Bringing more beauty (Kate Chopin) — and they all lived happily ever after

I do believe I need to celebrate … there is strawberry champagne that has been sitting in the fridge since Christmas but at 11 in the morning it is a little too early for me to consider uncorking. I have finished a book – an unusual occurrence this year to be sure. I finished Harry Potter last night. There is nothing like positive leverage to get you going – in this case the positive leverage of a new book I’ve been dying to read for ages.

I love nothing more than sharing the beauty I find in case other people find it beautiful too (the Hudson River School art is case in point), or sharing thought provoking stuff that may provoke others.

In the beauty department you really must check out Lydecker’s latest series of poems called “The Bubble and the Moon”. They really are exquisite.

Last night I also started “The Awakening”, which is a classic in American literature by author Kate Chopin. I don’t know the exact date of publication, but this book is over 100 years old. I have only read 40 pages so far (it’s quite a small book) but I’m already swept up in it’s atmosphere. It is very evocative of the turn of the century – the romanticism of women in muslin dresses, the languidity of a holiday in the heat of summer … how can I resist? As a lover of Debussy and the like, Art Nouveau and the Pre-Raphaelites … the most romantic time period of all (sigh). This book elicited shock and angry responses from critics … it (and it’s author) was banned from some places. This book was considered erotic for its time.

I share here one very short chapter that, in reading last night, touched down deep in my soul.

“Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her.

A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her – the light which, showing the way, forbids it.

At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.

In short, Mrs Pontellier was beginning to realise her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognise her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight–perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.

But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in the tumult!

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamouring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”
Ah. What recognition I sense in this. What a beautiful, and important, book. How few of us ever jump off that hamster wheel of endless searching for God-knows-what and self reflection (of those of us that jump on and run interminably in the first place).