New Year, Same Old, 25. Dark Reading on a Dark Day.

Today is a grey, wet, dark day. A typical winter's day here in Galicia. Every once in a while, a day like this isn't such a bad idea. The best scenario would be a day with little to do, and nowhere to go, with a couple of good, interesting books awaiting. The only downside would be waking up after finishing the books and realizing that now, there's nothing interesting to do, and the sun could try to come out a bit, if only to cheer the place up.

Of course, it depends on what the reading matter is. When I was a little girl, one winter's day when I was home, perhaps with a fever, or during February or Christmas vacation, I was alone with my mother. My mother was in the kitchen, I was in the living room. I had a high school literature book of American short stories in my hands, which still had some tales I hadn't read earlier. My father's workmate had given him lately another box of old books that had belonged to his grown-up kids, for me. As my mother tinkered in the kitchen, the radio in the bedroom the only sound beside the tinkling dishes, I read my book.

One of the stories had an interesting title, The Devil and Daniel Webster. I've always loved ghost stories, even as a little girl. When I finished reading it, my mother had already turned off the radio, and was sitting in the kitchen quietly, probably drinking a coffee, since I remember the smell. The grey light seemed to hang in the air, with sketchy shadows gathered in corners. It was just as well there was no thunder rumbling through the moody clouds outside. I decided I was too lonely in the silent living room, and joined my mother in the kitchen. Ghost stories and stories with a devil and the damned were just not made for dark days. I didn't read that story again for years afterward. 

Another story which I do not want to re-read on a grey day is The Family of Pascual Duarte, though not because it originally scared me, like the short story, but because it induces a deep depression. I remember I bought the English translation back in the late 1980's, when the author, local writer Camilo José Cela, won the Nobel Prize in literature for it. (If he really did write it, it's the only decent thing he ever wrote; he was accused of plagiarism of another book he published years later, and his early works are completely uninteresting. It's also rumored Franco let him be published in Spain for ratting out fellow writers to the regime.) It is a study in far-out existentialism, Spanish-style. While Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit is thought provoking, and induces hopelessness, it is a comedy compared with Pascual Duarte. 

Everybody dies. There is no future. When I finished reading it, it was a grey day. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed. Maybe, if I woke up, the desperate misery the book had created within me would have disappeared. I recommend, to read that book, to choose the sunniest, hottest, best day at the beach, surrounded by life bubbling over, with a best mate next to you, who will ask you with all the tenderness in the world, "Is everything ok?" when you look up from the despondency in its pages. Maybe your surroundings, the sun, and the care in the voice of your friend will help thaw out the ice cube the book would have made to grow in your heart. 

Nope. The best stories to read on a grey day are mystery novels, where the problem is always straightened out, and the bad guys are caught. Or perhaps a book that inspires laughter, like My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber. Anything that doesn't interact with the weather outside to create a tropical depression inside you.  

On the Covid front, our township is down to 33, but the news on the regional and national front is getting even worse, with hospitals about to conk out. We await new restrictions here in Galicia later today, perhaps with the shutting down of all hostelry, and the prohibition of meeting up with anyone who one does not live with. In the latter case, I would have to stop physical classes, again. And this news is on a par with the aforementioned depressing reading matter on a grey day, so I'll stop this, now.

Life continues.