Stress Relief

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My last nerve!

I don't know about you, but with the pandemic and the upcoming inauguration, stress sits on my shoulders like a 12-foot, hundred pound python named Charles. It's gotten to the point that I find myself holding my breath doing such death-defying stunts as writing blog posts, getting the dogs back in the house, waiting for the bread's second rise, or trying to go to sleep at night. 

Of course, during the evening, sitting on the couch, watching George Gently -- my current British cop show of choice -- I fall asleep easily. I do miss the ending, but that means I can watch it again and still enjoy the mystery. I do find cop shows very relaxing. First off their focus is narrow, the crime is local and has no far reaching consequences. There's a mystery for me to solve and whether or not I can suss out the whos and whys, the cop on the case does. The villain is apprehended and I'm satisfied there will be a trial, a verdict, and a sentence.

Or I can read a book. Oddly enough, I find nonfiction to be better therapy during these trying days. Fiction seems somehow too frivolous. Yeah, right. What sort of frivolity can I get up to reading narrative histories, or books about theoretical physics? Actually, Shelby Foote's Civil War in three volumes, reassures me that my nation has indeed been in worse straights than it is today. And
S. James Gates, Jr. and Cathie Pelletier's Proving Einstein Right is an engaging travelogue -- scientists' early 20th Century adventures following solar eclipses around the world, doncha know.

I was reading Barack Obama's A Promised Land. It's really quite good. It not only gets into the nuts and bolts of running for office, but why run and what his goals were. I was reminded of Arthur Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times which I read some forty years ago. Back then I was inspired that there was hope for a better world and politics could play a positive role in achieving that better world. Then January 6, 2021 and the assault on the United States Capitol.

I needed something else to read. Something as far from politics as possible. So I went back to a book I enjoyed the first time through and each time I've dipped into it since. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, Random House's Chief Copy Editor.

And you thought the other books I've mentioned would be anything but light reading. Of course, you're right. But Dreyer's English IS light reading. Mr. Dreyer says out loud, or rather in black and white, all those things you've ever thought about English grammar rules. Like his admonition against sentence fragments where he then quotes his "favorite novel opener of all time" from Dickens's Bleak House:

     "London. Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.
      Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly
      retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
      forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering
      down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as
      full-grown snow-flakes -- gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun."

The quote runs on for a good, full page. Mr. Dreyer challenges us to count the excerpt's complete sentences and let him know when we get past zero. He enthuses, "Isn't that great? Don't you want to run off and read the whole novel now? Do! I'll wait here for three months." 

That was one of my best laughs of the day when I first read it and it continues to make me laugh every time I read it. Anybody who's ever read Dickens gets it! 

Maybe, after Trump is gone, Biden is safely inaugurated, the fences along the Mall are taken down, and the National Guard Troops have gone home, we can breathe normally again and read whatever we want. Even Dickens.