Sabbath Cup

Yesterday, Saturday, I wrote:

I was beginning to enjoy watching instant-play Netflix selections on my computer. Beginning to--hell, I already was, deeply, enjoying this on weekends. I looked forward to more, and more, and more: Brit coms, Woody Allens, documentaries; I was going to watch Cape Fear with Juliette Lewis this weekend. I enjoyed sitting there at my desk, the filmed world at my fingertips, while I would eat a square or two of dark chocolate, the kind with sea salt, and drink my excellent Ethiopian coffee. This activity was so fun! So nice! I was enjoying this new way to have weekends; I thought I might start having a few weeknights this way, too. Not terribly often, of course: with my long commute I have short weeknights, and I've been writing about reading Les Misérables at work most weeknights lately, when I've been home. Most, that is: but not all! Not every night am I bent over my notebook. I need rest and leisure. I'd added instant-play films to my new instant Netflix queue, planting my future with fruit-bearing shade trees--that is, somehow, their equivalent. I had a lifestyle ahead of me, dammit!

What happened? My neck hurts. I'm sore from that chair and the thought of screen-staring revolts me: I think it's hurting my neck. What's the point, anyway? What's the difference whether I watch something this week or next year or never? What does it matter? If it weren't for my neck, would I be asking? I wish it weren't hurting. It doesn't seem fair that rest makes me sore--that I feel no better for it, but rather and further depleted after my work week by the very measure of my self-reward: as if I were back bingeing, sickening, grossly, upon my leisure activities and running almost audibly to fat. My chocolate squares, my cups of coffee, my Netflix queue: I'm recoiling from them, pained and startled; I'm confused and ready to feel chastened. The pain in my neck puts the fear of God into me.

Employee Handbook

Yesterday I finished reading Book 7 (the second to last) of the first volume of Les Misérables, taking advantage of a rare slow morning at work to confront the scenes I'd been avoiding--Fantine's sickbed, and then the courtroom in Arras. I'm not sure what I'd been expecting. Something grim and dire, the limits of the bearable in "great" art being familiar to me from afar (and from Puccini). The rumble of the cataract I was approaching raised a picture in my mind of waste and wreckage: mighty falls ahead. But what happened was the falls flowed upward. I was lifted, sitting at my desk, onto a higher plane by Jean Valjean's behavior in the courtroom. Solemn, joyful, comforted, amazed, all before lunch hour: I was soaring, for awhile there, taking deep breaths, and when I walked away from my desk my step was light, my posture ideal. It is good to read about heroic acts, maybe especially while at work: it raises the spirits, elevates morale. Strangely enough this never occurred to me when I was reading the Bible every day. I'll have to keep it in mind, when I return to that practice, so maybe I'll find it more helpful.

Torture

Monday I read Les Misérables at work until I had to leave Jean Valjean on the road to Arras, where Victor Hugo left him, too; next comes an interlude with Fantine that I dread almost as much as I do Jean Valjean's arrival in Arras. I don't know what will happen next--I've never read this book before, never seen the musical or any of the movies. There was a TV miniseries version when I was a kid; it had a musical theme, five notes that went "Lay Miz Ah RAH BLAH!" which my sister used to sing, largely to annoy me. I can't remember watching the show. 

Train Rides

Monday after work on the train, having left Jean Valjean on the road to Arras, I look up from my book (Paul Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar from 1975, with hippies!) to think about India and train episodes I enjoyed there; and I observe the people about me, wires trailing from the ears of half of them, phone things in their hands. To my left, a young maybe Turkish man in a leather jacket with a Chinese dragon on the back is listening to a work for solo violin. I feel something shift: the plates of my tactile existence grind briefly and heave, stayed and balanced--for the moment--at relief.

Tuesday heading to work on the train, I write in my notebook for the first time in a week. Home life: so intervening! Family and friends and eating and theater; cleaning the house; petting cats; going on-line or napping; watching televised tennis or babbling over the healthcare debates: so time-consuming. Like hippies! Who ended up where? Dead from hepatitis. Inventing the i-Pod commercial.

One time in India on the train I was riding in 3rd class, some long trip between large destinations, and a young family--husband, wife, two little boys--took the seats facing mine. They were sweet; poor; spoke almost no English beyond the words required to ask all the personal questions that everyone asks there (Was I married? being foremost among these); all very thin and small. They offered me Indian sweets, from a small box they'd bought for their journey, probably an extravagance. I took one, maybe two if they insisted, and ate. Immediately upon swallowing whatever it was, something terrifically sweet, I remembered my Lonely Planet guidebook's warning about train theives who drug you with candy and make off with your possessions and money as soon as you've fallen into a drugged slumber. I'd given one of the sons an empty Altoids box and the other probably a pen and the sweets had been produced reciprocally; even so, it struck me, mightn't the whole thing have been planned? I was riding in 3rd class on a whim, had been enjoying the hot dusty breeze through the glassless barred windows. My companions were small and dark and did resemble Gypsies. They were poor.

