Reviews for Meaning a life

The average rating for Meaning a life based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-11 00:00:00 Jacob Mcnutt A book that informs much of life today as well as history. Mama had had enough of farms, and animals, and outdoor work. She had spent her childhood, one of 14 children, living in a log cabin. Below my mother's surface exuberance, I know she felt deprived, and she wanted to make up for the deprivations. I think she felt compelled to be busy, and did not know how to slacken her pace, to reflect and to think. Papa lived his life at a different pace than did Mama; he went more slowly, and liked to walk, to talk, to read. Papa spent long hours at work, but he seemed to enjoy being wherever he was at the time that he was there. I felt that he was really with me when we were together, and whatever we did, he seemed to prefer doing it at that moment more than any other activity. I am convinced that he loved me entirely, and my brothers feel the same way about his love for them. Montana was so newly settled that children and Indians were the only natives. My teachers talked of back east just as my parents did; they came from the midwest, but for them as for my parents, "back east" was the center of the continent. Mama would say: "Mary doesn't pay much attention to my friends, but she talks to every dog she sees." From a catalog, Mama ordered long-sleeved and long-legged underwear for winter, which we put on as soon as it arrived. I always longed for the freedom and lightness of summer underwear and short socks, for slippers instead of buttoned or high-laced shoes. Part of the freedom of spring was the light feeling in my feet as I ran, as though I skimmed the earth. [My brother] Noel talked to me in the idle hours when we were together in the shoe department, where I worked after school and on weekends. He had the most influence with me, and I can trace some of my attitudes directly to those he had worked out for himself. I remember his philosophy of self-love most distinctly, and I made it my own: that one must love oneself the most in order to love others and in order to survive. There was no birth control; pregnancy meant marriage, probably to the first boy a girl had ever gone out with, or it meant abortion. Abortions were available in all categories, from low-cost up to legal abortions with doctors conferring and performing the abortion "for the sake of the woman's health." This latter was for rich married women only. Still, I decided in favor of sex for myself, but only sex which was not a trap. I felt appreciated by very few, really only by Noel. I suppose he discussed me with Emma and that she took care of me and advised me with his full consent. Noel assumed, I think, that any healthy young person would enjoy sex, but he did worry that I might marry badly and ruin the rest of my life. I had lived in the trust and confidence of two men, my father and my brother, Noel; I was not open to love that was less than theirs. I saw in Grants Pass that sexual relationships were for the most part made and lived with diffidence. And I too entered into relationships with no ties and no expectations that they would solve anything. I have heard this small-town sex life described as circular sex. 1926-7 Love & Escape After I am dead and you wonder where I am and you see the dark blue wood-smoke in dark green evergreens climbing over their tops and disappearing perhaps you will know where I am but I think not The time and the urge to write did not come again to me until I was working on translations of St John of the Cross in 1971 or 1972. I wasn't aware of all I remembered until I tapped at the door and memories came flooding in. I think I have reached a safe age from which to release these memories which have troubled me over the years. Perhaps they would not have been released for the asking when I was younger. We were constantly searching -- We were searching for a way to avoid the trap that our class backgrounds held for us if we relented in our attempts to escape from them. Young George and Mary, or George and Mary now - so long as it is George and Mary it is life as I have known & lived it, as we have known & lived it. The young people now come to visit, to talk, & they seem happy just to look at us, survivors. Perhaps they are strengthened by a view of us which represents 50 years together in a fully lived life. This achievement, be it luck or choice, has been inevitable. 