It has been a strange week, the heat-wave tempered by overcast skies and high humidity which I, for one, find uncomfortable. It was great to be able to turn off the heating again, walk about in bare feet and wear summer clothes but the house was gloomy morning and evening so I needed more lights on (I’d hate to deny the energy companies their bonuses) and thoughts of Seasonal Affective Disorder were sending customers into the shop for ammunition against The Dark.
Also making me wonder about getting daylight bulbs for reading lamps. I hate these dim low-energy things.
My diverse reading over the past two weeks has sometimes failed to lighten my spirits. It’s all very well reading quality literature but mostly all I need is escapism that’s just a bit thought provoking, nothing too heavy or meaningful.
Elizabeth Haynes’ first novel ‘Into the Darkest Corner’ was gripping, intelligent, insightful, worrying. That thing about feeling mad, and possibly behaving madly, when you don’t expect people to believe you or don’t want to believe yourself. The protagonist suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and is paranoid, maybe for a good reason - maybe not. It’s nicely paced without the method of pacing becoming too overt ( one gripe I have with Phil Rickman is that his habit of creating cliff-hangers then sashaying off into another thread or back-story is beginning to irritate. It was a OK formula to begin with... need remodelling!)
Tanglewreck, a children’s story by Jeanette Winterson, the author of ‘Oranges are Not the Only Fruit’ is really good. A story line crafted out of flights from quantum physics and modern molecular scientific observations like the String Theory. The weirdness of Time - does it exist or have we created it? Can it really become a commodity? Adults never seem to have enough of it these days. There is a cat called Dinger who exists in a quantum state in which he is both alive and dead. You can't tell which he'll be until you open his box. Sound familiar? Well it may not be quite so familiar to a child reader and anything that introduces children to Schroedinger and a mind-fuddling paradox like that one in fun way is good news in my world. Nicely drawn characters too. I can’t think why I hadn’t heard of this book before happening upon it on the Red Cross shelves, or that there hasn’t been a film or TV production of it. It’s not as dark as ‘His Dark Materials’ which to my mind isn’t a children’s novel at all by the third book. Very heavy stuff that.
Jillian bought me ‘ Sisters of Sinai’ by Janet Soskice because she thought I should know about these remarkable Scottish twins who were born in Irvine, just 30 miles SW of Glasgow, in 1843. Their mother died two weeks after their birth and their unusual father, a lawyer, devoted himself to their upbringing. His views on what that meant where, for the times, unconventional but he set about it with a conviction with a conviction that enabled them to flout most conventions and disregard social boundaries thereafter. He believed in education (including physical fitness training)and the fact that his offspring were female seemed no reason for them not to learn to use their brains and bodies in the acquisition of knowledge and good health. They showed an aptitude for language so he promised them that for every language they set themselves to learn there would be a trip to the country that spoke it. It began a lifelong passion for linguistics and travel and led, as they were also passionate about their severe Presbyterian religion - to travels in the Bible lands. Eventually this caused them to make what must have seemed like a miraculous discovery; in an isolated monastery in Sinai they found pages of vellum on which were written four additional gospels. The twins, with scholarly male travel companions (and sometimes their husbands) translated these causing a furore throughout the Christian world. The discovery, which they insisted on being credited with in accordance with the part they had played, sadly brought them into dispute with the men who had travelled with them (and their wives!) and also with Cambridge men back home who were outraged by the temerity of these two 'uneducated' women.
It’s all beautifully written in a coolheaded sort of style though the story could easily lend itself to hyperbole!
Lesser considerations than scholastic moved me of course. Always when I read accounts of women travelling into lands dangerous for men, never mind for women, in the days before penicillin, anti-malarial drugs, decent dentists, Tampax. etc. etc. I am filled with total awe!
The third book of note that I’ve dipped into over the past week has been Ayya Khema ‘When the Iron Eagle Flies.’ Ayya Khema was born of Jewish parents in Berlin in 1923. In 1938 she was taken in a transport with 200 other Jewish children to Glasgow. She was only reunited with her parents two years later in Shanghai. At the onset of war the family was put into a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp where her father died. It wasn’t a great start to life but life is what we make of it and she, like the Ayrshire twins, carved out a notable one for herself, travelling with her husband in Asia and Tibet, learning meditation, teaching meditation and eventually becoming ordained as a Buddhist nun and being given the name Khema, which means safety and security.
This was a book that inspired me years ago, probably when it first came out in 1991. It is the teachings of the Buddha put in simple form and a guide to meditation toward Awareness. I haven't progressed very far along that path, but I have tried, spasmodically, and it has helped me. Once begun the quest for awareness never really ends. I was so pleased to find it again, (the book and the path!) the same edition and in really good condition - thanks be to Amazon!
What especially stayed in my memory was the source for the title: It is taken from a prophecy by an eighth century Indian sage who travelled to Tibet and helped establish Buddhism there.
“When the iron eagle flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered over the earth and the dhamma will go to the land of the red man.’ (The land of the red man is considered to be the wets as our skin looks pinkish-red to the Tibetans.
The advent of the aeroplane and the petrol engine did almost coincide with the forced exodus of Tibetan monks fleeing from the Chinese. I think that's emarkable.
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