Mallory's Camera

Way back in the Cretaceous Period when I first began uploading my diary to this particular site, I had no idea it was a "community" site.

When random strangers began dropping stray comments, I was shocked.

Of course, I was delighted. When you put a message in a bottle, and somebody reads it on the alien shore where it washes up, you're always delighted. Isn't that the whole point of putting messages in bottles?

Over time, I developed a whole circle of readers, and of course, I read their diaries, too. I love other people's diaries! I love looking through other people's fence holes.

This diary is not promotional. I do many performative, transactional things online, of course. Social media is all about instilling as much FOMO as possible in one's readers. That's why social media sites call them "followers".

But I've rarely done that here. In fact, I'm a bit of a train wreck here. I don't think many people reading about my life here would want my life.

But I was never interested in amassing huge numbers of followers here. I'm a long-form writer, and one might say excessively literary, being a prodigious reader and having been steeped in the Great Western Literary traditions all my life. My diary is never gonna to appeal to large numbers of followers.

So, I didn't really notice when online journaling lost its popularity.

The people I liked still journaled. I read them, and they read me.

In the past couple of months, though, one by one, many of those people have stopped journaling.

This makes me sad.

I am not going to stop journaling, though. I've been keeping a diary since I was 12 years old and keeping it online sure beats hauling around 50 volumes of mouldering paper and barely decipherable ink. It's the delusion of immortality.

###

Meanwhile, anxiety over To Do lists, impending trips, and impending moves has seeped into every corner of my life.

Ichabod tends to call me when he's driving. He was driving up to San Francisco a couple of days ago when I spoke to him most recently. Dinner and a jazz club with his old RLS pal Josh.

"Are you driving back down after?" I asked nervously.

"I am!" he said.

"Oh, honey," I said. "Please don't. That's so late at night. Get a motel."

He laughed. "I'll be fine, Mom."

I realized how ridiculous I sounded, so I added, "In fact, I don't think you should ever go out at night. Just stay home and watch Netflix! And you know what? Don't go out during the day, either. I think you should start conducting your entire work life by Zoom!!! That way, you'll be safe!"

We both laughed, but I had a hard time falling asleep that night. I kept picturing Ichabod bleeding and dead on Route 17. (The Highway of Certain Doom, as I used to call it when I lived in Monterey.)

And then yesterday, I let Black Chicken out of her coop in the late afternoon—because honest to God, what kind of a life is being a solitary chicken alone in a coop day after day after day?—and I was a complete wreck until she tottled back into her coop at sundown. I kept picturing her—grabbed by a fox! nabbed by a hawk! on my watch!

I can't keep anything safe!

###

In a few minutes, I am off to help real-life Flavia clean out Brian's old place. I've proceeded to rehome almost all of Brian's books; I'm taking the last batch today. And Brian had this perfectly fine treadmill, which Flavia was gonna give to a scrap metal guy—

"Oh, don't do that!" I said. "Somebody will want that treadmill."

Flavia was dubious. "But it's so huge! And they're gonna have to dismantle it to get it out of the house—"

I was firm. "Somebody will want it."

So, she gave me permission to list it on craigslist, and within one hour, we had three takers—

She is also renting an enormous dumpster and is letting me use it, so I need to start going through my things and dumping every thing I don't want to move with.

So much work!

A classic symptom of PTSD is a feeling of looming catastrophe.

It's clear I have PTSD about the invoicing process—which I can only surmise comes from living with Ben, who was always lying about money, in particular after he'd been laid off by Sports Illustrated and kept assuring me for eight long months: Well, they promised the check was in the mail! They promised the check would arrive here by Fed Ex at precisely 3:15 this afternoon! Etc, etc.

Specifics in lying are always a sign that the liar is getting too full of themself. Really talented liars keep it very general and try to overlap with the truth as much as possible. Ben, in other words, was not a very talented liar. I believed him because I wanted to believe him—(a) because the little household I was running was a house of cards where every penny had its use, and (b) because I loved him.