1928-9 First Travels The Midwest meant to us not only the geographical center of our country, but a center for the poetry which was being written everywhere, which meant that a literature was being written out of our times. We arrived at Detroit, on wide and lovely Lake St. Clair. The wind was free & George could sail, and when we examined our road map, we saw that we could sail to New York. Lake Erie is 570 feet above the sea, & the system of locks took us daily nearer to the Hudson River. We reached the end of the Erie Canal at Albany, which is on the Hudson River, and across the river in Rensselaer we found a small boat yard where we had our boat hauled out for a paint job. We left the canal at Albany to go down the Hudson River to New York City. The lovely Hudson River, held between its high cliffs, is a clear, fast-flowing deep river, widening in only a few spots. As we neared the city (at that time there was no George Washington Bridge) we found we had gone faster than we had reckoned, probably because the tide was stronger nearer to the sea. We were in New York City, & the white walls at the tops of the cliffs were the apartment houses of the Bronx & upper Manhattan. Fruit stands and vegetable stands and wagons drawn by horses were piled with heaps of color created by oranges, lettuce, tomatoes and watermelons. At Coney Island, we went into the hall of mirrors and laughed at ourselves. I was reading Marcel Proust, sinking deep into his memories and awakening to intuitive knowledge of my own; more than I had known before I read him and learned to trust my intuitions. I also discovered Virginia Woolf's novels, just appearing in 1928; her writing meant to me the flash of insight while a leaf falls, the knowledge of complex relations that comes in a moment of understanding. One, invited to a party to which we had to walk the length of Manhattan b/c we had no money, we paused at a bookshop and leafed through more books of poetry than we had ever found in one place before. This was the Gotham Book Mart. George and I were western kids. Although there was much that New Yorkers knew which we did not know of the arts, the theater, Europe, and the ins and outs of their city, they did not know the forests of Montana or of Oregon, the swift flowing rivers and the mountains. Nor did they know the life of hitchhiking and of sailing across half the country with almost no money. We had our own strengths and knowledge, and I think in our friendships the differences were part of our fascination for each other. Aunt Elsie took me to lunch one day to ask me if we intended to have children. I thought it was none of her affair and said no, but I did not have any kind of birth control and we had gotten no advice from doctors we had asked. She took me to the birth control clinic the next day, and I never had to have another abortion. I wrote to Nellie and to my sister-in-law Julia, who had so many children, and told them they must find birth control clinics at once. Nellie replied in high glee, with cartoons, but Julia could not arrange getting from Oregon wilderness to a San Francisco birth control clinic, and she had one more child. At that time there were only 11 states that allowed even doctors to give birth control information. When I walked in neighborhoods near our hotel on 24 St in Manhattan, each direction took me to a neighborhood intact in its national origins, with corner stores and markets reflecting the culture of the people and the country from which they came. Most of these people did not know the United States beyond the subway system. One of Libby's poems: Come into my Parlor/ I live on a sheet of glass. Her love for her brother and for her father was faithful and childlike, but Libby never achieved self-love, and so her love for anyone else was also wanting. No man loved her with a love that nurtured her, and no woman really loved Libby except her daughter, Andy. I entered this family when I was 18. Libby would have liked to be my friend -- I know it now, but at the time I was a stranger, a newcomer, a new young wife. I sometimes saw Libby standing in our doorway looking on, her clothes too provocative, her bathing suit too daring. She wondered at our youthful spirits, she who had no experience of exuberant living. 1929-32 France We were eager to travel, to have a view of our own country from a distance and from another culture. Many American writers, poets and artists were living in Europe, and we wanted to visit those who especially interested us. In 1929 Europe was already full of American students, and it was very late in that hejira [flight or journey to a more desirable place]. While British artists at the same or at a slightly earlier time were drawn to Germany, our antipathy to Germans and things German, even before Hitler, governed our travels; we chose France, and briefly Italy. We were in a narrow stream influenced by Pound, by Eliot, and by the Impressionist painters. With our dog Zee-wag, we embarked on a small French freighter from San Francisco, destination Le Havre, a 30-day trip. George wrote me a Valentine: he de dark handsome young man has for her de fair maiden Uh present, de darling We had planned this time in France to be for as long as we liked, in order to paint, write and continue the conversation we had been seeking before we met and now were pursuing together. We wanted time to "look, gape, gawk to dawdle" -- to try to comprehend what