Yesterday, I also finished Francis Spufford's novel, Light Perpetual. It is a novel about life, its seasons, its mystery, its joys and sorrows. It is one of those books that will leave a mark but in a wholly good way. In the novel, Spufford follows the imagined lives of five children who died in a German rocket attack on Woolworth's in London in 1944: Val and Jo, who are sisters, Vernon, Alec, and Ben. The novel begins in 1944, moves to 1964, then to 1979, on to 1994, and ends in 2009. Each chapter features a section about each character. It was a good book to read around my birthday.
It's funny how anti-climactic birthdays become, especially when contrasted with the grand events birthdays were growing up. All I can say is that it's nice to be remembered and to be reminded of people, times, seasons, events, those things that make my life mine. It could've been different, I suppose, in ways both better and worse. Since turning 50 I've made a deliberate effort not to play the What if, ... game. While Kierkegaard was perhaps correct that you can really only make sense of your life looking back on it, living your life mentally in reverse strikes me as a futile endeavor.
For quite a few years, I used to set aside time on my birthday and compose a rather ponderous post for this modest little weblog. I suppose during those years I found that a useful exercise. With my birthday falling on a Thursday this year, I figured I would wait for Friday. It just so happens that in 1965 11 November also fell on a Thursday- for whatever that's worth.
These days, my blog posts are more sketches than the attempted thorough-going pieces I used to attempt. I began blogging in earnest in July 2006. I've been at this consistently for 15 years, which seems incredible to me.
As I've stated and restated, blogging has been a vehicle of growth for me. If nothing else, I am a much better writer for doing this than I used to be or would be. This is not to say that I think myself a good writer- intermittently adequate, sometimes able to make a point, might be the best description of my writing ability. My genre? Unmaginative non-fiction!
To live is to grow. I hope I'm still growing. I think I'm still growing. I am still dreaming, too. My dreams these days have a little different tone and texture than they did, say, twenty-five years ago.
Since seeing him in concert last summer, I've been listening a lot to the music of Colin Hay. Hay, as some people my age might know, was the lead singer of the band Men At Work. Over the past about twenty years, he has carved out a solo career. While I used this song for a Friday traditio only back in September, I am posting it again. What song is that? "Waiting for My Real Life to Begin."
Especially with the much-neglected season of Advent on the horizon, not just waiting but anticipating is on my mind. It's hard to imagine anything more hopeless than waiting without anticipation. I think one of the things that makes Beckett's Waiting for Godot hopeful is the anticipation exhibited by Vladimir and Estragon. Since I am in the mode of literary reminiscence, Milan Kundera's novel Life Is Elsewhere comes to mind.
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