Day 164.2: Alias Grace and Sadnesses
Oct. 27th, 2024 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sunshowerdandelionFresh off the gutpunch of The Devil in America I read the Mary Whitney death scene in Alias Grace. And then I was about to read A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke and had to ask myself: Do you really want to read this, right now? It's about someone losing his mother. Right now? And so I stopped reading that and went back to Alias Grace and read the whole Mary Whitney scene until the part where Grace says here is where all my happiness died and then stopped. And then I went and wrote this blogpost.
It's not that I distrust happiness really, it's just that without the scaffolding, knowing that vast amounts of people are at this moment sad, or suffering, happiness in fiction feels like a luxury, and this stalwart sadness punctuated by gutpunches feel more real. But that's not true: even in the darkest books there are spots of hope, because I think those books are the most truthful, and the books where it's all gloom and death are those made by people who are very particular about their way of seeing the world. Because the world is not that. I think.
It's not that I distrust happiness really, it's just that without the scaffolding, knowing that vast amounts of people are at this moment sad, or suffering, happiness in fiction feels like a luxury, and this stalwart sadness punctuated by gutpunches feel more real. But that's not true: even in the darkest books there are spots of hope, because I think those books are the most truthful, and the books where it's all gloom and death are those made by people who are very particular about their way of seeing the world. Because the world is not that. I think.
