Lately I've been running online chats with friends of mine, mainly to distract everyone from the general misery of the pandemic. One of them is simply entitled So, What Are You Reading?, which we do every two weeks, and it is very free form and gives people the opportunity to jump in or just listen. When we ran our first one it was very apparent that folks were either focusing on true almost apocalyptic readings or the purist escapism, which, of course, makes perfect sense. I was thinking about today as I was out on my daily walk. I've been listening to Charles Dickens'
Bleak House on Audible. Now, I've read
Bleak House two or three different times over the decades, but I've never listened it before. Truthfully, it's been a pleasure, far beyond the virtue of merely knocking off thirty-seven hours of isolation. There are times when I actually found myself bent over in laughter at some lovely turn of phrase or tomfoolery. Today, however, I found myself crying, although not from laughter, and it reminded me of what an extraordinary novel
Bleak House is. I was working my way through Chapter XXXI, "Nurse and Patient," which is a combination of socially conscious, chilling, heart-warming and heart-breaking all at the same time, in that way that only Dickens is. It's the chapter where the poor orphan boy Joe, Charley (Esther's maid), and Esther herself all get sick with a contagion. I remember it well, but this time it was a couple of paragraphs at the beginning where Dickens set everything up. Esther and Charley are on their way to the brick-worker hovel where they know that Joe has ended up. Dickens tells us:
It was a cold, wild night, and the trees shuddered in the wind. The rain had been thick and heavy all day, and with little intermission for many days. None was falling just then, however. The sky had partly cleared, but was very gloomy even above us, where a few stars were shining. In the north and northwest, where the sun had set three hours before, there was a pale dead light both beautiful and awful; and into it long sullen lines of cloud waved up like a sea stricken immovable as it was heaving. Towards London a lurid glare overhung the whole dark waste, and the contrast between these two lights, and the fancy which the redder light engendered of an unearthly fire, gleaming on all the unseen buildings of the city and on all the faces of its many thousands of wondering inhabitants, was as solemn as might be.
I had no thought that night, none, I am quite sure of, what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since that when we had stopped at the garden gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then and there that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with that spot and time and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill.
I found this passage devastating today, and not simply because it foretells so much of what is getting ready to break in the novel. It also seemed to bring the two opposite ends of the reading spectrum, the apocalyptic and the escapist together in one novel. Finally, it made me think that after we've all been sick, and we'll all be sick, we won't remember when we were sick, or even that happy moment when/if we've survived, but instead we're remember clearly the moment before the world changed. We already remember what we were doing before the Great Isolation began, but that will pale in comparison to our remembrance of when we were well.
