Pandemic and Marcel Proust and the Hadal Depths

Yesterday and today, I was reading an essay about an exploration by submersible of the deepest trenches of the earth's undersea geography.  A multimillionaire, Victor Vescovo,  devoted himself to building submersibles and then to visiting and mapping the deepest places in the undersea trenches. such as the Marianna Trench and the Java Trench off Australia and Indonesia and the Molloy in the Arctic.  Just after I finished that essay, I read one about a mycophile who traveled the world hunting and gathering the most exotic and valuable mushrooms.  

Sitting on the porch thinking about these adventurers, I was admiring my neighbor's rhododendron and thinking how little we actually ever explore our nearest worlds, the home, the neighborhood, the plants and soil in our own yards.  I had taken to calling the neighbor's rhododendron The King of Shrubs and imagining myself bestowing a blue ribbon first prize for it.  Then I realized that although I do a one mile daily 'border patrol' of our side of town with my dog, we had never ventured to the other side of our small town, the side south of Market Street.  Even my own little town held infinite secrets of history and unexplored shrubbery.

That brought me back, as so often happens to Marcel Proust.  Although I own a set of his volumes, I have rarely progressed very far into the text.  For me, the propulsion is missing;  the prose does not propel me forward further into it, and there is no outward push as in taking a literature course and having deadlines, so I wander in and out of Proust and tend not to remain, but the idea of what he has done stays with me all the time, the traveling via memory through time to recreate people and events and places, exploring that most deep and mysterious of worlds, our accumulated individual human experience.  That, of course, is what made me into a diarist, a journal keeper, though not a very good one.  

For more than 50 years I have kept diaries but especially of late, I have tended toward bulleted chore lists, accomplished, or still to be done, and my thoughts go mainly here, to the blog.  

Never before the pandemic, have so many of us spent so much time in our own company.  Unlike many, however, being elderly, I have no cacophony of family life to draw me away from the inner world and fix me, anchored to the world of family tending.  My dog tries to hijack my life to her own purposes, or perhaps to be fair, she simply tries to get me to fulfill my part of the unspoken bargain we have, which is the if I give her the daily mile walk, she will avoid barking at me all day.  Otherwise, she barks and barks until I fulfill my obligation, so some form of family life still exists in my otherwise cat quiet world.  Most of the cats wait quietly until I provide their breakfast, dinner, or restock their dry food snacking bowls.  Some, the younger ones, take to making little cat type demonstrations that they are running out of patience if I dawdle at their meal time.  They walk around on the tables, pawing at rolling objects like pens, chapsticks, bic lighters, my glasses, and knocking them onto the floor to make me get up with the hope that once up, I will get back to business.

My point, or my theme is, that there are so many phenomena to study from cat behavior to dandelions, close at hand, that one need never go to the ends of the earth to find something interesting to map and to explore.

Happy Trails, in the woods, in the neighborhood, in your mind!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com

ps.  All these articles were in the May 18 issue of the New Yorker.