was before our eyes. We and Zee-wag started back to the city, driving our horse, Pom-Pon, and cart. We were searching for something more than a life of "making a killing," as my mother said. The United States we had just left was rich, with an affluence of new cars and talk of the stock market. We wanted a way of life that allowed us to paint, write, think and converse in friendship with those who were on our same path. We traveled 30 or 40 km a day, stopping over a day and a night after every five days of travel, for Pom-Pon needed to rest and to eat more than he had time for while traveling. The slow progress suited us, and we found the long stop-overs a time for talking to people, wandering and observing. Mme Sicard came every day to care for us in Marseilles - in the vineyards of Le Beausset. She asked for an 'osaydar" & we didn't understand until one day in a hardware store in Toulon I saw an O'Cedar mop. "Osaydar!" We had a toilet put in the centuries-old farmhouse before we knew that the water supply was seasonal. "Ça va?" Mme Sicard prescribed and brewed tea for stomach aches and back aches and to relieve muscular pain. Cupping was also a common remedy. One Sunday we went into the country with Eva & Dan and stopped at the country house of some of her Russian friends. We were admitted by a servant and shown into a parlor to wait; it was a damp, cold, cheerless habitation. Eva sniffed & said, "Smells like goldfish pee." Before returned to the United States, we made a trip to Venice and to Florence to visit museums and to see a little of the country other than France. We were pinned against the monument at the center of the Piazza by a press of the crowd crying, "Il Duce -- pericolo del morte." (in danger of death) Mussolini's life had been threatened, and we were trapped in this sudden, impressive demonstration. We saw no differences of expression on the faces of the young men, only a blind fanaticism, in ecstasy and worship of Il Duce. Roosevelt had been elected President of the USA in Nov 1932, and in that winter the Blue Eagle was introduced in the States. Blue Eagle posters were pictured on the front pages of Parisian newspapers, and the military-looking symbol frightened us. We were afraid it meant that fascism was rising in the USA, too. Germans in Venice, military men, had said to me as they passed, "Guten morgen mein Taube." (good morning, my dove) In was 1933, and the next war was ominously looming. We could feel more than we could understand of the threat to Jews, to artists, to all freedoms. I was determined that fascism was not going to strike this pigeon! 1933-7 New York City The people I see and talk to, the ways they earn their livings, the children I watch, the courting customs, the ways of parents with their children are all to me learning, and I re-evaluate my own ways and my country's ways every time I travel. It is not comfort, ease, or previous knowledge that takes me traveling; traveling is never as comfortable as being at home, and I am thrown out of my accustomed style and habits on meeting situations and people for whom I have no preparation. I go traveling in order to be jostled and jolted and confronted with the necessity of thinking faster to meet fast-changing occurrences. Happiness comes in the conversation and the learning that I have to master, even in the barest knowledge of how to get form here to there. I think I travel to ask the questions which are hard to formulate about one's own times because one is in the midst, at home, of all that one has seen so often that one does not receive the jolt that might confront one with the uncomfortable, but important question. Not with answers -- answers are not possible for one's own times and in one's own place. The answer only becomes obvious after time has passed, and we can see, if we have survived it, the predicament that we have passed through. Apprehension mixed with elation as we disembarked at Baltimore and began the drive to New York City. As we approached the first stoplight, grown men, respectable men - our fathers - stepped forward to ask for a nickel, rag in hand to wipe our windshield. This ritual was repeated every time we paused, until we felt we were in a nightmare, our fathers impoverished. Many people in the USA were beginning to think about politics. We had seen the beginnings of fascism in Europe, and now we tried to understand the reasons for the collapse of the economic systems of the western world. Men felt guilty when they became unemployed and could no longer support their families, and many left their homes in despair. Young men roamed the country. In the last days of February and first days of March 1933, when we returned to the USA, President Roosevelt's first act as President was to declare a bank holiday. In effect, the US Treasury was empty as President Hoover went out of office. Depositors had lined up in front of banks to remove their money. Some banks went bankrupt, and