The Uncommercial Traveller

Sigh, I am about 50 pages away from the end of the Uncommercial Traveller and I do so wish it was over already. Although there were spots of brightness (like when Dickens reminisces about his childhood and becomes amusing and charmingly absurd (just read the chapter on medicine men, where he describes how ridiculous a funeral procession actually is) or when he talked about lawyer's chambers, a theme, if you would remember, in Pickwick, a lot of it drags.

He is at his preachy worst here.

I was thinking of how much I loved Virginia Woolf's essays (even more so than her fiction which takes some getting into, not being the most accessible stuff in the world) and how for the most part I love Dickens's fiction and hate his essays or articles.

I keep doggedly on, reading about 100 pages on my little iPad a day, until yesterday, when I should have finished, but could not, simply could not, face it.

So today, instead of reading it on the iPad, I tried for a spell on my laptop, downloading the Penn State PDF version, and oh my, I read two stories, or rather one a half and how it dragged, until finally, I X-ed out of the window, without bothering to finish. It will keep till tomorrow.

And so will I, as I drag my weary footsteps through the last pages of this book, happily to close it once and for all, and never to revisit it.

Funny to think that the Uncommercial Traveller actually inspired that theatre exercise which they took around the world. Which means other people obviously liked it a whole lot better than me.

But to be fair, that exercise was based on only one chapter of the book, the chapter where Dickens has insomnia and goes wandering through the streets of London at night, when everything has taken on an unfamiliar hue and you wander and wander, hoping for a light in the window, hoping that someone else is up late keeping a vigil, so you feel companioned.

But, as I said.

That was only one chapter.

I'm feeling very tired these days. A weariness that has settled in my bones. I go through the motions, but it's like part of me is off somewhere (like Dickens wandering the night streets) not really interested in what's happening around me, not really interested in what I am doing, not really caring about anyone around me.

Compassion fatigue?

Or just fatigue?

The other day, I was driving, and suddenly I remembered an episode from The Waltons (I think it was the first episode, Season One where a little deaf girl is left on the doorstep and the Waltons take her in) and something about the scene brought tears to my eyes.

Strange. Real life fails to move me.

A vestige of memory of fiction does.

For a heart rending second I think I am going to burst into sobs and I control the heavy exhalations. Allow the tears to course freely from my eyes, but trying desperately not to scrunch up my face into its mask of misery so that all the cars around can see what I'm doing.

It's the idea of family that makes me cry.

While in real life, it leaves me cold, hollow, lifeless, anger calcified into quartz.

Of such absurdities is life made...and Dickens, in his own voice, fails to move, but I will journey on to the end, and will not mark the ending by any new words (because I don't want to) and will move on to the next book in my list, wending my weary way home.