###

I don't know what one does about PTSD. My client, in fact, processed the invoice in four quick days, which I absolutely knew they would. It will be hitting my bank account this afternoon.

It would help if my savings were a bigger buffer, I suppose, so that's what I'm going to concentrate on over the next few months.

###

Anyway...

The anxiety was intense.

And because I need to keep my head clear for tax law, I eshewed gummies. And I am also eschewing alcohol because I'm on the All lentils, oatmeal, & salmon, all of the time! diet.

All I could do was try to distract myself.

It was raining very hard, so no tromping about outside.

So instead, I watched the entire Godfather saga. Godfather 3 is so fuckin' awful, it's hard to believe all three were created by the same director, since the first two films are absolute masterpieces.

And I Photoshopped a bunch of photos to make them look like Thomas Kinkade paintings (see above). I will confess to having a certain sneaking affection for Thomas Kinkade paintings. Yes, they are the most awful kitsch imaginable. But I like kitsch.

Then I wrote another 1,000 or so words on the Work in Progress, describing how Grazia becomes an ER nurse and the appearance of Patient Zero in the ER where she works at the start of the COVID pandemic.

I am not very confident about the status details. I haven't actually worked in an ER for more than 30 years. So, assuming I am actually able to finish the damn thing, I will have to run those status details past someone with more recent ER experience.

It is still very gloomy & dark, but since it's not raining, I will try to tromp today. And also do tax law & work on the Shawangunk Dem and RTT birthday websites.

There are logistical issues with the garden. Since I now live so far away from it, I have to plan going there—which has been difficult given the rainy weather of the last week or so.

We've had a break from the rain the last couple of days. But weather forecasters, modern-day variants on those white-bearded prophets of yore, say it's gonna start raining again tonight.

Which leaves me with a dilemma.

I've been trying to be very accountable with the various revenue-generating activities—not that I expect them to keep me safe from the various horrible geopolitical events that are taking place around the world or even from the pitchfork-wielding, torch-waving villagers in the small Trumpy town where I now live. But, you know. Money! The one true cure for FOMO.

So, I have been assigning myself a word quota.

And I don't leave the house until I complete that word quota.

Which doesn't usually take place until the early afternoon.

I'd like to drive straight over to the garden right this very moment! The sun is out; the freshly mowed grass and newly leafed trees are such a radiant green promise.

But I'm forcing myself not to.

And that is frustrating.

Of course, I can always traipse off to the garden when I stop working.

But by then I may not feel like it. The trip won't be spontaneous.. It will be just another pro forma thing on the pro forma list of things I must do because—Well. I just have to.

###

I've been in a mood.

It's nothing a little distraction wouldn't cure, but the world seems too scary right now to look away for a single moment.

When you're a passenger on an airplane, you gotta keep staring out that window—or the plane's gonna crash.

Magic!

It's the only way the truly powerless have to control things.

Earlier this week, I started my annual cannabis prophylaxis.

It’s supposed to be protecting me against anxiety attacks, only it doesn’t seem to be working very effectively.

Dunno whether this is because I’m more neurotic than I thought or whether the news is becoming more terrifying each & every day—as for example, this story about how RFK Jr.’s lawyer intends to ask the FDA to revoke approval for the polio vaccine.

I mean—I. Can’t. Even…

###

Also started training for the 2024 TaxBwana season.

So far, the Ulster County TaxBwana trainers seem to have a much better handle on adult education than the Dutchess County TaxBwana trainers had.

All the training sessions save one will be conducted over Zoom, and I am actually learning something.

###

Before I left on vacation, I’d been on a reading spree of novels exploring soul-sucking American life in the 1950s.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve been binging Mad Men—the quintessential America-emerging-from-the-50s TV series. (I hated Don Draper’s second wife so much that I actually stopped watching the show when it originally aired in the fourth season when Megan first appears.)

