Extra/ordinary

One of my favorite bloggers, Stephanie Madewell of EvenCleveland, wrote recently about the struggles of the heart in achieving “ordinary greatness,” with knowledge that extraordinary greatness requires selfishness, ruthlessness, harm. In her beautiful post (find it, here), she goes on to quote a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which ends, "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you or me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

This is a theme I've discussed a lot with friends – faith in small sacrifice, in unhistoric acts; the struggle in finding a fit in extra/ordinary living and permitted selfishness. My husband and I both have creative ambitions and we also both have practical, professional degrees. We are lucky to have the degrees we do, degrees that promise livelihood. But we struggle over what shape our contributions should take. We have real desire to create a life outside of those degrees. There is so much we want to do and there is so little time.

I just finished James Salter’s book, Light Years. I mentioned that to a new friend. He responded by describing the book as painful, beautiful. Those are the perfect adjectives, I think, to describe it. Light Years charts the life-course of a married couple, Viri and Nedra. Nedra pledges her life to self-conquest, to satisfaction, to selfishness. Viri,, meanwhile, defines happiness as the possibility of conquest; he devotes himself to home life. We follow Viri and Nedra through moments of robust family health into moments of friction and fraying. Their life together evolves from what once seemed beautiful, certain and protected into something completely other. As readers, we are exposed to the full life cycle of Viri and Nedra’s marriage, from their lives as young parents to old age. That fullness is, in part, what is excruciating – time moves apace and then it stops.

The marriage of Viri and Nedra is, at first, achingly beautiful. It is filled with the material wealth of wine, fire, elaborate meals, art, handmade birthday parties for children. To me, what is essentially painful about Light Years is it destabilizes faith that constant and small sacrifices yield good. Selfishness instead has a special durability, a lasting power. “The feast was ended. Like the story he had read them so many times…he had not wanted enough. He saw that clearly. When all was said, he had wanted one thing, it was far too small: he had wanted them to grow up in the happiest of homes.” What a terrible line! Sure, the regrets of these characters are specific to them; the brittle seductions of Nedra, the hopefulness of Viri...Still, the book offers faint objection (but objection nonetheless) to the notion that ceding ground is right.