"Kindness means so much, both for the one who shows it and for the one who receives it."
This week is in Sweden called "Vänliga veckan" which means the friendly and kind week .In Swedish "vän" is a noun meaning friend as well as an adjective meaning " amiable, delightful, nice, delicate" and "vänlig" is the adverb of the noun which means both friendly and kind. This week is now dwindling due to the much more commercial American celebration of St. Valentine's Day. However, when a Swedish magazine started this week in 1946 they used the 14th of February which in Sweden is called All Hearts' Day, thus it has had none of the stressful connotations of popularity among teenagers as it had in other countries, hence schools usually encourage the "Vänliga veckan".
The kind and friendly week of 2023 has the theme. "Show kindness to those who don't expect it." This Sunday is the last day to celebrate this week, nevertheless the intention of the week is of course to inspire to kindness all through the year. There are so many good ways of doing this nowadays, one of the perks of social media: send a DM, buy flowers, phone calls (my toughest challenge), a post card, a letter, an E-mail and being extra kind and attentive to others. This week the earth quakes in Syria and Türkiye has of course been an obvious way of being kind by donations.
This week is a favourite of mine and I would like to promote it much more than the , for so many, painful St.Valentine's Day. An easy way of keeping this week is to smile whenever you meet someone wherever you are. For Swedes it feels awkward greeting strangers on a city street even with a smile, but in a forest or village a greeting is the natural way of meeting anyone. So just smile in a city this week, and do as usual on the country side. I guess this is also applicable in other countries with huge cities, even in cities like Cebu, with millions of tired people rushing from jobs to homes, and vice versa, a smile is never wrong.
And in case you didn't get a greeting this week neither the 14th or any other day, remember you are so dearly loved by God, that is the truth every day, night and all weeks.
I tend to forget this blog where I think and reflect over the books I read. For the moment I read La saga des émigrants the Swedish auttor Wilhelm Moberg's epic work on the Swedes who left for a better life in the United Staes of America in the mid 19th C. But this edition is in French. I got it from a dear friend of mine and I am happy that I have only read one of these novels before I got to read it in French. I find it so interesting to read it from another language angle and I get to realize a little bit of the prejudices people have about Sweden and Swedes in France, as well as in many other European countries.
One lovely fringe benefit of beeing a language teacher is reading a
great a variety of books with different groups, in different languages
and I get to do a lot of re-reading at the same time since I use "works
that work" and, of course, I have to use books that are available in
sufficient numbers of copies at our school.
Thus other novels that has had a great impact in my life lately are actually books I have read with my students such as Tove Janson's collection of short stories The Invisible Child I read it so often with my students and for each time I wonder over all the wisdom and humour in it. The inhabitants of the Moomin valley are modern fables that teach us how to be a decent person from so many different angles.The Divine Comedy was a good re-read as well. To read it together with a fan of fantasy literature was an eye opener. The last part, "Paradise", in particular where Dante and Beatrice, later St. Bernhard, travel through the universe from planet to planet.
It also gave me a new understanding of the novel my French niveau 4 et 5 read: Le Petit Prince. I realize that St.Exupéry must have thought about Dante's masterpiece as he placed different "sinners" on their own lonely asteroids in stead of the different levels of Inferno. Dante places only Petit-Prince characters on the planets but St.Exupéry places the Christ-like Prince as well as the self obsessed "grown ups" on the asteroids. This is probably something that others have known for ages, but for me it is a new "revelation" which adds a lot to the reading for me. My reflection deepens over both The Comedy and the Little Prince by parallell reading in two groups and languages at the same time.
Last but not least, I have read some short stories and a novel by Selma Lagerlöf, which always are poignant. The students understand and discuss so interesting things since Lagerlöf always is up to date when it comes to current issues like outsidership, making the right choices and accepting differences. Without Lagerlöf life as a language teacher would be much duller. The novel we read is Herr Arne's Hoard which also fits well as it is a ghost story; a perfect to read in late October and All Saints' /Halloween tide.
The students finish reading during this "Läs lov"="Reading holiday" as we currently have in Sweden, due to the old tradition of All Saint's day. But in stead of calling it All Saint's vacation it is now called "Reading Vacation" to stress the importance of reading since this is a skill sadly deteriorating in Sweden. Children and adolescents prefer You Tube and other video media on screen to reading , either on screen or in "real" books in codex format.
