Poshlust & Thinglust
The humanoid and I have been home all day together, her with a nose full of snot and me with various rags and tissues and saline spray and the nasal blaster thing. Nobody tells you how sad and severe-seeming simple congestion can be in a baby. She wants to eat and drink but derives no pleasure from it, no relief. Her frustration would be comical if she didn't feel so lousy, I think, and I feel her frustration and her lousiness and it makes me irrationally mad at the small nasal passages she seems to have inherited from her father (anyone who has ever seen my nose knows I can't be blamed here), and sorry that I can't blow her nose* or ingest things for her.
We spent a lovely half-hour on the bed, though. Our headboard is wide at the top, and since there's not room on my side for a bedside table, I keep books up there--a couple that I'm reading currently and a few others that I just like having close by. One of Beatrice's favorite pastimes, easy, is toppling them from on high onto the bedspread, and then leafing through each one. She was alternating between Peter Rabbit and The Body in Pain and I was thumbing through my much-worn copy of Gogol's Collected Tales. I came across "The Overcoat," which I hadn't read in forever, and I started reading aloud from it, more for my own pleasure than for Beatrice's--she didn't seem to care one way or another--and I was sort of delighted by it as though I had never read it before. I skipped around, reading passages I'd underlined years ago, and I felt so keenly that Russian magic that is like three parts sardonicism and two parts existentialism and a half-part almost embarrassing sincerity, and then that hard-to-define-but-unmistakable poshlost.
I'm thinking that this may need to be a Russian Winter, a good, cold**, dark time to revisit Gogol, and Nabokov, and Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.
And lately I am consumed by thinglust, an insatiable drive for certain objects, and a belief that these things will make me happy, even as I know that they are only "falsely important," as VN might say, and therefore poshlusty in their own way.
* The nasal blaster thing, or aspirator, is supposed to provide the same kind of temporary relief that a nose-blow would, but this relief is usually overshadowed by the trauma (mine & hers) of ramming it up a tiny, inflamed nose.
** Wish it got colder and wintrier in Georgia.
We spent a lovely half-hour on the bed, though. Our headboard is wide at the top, and since there's not room on my side for a bedside table, I keep books up there--a couple that I'm reading currently and a few others that I just like having close by. One of Beatrice's favorite pastimes, easy, is toppling them from on high onto the bedspread, and then leafing through each one. She was alternating between Peter Rabbit and The Body in Pain and I was thumbing through my much-worn copy of Gogol's Collected Tales. I came across "The Overcoat," which I hadn't read in forever, and I started reading aloud from it, more for my own pleasure than for Beatrice's--she didn't seem to care one way or another--and I was sort of delighted by it as though I had never read it before. I skipped around, reading passages I'd underlined years ago, and I felt so keenly that Russian magic that is like three parts sardonicism and two parts existentialism and a half-part almost embarrassing sincerity, and then that hard-to-define-but-unmistakable poshlost.
I'm thinking that this may need to be a Russian Winter, a good, cold**, dark time to revisit Gogol, and Nabokov, and Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy.
And lately I am consumed by thinglust, an insatiable drive for certain objects, and a belief that these things will make me happy, even as I know that they are only "falsely important," as VN might say, and therefore poshlusty in their own way.
* The nasal blaster thing, or aspirator, is supposed to provide the same kind of temporary relief that a nose-blow would, but this relief is usually overshadowed by the trauma (mine & hers) of ramming it up a tiny, inflamed nose.
** Wish it got colder and wintrier in Georgia.
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