Mad Men deserves its plaudits. It’s a scathing review of artificially created demand & the conformist culture that bloomed across America prior to 1969. To my mind, Mad Men is an absolute vindication of the Boomer demographic: Look what we saved you from!

###

I see the culture shift pre- and post-1969 as one of the sharper attitudinal borderlines.

In general, the new enters the scene more-or-less unnoticed while the old is still happening. There's considerable overlap, and, of course, we are all more-or-less wedded to the first new we were a part of, so much so that we miss all the signs that that new has become an old.

But the Sixties..

Was it the sex? Was it the drugs? Was it the post-modernism? Was it the rise of the so-called New Journalism that took media coverage out of the realm of recounting facts and made it all about the reporter’s experience?

Whatever, to me at least, it was a clear Before & After, the sharpest cultural break between two generations that America experienced in my lifetime.

Although, I acknowledge that like everyone else, I suffer from generational chauvinism. No doubt, GenXers & Millennials have the same sense of a moment when the past dissolved and their’s became the relevant context. I just don’t know what their seed experience might be.

And yes, I know I am blathering.

In the final analysis, I suppose we always see things the way they weren’t.

Spent a long time yesterday trying to puzzle out the utility of emotion. Why do we feel what we feel?

Emotions are a way to color-code gross neurochemical changes, I suppose. Such changes happen on a cell-by-cell basis, which somehow gets collectivized in the organism’s central processing center (for which read cerebral cortex) into profound mental states. But why? Could there be other intelligent life forms that assemble that neurochemical data using a different model? If so, what would that model be?

###

I was pondering, of course, because I was screwing off between Remunerative bouts & have run out of Law & Order episodes with which to distract myself.

But also because, for whatever reason, I am feeling anxious.

And anxiety is an emotion that has no utility whatsoever.

It’s a vestigial emotion. The affective equivalent of an appendix.

And it’s really fuckin’ uncomfortable.

###

In the early afternoon, RTT texted me this:

Hey mom, I just want to follow up on something we discussed. I think you seem to spend a lot of time drifting into what ifs about things you’d like to have done differently raising me, but I think for the things piled onto your plate you did an amazing job. Where others may have crumbled under the wake of pressure, you kept your cool in really emotionally trying times and always did your best to look forward. Where we talked a lot about things I could’ve done- played more sports, stayed at ISM, etc- I think you deserve a lot of credit for building important foundations in me too. While we skirted the poverty line more than most, I still never got into hard drugs, did crime, lost any sense of morality. While we did spend a lot of time without a home per se while on the circus, you kept me surrounded by pets I loved and normalcy in the form of museum trips or books we’d read together. You also got me into music- who’s knows where my sense of taste might be at if you didn’t make me do the law and order dance?

There’s not really a point to this tangent, I just wanted you to know I really do love and appreciate ya, and it always makes my heart swell spending time with ya

Very sweet!

Because I do, in fact, spend a lot of time agonizing over my failings as a mother—not just with RTT but also with Ichabod.

Like if I had been a better mother, they would be happier human beings—not that they’re particularly unhappy human beings, but you know, if only I had paid more attention, they’d be right up there now with the Laughing Buddha.

###

The Law and Order dance referenced above…

When I first started watching Law & Order, I was so taken by the Law & Order theme song—best bit of musical branding ev-ah!—that I choreographed a whole Gladys Knight & the Pips dance routine that I somehow cajoled or bullied the boyZ into doing with me.

It remains one of the touchstones of their childhoods.

Like when Ichabod was applying to law school, he got drunk one night and actually wrote an essay that began, But the real reason I want to become a lawyer is because when I was a kid, my Mom made me dance to the Law & Order theme song….

“Don’t send that one in,” I said when he showed the essay to me.

###

In the afternoon, I had a long, lively phone conversation with Tom whom I’m trying to persuade to go to Las Vegas with me in February, and then in the evening, Iggy arrived for his one-week residency at the dacha.