I continued to sit there and smile, pleasantly, without language; continued to feel, towards this small, sweet family, a liking, really a fondness, inspired by their sweetness and kindness--by their charm. At the same time I prayed. I bargained with God. I said, I remember so well, that I would be much more careful here (there) after and wouldn't take candy from strangers ever again; I promised to stop being an idiot: Just get me, I begged God, to my next destination, and not in a drugged stupor, and with all my possessions intact. For many miles in Rajasthan I prayed this. The family rode the train not a great distance; at a station well before mine we exchanged sweet smiles and Namastes.

What would be funny, it just occurs to me now, is if whoever had sold them the knockout drops cheated them.

Porpoise Spit

I fear I have been ripping through Les Misérables at a rapid pace. I read too fast at work. I've trained myself for speed in the workplace over years of working with words on a screen. Hand it to me on paper, I downshift at this signal to study with care. Also from a book I know how to look up and stare at the wide world, maybe half-unseeing maybe more, but the process is useful: it helps with the reading and it helps me to live while reading--I emerge, surfacing, for a breath of my own thoughts, my blank stare a mist-spurting blowhole of which my fellow train passengers, understandably wary, take note. They have seen something.

Whereas to look up from a screen (I will pause to salute, from a distance, the Kindle, from which looking up would be possible even though it is a screen; while to read Les Misérables, all of it, from something even smaller, say a phone--I can see nobility in that, if not actual greatness) while working at a desk, doesn't fit the way screens work. It can be done, in an indoor cloud-counting sort of way, but more commonly one looks aside--as if a phone or other task were calling--or shuts one's eyes entirely against (and this is key) the light, to rest them. The screen glows and the text embedded in its molten face is hardly still: up and up it floats to vanish quite away, like cinders in a chimney; re-reading is rewinding, a time-lapse reconstruction of a vanished structure undertaken to repeat its dissolution.

So I read too quickly but I've found a satisfying way to compensate, and go back a chapter or two (the chapters are very short, most of them) every time I start reading Les Misérables at work. This is a different way of living while reading: it's more like working. I'm sort of assisting. As if retracing Les Misérables on my screen were making it thicker and darker, turning it heavy and solid; as if looking longer and twice were the means of restoring it to book form.

Property of Cameron Mackintosh

Started and finished Book IV of Fantine at work last week and even started Book V, which I backtracked over to start again, along with the end of Book IV. That would be the chapter called "The Lark" which concerns the child, Fantine's child, Cosette, and her sufferings. This is the chapter the famous (Bayard) illustration's from, the one adapted for the poster for the musical--the windblown child. She is four or five and living with the Thenardiers, an awful couple and their two awful daughters; all of them abuse her, beat her, scold her; she eats their food scraps as she's crouched under the table; she's got nothing but rags to wear. Her mother sends money, more money being demanded all the time, for her upkeep; they make off with it. But Fantine can't have Cosette with her because there's no husband to make it alright to have had a child, and she wants to make an honest living. She sends the money, sometimes late, and can never get away to visit, not having the funds to do both. Cosette "grows" shy and puny. Her tiny hands are red from work and cold. Her life is awful. Before dawn she's sent to sweep the street, in her rags, in all weathers, with an enormous broom. The famous illustration shows her with the broom and her bare feet in a puddle.

Since I've started reading Les Misérables at work it's brought me to tears several times. Book V of Fantine had me crying while I ate lunch at my desk--I was reading, crying, and eating a sandwich, getting a lot out of that hour--but the end of Book IV and "The Lark," somehow, left me not exactly cold but certainly dry-eyed. I looked at the picture: what a great image; and what a great re-purposing of it was in store, selling that show. (I've never seen the show.) It's instantly recognizable. Reading and re-reading, my mind sidestepped away from the little girl under the table, the motherless child, to the icon that's been made of her, and from there to the icon's manufacture. Here I am, looking up the design team, and finding my way to the fine print at the bottom.

On the Road to Les Misérables

Let me be clear. I think reading Les Misérables at work ought to be not only popular, but common. At the same time I believe that everybody else knows best how to minister in the moment to their own sweet sakes. As the founder of this movement, as a movement founder, I'm not imposing haste upon its spread, its growth. You're sitting in an office, at a desk, in a room, in a corner, in a cubicle--anyway, at work--with nothing to do but fill time. This doesn't mean you're unimportant! It means that your department in a battle over money won the right to seat you there: of course you're not useful--you're not a tool, you're a trophy! Possibly you even sit there on your own behalf, there where your fortunes and merits have brought you, dropped you, in front of your screen, your files, your phone with voice mail and caller ID, your wall space and desk space ornamented with colorful objects and pictures you've selected to recall you to yourself. Quite possibly you've got a pile of work to do--but you can't face it. This doesn't make you weak or lazy! What are you, a machine? No, that's a machine, what you're staring at. You need a break.

So there you are, somehow, at work. Possibly it occurs to you that you ought to be using this time more effectively. Since you won't spend it working, and you can't leave your desk, or have a conversation, or groom yourself, or play a game (there used to be games); you stare at your screen: For heaven's sake don't shop! It's not good for you. (Since you will anyway just don't do it to excess.) But possibly you're out of money, or you've given up your on-line shopping for another cause--neither of which marks you as a freak or a loser. "Enough already" sums something up for you now, that's all. You choose content.