Down and Out

Madam Monce: "Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out the window like everyone else?"

...the walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. (Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell) 

I thought that in honor of the holiday season and the news that the chasm between the rich and the poor is larger than its been in decades, I would take a break from Proust's drawing room dramas in The Guermantes Way, and focus on those who are prey to creepy crawlies. (Though, I must admit, Orwell awakens a certain pleasure in the grotesque.)

Last Saturday, while so many were going hungry, I joined a luncheon at the Scandinavia House, with an open buffet table creaking under the weight of a variety of Nordic delicacies, from herring to pork meatballs to gingerbread, and then plenty of steaming glogg to go around. (Of course, I'm a fun-loving teetotaling vegan, so I focussed on the mashed potatoes.)

Yesterday, I attended Meet Me at MOMA with my mother and, as we were looking at the controlled chaos of an early Jackson Pollack and talking about the postwar art world, one woman said she couldn't bear to read the front page of the newspaper anymore. "I know," the young guide replied, "I was an activist when Bush was in office and now I just don't want to pay attention to politics at all." That numbness can be felt everywhere.

The holiday season lends itself to gloomy reminiscences along with its good tidings.

In the "search of lost time" corner--I realize that often we must act (feel the fear and do it anyway!) when an opportunity presents itself. That moment only lasts a split second before it's lost forever.

It's been an entire decade since I missed a chance to have a relationship with someone I still have feelings for and, I'm afraid to admit, someone I google from time to time. Talk about a phantom in the machine...he is so close, yet so far. To cultivate this thorny regret is unnatural but strangely satisfying in a compulsive way, like emptying the lint filter in the dryer or reading US magazine.

But enough of that! This is the season of birth and beginnings. It's been so cold. I fear for those with empty stomachs and nothing to protect them from the elements. I'm grateful for everything in my life--even that black L.L. Bean coat I wear that looks like a burqa and the gloves I bought yesterday on a street corner.

In spite of all the fear and all the lack, there's a certain solemn magic to the season as in this spiritual by Jay Althouse:

Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby in a manger lay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today!
Whisper! Whisper! Tiny baby, he sleep in the hay.
Whisper! Whisper! Baby born today.