Roz again
“Why?” It’s a fair question dear reader. It’s the question I asked in response to his question when Ted asked me, “Would you write something more maybe?” “Why?” because wasn't the purpose of what I wrote five days ago to excuse his not writing both before and after? Besides, what would I write about?
“What about that book you just finished, the one you were telling me about?” The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot by Angus Wilson, which my mother had given me. “This is supposed to be really good,” she said. She learned that no doubt from the blurbs on the cover.
But: “I’m not a critic,” I said to Ted. “I don’t know who to write about books.”
“Who does? Certainly not those that think they do, the ones that spend most of their word allotment trying to prove if they’re not smartest in the room, at least they’re the cleverest. Just say what you told me.”
That was this (after I tell you that there will be no plot summary because there was no plot and there is nothing else much either because I don’t know how to write about books). I said this:
What Mrs Eliot needs to learn, she thinks, is how to care and not to care at the same time. Or she would think that if she didn’t think she already knew it because she has a sense of humor and that is what a sense of humor teaches: nothing, not even the most serious of matters, can be taken completely seriously. Underneath the seriousness, we are always having a bit of a chuckle. But underneath the chuckle, there is also always selfishness. None of the characters of the novel are other than selfish, and Mrs Eliot, though it took me forever to figure out because I just couldn’t imagine it, is the most selfish of all. So, the book is all about selfishness, the hundreds of forms it can take and thousands of nuances each form has, its immense, irresistible power to delude even the cleverest among us. Our selfishness is always cleverer than we are.
Roz Randall
02.14.22
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