April 25 Friday roundup

This week’s episode of “Next Comes What” focuses on antisemitism in the Holocaust, and how it transformed into a very flexible kind of bigotry to be applied in any direction against Jewish people, regardless of who they were or what they did. I also look at the deepest-rooted bigotries in the U.S, how they too are becoming more elastic, and why that’s a problem. You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to explore links to different parts of the history mentioned in the episode, you can read this week’s Tuesday post.

There’s so much going on in the news minute to minute. My sense is that our brains aren’t meant to have this much anxious information stacked on a constant basis our in-baskets.

At times like these, do what pleases you, if you can. We need to imagine the good parts of the world that can go on even as crises continue to unfold.

I have a list of things that are meaningful to me that I often return to in wonder. Here’s a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, which I read in the summer of 1987, when I was in college. It’s been one of my favorite books ever since—in part because of the lovely, ghostly writing, and in part because it had odd women and girls as characters in it, ones who seemed like no one else I had met by then in literature but very much like people I knew from my own life. Helen here is the narrator’s mother.

Bernice, who lived below us, was our only visitor. She had lavender lips and orange hair, and arched eyebrows each drawn in a single brown line, a contest between practice and palsy which sometimes ended at her ear. She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease. She stood any number of hours in our doorway, her long back arched and her arms folded on her spherical belly, telling scandalous stories in a voice hushed in deference to the fact that Lucille and I should not be hearing them. Through all these tales her eyes were wide with amazement recalled, and now and then she would laugh and prod my mother’s arm with her lavender claws. Helen leaned in the doorway, smiled at the floor, and twined her hair. …

Bernice liked to bring us custard, which had a thick yellow skin and sat in a copious liquid the consistency of eyewater. Helen was selling cosmetics in a drugstore, and Bernice looked after us while she was at work, though Bernice herself worked all night as a cashier in a truck stop. She looked after us by trying to sleep lightly enough to be awakened by the first sounds of fist fights, of the destruction of furniture, of the throes of household poisoning. This scheme worked, though sometimes Bernice would wake in the grip of some nameless alarm, run up the stairs in her nightgown and eyebrowless, and drub our windows with her hands, when we were sitting quietly at supper with our mother. These disruptions of her sleep were not less resented because they were self-generated. But she loved us for our mother’s sake.

Bernice took a week off from work so that she could lend us her car for a visit to Fingerbone. When she learned from Helen that her mother was living, she began to urge her to go home for a while, and Helen, to her great satisfaction, was finally persuaded. It proved to be a fateful journey. Helen took us through the mountains and across the desert and into the mountains again, and at last to the lake and over the bridge into town, left at the light onto Sycamore Street and straight for six blocks. She put our suitcases in the screened porch, which was populated by a cat and a matronly washing machine, and told us to wait quietly. Then she went back to the car and drove north almost to Tyler, where she sailed in Bernice’s Ford from the top of a cliff named Whiskey Rock into the blackest depth of the lake.

Feel free to reply with some of your longstanding musical, literary, or other favorites. And best wishes for a lovely weekend…