Alma Whittaker is the friend I needed during a cold winter of grief. The secret life of mosses revealed truths for her that science had not yet seen in her time. She loved reading and her mother taught her to read, write and speak several languages before her premature death of cancer in Alma's adolescence. Her adopted, beautiful, sister Prudence is in many things her opposite but also her most faithful friend. Prudence does not put much effort into science. In stead she dedicates her whole life to fight slavery and rescue former slaves to freedom.
This novel that literally offers the reader a trip around the world of science and the search for the answer to the question which Darwin never could understand: why we do good to each other. Why are there so many Dorothea Brookes and Prudences in this world of survival of the fittest?
Sometimes we cannot get answers to the questions we have but it is a great comfort that we have that question, still unanswered, for without that phenomenon, who would survive at all? What would become of us all?
One of the novels I've read that will remain in my heart and head for as long as I breath is Toni Morrison's magnificent Beloved. When I first read it I was expecting my fourth child, exactly as Sethe, the main character of the novel does in the beginning of her escape from "Sweet Home farm" in Kentucky, to freedom on the north shore of the Ohio. I felt her love for the third child so deeply , the premature beautiful little girl Beloved that had to die to give her family a new life in freedom. Oh, the love you can hold for your baby girl, nothing compares to that. It's a "thick love" as Paul D puts it, "too thick". Toni Morrison manages to conjure up this love so vividly that it almost suffocated me. Pregnant with number four, as Sethe was when she escaped Scoolteacher's boys who stole the milk Beloved should have once they were all safe on the north bank of the Ohio. When I read the novel for the first time I was Sethe.
Sethe filled with strength and ardour. Sethe filled to the brim with the thickest love you can think of. Sethe fighting for freedom and for her children. Sethe finding an unexpected midwife in the forest on the river bank: a whitewoman. This white young woman is not amongst those who turn in fugitive slaves for rewards. In stead she helps Sethe to give birth to a baby girl with a charmed life. This little girls gets her name, Denver, from the whitewoman Amy Denver.
I think I felt so close to Sethe because my number three also felt so especially close to me when I was pregnant with number four. I realized how she felt when she wanted to save her children from the slave hunters by killing them and I had experienced her agony when her breasts were filled with milk but had none to give it to, since I had lost a child , the first number four, a year before I first read Beloved.
This time I felt so close to Denver I saw her grow up to a head strong woman with self esteem in the centre of her community, from being a weak, lonely and dependent child. Denver saved her mother from mental illness and grief that almost killed her. The vengeful baby that almost killed Sethe made Denver find herself and the grown up Denver resembled her father Halle who couldn't escape slavery but paved the wave for his mother, the spiritual leader Baby Suggs, and family with his own hard working body.
Paul D is also a character that stands out more this time, when I read Beloved together with a class of only male students in the same age and passage of life as Denver is in the novel. Paul D is a person to relate to for a young construction worker-to-be. Intelligent, though he can't read and write, a handyman, he figures out how to survive 18 years of tribulations knowing his value as a slave, exactly, put in dollars-rather high. A man with a tin box heart and hands that can take the pain from the choke cherry tree whipped into Sethe's back by the boys who stole Sethe's milk. A trustworthy man. Always remembering Sethe and her glowing eyes, the girl all the Sweet Home men fell in love with, but only Halle got for a wife.
The notion of a real wedding made the kind Mrs. Garner laugh out loud. She cared for her slaves but who would think of an atrocity as a real wedding for slaves? Mrs. Garner was like a mother to Sethe, however, it's hardly likely that Mrs. Garner felt like a mother to Sethe. For Sethe all human beings were alike; good or bad, no matter the colour of skin. Although Mrs. Garner was a kind and "good" slave owner, she still was a slave owner. Sometimes she acted as if Sweet Home really was one, but when Mr. Garner died and she fell fatally ill with cancer the Sweet Home men and women got to see reality: it's a difference between being free and not. Slave owners and slaves don't relate as mother and daughter. Schoolteacher comes since Mrs. Garner wouldn't trust those who imagined themselves to be her family. To her they were family, sort of, but no more than her horses and dogs were family.
The underground railroad across the Ohio was the life
line for those who realized that freedom is something else than slavery, no matter how life like the home feeling gets on the plantation that also were their prison camp. When the illusion of home died with Mrs. Garner's fading voice-lost to cancer- and the cruel Schoolteacher, slavery showed its real self.
