the everyday

Rachel Monroe on Marion Milner's 'A Life of One's Own'

kathbarbadoro:

Relating really hard to most of this article and really want to read the book discussed in “2” now (even with the reservations about it discussed in “3” as WWJDS (What would Joan Didion say?) and the really important points made in “4”).

Some of that experimentation is through language, through the search for the right verbs and metaphors to translate her mind’s movement. It keeps secrets. It noses for crumbs. It spreads its tentacles, or narrows into a focussed beam of light. It behaves like water, a worm, a butterfly, a baby, a room that needs sweeping, beetles skimming the surface of a pond. Her ideas are “strange birds seen in remote marshes.”

AND

“In “On Self-Respect,” Joan Didion looks back at a “dry season” from her own past and “marvel[s] that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor.” But isn’t that exactly how it goes? When I’m happy, I’m too busy swimming or kissing or eating cookies to track the topography of my moods; when I’m uncomfortable — mentally, I mean — I poke and poke and poke at my brain as if it were a sore tooth.”

oh man, me too.

“The point is, Milner dives into her brain and comes out the other side. Three-quarters of the way through A Life of One’s Own, something changes; other people start to creep in the edges of the narrative. Toward the end of her experiment, Milner is amazed to find that, instead of finding transcendence through nature and solitude — a major theme of the first half of the book — she now “chiefly reckoned each day’s catch of happiness in terms of [her] relationships with others.” She marvels in the wordless communion that comes from “spreading myself out towards a person,” sharing moods, even in silence. She gets really into sweeping: “I seemed to like it because it was a kind of communication, it expressed my feeling for the house I kept clean and the people who lived in it.” Once she calms down her own mind, other minds start to matter.”

(Source: 100yearsoflolitude)