I realize at this point that I’m just looking for any reason to feel derisive toward Iggy, but he just filled me with scorn when talking about the chickens—“I mean, they look like shit, they won’t come out of the woods, and they’re not laying eggs—”

“They’re molting, Iggy,” I said, trying not to clench my teeth. “I imagine it’s a physically uncomfortable sensation, and it makes them want to hide. They’ll be fine when their new feathers come in, and they’ll start laying again in the spring.”

The conversation reinforced my belief that Iggy is incapable of love because he can’t love anything when it’s ugly.

What did Crazy Jane say to the Bishop?

For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

<>

Since my return from California, I haven’t been sleeping well.

I’m tired, I lay down, I can feel my body begin to let go—but my mind refuses to go under. My mind remains stubbornly fixed on the waking world. Those little whirling thoughts, those eddies of memory that I rely upon to take me under, to sink me down, do come. But they’ve lost their power to anchor me to the subconscious.

Or something.

And I’m an early riser. Always have been.

###

Sleep is kinda the glue that keeps me together.

When I don’t get it, I feel really pathetic. Like everything I touch, I imbue with some deep sense of wrongness. I become a veritable little squid, squirting black psychic ink! I radiate repulsiveness!

And I don’t have much fun.

###

I think I’m feeling overwhelmed.

At the best of times, though, I don’t have a very good conduit into my feeling state. Humor and a kind of amiable vagueness are my standard operating protocols.

I figure out my emotions from the pieces lying in front of me as though they were some kind of jigsaw puzzle… Let’s see… you spent a lot of money on a trip you had not planned to make to visit someone with whom you have a lot of history but who (let’s face it) is ape-shit crazy… You did keep her from killing herself… But maybe she wouldn’t have killed herself anyway! And now, you have to move, and the money you spent on that trip would have been better put into moving, plus there is no guarantee that any leap from the frying pan you take won’t land you right in the fire… No wonder you feel anxious…

Okay!

Puzzle solved.

###

I’ve been steadfastly staying away from gummies and alcohol in this mood, figuring that indispositions like this are what give rise to addictions.

I’m a big fan of the recreational use of alcohol & drugs, but I frown on addiction.

Still. I think I may have to try to sedate myself with something tonight.



On the agenda today: Trip with Loraine to the Northern Dutchess Botanical Gardens followed by lunch.

And more Remuneration.

Massive anxiety attack all night long.

Actually, it wasn’t an attack. Attacks are kamikaze raids on the nervous system. Zoom in, zoom out. Hit & run.

This was more of a sustained and ongoing battle.

Ostensible trigger was a phone call to someone who didn’t pick up the phone.

This is why you don’t like making phone calls, I reminded myself.

I turned off my phone. Ancient tribal magic! When you make yourself unavailable, people call back.

But morning came, and there was no record of callbacks on my phone.

My mind immediately spun out in the direst directions: Person got into a car accident, a spinout & crash on Highway 17, which long ago I nicknamed “The Highway of Certain Death”! Person was kidnapped by members of a drug cartel who are even now dismembering him slowly!

Neither of these things happened. I know that.

But that anxiety somehow got mixed into anxiety about money (All your clients are going to drop you), anxiety about life (You were given chances, and you wasted every one), anxiety about self-worth (You’re a failure.) Cascade effect!

Not Fun.

The BIG Not Fun.

Outside, fine snow had begun to fall. It looked like diamond dust.

###

Lotta people I know practice “manifestation.” The way it works is you perch the vision of the One Perfect Thing you want on a lotus leaf floating on a sea just in back of your third eye. Sometimes, the vision works like a compass, and sometimes it works like a magnet, but however it works, slowly, shimmeringly, the One Perfect Thing begins to materialize. Maybe it loses a little of its perfection in the phase change; maybe it becomes the One Good Thing instead of the One Perfect Thing, or maybe even the One Okay-I-Guess Thing, but does that matter? The important thing is that you got what you wanted.

