War and Peace

No matter how wonderful your holiday has been, there is something comforting about returning home. It’s like being given a consolation prize once you’ve blown your lottery winnings.  I’m usually relieved to drop my bags in my darkened hallway, throw open some windows to let the stale air out and, because I never remember to pick up milk on the way home from the airport, plop myself down on my sofa with a cup of black tea.  Home, sweet home.

But, two nights ago, when I opened my front door and shoved two oversized suitcases, two car seats, one stroller and one grumpy toddler through the door, I didn’t feel a wave of pleasure at the familiar. Instead, I was gripped by anxiety that this was really my life and I was back to failing at it. It’s almost halfway through December, after all, and I had a sense that I was running out of time. At first I wondered if perhaps I’d put too much pressure on the idea of this holiday. I’d been looking forward to it for so long, and enjoyed it so much, that I thought it would refresh my life to the extent that I’d be on fire as a writer. I thought, at the end of this holiday, I’d be ready to tackle all my projects with renewed energy instead of feeling weighed down by them. I spent a fretful night destroying any residual holiday bliss and, by the time I finally popped a tranquliser in the early hours of Sunday morning, I’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t just my expectations that had turned me into a nervous wreck, but my choice of holiday reading.

Durning my week sojourn to visit family in Johannesburg, I chose to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s international bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. What possessed me to continue reading after the first few chapters I’ll never know. I found it highly irritating in a way that only a depressed pessimist can. I guess, if I’m totally honest, I have to admit to feeling a little envious, not only because she managed to tap into that ever elusive mass market appeal and sell millions, but also because she spent a year traveling and feeding her soul on her publisher’s money. I too want to escape my life in an Indian Ashram after stuffing my face on pasta in Rome, but since I’ve chosen to have a child, the very thing that drove Ms Gilbert to an ugly divorce and a quest for fulfillment, I’ll have to pass until I join the blue rinse brigade and take a pensioner-discounted bus tour to enlightenment.

My second week of holiday was spent on the banks of Lake St Lucia in a luxurious lodge nestled in the forest. For those seven halcyon days, I buried my nose in Jonathan Franzen’s much acclaimed epic, Freedom. Talk about oil and water literary choices. Several times during our holiday Julian asked me if I was enjoying my book and every time I said no. I liked The Corrections, his previous novel, for its wit, humour and dark sociopolitical views but, although he repeats many of the themes from The Corrections, Freedom is heavy handed in its pessimism. I found his characters, every one of them an amalgamation of flaws with few, if any, redeeming qualities, unlikable to the last page. If these portraits of middleclass Americans are to be believed, there is no hope for the future of humankind. The overriding message I took from the novel is that we’re doomed by our greed and our economic reliability on growth. Reducing our individual carbon footprints is useless. Changing to sustainable energy sources, such as wind, equally pointless, and nuclear energy is just ridiculously dangerous. The only thing worth doing, it would seem, is to get rich, buy up as much land as you can and find a way of protecting it until everything goes bang. A pretty stupid idea, since the armies of destruction are only going to come knocking on your door looking for leftovers when the rest of the Earth has been scorched and the only creatures left are us and the rats and cockroaches that have adapted to live off the effluent of our society. The novel ends on the tiniest note of hope: Walter and Patty, the two main characters, find some peace in themselves and their marriage, and Walter cat proofs a piece of land as a bird sanctuary, but it’s like throwing a dry chicken bone to a starving dog. It did nothing to dispel the hopelessness the previous 550 odd pages spent drumming into my soul.

So back from my holiday aching for spiritual succour and worrying about whether there’ll be any Earth for my child to inherit, but all I can really do at this point is bury my head in the mountain of dirty washing and pretend the good life is just around the corner.