Those who know me well know that I love to read on a wide variety of topics in every genre. So, I am always looking for fascinating things to read and am always getting recommendations from friends on books to read. Reading is a constant in my life and work these days and, in these pandemic-infused times, I find some comfort in the pages of books. Books can carry me away from the grief of the moment and the stress of being isolated away from people for days on end.
The grief of being cut off from family during the holidays, the increasing cultural shifts inherent in the way the pandemic was being handled, hearing about family members who had contracted the disease, or friends who had lost loved ones as a result and the fog of shutdown that hit back in March, made me unfamiliar to myself. Some days, it was as if I was floating around in some disembodied reality. Although reading had always brought me comfort, now I was unable to focus at all.
I had time. The stack of new books sat untouched. I had become familiar with George Saunders, an author who had been recommended to me by a friend, and I started reading his earlier books. In reading, I found his beautiful and oddball families to be an unexpected balm in these troubled times. Reading his books helped me float back down into myself and my reality. And, since I love all things Lincoln, Saunders' 2017 book Lincoln In The Bardo gave me a new perspective on life in the age of Covid and the collective grief all of us in America are feeling following the tense election season and never-ending pandemic restrictions.
The book is filled with shadowy graveside settings and, reading it made me feel a lot like Saunders' ghosts roaming around the graveyard. But, instead of wanting to get out, like those in the novel, I found myself wanting to enter that graveyard.
As I read the book, I enjoyed the play-like format of different ghosts having heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious conversations in a cemetery purgatory, or, as the title suggests, Bardo (the Tibetan term meaning the state between death and rebirth). The novel takes place in the same cemetery where Abraham Lincoln's son, Willie, is recently buried. In the novel, the president pays a visit to the grave, opens the crypt and cradles his son's body in his arms. It was at this point in the novel where I started to read slowly, sank into the book and let the entire section sink deeply into my conscious mind. That section seemed to embrace all my despair over the state of a world changed forever by Covid-19 and an even darker stain on America's soul.
Saunders is known for deeply funny, satiric short fiction that lampoons American consumer culture, among other things (similar, in many ways, to the works of Sinclair Lewis or George Orwell). Saunders' work also offers a gut punch, revelation, or moment of being that seems wholly apart from the humor. Some of his earlier stories are bombastic and over-the-top compared with the works that would follow, but repeated themes echo. The early stories are like early lives, hinting - at least in retrospect - at what is to come.
Throughout his books, recently departed souls try to sweep through the bodies of the living, attempting to change their hearts and minds, because they are out of chances to change themselves. Often, the most powerful moments in these stories come when children demonstrate a kind of grace, despite the problematic adults surrounding them. The children in his stories are always absolved. They offer a second chance at life. The adults can watch and learn.
When the frame of his stories enlarge, the works include not only the humiliating jobs and adult failures followed by eventual satiric/tragic death, but also the young people on the periphery as witnesses, doing better at life than the adults could. Much as children manage better at handling the pandemic than most adults, as they don their masks as soon as possible when approaching others, while the adults remain oblivious. Consider Willie Lincoln. This dead child holds so much power, as if to say we are the ones in mourning purgatory, seeking comfort in the absence of ritual.
In Lincoln in the Bardo, when a grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln visits the cemetery and holds the body of his son Willie, he is attempting to comfort them both. Nothing else can be done. Willie desperately wants his father's attention, even after death. His painful moment of failed connection is countered by Willie's realization that he and the other lost souls are dead, not sick or waiting to be healed. This understanding releases them and, when the souls go - wherever it is they go - Saunders imagines it as a "matter-light blooming phenomenon" complete with "bone-chilling fire sound."
Still, there are stragglers in the cemetery. Foulmouthed ghosts and heavy partiers who acknowledge their shortcomings as parents and ghosts who cannot leave until they right the wrong of failing to help a child who is trapped.
Anger, fear and shame are the real purgatories of Saunders' fiction. To be stuck in the bardo, while living or dead, is to be lost. A lot like the feelings we struggle through in the modern reality. By reading this work I was saved from my thoughts, which had tended toward the morbid and the fearful over these past few months. When will I learn to truly feel less lost? I struggle to stay present in a moment that otherwise feels unmoored in time and space.
You have to keep body and soul together, after all.
Until you cannot do so anymore.
We have only the time we are given. What did you do with your time - that is, your life? Did you help or hurt others? These are the questions Saunders attempts to answer in his fiction, as characters glimpse, evade, or experience their inevitable end. Who did they hurt and how do they make it right? The children in his stories serve as mini consciences; they remind the adults of their own younger selves. Maybe even their better selves.
In turn, the relieved adults praise their children for coming through in the clutch.
That was an earlier reading life, lived by a different me.
Now, as I read it through a widened frame, the picture expanded. I did beautiful by being alive and free. I did beautiful by choosing, when I had a choice, and it cost me nothing that mattered, to keep others alive and free, too. And, when the time came and I held a heavy, hurtful thing in my hands, I did beautiful by letting it go.
I stood in the yard one night in June searching for the comet that was supposed to be visible in the Northwest sky: Neowise, which had been discovered earlier in this tumultuous year when our world was different. Inside were books: comfort waiting on a shelf, ideas and words to be read and reread outside of time and space.
Then, when I spotted it, I gained a new perspective on life in a scary world filled with Covid and an uncertain future in an America I barely recognize.
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