I cannot manifest.

I am so convinced that anything I visualize in any degree of detail will not happen that the only things I can visualize are absolute calamities. Because if I imagine them in excruciating detail, then the calamities won’t take place.

I’m sure this negative manifestation tendency plays a significant role in my anxiety levels. As does, of course, the season… hence, seasonal affective disorder.

###

Anyway, really, there’s nothing to do about it but take deep cleansing breaths, pop a gummy, climb back onto the conveyor belt that’s rolling me ever farther away from whatever trauma predisposed me toward feelings like these.

Writing helps.

Talking might help. But honestly, I don’t have anyone here that I can talk about stuff like this with. It's kinda like needing to be talked down from a bad acid trip.

###

When I’m feeling stronger & calmer, it might be enlightening to trace the anxiety back to the original Big Bang. I’m guessing it was abandonment. My mother abandoned me a lot when I was a little girl. Sometimes, she would walk me to the corner of 72nd Street & Broadway, and leave me there for hours & hours & hours. My father would come and get me, she’d tell me: You’re bad. I don’t want you anymore. I’m calling your father. You can be his problem. You wait here for him.

But I won’t feel mentally centered enough for this exercise until spring.

And by the time spring comes, I’ll have forgotten all about the anxiety attacks.

Quite the fabulous mini-vacay!

From the quaint & scenic Hudson Valley, I traveled to the NYC Botanical Garden to see the miniature trains. Very cunning & adorable they were:





Though even more cunning & adorable was the strange & wondrous New York City some arboreal-minded miniaturist had conjured out of found materials like branches, acorns, bark, and leaves:





Neil Gaiman’s Christmas Carol was excellent.

Gaiman didn’t read from the published version of A Christmas Carol.

And, apparently, neither did Dickens.

Instead, Dickens went through the tale, took out all the long-winded, expostulatory passages, and prepared a kind of read-aloud version with stage directions—Stand up here. Gasp & hold finger up here. Pull beard reflectively here. Etc, etc—which he called a “prop book.”

The New York City Library somehow came into possession of Christmas Carol’s prop book, and Gaiman used it to guide his performance:



Gaiman has a remarkably pleasant public persona. It was just so interesting to watch how this evolved into his relationship with the audience. Because in the end, it’s not the material that makes a performance—it’s the delivery that makes the performance, and Gaiman can turn two sentences that lie flat on a page into a laugh fest. You see it most clearly when he is performing his own stuff:



###

As always, I remain intrigued by the secret life of New York City rooftops, which can only be viewed from the windows of certain magical hotels—



—and mystified by biznesses that occupy upper stories in Midtown buildings:



I mean, that barbershop. Gotta be a money-laundering operation, right?

###

In the morning, I took my coffee at one of the many kiosks in Grand Central Station.

Grand Central Station right now is surrounded by homeless people, struggling to sleep over subway gratings that might keep them warm. I struggled mightily with my desire to document this phenomenon and my respect for other people’s privacy. In the end, respect for privacy won out: If I were sleeping on a subway grate outside Grand Central Station, I wouldn’t want anyone taking photos of me.

But I feel like I’m seeing more homeless than ever before, and if I can’t document it, then how do I prove that?

###

After coffee, I toddled off to J.P. Morgan’s old mansion, which is now a small museum.

The museum was staging an exhibition on medieval money, merchants, & morality.

Will money damn your soul?

Clearly, Hieronymus Bosch thought so:



Clearly, the 9th century monarch who owned this bible did not:



Of course, the great jewel of J.P. Morgan’s old mansion is its library:



Whimsical statuary had been installed up & down Park Avenue, and the Yuletide buskers this year mostly seem to be horn players:





I liked Manhattan much better on this visit than I had over Thanksgiving.

I’m old, so I’m invisible.

