Self-Improvement and Its Discontents

For the record, I am now hopelessly addicted to a certain Web site Robin sent me that teaches geography. It is highly educational and yet fun. I wish there were a site like this for learning the Polish language. Well, there probably is, but not free, as the geography site is. And would I actually use it if I owned it? That is the question. It is humiliating to reflect on how many years I have been married to someone whose first language is Polish while failing to learn anything but the very basics of the language. But then, there are many things that are humiliating to reflect on, all the ways that one could be a better, kinder, more well-informed, more accomplished, fitter person than one actually is.

For some reason I am thinking about this today, yet also conscious that the thought itself is not above reproach, that is marks me as somehow as an idler, someone with the margin of comfort to even worry about such things. The people in Iraq who are trying to surviving another day, the people in many parts of the world who do not have enough even to eat -- they would long for such shortcomings as I complain of.

One thing I started doing, in the self-improvement line, last year that is easy and yet worthwhile is to make a note of every book I read, month by month, usually with a brief comment. It has made me more aware of my reading habits and helped me remember books I might want to advise others to read. It has also made me aware of something I really wasn't before: the sense almost of bereavement when you come to the end of a great book and have to close it and note it down. It's over -- you have been expelled from that paradise. You can read the book again, of course, but it's not the same. A particularly excellent book also makes it paradoxically harder to pick up the next book -- can it possibly be as good as the one you just finished? There is a cure for that, sort of, which is to have several books under way at a time. In this way the pain of finishing and of starting over is lessened. Right now I am reading "Reading Like a Writer" by Francine Prose. I like this, although I find myself not always agreeing with some of her examples of fine writing -- some seem to me overwrought and ponderous, for example the end of Joyce's "The Dead." (But he is a writer I loved deeply at one time and now cannot bear to read, so that might not be the best example.) I am also reading "Master and Commander" by Patrick O'Brian, the first novel in an acclaimed series of seafearing novels set at the turn of the 18th/19th century, a series I have been planning to read for years. The voyage is barely under way, but I am quite at sea, no pun intended. (Though isn't it remarkable to consider how many turns of phrase come from the world of seafaring, living on in language much longer than in most people's lives?)I find myself longing for a glossary; the nautical terms are washing over me like waves in a stormy sea, and I am just holding my head above water.