One reason for not blogging is that I'm not reading. I don't know where the image of curling up with a book on a cold night came from, but the singular problem with the activity is the cold. I don't read in the cold. If I had a choice, I wouldn't work in the cold. The only cure for cold that really works is physical activity.
Fortunately, I've discovered house cleaning. It's kind of like reading, only it produces a result you can't see on a blog. A month ago I thought that hiring a housekeeper was the only thing for a sane middle-class person to do; now I can't see why anyone would possibly need one. Except perhaps the owner of a McMansion, but even then it's mostly vacuuming and dusting. The only things that are difficult are the wet rooms, and aside from the kitchen and one bathroom even those go unused most of the time. A few seconds while the tea is brewing or an idea needs rattling around, and the job is done.
But it's still cold, so then that leads to house purging. I have a intense pride in empty shelves. "Oh look how much storage space I have!" Isn't that the mating call of the happy yuppy? It's more convincing when you can actually see the shelves. Not sure why that activity got transported to spring. Perhaps a trans-location instituted by married people trying to forget where fresh mating calls lead.
Which is my second reason both for not blogging and for not reading. If I'm not reading, there is the danger that I might blog about something inappropriately personal, like the fact that aside from the chill in the air there are ice crystals in my brain and the thaw caused by reading gives me the damnedest headache. I've been cut off for the first time in my life by one of those creatures that pawed at the ground and threw dust and enticed me to forget all about house cleaning and shelf purging. I'm no less the caged elk listening to the bellows from the next valley than that round and surly housewife beating her rugs. I would gnaw off a leg, if I could. Not necessarily my own.
Bertrand Russell, who seems so humane, either cut off his ex's or betrayed them so horribly that they cut him off. After a relatively long marriage to his first wife, he discovered suddenly while on a bicycle ride with her that he couldn't stand her at all. There was a long separation, followed by divorce, followed by many other marriages. She always seemed a bit pathetic, hoping to be in his favor again, even in her dotage having fresh ribbons put in her hair if she thought he might visit. Alone, she seems not to have made much of her life.
Arthur Koestler, whose narcissism seems to have driven his compliant last wife through several abortions and ultimately joint suicide at the point of his terminal illness, nonetheless maintained his most important relationships throughout his life. His ex's lived vibrant, interesting lives before, during, and after their Koestler phase. Even that final wife seems to have lived on a far higher plane because of him than she would have lived without him. Her pathetic compliance seems at root to be because she was pathetic, and not something that could be placed entirely at his door.
I like to think that I'm more like a Koestler woman, living through a Russell moment. After the cleaning and the purging, the last few weeks I have sunk a large amount of energy and money into making a home. This is something I couldn't have done last year, or in previous years. Single men often live in happy uncertainty about their residence- the sparsely attended to "bachelor pad" being the cultural norm. Women live in a more dicey situation. The bare apartment is unsatisfactory, but the woman who has thrown herself with too much abandon into her home might as well hang the "spinster" sign out on the front door. Even Simone de Beauvoir never dare put too much into her residences (not even so much that I could dare call them "homes"), while Sartre was built into his office in the house he purchased for his mother. I'm not quite ready for the spinster plaque, but I'm definitely at the "love me, love my wallpaper" stage.
One of my ex-husbands was over for coffee this week, and he asked what I thought was going to happen to my things after I die. He had been thinking about the issue, "People like us," he said, "living our lives alone, what is the point of having anything?" Then he borrowed some books that I didn't want any more, and called me the next day to tell me how much he had enjoyed reading them on a cold night. People like us, we take a cold night and create our home however we like.
Yee-haw! damask wallpaper by Paul Loeback
