Reading and Writing in a Mad Age

Origo, Sarton, and Nemirovsky plus two short books

Woman Reading, Torajiro Kojima, 1921

“A still, lovely summer’s evening; the grapes ripening, the oxen ploughing. Only man is mad.” Iris Origo

There’s a haunting passage in Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, juxtaposing the horrors of war with the banality of a lovely spring day. Something about a cat in a lane and yellow flowers — I can’t find it, but it’s clear as a bell in my memory since reading it years ago. The sun comes up, the cat bathes, the flowers bloom. Only man is mad.

I want to write. I long to fill pages with the tangle in my head — food and memories, my body and my grandmother. I’d like to write about light, fire, worry, and wine. But the world burns and the worst of us spoil the everyday.

I want the unspoiled everyday back.

These years have been a nonstop circus, a festival of madness and bad reports. The noise outside the kitchen window has been so great and terrible, it’s impossible to ignore. It curdles the custard and sours the sweets. We can’t seem to look away from this increasingly rotten national moment, and it’s contributing to a sickness in the soul of the nation.

The staggering offenses pile up so fast that we reel from each shock, unprepared for the next. Anyone paying attention knows that the American experiment has always been driven by greed, built on racism and misogyny, rife with corruption. That is not new. In the past, however, it seemed more cloak-and-dagger, more backroom cigars and handshakes. The public face of previous marauders was a little more hail-fellow-well-met, the better to fool the beleaguered sheep. And, usually, a few heroes and heroines rose up to check the madness. Today’s public faces, for better or worse, openly lie and spin and spit — they sneer and wag their fingers at us while their machine plunders away. We await our heroes and heroines.

Maybe it’s better to know our enemies.

In an effort at distraction, I read two engaging journals: A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 by Iris Origo; and May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, from 1973. Each, in its way, suggests that our current panic is not unusual. Each is instructive in ways of looking, and making sense of outside madness. Though seated in very different time and place, these women distill the reality of managing the personal in the harsh light of the political.

It’s unnerving to identify with Origo’s journal of the Italian run-up to WWII, with its spectator’s analysis of Fascist sentiment, media complicity, and misplaced trust. In the summer of 1939, she writes: “It is curious — the unanimity with which everyone here refuses to believe in the possibility of war.” It can’t happen here. It can, of course, and it did. Some saw it coming, many didn’t. Origo reports the mood, she gleans partisan motives in the press, and she guesses at the concerns of the classes. She speaks with students, farmers, and officials. She watches, every day, with interest and rising alarm.

Just as we do.

Sarton’s journal is a more interior affair, focused largely on her small corner of the world and her internal struggles. When she ventures out of her bubble, however, she writes, “The big question, I jotted down during the long wait at the airport, is how to hope and what to hope for. We are citizens of a corrupt country, of a corrupt vision.” This was her mood in the last grinding years of the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American War), with Watergate as background.

Sarton returns to her writing, to her flowers and her friends, and tends the flimsy scaffolding of her sanity. She carries on, in spite of the noise beyond. Origo, too, does her best to write, read, and visit with other hand-wringers amid the high panic of approaching war.

It’s instructive to read women at different moments in history, as they strive to balance the mundane with the madness du jour. I’m increasingly fascinated with the stories, in letters and diaries, of women fighting the tides of history as they keep the lights on and pick up the dropped stitches. Storms gather, but we still need to eat.

So we will watch, and we will write and talk. We will lament today this abhorrent administration’s rejection of all reason and morality. The bile will rise as we watch the whole mad tale unfold. But we will also putter in the warm kitchen. We will make dumplings for the chicken stew, and watch the snow squall, and tend the woodstove. The fires outside will continue to burn, but the drafts in the windows need stopping. The compost needs to go out. Appointments must be kept.

I need to clear a path through the shrill panic and write it all down.

Pay attention. Read the news, write letters, march and yell and protest. But also: What’s for dinner? Should I change the flannels? Have you noticed how the dusk light hits the stairs? Are you planting bulbs? Would you like a drink? Snow is coming, along with the news.

The sun will rise in the morning, no matter the madness of men.

So should we.

“And now is the time that I laid aside, at least for a few hours a day, the world that pours in here from the outside …” May Sarton

📚 Lisa

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Two short books:

• Maira Kalman’s Still Life with Remorse is the perfect short read, with gorgeous art and profound bits of autobiography. I got it at the library, but will probably need to have it on my shelf to revisit.

• Somehow by Anne Lamott is a collection of lovely, funny meditations on love, but also much more. I’m not religious, but Anne shines with the best of the church. Kind, smart, open, thoughtful, introspective, and often very funny. And helpful! “This is the launch code when under attack: gratitude, chores, chocolate, service, breath, nature.” A mantra for a mad age.