When in difficulty, read a book

The world is a mess. The new global crisis is a Totally Trump Enterprise but it’s making life expensive and worrying. I hope the unlooked-for end result will be a more concerted effort towards non fossil-fuel energy. Calling time on Big Oil.

Meanwhile, I’ve been hearing about plans in the UK, and similar mooted ideas in the USA, for a lower speed limit and travel-rationing. That would come with big patriotic campaigns - because a war footing allows us all to make sacrifices. The fact that climate campaigners have been asking for something similar for years, to take the pressure off the planet, to inform and encourage citizens, only to be told they were in la la land, is a measure of how unserious our politicians are. The climate isn’t an emergency… is it? Oil crisis? Now you’re talking.

Unlimited money for a war. No price to high to pay for a war.

And just when, in the UK, inflation was getting where it should be, and interest rates were falling, and people were hoping to move house, or remortgage, Trump blows it all up, without discussing his invasion of Iran with any of his ‘allies’, then insults us all because we don’t fancy World War 3 right now.

Yes, I have bought some more prepping stuff. Tins for my War Cupboard, which drives me mad, because throughout my childhood life Mrs Winterson kept her War Cupboard stocked up. To be fair, she was a young woman in WW2, and Dad was in the Army, including the D-Day Landings, so if corned beef, sardines, dried milk and canned prunes made her feel safer, then so be it.

What did Oscar Wilde say? All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his. (Importance of Being Earnest)

Sadly, it didn’t make her feel safer. The War Cupboard was one more thing to worry about.

I worry too, because I love this world and grieve for it. Human hatefulness and stupidity. The dawn chorus where I live is wonderful. Every morning the four major Uk songbirds are in the trees outside my bedroom window. And they sing all together. The blackbird, the thrush, the robin and the wren.

Underneath, I can hear the goldfinches, chaffinchs and the blue tits. In the wood, the woodpecker, tap-tapping, and later, in the fields, high above the hedges, the skylark.

I feed my birds ( yes, they have a War Cupboard too) and the garden is full of them. How many millions of birds are we destroying in toxic smoke plumes? And then there’s the marine life and the mammal life. Trees and plants. All life on earth that has a right to be here.

So what do I do?

Well, I do what I do and look after what I can while I can. And when I start worrying, I don’t turn into my mother. I read a book. Or a few poems. When I am worrying, I don’t write, I read.

What for ?

I read so that I can return to another truth of who we are, we humans. Not only deranged and dangerous, bloody and tribal, but capable of beauty and goodness. Capable of finding words that are not threats or insults, not empty rhetoric, not lies. Language that runs like a river through the drought-lands of the heart.

When my heart is droughted, that’s where I go. I visit the oasis of a book. Sit by water and remind myself that ugliness and loss isn’t the whole of us, even when ugliness and loss is everywhere. No matter how dry there is still something to drink.

Humans invented language and we didn’t do it only to find our way to food and shelter and away from trouble. Language is utility but more than utility. Language lifts us out of our barbaric yawps. Gives us communication. A way of telling. So that I can hear you and understand. So that you can here me and understand. So that we can put into words things difficult to think ( thanks Dante) and, just as importantly, things difficult to feel.

Reading is never a distraction. It might, yes, take our mind off things, but reading the real stuff always brings us back to ourselves, to the place, brings us back but more able to face whatever it is. More able to live with it, or damn well refuse to live with it. The strength of reading literature, any of it, is that the nuance, the subtlety, the mental challenges, the grappling and wrestling with another mind working at a high level, mettles and polishes our own mind.

Reading is resistance-training.

And also… laying down your head on a heart at full beat. That’s reading too.

Reading literature isn’t going to rebuild hospitals or save children. Not directly. Reading isn’t activism. Activism is activism. Reading is a way towards. Reading is a way through. We can do nothing if we are powerless and demoralised. If our minds are under fire day and night from the heavy artillery of cruelty and lies.

Think of reading as a shield. Think of reading as medicine. Think of reading as what helps.

So that’s what I am doing… not only, not also, but I am

Reading