Society
The French for really sad thoughts
Published 09 October 2008
I have had 17 emails so far, some requiring long and thoughtful responses. I answer on my BlackBerry in between writing this and testing my son on French adjectives
It’s about 9.30 in the morning as I write this. One child is off sick, seemingly with tonsillitis, another is off school for Rosh Hashana, and I will deliver him to his father later today. The three dogs have not been walked, but our cleaning lady fed them. Rosh Hashana child has forgotten his homework at school. He later confesses that his tearful plea not to be sent to school for morning lessons was deliberate (French test avoidance) and that he can cry at will: "I just have to think really, really sad thoughts."
Meanwhile, I have had 17 emails so far, some requiring long and thoughtful responses. I answer on my BlackBerry in between writing this and testing my son on French adjectives, masculine and feminine. In the process of testing him, I discover to my horror that he can scarcely say "I am" or "I have": être et avoir have passed him by, except in distorted mnemonic songs. I set him exercises and return to the most urgent emails. "Mummy," he says sternly, "don't play with your phone while I'm working." And there you have it.
I recently visited Monk's House, in Sussex, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived. There's an other-worldly silence about the place, a feeling of leaden dread. Virginia's writing shed is at the end of the garden, by the flintstone wall to the churchyard, with a small Norman church nearby, and jackdaws circling in the afternoon sun. Inside the shed was her desk, with some folders, her essay "Three Guineas" on top. They were not far from the coast, and the Battle of Britain was near them. "I can quite distinctly see [the guns] and hear a roar," she wrote in her diary, "even though I go on, like a doomed mouse, nibbling at my daily page."
Afterwards I walked with my old spaniel towards the River Ouse, where Woolf drowned herself. There's a lane and some travellers' caravans; yellow dogs balancing on hind feet watched us over a scruffy hedge. The river is like a small canal at this point, the water not more than a foot deep, brown slurry on top. My dog was tramping behind me, stiff with age. I thought of the boundary between sanity and insanity, and the difficulties of knowing when that line is crossed, and that perhaps it's not a "line" at all, but more like overlapping, merging fields of being.
Time briefly stood still, a moment of being and homage. I thought of my brother, and his fields of consciousness, of his addiction, and the tragic fragmentation of his life. In the end - and the road of conversations, letters and interventions is so long and hard for families of addicts - one stands helplessly watching, and waiting.
I watched the last half of the Biden-Palin debate on Friday night; we tried to tape it and ended up recording an old Jeff Goldblum monster movie instead, so I missed half of it. For the intellectual content, as well as sick fascination, I might as well have watched the movie.
This is Palin, from the transcript: "Darn right it was the predator lenders who tried to talk Americans into thinking that it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford a $100,000 house. There was deception there, and there was greed and there is corruption on Wall Street. And we need to stop that. Again, John McCain and I, that commitment that we have made, and we're going to follow through on that, getting rid of that corruption." And: "Darn right we need tax relief for Americans so that jobs can be created here."
Her answer to Joe Biden's cogent critique of the Bush regime was to admonish, jocularly: there you go again, looking backwards when we should be looking forward (steely wink at the camera). Thus the logic of a thousand self-help books about "moving on" legitimises the expediency of refusing to engage with the legacy of the past eight years of Republican rule. Lest we forget, here's an (incomplete) list: $10bn a month spent on an unwinnable war; 100,000 Iraqis dead, 4,000 American soldiers killed and at least 20,000 wounded; drowned bodies in dirty, flooded New Orleans; financial meltdown; Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib; torture memos which provided legal justification for "enhanced interrogation techniques".
All this dismissed by Palin as irrelevant to the new Republican project, with America as the "shining city on a hill", the beacon of hope and redemption. She was quoting Ronald Reagan, though John F Kennedy and Walter Mondale referred to the shining city as well. But the phrase was originally used by John Winthrop, a Puritan born in 1588, and the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. "For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill," he said. "The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world."
How apt, and how sad.
Sigrid Rausing is a publisher and philanthropist
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