the depositors' savings were lost; with no insurance of depositors' funds, they quickly ran out of money and closed their doors. Some banks had speculated with depositors' money, and Wall Street had sold them out; but most of them re-opened with the assurance that government would pass legislation as soon as possible to protect deposits in the banks. To Italians, Mussolini was a hero because he was winning the war against Ethiopia, and he was unifying Italy, where the trains did run on time. The Socialist Party had organized the Workers Alliance, and the Communists had organized the Unemployment Councils -- these two organizations merge to form one organization, called the Workers Alliance. When no one in the family work the rent could not be paid, and if a family could not get 'the relief' (as it was called), the landlord gave them an eviction notice and called the city marshall, who with several assistants put the furniture in the street and put a lock on the door. If the furniture was not soon taken from the street, the sanitation department hauled it away to the city dump. The purpose of the Workers Alliance was to relieve starvation and to guide people to a realization that government could solve these problems - not with fascism, but with a liberal solution. We 'sat-in.' I asked George to bring the membership of his Borough-Hall Workers Alliance to picket the sit-in at the Nostrand Avenue relief bureau. We had learned this technique from the auto workers in Detroit; we sat in for a day and a night, holding the relief bureau so that the day's business could not go on. The administration of the bureau decided on the second day to smash the demonstration, and the police came through the big front doors with clubs swinging as our women screamed. We were arrested. At trial, after deliberating for many hours, the jury returned at 10 o'clock at night with a not-guilty verdict. We went out free to the street, and there, waiting for us, were our Workers Alliance members. George and I were 29 years old. The war in Spain had been going on for a year, and George wanted to go, but I would not agree unless I went to. Pop Mindel: There are times in your life in which you might choose to be a revolutionary, but there are also times, as when you marry or when you have children, that this is impossible. George and I had been unaware of our being a special kind of couple until Hitler and fascism made being Jewish a pointed issue of survival. Our interest had been to understand a class not our own and to be part of sweeping changes in the USA. If there had not been a clear need for people like us to defeat fascism, we would probably have resumed a life in the arts and dropped the politics as the depression eased. Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain became fascist; France had a People's Front government, Russia was socialist, and the USA had embarked on a more liberal form of republicanism with the election of Roosevelt and his cabinet of Keynesian economists and politicians. Communists were still, at the end of the Depression, the ones who warned most consistently against this danger. Friends found friends at these meetings, and there was an awakening. All the people endangered their livelihoods by their interest in the left, but nevertheless they were interested in defeating fascism. Intellectuals joined the League of Women Voters or the League against War and Fascism, or one of the many groups in the more liberal churches. The election of Roosevelt and the work done to alleviate the Depression had stirred people, and a strong liberal tendency was growing throughout the country, due not only to Roosevelt but to all of us who were opposed to fascism. Usually the vote is more radical in the United States than the apparent opinion of the people, and we met surprises when we went door-to-door selling the Communist Sunday paper. People were not afraid of us in their own homes -- the fear was for loss of jobs. These people knew at first hand the long and frustrating struggle for trade unions and the continuing struggle to keep those unions honest. 1938-41 Transition I was 30 years old and I wanted a child. George was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it. 1942-5 Wartime George wanted to go to the war. The enemy was fascism, and we agreed that the war must be fought. 1946-58 California and Exile [9 yrs in Mexico] In Apr 1950 the FBI began its visits. With the war declared in Korea it was clear to us that Joseph McCarthy & Gen MacArthur, representing the policy of the Pentagon, sought to silence opposition to this war. Carmen, our lawyer, walked directly up to one of the men. "My clients tell me you are bothering them. That is very ugly [Es muy feo]. I want you to stop at once. I want you to promise you will not do it anymore." We never saw the men again.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-12-28 00:00:00 Martin Horn Hard to find but an interesting memoir.