Although freedom hardly was the schlaraffen land they imagined before they
settled outside Cincinnatti it was as far from slavery as the harvest moon from the corn field where Sethe's children were concieved.
Stamp Paid knew the river, every snag and curve,
all the banks and shores and under water rocks. He knew the river and he knew what happened when Baby Suggs gave a party for her daughter-in-law and her children. Stam Paid saved lives on the river as well as he saved the lives of Sethe's two small sons when Sethe paid for their freedom with the blood of her beloved baby girl. She bought their freedom but was it worth it? Yes, she never had to be parted from her children. Baby suggs had to part with seven children. Than Halle bought her freedom but perished before he could reach it himself. Eight children the only remianing were Sethe and three of her grand children. Yes, freedom was even worth the horrible prize Sethe payed.
Stamp Paid, he was also paid for. his freedom also had a proze as all creation's freedom has a prize. So many allusions to the Great Story of redemption. i didnät notice them before, but this time we read the novel during Lent. My students also noticed Jesus everywhere. And all the music.
Beloved is a novel of realistic hope. Presented as a down to earth low fantasy, horror and documentary in one, created by the means of exquisite prose. The story of 124, number three is missing, on the outskirts og Cincinatti is the American equivalent of Middlemarch filled with characters that we all could relate to because we are all human beings born to be free, lost in captivity and bought back to freedom with thick love.
New Bern, a small Southern town on the river Neuse remains the lasting impression of the cute love story told by Nicholas Sparks in his award winning novel The Notebook. This doesn't indicate that the novel is disposable. On the contrary it is a small novel that grows from a rather ordinary romantic novel to something special in the end. You rarely follow the happy couple through all those years when they lived happily until death did them apart. In this novel you do, the end of life with all its trials and tribulations is in fact tying this story together which embraces a life time from 1935 up until the 1990's when the happily ever aftr comes to its tragic and tender end.
In the end Sparks examines the process of falling in love in a way which I have never seen it penetrated before. To be able to depict romantic love with old people as the main characters must be as easy as doing it with young people, and yet there are so few novels about mature love. Why so many novels and stories about young love and so few about life long love? I guess someone out there thinks that we want to read about young love all the time. However, most readers are not extremely young today and I predict that more novels will deal with similar subjects as this one.
I also hope that more novels will deal with age and sickness even if they are written for a young audience. Right now my pupils aged 16 and 17 read The Notebook. I hope they will remember it and that they get tools to confront old age when it comes to them, 60 years from reading this at school.
Back to New Bern, why was that such a lasting impression of this novel? Simply because my picture of a small river town in North Carolina was very vague and with this novel I felt that I got to know it a little bit. The life on the river, water fowl and kayaking plays an important part in the story and suddenly, for the first time in my life I feel an urge to go to North Carolina. Don't worry, this too will pass.
This song creates a sound track suitable to this saga of neverending courtship that begins and ends when the ever after part is almost over. In fact, the love story in The Notebook is exactly like this: "I don't know if the suns gonna shine and I don't know if you'll ever be mine, but I make love to you anytime"
This semi-classic novel was an adventure to read with pupils in Upper Secondary School. They found themes and stories hidden in the text that we missed at the University. His Catholic friend, that everyone bullied but he secretly felt close to and secure with, although he didn't want to show him or the rest of the mob that he did. Did my pupils recognize a pattern in their own lives?
The kid sister Phoebe was also a character they felt close to and she is amiable in every respect, feisty and kind at the same time. No wonder Holden trusts her and is willing to do everything to make her happy. She is fut´rthermore a rather rare character in a novel of this genre: "angry young man going frantic". In those novels you rarely meet any positive female characters.
My own strongest impression from the novel this time was that cruel treatment of upper class children has to do something with the ruling groups in society. To be a top dog is to begin your life unhappy, lost and lonely, friendless in spite of all the money. I hope all those boarding schools make Catcher in the Rye compulsory reading.
I have neglected you for too long, so many griefs and bereavements got in between us, but now I am back and the reading has found me again, although most words are lost to me. I have not forgotten you, though, I still want to become more like you and those who made so much difference and still are buried in unvisited tombs.
I am currently reading about your literary brother, Silas Marner, he is conceived by the same parent as you, George Eliot. You will hear from him soon.
