks pick out what they’re going to read, do you suppose they consider the cover of the book they’re holding? The weight of the paper? The flexibility of the spine? Perhaps they’ve transcended all that to live on a spiritual plane that precludes such judgements. Paper is paper, and words are words. Trying to find books you enjoy is just needless struggle.

Or, more likely, they simply don’t worry about such things.

(I just looked it up and, yes, monks of both Buddhist and Taoist flavors can go to the libraries. It depends upon the sect, but many/most of them value education and don’t prohibit reading for pleasure.)

“Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale Hurston

For weeks now, I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to write about Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” #462 on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. It’s gotten to the point that I’ve started reading books on literary theory to get inspiration. Most books on the subject are awfully dry and filled with the sort of academic jargon English departments are notorious for. 10-dollar words like “philology” and “hermeneutics.”

The issue isn’t that the book is hard to understand. Sure, the dialogue is written in dialect, but it’s not difficult for the average reader to comprehend. And the issue isn’t that the subject matter is inherently depressing, even though you do feel somewhat drained as you flip through the pages. A lot of bad things happen, and it can be difficult to read such a novel when we live in a world with so many bad things happening. 

That isn’t the problem with my blogging about the book, though.

The problem is something usual, something that I experience with a lot of the books I read that are on this list: This book absolutely isn’t written for me. As a straight, white, American male, I am about as far from the “target audience” for “Their Eyes Were Watching God” as you can possibly get.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

I feel like I’m bogged down by thinking of this blog as a “book review” blog, which is not what I want it to be. 

I don’t want to give books five-star ratings. I don’t want to sell you on a story. I don’t even really want to give plot synopses, to be honest, although it’s hard to think of a way around it. What I want to do is have a chronicle of my journey (if you want to call it that) toward reading these 1,000 books. Something I can look back on in seven years’ time and think, “Oh, that was right around when the election happened and the whole world went to shit. My how time flies.“

The whole thing is steeped in nostalgia. Nostalgia for a time when blogs were popular, when the internet wasn’t an ad-riddled, subscription-based nightmare of trackers and trolls and propaganda. Nostalgia for when we didn’t refer to this sort of thing as “content.” Nostalgia for when the internet was populated by people and you had a sense of community.

It seems as if we’re intent on killing that version of the internet. More’s the pity.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

Anywho.

Zora Neale Hurston died in poverty after being nearly forgotten by the literary community. She had become popular during the Harlem Renaissance, but many people thought her work focused on the wrong topics — she tried to capture the everyday lives of black Americans rather than writing about social justice and the struggle for equality, which, naturally, were prominent topics in African American literature.

This is a simplification, of course, but sometimes books go against what are considered “modern trends” and fall out of public consciousness. This was the case for Hurston and many other “Harlem Renaissance” artists.

After Hurston died, scholars like Alice Walker “rediscovered” her writing and realized its uniqueness and importance. Suddenly, Hurston’s work was like a diamond that had been found in the garden, and Hurston has since become somewhat of an American staple — she is still taught in many U.S. classrooms, including my own.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

I often think about what it’d be like to be forgotten in that way. It isn’t quite the same, but recently I’ve been wishing I could experience it. I’m not saying I’d like to disappear, but I’ve been having this desire to…hibernate, if that makes any sense. I’d like to experience what it’s like to crawl into a cave, cover myself with leaves, and sleep for three to six months. 

In fact, I have been sleeping a lot more than I usually do. When I get home from school, the first thing I do is crawl under the covers for a quick nap. After dinner, I also go to bed relatively early, often sleeping for 9-10 hours.

