The Beggar Maid

It's a rainy, warmish night in my neck of the woods. Warm enough to have the bedroom window open to the outside air, after months of being stifled and confined, after all that bitter cold and ice. It feels heavenly.

So I'm in my bed, eating cookies and drinking green tea out of a mug that was a present from someone I adore, which feels nice. And I'm working my way through a big, heavy, marvelous book - Alice Munro's Selected Stories. I'm not sure there could be a better way to spend a Thursday night, for me.

Every single story in this book - in any of her books, this is my third - has at least one sentence that leaps through the page and punches me in the face. But somehow, gently. With grace. She is masterful.

(I suppose this is why they gave her a Nobel Prize this year. I am so late to this party.)

I tend to be enthusiastic about things that I love, it's true. But I'm glad, now that I'm learning more about "serious" literature (although I'm always down for non-serious literature, let's not be snobs, people) that I'm learning discretion. The more widely I read, the more able I am to discern something worth truly marveling at.

When I read Alice Munro, all I can think is, this is a woman who understands people. Who tells the truth about them. Even though it's fiction, it is all lined with razorblades of truth. And it's all so ordinary, just stories about ordinary people living ordinary lives. But illuminated. My very favorite kind of stories - simple and true. If you've never read her, begin. I just read The Beggar Maid, and feel like I could read it five more times before I can even begin to discern the layers of intelligence and depth under the surface line of the plot itself.

Oh, graduate school. You're going to exhaust me, aren't you?

"This is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don't think about it at all. 

The thing that was your bright treasure. You don't think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. 

This is what happens.

Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang onto it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you."

- Runaway, Alice Munro