Stone Yard Devotional
“Human beings need recognition as much as they need food and water. No crueler punishment can be devised than to not see someone, to render them unimportant or invisible. ‘The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,’ George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.’ To do that is to say: You don’t matter. You don’t exist.” This is from David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. Whether or not you like Brooks, it’s fair to say he can address a topic with ease and clarity; I found this one — which zeros in on something I think about quite often — an excellent read.
But what happens when someone seems to be actively eschewing being known? Or, how about this: What if by hiding oneself away a person may actually be *more* known? Does visibility = being “known”? Or is it something more?
Stone Yard Devotional by Australian writer Charlotte Wood was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker. It follows a woman who leaves her urban life (including an urban husband…yeah, I’ve just coined that term) behind to live in a convent with nuns — despite not really adhering to their belief system. This is in her childhood hometown, so nostalgia — in good and bad ways — is all around, everywhere. “When I think about the phases of my life, it is as a series of rooms behind me, each with a door to a previous room left open, behind which is another room, and another and another.” Two figures from her childhood play a large role in how she tries to make sense of how she got from here to there (and then, presumably back to “here” again, albeit in a very different circumstance and situation).
“It’s been my observation over many years that those who most powerfully resist convention quite peaceably accept the state of being reviled.” FASCINATING OBSERVATION, cloistered narrator. This certainly isn’t true in the case of someone genuinely seeking to know someone, convention-resistant or not. But then again, that falls on the “seeker.” (The moral of the story: I really wish Brooks’ book could be required reading for everyone…)
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