happy birthday, edith

celebrating my favorite author's birthday with a memory and Mirth quotes

Hi.

This week feels as if it were one hundred years long. Perhaps some of you can relate. I have felt many things throughout the week, including anger, confusion, rage, exhaustion, fatigue, depletion, worry, anxiety, and all-encompassing numbness. I have felt what I suppose is sorrow.

And so, as usual, I have felt the pull toward the wise words of Edith Wharton.

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

—Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

And today just so happens to be Edith Wharton’s birthday. There is something cosmic about that. Wonderful. Warm, like the feeling you got as a kid when you wished on a star.

A press portrait of Edith Wharton

And so instead of looking at the murky and nauseating present, I thought about the past. And I realized that I remember, with a kind of shocking clarity, my first experience of reading Edith Wharton.

So, to celebrate her birthday, I thought I’d share the memory with you.

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I was sat by a large, floor-to-ceiling window in my university’s main library, an overbright sun flaring announcements of spring in the air despite a deep winter chill that froze your ears any time you walked between buildings on campus.

It was late February or early March in Utah county, a deeply red part of a deeply red state, and I was often interrupted while reading at the library by young men who wanted to know what I was reading. When I attempted to answer, they’d usually interrupt me to ask why I was reading and to insist I stop “doing homework” and accompany them to a local chain restaurant for mediocre food and mind-numbingly stupid conversation.

(At the risk of sounding like I’m reaching for hyperbole here—or that I have imagined that I was just so darn irresistible to all these college boys—I would like to remind you that Utah county has the highest per capita population of Mormon men in the entire world and the majority of them are absolutely hard-on to get married as quickly as possible, to whatever girl (and I say girl intentionally) says yes to them the easiest. “We can figure out if we’re a good match after we’re married,” one of them actually said to me over lukewarm chicken tacos one night. The romance, it swoons.)

I often felt like Belle in the town square when Gaston steals her book, asks why it has no pictures, and drops it in the mud.

But on this particular day, I had found a rare window seat at a small table. I’d ordered a coffee (I drank it hot and black with neither sugar nor cream at the time; those were the days). I sat down with a well-loved, used copy of the novel that had a handful of curious notes inside; a fellow literature student had read it with care some years before.

I sat in that window and I placed my headphones over my ears. I clicked my iPod wheel around to my favorite instrumental playlist. And I started reading.

The first sentence hit me like a train.

“Selden paused in surprise.”

And the opening scene unfolded, in that meticulous chiaroscuro lighting of Wharton’s prose, as I fell in love with a world—and a woman—I had never known before. Hours later, I realized the sun had started to set; I had read through my evening Spanish lesson and it was well beyond dinner time.

I was a dutiful and eager literature student, but few novels had ever held me like Wharton’s did. I often finished my reading assignments in dedicated library sessions, saving research papers for bedtime and breaks between classes. But The House of Mirth consumed my every thought—every spare hour, as well as a few I could not spare—for the entire week.

As I read the final page, my eyes clouded with tears and my hands wringing with unexpected suspense, I remember sighing loudly. I closed the book and held it to my chest. A few moments later, I opened it back to chapter one and started it again.

By the time we discussed the novel in class, I had read it in full a second time. My professor made a well-intentioned effort to get our class discussing the tragic ending of the novel, but his lecture left me with a nagging feeling—of annoyance, of confusion, of surprise—that he, and so many of my peers, had completely missed the point.

It became something of a life project to figure out why I felt that way. To examine what had been so wrong, to me, in my gut, about my professor’s easy dismissal of Lily Bart as “a silly party girl with a drug problem.”

I have spent more than a decade reading and rereading The House of Mirth and have felt myself changed by it, in brand new ways, with each revisitation of the story. (But I have never thought my professor was right about her; I hope I never will.)

I remain insatiable in my intellectual curiosity about stories, especially those written by Wharton. I am interested in big things—systems, powers, institutions, especially how they work in the stories we read and the ones we tell ourselves about our everyday lives. And I am happy in small ways. Like how my cat purrs whenever he smells turkey or the croissant charm on the necklace I made myself or maple donuts with sprinkles.

I remain deeply grateful for and indebted to Edith Wharton for her words. They were a balm to my aching heart that longed for a life beyond mediocrity and Applebee’s platters; that yearned to find love rooted in understanding and self awareness; to pursue a life beyond the one represented by all those interrupting men and their vapid ideals.

I believe, to my marrow, that if I had never found Wharton, I may never have decided it was time to find myself. For that, I raise a glass on her birthday and say, Thank you.

To celebrate, here are my favorite sentences from The House of Mirth.

“Could one never do the simplest, the most harmless thing, without subjecting one’s self to some odious conjecture?”

“She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself. But what manner of life would it be?”

“She was like a water-plant in the flux of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was carrying her toward Lawrence Selden.”

“How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden’s distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.”

“The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else.”

“She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynold’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.”

“Love me, love me, but don’t tell me so.”

“Does one go to Caliban for a judgement on Miranda?”

“It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be!”