But being invisible seemed more like a superpower this time round.

###

As soon as I got back, I immediately felt weighted down by a very physical sense of apprehension—

It’s because you don’t feel safe, thought I to myself.

Sadly, this is an all too familiar feeling.

I can remember feeling just this way at three years old when I had to deal with my mother’s insane, capricious moods, and of course, it was an intermittent beacon—Danger, Will Robinson!!!—flashing throughout all the long years of my relationship with Ben.

I’m feeling it now with Lois Lane. She’s been very flakey on the responding-to-communications front. Which does not auger well given that we have plans to set up housekeeping together.

Flakiness has ever been friendship’s burden with Lois Lane. There’s a deep bond there, felt and acknowledged on both sides, but also that flakiness on her part.

Thing is, I never know how much I can rely on my gut when I start feeling this particular species of anxiety. You’re overreacting, some logical part of my brain counsels.

And in many cases, that would be true.

But it wasn’t true in my relationship with Ben where, if anything, I underreacted because I simply couldn’t believe I loved and trusted someone who was such a sociopath.

My kids tell me I am constantly over-anxious for no good reason.

And every time they do, I secretly think, Good! If you think it’s over nothing, that means I protected you from seeing the very real situations that caused that anxiety.

###


Owning this feeling in precisely these words—I do not feel safe—is actually pretty helpful.

It makes asking the corollary question automatic: What do I need to feel safe?

And that inspires agency.

I need to start working on a Plan B. And a Plan C. And maybe even a Plan D.

That is a bit daunting because it widens the circles on the map again.

The current living situation has settled down. L seems to have largely bounced back from Whatever It Was, leading me to believe that Whatever It Was was what they call a transient ischemic attack, a TIA, a kind of mini-stroke. To the best of my knowledge, she never sought medical follow-up. And she could have another TIA at any time, of course.

But the Universe seems to have granted me a stay until spring on the moving front.

I wouldn't want to try the Universe’s generosity beyond that point, though.

I’ve been so anxious this past week.

This past month if I’m honest about it.

Without understanding why.

###

Yes, yes, of course: the upcoming trip. Will I get my flight dates mixed up and miss the flight to Guatemala? Will the plane disappear in the Bermuda Triangle? Crash in the approach to Guatemala City when Pacaya decides to spew a real live ash column for the first time since 2010? Will Mara Salvatrucha decide to storm La Aurora airport and take all elderly gringo ladies with purple hair hostage? Will the shuttle I’m taking from Guate to Antigua blow a tire, killing all aboard?

The usual pre-trip anxieties, in other words.

###

But I was also thinking there was more to the omnipresent jitteriness than the pre-trip wobblies, and at last, I admitted to myself: It may have to do with nervousness about ongoing revenue streams.

So a couple of days ago, I took the bull by the horns and contacted my three most regular clients: Do you foresee the rise of AI tools having a marked influence on our professional relationship?

Best to know, right? So I can start putting in those job applications at McDonalds.

My retirement income pays all my basic bills, but anything I do beyond paying basic bills is subsidized by Remunerative Projects.

###

By yesterday, I’d heard back from all three clients.

No, said one.

No! said another.

NO, NO, NO! said the third—and confided they’d recently had to terminate the contract of another writer when they’d detected the unmistakable ChatGPT fingerprint. All AI does is spin existing content, the client told me. We want original insights.

So, that's a relief.

Though, of course, I am still anxious.

Because anxiety is what my body is used to.

It will take it a couple of days (at least) to get used to something else.

###

To that end, I have decided to do absolutely nothing today but read, watch TV, ablute (I have a new fabulous body wash,) and play with the cat.

Decompress.

I may tromp—but only because the sun is out and the sky is blue. Not because I want to exercise.

###

I’m reading The Ink Black Heart, J.K. Rowling’s latest Cormoran Strike detective procedural.

I admire Rowling for many reasons, but her writing ability is not among them.

