Bonne Année!
We kicked off the new year with a champagne brunch . A bubbly start to a new note of the year.
At the weekend food, art and craft market, a young lady was selling some of her books from her collection. I bought her copy of The Joke by Milan Kundera. I told the lady we should exchange our books. It is always a pleasure to meet another avid reader.
DAY TWO
In the morning, I checked into my mailbox and came across this article written by Shannon Hugman and I like what she writes in her article :
‘2022 is a year to know who you are, what you want and where you stand. Then from a place of confidence, step forward into the world. No one will come and save us, especially not any astrological cycles. Instead, we have to put the responsibility on our shoulders and create the lives we wish to experience.’
Her article is a good reminder about how we should embrace all our differences and diversity is what makes the world beautiful . The key to a joyful and prosperous world is through love and compassion. Splendid.
I have not been able to engage in much reading and writing the entire weekend. On Sunday evening , I randomly turned to a page in Intimations, a collection of six essays by Zadie Smith written during the early months of lockdown. Here is this excerpt:
‘In real life, submission and resistance have no predeterminded shape. Even more befuddling, to a writer like me, is that the values normally associated with those words on a page —submission, negative;resistance, positive –cannot be relied upon out in the field. Sometimes it is right to submit to love, and wrong to resist affection. Sometimes it is wrong to resist disease and right to submit to the inevitable. And vice versa. Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and —if you experience enough of them – will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which to catch your breath…..it just keeps coming at you.’
– ‘Peonies‘ from ‘Intimations‘ by Zadie Smith.
In her essay entitled ‘Peonies‘. Smith caught herself staring through the bars of the Jefferson Market Garden along with two other middle-aged women , ogling some tulips on a cold, bright and blue day. She wished that they had been peonies and not tulips. In her essay, Zadie Smith muses about the tug of war between resistance and submission. To her, writing is all resistance. Smith is an insightful and prolific writer.
As we navigate through these challenging times, we look to the scientists for solutions and we are given vaccines and booster shots. I understand that they are not vaccines in the conventional sense and that they are dissimilar from the kind that we immunise against small pox and diseases for more than two centuries. Again I wish I had paid more attention in science class.
DAY THREE
In the morning I rummaged around our house with a view to locate my copies of the other books by Milan Kundera. I have Immortality but I cannot locate The Unbearable lightness of Being. I have written a post on Kundera‘s most known novel and I will reproduce it in my next post. HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE !
The Joke and Immortality will be my next reads.
Bookaholic Macchiato 