The Wall
[Some scribbled notes…the kind that get my brain going when I’m trying to figure out what I want to say:]
It’s the whole vacuum concept that I think about all the time (see Orbital post): Who *are* we independent of all the “stuff” (& that includes people) around us? A feeling of adjustment … that notion that we get used to things over time no matter how we feel about them at the beginning? Is “finding oneself” while in isolation undesirable or merely tolerable or actually something to strive for? Don’t know!
[A more edited take:]
Here’s what’s going on in The Wall, the 1963 novel by the late Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer: A middle-aged woman visits her cousin’s hunting lodge in the mountains and wakes one morning to find she is alone — save for her hosts’ dog, Lynx — and that a prescribed area among the grounds is now encased in a transparent wall. (A cow and a cat enter the picture later.) Think Truman Show except there’s no one else enclosed in this area — and, as far as we know, no one else is watching or observing from afar. The unnamed woman must come to grips with survival, both from a practical perspective and an emotional one. James Wood, in The New Yorker, sums up the arc perfectly: “’The Wall’ is a dystopian novel that gradually becomes a utopian one.” After two years of writing a “report” of what’s happening, the woman can say this with assurance: “It’s only since I’ve slowed down that the forest around me has come to life. I wouldn’t like to say that this is the only way to live, but it’s certainly the right one for me.”
Interestingly, I read The Wall concurrently with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Two middle-aged women contemplating life and love, but one is in the middle of London, one is literally in the middle of nowhere: Fascinating!
Haushofer’s protagonist claims “There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one.” And Lucrezia Smith in Woolf’s novel wonders if “To love makes one solitary…” So, a new dimension to my “vacuum” ponderings: Does love happen independent of our surroundings? (Don’t know!)
{PS: I didn’t mean for my dog to be staged like the cow, but there you have it.}
originally published on instagram