MML #9: Reading something in a story that you completely relate to and understand.
And it's a little crazy, because for a second you can't believe that someone has shared the exact same thoughts as you. It's like when you are meeting a person for the first time and you're realizing that they are your brain twin (but that's a topic for another time).
We've just finished reading Alice Munro's collection of short stories entitled Too Much Happiness and I have absolutely loved it. There were two particular passages that I read and thought "I totally get that!" and I adore that feeling and aspire to pass that same thing on to readers as well one day.
The first one was from the story called "Some Women":
“I began to understand that there were certain talkers – certain girls – whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure.”
My eyes almost fell out of my skull when I read this, simply with the pure shock that I felt as if I had never read something so true in my life. In less than a hundred words Alice Munro took something that I have found myself never quite able to explain: that I love talking. That I always have something to say about the smallest and silliest things because sometimes those are the things I find most entertaining. And if I am entertained by those things, surely my friends would be as well, right?
It is funny that this story has come up now, since any of my friends will tell you that over the past week I’ve been obsessing a little bit about the fact that I talk too much. I’ve been pestering them to make sure that I don’t annoy them. Basically, I’ve been talking too much about the fact that I talk too much.
The second one was from the novella "Too Much Happiness":
(Background information: This is a story based on Sophia Kovalevsky, the first female mathematics professor in Europe from the end of the 19th century. Maksim is a fairly harsh and unyielding man that she loves and hopes to marry.)
"She is thinking of Maksim. Would Maksim ever in his life board such a train as this? She imagines her head lying comfortably on his broad shoulder - though the truth is he would not care for that, in public. His coat of rich expensive cloth, its smell of money and comfort. Good things he believes he has a right to expect and a duty to maintain, even though he is a Liberal unwelcome in his own country. That marvelous assurance he has, that her father had, you can feel it when you are a little girl snuggled up in their arms and you want it all your life. More delightful of course if they love you, but comforting even if it is only a kind of ancient noble past that they have made, a bond that has been signed, necessarily even if not enthusiastically, for your protection."
The image of the girl snuggled up in her father's arms is really what got to me most. Remembering how my favorite place in the world as a small child was my dad's lap, and recalling that even then I knew that one day I would grow too big to fit in his arms, and I dreaded that a day like that would ever come. And then realizing that there is such a truth to the fact that somewhere inside all women, whether we are clueless nineteen-year-olds in the 21st century or brilliant mathematicians from the 19th century, there is a weakness. No matter how successful we are or independent we make ourselves, there is something inside of us that desires men, desires partnership, desires protection, and we value all of that so much that we will sacrifice - or at the very least pause to consider sacrificing - everything else in the name of getting back that thing we all had has little girls.
