Reading my way through a world gone mad

Do you find yourself trembling, even slightly, at the thought of declaring a complicated opinion about any aspect of the volatile state of the world? Or at least hesitating in bewildered uncertainty at moments when – so you imagine – you ought to be certain and resolute and full of answers? Do you ask yourself, floundering in bottomless vats of contradictory information, how anyone can be certain or hopeful or optimistic in the face of the problems bearing down on the world (bathwater oceans, predatory social media, drunken AI, I could go on. The Leafs.).

I have some modest good news. I’ve devised a routine that dispels despair. I thought I might pass it along, free with the price of this newspaper.

The routine was revealed to me in a haphazard way. A few months ago, I started waking up very early – not by choice but yanked into instant consciousness by nagging details: all the aforementioned challenges, plus I was behind on my taxes, I forgot to pay the exterminator’s bill, and life is passing and death is getting closer every day.

Also, and this was discouraging in a new and different way, I kept wobbling on Gaza. I had no trouble with people demonstrating against the deadly and indiscriminate bombing of Gaza by Israel, but I understood Israel’s desire to be rid of Hamas. Hamas is a criminal terrorist organization (reviled by many Palestinians) that brutally murdered and desecrated some 1,200 Israelis, and took 250 hostage, on Oct. 7, and then used Palestinians as human shields against the predicted Israeli response, in part to make inroads with a new generation of supporters all over the world. On the other hand I am not surprised that Benjamin Netanyahu is reviled for the way he has conducted the war in Gaza, nor that Israel’s military response (more than 37,000 Palestinians dead, according to Gaza health authorities) has been branded a potential war crime (as has Hamas). There is no persistently good side in the continuing war, only thousands of collateral dead and displaced and damaged between them.

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But I took a long time to arrive at those conclusions. I am not a fan of intellectual certainty. This complicates the forming of opinions. No sooner did I take a tentative stand than a fresh slew of information washed it away. I was as troubled by my wobbling – what a weak and wishy-washy character I am! – as I was, for instance, by the callow generalizing of demonstrators on the university campus near my house, some of whom were heralding the motto “From the river to the sea” – a slogan that means radically different things to different people, but which features in the constitution of Hamas that calls for the destruction of Israel, which in turn might (common sense would suggest) be reason not to be waving it around, for fear of tainting one’s cause. But slogans are designed to breed uncertainty and possibly even shame in people who aren’t completely onside with the cause, whatever that cause may be.

And so, in my anxious early morning state, to distract myself, I got out of bed and padded downstairs to read.

The first book I dropped into was Claire Keegan’s Foster, a short (92-page) novel spread over eight chapters. I didn’t know how much time I had to read before the demands of the day would overwhelm me, so I wanted a story that came in a) distinct and digestible chunks, and b) first-rate prose. I figured I needed to find books by proven writers whose work had moved me before. Keegan writes exemplary and instantly moving prose in a clear, uncomplicated style anchored to concrete details, all with zero moralizing, at least overtly on the page. This is what my overtenderized consciousness wanted, apparently.

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Foster, it turns out, is the story of a young Irish girl who goes to live with an aunt and uncle for a few months while her harassed mother has yet another baby. The girleen has been raised in straitened circumstances under the harsh regard of her feckless and heavy-drinking father, and initially the forthright but forgiving standards of her relatives’ startle the child. Later, they reassure her. She becomes less feral and more human. This is how the book opens: “Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from.” The story is told entirely from the girl’s point of view, what she sees and hears and feels and notices, often for the first time, in this new home where she is a person, and not just another mouth that must be fed and tended. There are no theories or outright blamings in the book, just the subtle and almost but not quite invisible coming and goings of human distress and affection, of wariness and love. I read a chapter a morning, 14 pages, deliberately limiting my pleasure. The girl learns to play cards, takes up sprinting, realizes that people can be very different from one another. “I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end: to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder. Some big gaffe, to break something, but each day follows on like the one before.” She has discovered the beauty of a routine, of trying to do a competent job on a regular basis. “We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with toast and marmalade for breakfast. Then Kinsella puts on his cap and goes out into the yard. Myself and Mrs. Kinsella make a list of jobs that need to be done, and just do them: we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards …” It’s all details, nouns and verbs you can see and touch and carry. There is not an abstraction to be seen.