Is it seasonal depression? Maybe. Nights are getting longer, and the weather has finally turned into the bitter cold that’ll be tapping at our windows around until March. Ultimately, though, I think I’m just craving the feeling of sanctuary you get when you crawl into a warm bed in winter. The coziness, the safety. Much like I imagine a hibernating bear feels when her nature tells her it’s time to go into her cave. No expectations, no responsibilities, just me and my earthen hovel and my leafy blanket.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

It’s interesting to consider the impact of a book upon someone who isn’t the book’s target demographic. I said earlier that “Their Eyes Were Watching God” wasn’t “for me,” but that thought is slightly more complicated than it seems on the surface. Whatever literary theory you subscribe to (which may be no theory at all, and God bless you), it’s difficult to read a book if you can’t put yourself into it. There have to be characters, themes, settings, plot points, whatever that resonate with you. Or, at least, that’s the way our modern education system has trained us to approach literature. Right or wrong, we read books and ask ourselves, “How does this make you feel?”

In the case of Zora Neale Hurston, I can recognize that there are elements in the novel that readers might identify with, but they just don’t hit me the way I think they’re supposed to. I don’t know any people who are like these characters, I’ve never had these sorts of marital issues, and I’ve never been to Florida.

I would probably say that it’s a “difficult” book for these reasons, but there are others. There’s a lot of dialect in Their Eyes. It’s enough that you often get the impression that you’re reading two separate books.

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

The prose itself is not written in this voice, but whenever we hear a character talk, that’s what it looks like. It made the novel an interesting and…er, novel experience, constantly switching between standard prose and prose in dialect, and there are many people in American society who use a variety of voices when they speak. Depending on the context, people can often have what you might call “dual personalities.”

Some of my students are prime examples. To hear them speak in the hallways is one thing, but the way they talk inside the classroom makes them come off as entirely different people. Are teenagers everywhere like this? Probably, to some extent. Teenagers all over the world act one way with their peers and another way around adults.

That, I suppose, is something we all can identify with. While all of us don’t have modes of speaking with such dramatic and noticeable differences, there are times when all of us feel like we are someone we’re not.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

In my case, I often feel like I’m pretending to be a “good teacher.” I’m not sure if I even want to be what I’d call a “good teacher.” I’m a competent teacher — don’t get me wrong — but the line between “competent” and “good” is one that, in my own mind, I’m not sure I can cross. “Competent” teachers have to do a lot, but “good” teachers take on extra. Often times, they take on more than is healthy. 

There are teachers at my school who are there 11 or 12 hours a day, teaching regular classes and then doing sports or activities after. They work on weekends, organize field trips, do fundraisers, and generally throw everything they’ve got into the teaching profession. I do care about my students, and I do everything I can to make my classes engaging and useful, but when that final bell rings, I want to go home and do other things. I want to have a life outside the building.

When I first became a teacher, things were different. I wanted a career I could throw myself into with every element of my being. I wanted to be like one of the characters on The West Wing, a kind-of Sam Seaborn who sleeps, eats, and breathes his work. The problem with shows like that is the fallacy that there are intelligent and moral people in charge of things. In reality, there are no whiz-kid doctors who’ll stay up all night to diagnose your medical condition, there are no tough-as-nails police detectives working overtime to catch the guy who broke into your house, and there certainly are no brilliant political officers who are trying to make the world a better place.

I know it’s putting awfully high expectations on myself when I say that I need to work 60-hour weeks in order to be “good” at my job. One thing that you learn if you study mindfulness or Eastern philosophies is that a person should be okay with being “okay.” You don’t need to be brilliant — it’s enough just to exist.

That’s just a tough pill to swallow when you live in a country filled with bozos who brag about how little sleep they’re getting or how much overtime they’re putting in. As if it’s some kind of badge of honor to work yourself to the bone for a system that couldn’t give less of a shit about you.

Zora Neale Hurston, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”

Last night, a freezing rain fell that covered the whole city in a layer of ice. Sarah and I went out to get some drive-thru chicken and quickly realized that we wouldn’t be able to get out of our neighborhood — there was no way to drive up even the slightest hill. We saw cars hopping curbs, cars that were stuck at intersections unable to move forward or backward, people who’d gone out for a walk and were slipping helplessly down the sidewalks.

Some nights you’re just stuck. Nature will always remind you of that fact.