Lory

Wow. Devastating and so important. This is not just a relational trauma memoir but a record of a spiritual battle, a fight for the grounds of reality itself. A fight in which we will all, at some point, have to make our own stand.

Let me never, never, never try to hold someone hostage to my own world view. That is the genesis of evil.

“I could have my mother's love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.” Ch 39

THIS is what the struggle of the “end times” is about, not owning stupid hoards of food and gasoline and guns, but the ability to own your own thoughts, your own understanding, and through them to connect freely with others, not walled off in fearful isolation. The “end” refers to the end of the era when this was not fully in our own hands. Now it is. A terrifying, amazing prospect. And some have made it through, but many others are falling to the temptation to give themselves up, to bury themselves and remain dead rather than risk true life.

“Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” Ch 40

Reread this in 2022, three years after my first read. At that time it was an eye-opening introduction to the concept of covert male depression, something I had encountered in family members, colleagues, and even been seeing in action on the world stage without understanding what I was experiencing. The book is extremely helpful in identifying the dysfunction that plagues so many men and in articulating a path toward healing.

This path can only begin when an individual man himself decides to stop the cycle begun by relational trauma, and go a different way, a way of facing his condition rather than running from it and covering it up with addictive defenses. We can't legislate or force such a decision. But only if enough men make it – as the inspiring stories in the book show that many men are capable of doing – can our world survive, in my opinion. Among all the crises clamoring for our attention, this is THE central crisis. The others all stem from this one, especially from the addictive defenses with which men combat their depression.

During this reread I really longed for some discussion of how covert depression also affects and presents in women. Women may be more prone to overt depression, which is a more obviously disturbing, but ironically probably less dangerous form of the disease – because it has come out into the open and there is at least a chance of seeking help. However, women are also highly prone to covert depression as well, and I suffered from it for many years.

Real describes depression as a disease of “carried emotions,” emotions generally carried over from a dysfunctional parenting relationship, and I started to wonder about this in relation to the gender gap. Far from being a “women's disease,” as it's often considered, depression may be in fact a men's disease that women frequently end up carrying for the men in their lives, covertly or overtly. Men have trouble naming, cognizing, and processing emotional experience, but they are not less emotionally needy than women – if anything, they are more needy than women. Maybe their depression infects the women around them, who have more innate tools for dealing with emotional issues. And their presentation of overt depression may at least sometimes be a cry for help on the behalf of those who are too emotionally shut-down and repressed to do it themselves.

Unfortunately this often does not lead to the healing of the real, root problem, which is fundamentally one of failure to protect and nurture the fragile human core. Without awareness of what is going on, this failure gets transmitted unconsciously down the generations, and continues to compound and be strengthened. Those who present overt symptoms can end up scapegoated by others who don't want to fully confront the issues, while others with more covert symptoms are discouraged from revealing and releasing their pain. I feel as though that is what has happened in my family, with my own covert depression, and other family members who have exposed more overt symptoms and ended up as the “symptom-bearers” for those who don't want to acknowledge the hidden connection between all of us.

But I don't want to be one of the deniers any more. I really want to wake up now, and break the cycle of depression in my own family, and I appreciate books like this that are helping me. It is not about blaming anyone, but about uncovering unconscious patterns that have been controlling our behavior and harming everyone they touch. There is so much work to be done, but it is a source of hope to have a new orientation towards the problem.

Read for the Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week at A Gallimaufry. This was quite striking as an evocation of medieval life, with all its stinks, vermin and diseases, along with the persistent human doggedness that was needed to keep people going through all that. Lively and discursive as Chaucer's pilgrims, it's not at all a conventional narrative, leading the reader along a winding road that seemingly goes off into thin air at the end.

Strangely for a story centered around a convent, there was absolutely no sense of the immanence of God nor any striving after Christian love. The primary concern of nearly everyone is money, as they struggle along to keep the convent going, preserve their small luxuries, and keep the threatening and hungry poor at bay. Not a single nun is more than mildly inoffensive, or perhaps too stupid to offend, and most of them are quite unsavory characters, up to and including a murderess. Hers is not the only sin that is never discovered or punished; in this “holy” place, the temptations of the world seem to be hiding in plain sight. I'm not sure whether this is meant as an expression of Warner's own views against religion as an empty and hypocritical exercise, or as a portrayal of the kind of corruption in the religious life that led within a couple of centuries to the Reformation.

For me, it provided an interesting excursion, with often beautiful and highly original language, but I'm not sure what to think about the underlying message.

Love the overall theme of spiritual training in a vaguely Celtic setting. The ending was a bit rushed, as with Wise Child. From former readings, I remembered most vividly the fact that Juniper's leaving a flaw in her Doran cloak that she thought no one would notice, resulted in her being injured by her enemy - a powerful image that stuck with me.

Wonderful book for lovers of books and libraries (aside from the trauma of reading about a horrible library fire), which has now provided me with a reason for wanting to go to Los Angeles, a place I never had the slightest wish to visit. Some sections, especially towards the end, were a bit thin and could beneficially have been filled out more. And Orleans's personal distaste for the lower classes does come through, as other reviewers have noted (she herself baldly states that she's afraid of homeless people), although the librarians don't generally seem to share her prejudice. Aside from these drawbacks, I found it full of fascinating information and stories and would gladly gobble up more “library books.”