my many distractions

I was wondering why my mind was in so many places, why I couldn't focus on much of anything, when I realized I have too many things to think about and too many things I am involved in. It is only natural to be distracted when I have created hundreds of distractions of my own accord. Well, maybe distraction is not a term to be used for things like child-rearing, housekeeping, crocheting or whatever. But what happens is that I become preoccupied with all the other things while I am supposed to be doing something else. Like mentally restoring my dining room when I am not in the room and have no option to work on it. Or mentally crocheting scarves for the entire sphere of my acquaintance when I am really surfing the web. If only I had little gnomes to putter around and do stuff for me as I think of them, or at least a handy piece of paper attached to my person so I could write what has been happening in my head. And a pen...

Even now, I am writing emails in my mind, calling D on the phone, and thinking about vacuuming the living room to get ready for putting up our little christmas tree. But before that, I have to clean the toys up, put the furniture out of the way, lug the old vacuum out of the upstairs (which also needs a deep cleaning), and that reminds me of the advent calendar ornaments I made for us, which are still in the process of being made (d'oh!) and I forgot to get candy to put in them today and on and on.

And then my eye starts twitching.

Breathe.

There are some good things that have held my attention lately, and made long hours go quickly. I have listened to two Charles Dickens novels on tape recently (Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities), read by excellent actors who turn Dickens' ponderous descriptions into the works of art they really are. I find when I am reading Dickens, I don't breathe well because his sentences are so long that I feel I am reading them aloud and can't breathe until a comma or the end of the sentence. These actors are more than a match for the great Dickens' verbosity, and have reawakened my love for the author. I read as much of his work as I could stomach in high school, Bleak House being my favorite by far, and I am amazed at his ability to create such unique individuals--scores of them, sometimes in the same book (Bleak House has about seventy characters). As they are read aloud, each has a unique voice as well.

Dickens' most enduring theme is Squalor. It is its own character, in a way, the varied forms it takes and the stark contrasts with Plenty, embodied by both callous and kind individuals in every work. I have wept many times reading his descriptions of the degradations of children, the weakest of the weak, bearing the worst of all the miseries in his books. He had the courage to shove it in the face of his readers over and over, and was at least successful in reforming schools in the country (like ones in Nicholas Nickelby and David Copperfield), which substituted care and instruction with abuse, starvation, and neglect.

This shouldn't be comforting, and it isn't. All the same, it is a relief to my mind when I think about how evil and depraved our world is, how much suffering is in the world and in my own crumbled city, and know that it isn't getting worse; it's just changing its form with time and technology. The same murderous barbarism that wipes out villages in the Sudan was at work in the French Revolution, with Spanish Conquistadors, in the trenches of WWI. More people are being killed at once, yes, and it is an evil that everyone will answer for who participates in it, but it is at its root the same evil, the same intensity and the same unfettered mania that consumes the killers. I am quite sure that if the barbarians running the French Commune had death camps at their disposal, they would have gladly put them to use.

With all this Squalor, though, is a keen sense of justice throughout every Dickens novel. You know the most evil of the characters will have some spectacular, crushing blow that will take down the entire edifice they have built of miseries. That one little thing will destroy the carefully crafted lies and leave them bare to disgrace. That all things will work out to the good of those you love in the book, even though they will bear the scars of the catalogue of pain leading up to the denouement.

And there will be at least one person who bears a striking resemblance to another, remarkably different person, which will lead to the discovery of an orphan's lost parent, a lover's child, or what have you. I think it's the one weakness (albeit an enjoyable one) that Dickens has. I'm always waiting for the "he-looks-like-someone-I-knew-in-my-dark-past" discovery. Ah well. One must indulge the Master his little fancies.

And here I have gotten myself Distracted by a long-winded treatise on Dickens.

Here's an article by Peggy Noonan, which I wish to heaven that I had written. I couldn't agree more with her views about grace being sorely lacking and sorely needed in this time. In all times, really, but especially now. And I agree especially that people haven't been able to complete a sentence in ten years, what with all the obnoxious talking-over of reporters, "interviewers," and combative Maury Povitch paternity-test monstrosities (it was on at the gym the other day, and I was disgusted. Here are these women with several children and their deepest desire is to find the father of one of them, but they just don't know who it could be. It could be one of five different men, ten different men, UGH!!!!! It breaks my heart and makes me ill. And these men are unmitigated scumbags). Anyhow, this article should be required reading for all in positions of power, and people whose job it is to hold them accountable in a civil way.

Alright, off to tackle my distractions. Thanks for reading this novel.