The Divine

The Fourth Way -- P. D. Ouspenski

The Fourth Way was suggested to me by someone I met at Olga's tavern who's name was Brian, but whom we (Jann and I) insisted on calling Briam, because Olga makes it so good.  We'd also had quite a bit if "medicine" (tsipouro, masticha and rosé) and had been crying on and off.  For no reason whatsoever I brought up The Ultimate Frontier and he and Jann got very excited and insisted that this be my next book on this 'journey'.  So far it's quite interesting, although it is just in the format of an interview, or rather, random people asking Ouspenski about his understanding of life, humanity, spirit, etc.  There one thing that stands out to me is that he stands against imagination.  T.U.F. also stood against the Arts as a waste of time.  Ouspenski states (and I'm paraphrasing) that there is no point in imagining things that are not so, and that daydreaming is a waste of our life and it distracts is from our psychic abilities.  To access the other floors of our brain (he says we confine ourselves to the basement and kitchen of a beautiful mansion) we should be aware of ourselves and our functions, breathing, digesting, seeing, etc., and analyzing if they are voluntary, involuntary or two other choices I'm not going to rack my brain to remember (I think I left that knowledge in the basement, I'm currently making a snack in the only other room I can get into).  He says that it is impossible for your average Joe to have complete self awareness without running away with frivolous thoughts for more than a couple of minutes.  I've tried it, he's right. It does become rather tedious.  So is the book, to be honest, but I'm reading it without expecting to understand what is being said exactly and just allowing it to pepper my subconscious with the hopes that someday, if I'm ready to read it again, it will have started to take root.  A pepper root. Although I have a pepper intolerance.  That's OK, I might never even finish it, let alone read it twice.

Corelli's Mandolin -- De Bernières

I've tried very many times to read Corelli's Mandolin (which I always thought had a"Captain " at the head, but apparently (Hollywood be damned) does not), but I could never get past the second chapter. This summer I have solved this hitherto insurmountable problem by skipping the second chapter altogether. I suppose I will go back to it when I've finished the book entirely and am missing something of de B.. Although chapter 2, or THE DUCE (Mussolini), is a character we don't  really meet or care about until later in the book, unless you are reading this book solely for it's historical and political rants, which I find interesting at first, but too tiresome to sit though chapter upon chapter of...I am, of course, talking solely for myself. I'm sure that the political insanity of the time is of much interest to almost any other person reading it.  I would be happy to have enough background to know what's going on, but not so much that I feel that it is two different books, shuffled like a deck of cards in with one another.  I have my suspicions that de B just liked the thought of chapter 2 being named The Duce, because Americans will read "deuce" rather than "duche".  Probably mislaid suspicions.  Glad I skipped it and insisted on reading ahead, (I even got through most of chapter 35, also about el Ducerino).  I'm very much enjoying all of the rest, except for Pelagia calling her father 'moped' (Papakis) and other small annoying Greek translations you'd think would have been caught and set right by now.  It's only been 21 years.  To be fair, though, maybe the editors never got past chapter 2 either. I am not ending on that sentence because it is accidentally too Bryson/Barry endingesque.  Even if this is just for me to read and remember what I have and haven't read, I could never forgive a Brysonberry closing remark.  In conclusion,.

The Golden Notebook -- Lessing

Aborted

The Summer of the Bear -- Bella Pollen

The Summer of the Bear is another book rescued from the pile of sun-bleached pool-side "recyclables".  It was the only brick in the pile that seemed to be without a serial killer or military adventures,  with the added bonus of having a bear in the title which sold me before I could read the back flap.  Like To Kill a Mockingbird, the book is divided into chapters that cycle through the characters one by one: the bear (or his wrestler-owner, I can't make out just yet), Letty, the bereaved mother of Georgie, Alba and James, however, it is in the narrator's omnipresent voice, rather than the character's.  It is set during the Cold War, which may explain why, after reading this until 3am last night, I dreamt of war myself.  I remember being told that there was a GPS coordinate where we had to go to defend ourselves.  I didn't want to be involved, but there I was, at the end of a dark street. There was nothing happening there, but we could here gunshots and saw that across a dark body of water there were tall hills where machine gun wielding planes were taking off, headed towards us.  We started to run back the way we came but the planes kicked up a thick fog of dirt and I couldn't breathe. I pulled a scarf over my nose and noticed that it was a red and white Arab headscarf, and was worried that I would be taken for an enemy.  We came out into a plateia where all the young people had similar scarves and I ran through them to a movie theater, where no one was aware that we were at war.  My husband threw 2 euros to the ticket taker who was my unrequited high school love, Duncan, and told him we were going to the bathroom. He said he would show us where it was and led us to a large underground ballroom where the bathrooms led to underground tunnels where we were meant to either protect ourselves or spread the word that we were under attack.  I wondered if Duncan could take better care of me than my husband and felt immediately guilty. In a room with very yellow light i saw my family and my daughter was spraying her whole body with my deoderant.  She was very thin, standing behind a ladder, wearing a peach dress.  I noticed my bag was torn and full of crap in the lining. My dad put it in a bag with paplomata and gave me a needle and sent me to the tailor to have it fixed.  I was surprised that the tailor had other customers during war time and wondered why i had such a large needle for him.  When I woke up it was after noon, I was groggy and still stuck in this dream world for hours afterwards.  

Two Weeks Later

I finished this book slowly, one paragraph at a time.  This is the second book I've read this summer about a father dying.  Life, unfortunately, imitates art.  How I wish the spirit of my father were in a bear who would come to save me from my broken heart.  I have to wonder if that dream of war and tailors that I had the night before my father's stroke, was a precursor to the battle we just fought and lost, if that big needle my dad gave me was to mend what broke?  It's unmendable. 

The Island of Doctor Moreau -- H.G. Wells

I'm a Stranger Here Myself -- Bill Bryson

Last fall I organized the tumbling bookshelves that make up the library at Odyssey. It was raining on Poros and Annette was nearby, editing her food blog, asking for grammar advice.  The Dutch like to use short sentences. Sometimes they do not make sense in English.  Anyhoo, I noticed this book then and found it kind of boring, but this summer I picked it up thinking that Pano might like it (he wouldn't) and found a new appreciation for it. I'm a Stranger Here Myself could have been written by Dave Berry (who Pano detests), but it's not, so the zippy closing one liner is a little less contrived.  He's a little more educated and not quite as silly, so it's a matter of taste as to which one is polio and which one is cholera.  I can definitely identify with anyone trying to make heads or tales out of a return to his birth place, and I like that he uses British colloquialisms without feeling a need to explain himself. Except for his background in economics and penchant for khaki pants, I feel like we have a lot of similarities.  I don't know if the stories are strong enough to have influenced my dreams yet, but there's still time. I'll get back to that.