Foster was so good I worried I wouldn’t find another story that could be consumed in such small, delicious, apparently apolitical bites. You can ruin an entire day reading the wrong thing right off the bat, by jumping out of bed and overconfidently inhaling a diatribe about Palestine or a passing insult Donald Trump has levelled at someone’s daughter. There were days when Trump and the campus demonstrations seemed to be the only news in the world. They are not, of course. The Sahel, the stripe across the chest of Africa that comprises Mali and Niger and Chad, is imploding: Some 80,000 children were reportedly close to starvation in the town of Menaka in Mali, which has been blockaded by Islamic fanatics. The Armed Conflict and Location Event Data Project, a U.S. crisis monitor, counts 170,000 human lives lost to war and conflict in 2023. If you count 30,000 in Ukraine and another 30,000 in Gaza, that still leaves nearly twice as many (110,000) that are barely mentioned in the monophonic blare of the media universe: 15,800 in Myanmar, 14,300 in Sudan, 6,400 in Somalia etc. We don’t seem to be capable of caring about more than two catastrophes at a time.

I spent a fine few days rooting about in Harold Nicholson’s diaries. A diary is a good thing to read if you are trying to avoid reaching the conclusions other people insist you must come to, because a good diary is mostly events that actually happen, in the continuous present. Theories – for instance, the proposition that divesting investments in Israeli companies is an effective way to enact lasting political change – are less abundant in diaries.

Harold Nicholson’s present is pretty compelling. He serves in Churchill’s government as an MP during the war, and is in the diplomatic thick of everything. He is also married to Vita Sackville-West, with whom he created their famous garden at Sissinghurst. Vita has endless affairs, mostly with women, including Virginia Woolf, sometimes while Harold is in Constantinople having affairs of his own, also with a variety of genders. They stay married all their lives. He has a sense of humour so ultradry you can see the martini in his hand. On Dec. 8, 1944, during a Commons debate about Bulgaria’s claim to Greek territory, Churchill gives a meandering speech. “He is like a spaniel who is diverted by the smell of a rabbit and dashes off wildly into the bracken,” Nicholson notes. He, too, has many crises of conscience and often doesn’t know what to think. When he finally gets back to his beloved Paris after the liberation of France, he steps off the ferry and reaches down to touch the ground. “Did you lose something?” someone asks. “No,” he replies, “I found something again.”

I even tried the short stories of our late and always brilliant Alice Munro. But her work is too complex, way too enveloping, and much too engaging – too rich, if you want – to be taken in the small therapeutic doses I am recommending. I started Wigtime, a story about reunions and 17-year-old girls and the rough attentions of an older man. Munro describes the sensation that comes over Anita whenever the man, Ruele, comes near her as “a feeling of controlled desperation along the surface of her skin. It was something like the far-off beginning of a sneeze.” But that’s just the launching pad of a Munro story. You can’t take one in all at once.

Eventually I found an old favourite, Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches, each one of whose short chapters (33 of them, one for each match in a box) begins with a middle-aged man in his 40s (Emmett) coming downstairs before 5 a.m. to make coffee and light a fire in the dark. Once he has both in hand, Emmett, a medical textbook editor, starts to type meditatively into his laptop in the dim early light, barely opening his eyes: He wants to tap into his still-forming morning self, the consciousness as yet uncolonized by the loud shouted imperatives of the day. He writes about his fires, match by match; about what he burns, and how it burns; about the smoke that rises through his mind and memory. The pace is his and his alone, unforced by outsiders. It’s a (short) novel about time, and how it can be stopped by small and – so we think – insignificant details. There is nothing Officially Important in A Box of Matches, which is why the whole book becomes important, because it is a portrait of someone noticing the priceless moments of an individual’s ordinary life, which (it might help to remember) is what we’re all fighting for anyway. He eats a pear, feeds a duck; his wife Claire makes a “pathbreaking noodle casserole.” When Emmett hears crows cawing each morning, he knows his private time is over, and gets up from his laptop to drop his daughter at school on his way to work.

I read a couple of chapters for half an hour every morning, to keep the blamers at bay. I learned to listen for an internal clunk in my mind, like an oar turning in an oarlock, that told me I had read enough, that I was now armored enough to face the bossy world that tries every day to embarrass me into thinking that I should be thinking something different about something else. “Hope,” Rebecca Solnit, the writer and activist, once wrote, “is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. … It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.” Or, to put it another way, tell me a story of the lives we live vividly enough that I can see it in front of me, feel it in my hands. Then I’ll pay attention eagerly. Just don’t try to make it simpler than it actually is.