Rowling seems never to have heard of Chekhov's gun. At least 250 pages of every 1,000-page tome she writes is filled with unnecessary details that add absolutely nada to plot or characterization.

I will say that degree of imagination micromanagement leads to a very dense parallel world in which it is oddly comforting to lose oneself in certain moods—like the one I’m in presently.

Also, she is dead right about the toxic nature of the Internet. Twitter, in particular. But really, all social media. I get that mileage varies on this one, but personally, I think fandom is a creepy phenomenon because it collectivizes what really ought to be a one-to-one relationship with a piece of art that moves you personally. And fandom is the engine that drives social media.

###

I was a very early social media adopter. I joined the Well—the great grand-daddy of all social media—in 1988.

I’d have to say that, yes, there was a sense of “community,” the like of which I hadn’t encountered before, and that sense of community was intoxicating. Many, many people I liked. A few I still consider friends.

But the Well was also a cesspool of bullies.

Just before I joined, these bullies had actually shamed and abused one prominent Well member so thoroughly that he committed suicide.

It was very obvious to me, a newcomer, not bound through fear or misguided loyalty to dissemble, that Blair would not have committed suicide had he not been pushed.

So, I said something. I am ever Joan of Arc into the fray!

And then I was bullied.

I was bullied pretty consistently by the same group of creepy people throughout the five or six years I remained an active Well member. But as I say, there were also people I had real bonds with.

Still. I roll my eyes whenever I read the private Well group on FB and read the nostalgia for old times.

And whenever—as happens from time to time—an old Wellie asks me, Why don’t you come back? I think, For the same reason, I don’t put Drano into my morning coffee.

Not much to report.

I Remunerated. I hung out with the cat. I gardened.







That middle photo? All the weeds are gone now.

###

I’m making yet another attempt to finish The Mirror and the Light, the final installment in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

This time I’m listening to it as an audiobook while I drive and tromp and garden.

I really loved Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and in the early days of 2020, I was literally counting down the days till The Mirror and the Light was published.

But a few days after I raced to Barnes & Noble to buy the book (in hardcover, no less!), the world shut down.

You’d think the world shutting down would make it easier to read the book. Fewer distractions, right?

But what I found was that the world shutting down made it absolutely impossible for me to focus on anything, and Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell books are not what one might describe as easy reads, they require concentration.

I’m still struggling with it two and a half years later. I don’t know whether the fault is with the novel or with me—or whether that even matters.

The prose is still shimmeringly good; Mantel’s recreation of Cromwell’s stream of consciousness, still a genius demonstration of close observation—of the man, of his historical epoch.

But it’s not clicking for me—though listening to it more or less guarantees I will finally finish it.

I suspect the deal is that in the final four years of Cromwell’s life, very little of narrative interest takes place. The rise and fall of Anne Boleyn provided the dramatic arc for the first two volumes, a kind of string through the labyrinth of Mantel’s dense prose. Once Anne is dead, there’s very little in the story that interests me narratively, certainly not the Yorkshire Revolt (popularly known as the Pilgrimage of Grace), or the death of Jane Seymour, or Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne of Cleves (and subsequent divorce.). There are few hooks for my imagination.

The novel’s title suggests the novel is ultimately about hubris: Cromwell would be the “mirror,” Henry VIII would be the “light,” no?

But hubris is very difficult to pull off in a stream of consciousness since it depends upon convincing readers that your protagonist is over-confident. When you’re that far inside Cromwell’s head, it doesn’t seem as though he’s over-confident; it seems like he’s a whole lot smarter than the world around him.

Being a whole lot smarter than the world around you? Not the essence of tragedy.

###

What else?

I’m feeling a certain level of low-level anxiety.

I can’t tell whether it’s just me or whether I’m picking up something from the world around me.

It’s controllable.

But it’s putting a certain damper on my ability to enjoy these cool, golden days of early autumn.