Whoever saves his life will lose it

We had quite a stimulating discussion last night in the O'Connor class. The take-away idea, for me anyway, thanks to Rebecca Loy (and of course the other comments leading up this point) is the scripture "Whoever saves his life will lose it and whoever loses his life (for me) will save it" from Mark 8:35 and other comparable scriptures in Matthew and Luke. We were trying to figure out if the ending of "Good Country People" was hopeful or not--and since the only scripture mentioned in this text is the one quoted above, we might conclude that Hulga's life has been saved--because she loses all the things that gave her life "meaning"--especially her wooden leg or wooden soul. At the end of the story she is "lost," but as Robert Frost says in his poem "Directive," sometimes you have to be lost enough to find yourself.

And as for poems, below is a poem that I thought of when we were talking about how Hulga sees "better" without her glasses:

Monet Refuses The Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps
as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller

I love Mueller's poem. I think it's in the preface of one of Anne LaMott's book (maybe Plan B?).

One other idea, in an email after class, David Gayk had an astute observation about Hulga-Joy: "I was thinking about her name and it seems that even though we might be born with original sin, we are also born with the name of Joy and somehow most of us turn from Joy into Hulgas (something ugly), whether it is in rebellion or whether it is truly the way we feel. It takes a confrontation with the "Truth" to help us realize that we are all Joys and to leave the ugliness behind. Sometimes the confrontation is successful and sometimes it is not."

So just some thoughts. The class is still open to those who want to "lose" themselves to find themselves.