We have beds that incline, both at the back and at the feet. Lying on the bed and adjusting the tilt appropriately, I find is one of the very few ways that I can relieve the pain from lumbar radiculopathy and sacroiliitis, which persists in spite of a recent steroid injection I had in the region of my right hip and also performing some exercises I learned in physical therapy, the last time I did that. So, already disposed toward sloth, I have yet another reasons to stay in bed for prolonged periods, even when I'm not sleeping or napping. It has now become the place where I do my long form reading, most of which I do during the daytime, and gets me away from sitting at the computer, still a habit for drinking the morning coffee, doing way too many word puzzles, and every once in a while writing one of these godawful blog posts.
This one is about my recent reading. Yesterday I finished David Copperfield, quite a long book, after previously reading A Tale of Two Cities. Some years back, I had read Bleak House and liked it very much. Yet, unlike when I was a kid and then got on a binge to read a series of books by the same author, my more recent trajectory of choosing what to read has been somewhat whimsical, and while I might read consecutively two books from the same writer, I will then bounce around to something else that has caught my attention for whatever reason, though apart from finding the novels that form the basis of TV series I've recently watched, I try to avoid contemporary fiction. For the most part now, given that I've been retired for quite a while, I no longer need page-turner fiction as a release from the daily grind. I want more than that from my reading, to be elevated in some way, either educationally or emotionally. About the former, one way to learn from the reading is to note parallels between the historical context and the current time in America. History repeats, or so they say. As to the latter, I will get to that in a bit.
Let me make one note here as a guide to potential readers, in case this post encourages someone else to give Dickens or other authors of his ilk a try. The reader of such works has an implicit obligation, to adjust oneself to the rhythms and timbres of how the author writes, which might take some doing as both the style and word usage may be somewhat unfamiliar. There is reward in showing patience as the story opens up that way. With that, let me make a confession. I read with my Kindle Fire disconnected from the Internet. I do this primarily to save battery life, but also to keep me from straying and Web surfing while I'm reading. For the same reason, I only rarely use the Kindle application on my Mac. But this means I don't have access to an online dictionary while I read. I need to get meaning from context, or miss it entirely, which does happen once in a while. Then, later, perhaps I will remember a word that stumped me and look it up when I return to the computer. (I recall finding the words gaol and gaoler when reading a Tale of Two Cities.) With that, there is more than just skill to the meaning making, as it entails developing a sense of taste as to whether sufficient grasp of the story has been obtained. I will add to this that I have imperfect recall of the characters who were part of the story earlier but then faded into the background for a while. I hope that the author will help to refresh my memory when it is appropriate to do so.
With David Copperfield, I identified a good deal with the title character, finding several similarities between him and me, in spite of the big differences in time and setting. The biggest of these, surely, is a penchant to be absorbed with producing narrative in one's head, finding it a natural occupation. I was able reconcile that eventually with having a good job by becoming an academic with a focus on economic theory. Yet the story itself made me reflect back on an earlier time, when I was in school, graduate school in particular, but before that as well. I developed a reputation as a very good student among my classmates and in some cases I became aware of something similar among my professors.
That serves as backdrop to the story. One way where my story is quite different from that of David Copperfield is that many of the main characters he confronted early in life remained important parts of his extended family later in life. In contrast, as I changed settings, particularly when I started out at Northwestern for grad school, I knew neither my classmates nor my professors ahead of time and indeed, having grown up in New York wondered whether the Midwest personality was different in some fundamental ways. Yet that hadn't been the only change for me.
I was overweight in high school, more so in college. I was also terribly shy regarding the boy-girl thing. It's hard for me to separate cause from effect this way. I deliberately lost a good deal of weight between college and grad school, as a way to have a clean slate on this score and improve my chances thereafter. And weight-wise, I was able to maintain the new level for about 20 years or so, well into getting married and having a couple of kids. What I want to note here is that my personality didn't change with these alterations in my outer appearance. I still felt physically unattractive and didn't know how to initiate with a girl, blowing a few opportunities at Northwestern as a consequence.
