According to the NYC public school calendar, mid-winter break began last Saturday. I, however, have been on a mid-winter break for a few weeks. There’s been a lull, because students have completed (and likely bombed) the state English language Arts test and have had time before the state math test. Starting Monday, students and teachers will reluctantly return to school, ready for hasty and ill preparation for another test.
This is not an entry about how the country and NYC, in particular, have set our young minority students in urban public schools to fail. Nope. It’s about how I have been in a pedagogical hibernation at work. I love my reading group. I love teaching my special ed kids. I love Saturday school, for the most part. The rest of the population I work with, though, got more and more unruly as the holiday neared. I was disciplining more than discussing, and I hate that. I remember the last few days as long, drawn-out criticisms of the educational system with random co-workers. Delightful. I’m never lazy at work, certainly not, just off-focus.
Anyhow, I was jonesing for something to read and came across the librarian’s copy of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. I tend to shy away from anything related to Oprah’s Book Club, because I don’t think she is a demi-god. Crucify me now, if you must. I love Toni Morrison’s body of work, but not because The Big O told me to, okay? [Insert ghetto snap of fingers here].
So I had read that The Reader is morally devastating and was lauded long before Oprah decided to pimp the print out of it. I read it, and found myself transfixed. The chapters are short and easy to keep reading, because the psychology of short chapters is so compelling - you really feel like you’re accomplishing something grand when you can read so many chapters in a short sitting. You read another and another and another and feel like one super-literate badass.
What most intrigues me about The Reader is the life cycle of the romance in the first part of the book. Schlink’s details of it almost painfully relatable and wonderfully written:
“Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something - whatever that may be - goes into action; ‘it’ goes to the woman I don’t want to see anymore, ‘it’ makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head, ‘it’ keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a smoker and always will be. I don’t mean to say that thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources, and is my behavior, quite independently, just as my thoughts are my thoughts, and my decisions my decisions.”
“Did I fall in love with her as the price for her having gone to bed with me? To this day, after spending the night with a woman, I feel I’ve been indulged and I must make it up somehow - to her by trying at least to love her, and to the world by facing up to it.”
“Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?”
“I asked her about her life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.”
“When an airplane’s engines fail, it is not the end of the flight. Airplanes don’t fall out of the sky like stones. They glide on, the enormous multi-engined passenger jets, for thirty, forty-five minutes, only to smash themselves up when they attempt a landing. The passengers don’t notice a thing… That summer was the glide path of our love.”
“From the outside it is impossible to tell if you are disowning someone or simply exercising discretion, being considerate, avoiding embarrassments and sources of irritation. But you, who are doing the disowning, you know what you’re doing. And disavowal pulls the underpinnings away from a relationship just as surely as other more flamboyant types of betrayal.”
“We did not have a world that we shared; she gave me the space in her life that she wanted me to have. I had to be content with that. Wanting more, even wanting to know more, was presumption on my part.”
“But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It’s there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?”
“…The finger I pointed at her turned back to me. I had loved her. Not only had I loved her, I had chosen her. I tried to tell myself that I had known nothing of what she had done when I chose her. I tried to talk myself into the state of innocence in which children love their parents. But love of our parents is the only love for which we are not responsible.”
“…If something hurts me, the hurts I suffered back then come back to me, and when I feel guilty, the feelings of guilt return; if I yearn for something today, or feel homesick, I feel the yearnings and homesickness from back then. The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one of top of another that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.”