This is unlike David Copperfield, how had a few girls in his life where he had both much contact with them and where he fell in love with each one at the time. One was in childhood with Emily, where they played together extensively. Memories of her fueled his imagination thereafter. It is this fueling of the imagination where I found similarities with the Dickens character.
The next girl chronologically is Agnes, who was a dear friend and confidant while David was in school. He lived with her and her father, who managed his aunt's finances. It was Copperfield's aunt who paid both for the this boarding and for the school tuition. Agnes remains a steady friend through the rest of the story. Eventually he marries her and the have a very nice family. But that is getting ahead of the story.
Before that is Dora, the daughter of Copperfield's first work boss. He immediately falls in love with her, because of her beauty. While I find that quite natural, as I will explain momentarily, Dora is also depicted as a silly little girl, playing with her dog Jip and looking for affection from David, but not otherwise engaging in serious matters. It is a wonder how someone like Copperfield, so caught up in the life of the mind, can nonetheless feel that love for a woman is entirely visual and tactile, without any intellectual component whatsoever.
Yet for most young men, that is probably how it is. My second year in grad school I was a TA, the first quarter, fall 1977, for introductory microeconomics taught by Assaf Razin. I held my office hours in the Library lounge. At one of these a girl in my class with blonde hair came to sit down at the table where I was sitting. Overtly, nothing unusual happened. In my head, however, I fell in love with her immediately and have long since regretted not pursuing the matter further.
In spite of Dora's shortcomings, evident to the reader if not to David, she calls him Doady, a cutesy idiosyncrasy, the two marry and seem quite happy. But her health is not good and after a while she passes a way. While Copperfield does experience grief at this time, it doesn't appear overwhelming and he recovers from it. Eventually he finds his shared friendship with Agnes, which for him really has gone beyond that, is actually a shared loved on her part as well. They then get married and there is seemingly more balance in their relationship than the prior one with Dora.
Something similar happened to me although it took quite a while to rebound from the Northwestern experience. While on sabbatical at UBC in spring 1989 I met Leslie. By this point I had tenure at Illinois and Leslie was an assistant professor at UBC. We feel in love and had a whirlwind romance, but we also had some more maturity then, being in our 30s. It was wonderful. Yet I still can't help wondering if I could do it over again whether I could have made my early 20s more fulfilling on an emotional level.
There are other parallels I've had with David Copperfield. The book has many stories of cruelty, overt misrepresentation, and evil. I experienced some of this happened while I was at Northwestern, partly from the Economics program and partly by my fellow students. Much of this was about funding for support of our learning. I was on fellowship my first year and not being a stickler for details I thought that fellowship was guaranteed for 3 more years thereafter, provided my academic performance was satisfactory. It turned out that no such guarantee existed and indeed that funding in the second year was scarcer than they originally had expected. So, my class became even more competitive in seeking fellowship support. Further, and this one is just absurd in hindsight, at the time being a TA was a requirement for the PhD and not a paid job, apparently as a way to gyp the IRS. Yet during my second year the program had raised the requirement from 4 quarter courses (2 courses for 2 quarters) to 6 quarter courses (2 courses of 3 quarters) without any adjustment in compensation for the TA. That was chutzpah.
Then, during the first year, one or two of my classmates got it into their heads that they could get a leg up on the rest of us by reshelving the bound journal that contained our required reading in the wrong place in the Library, so those who hadn't read the piece already never would. Also, in 1 or 2 cases they actually ripped out the article from the bound journal, so finding the bound journal was insufficient to get at the reading. In case it isn't obvious, this form of competition is quite demoralizing to the other students. Many of my classmates that first year got a Masters degree and then dropped out of the program. I'm guessing that the cheaters were among them, though I'll never know that for sure.
I hadn't thought about those episodes for quite a while. It's not obvious that reading Dickens would trigger those memories. But it does show that not all mental connections are linear and that sometimes in searching for a parallel we come up with what might seem quite other experiences.
Let me close with one other point. We are used to fiction delivering us with happy endings. Dickens doesn't disappoint on that score. It makes one wonder, even as we are living in a seeming dystopia at present, whether we can produce a happy ending to our own lives. I hope that is still possible.
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