If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Reading The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith has put me in a reflective mood. This is normal for the end of the year, but it’s also a beginning. The church’s new liturgical year is always the first Sunday of Advent. It’s a good time to ‘start over’ before New Years Day. Advent is also about preparation for Christmas, an invitation to sit in mystery and silence. This time of year is filled with chaos and stress from shopping but Advent gives us a moment to pause.
I don’t journal anymore. My last entry was a few months ago. I’ve been keeping a journal since middle school, but I don’t miss it. During my depressive episodes, I used to write at length, desperate to capture every minute detail. I was alone with my mind. Writing was the only way I could fight back against it.
Back in May I learned that Park Bo Young keeps her journals locked in a safe. Should anything ever happen to her, a friend has strict instructions to destroy those journals. She burned all the ones she’d been writing in before 2014. That’s something I’ve longed to do with my own, not wanting reminders of certain things and also to clear out space in my closet.
I was honestly surprised by Bo Young sharing something so intimate, that she has the same worries of her private world being discovered. She doesn’t want to cause her parents any pain.
I’m feeling reflective but don’t see the necessity of recording it in a journal. So much has happened this year, things I didn’t expect or wish for in January. I don’t feel like I’ve changed much, which is a bit disappointing. Am I going to leave this year kinder, more generous, more foolish for the things of Heaven? Will I work harder at all of that in the coming year? I wonder if my novel draft will be completed.
In The Price of Salt, Therese is a set designer working in a department store. One day an older woman comes in to buy a doll and Therese is smitten with her at once. She sends her a Christmas card. She’d like to see the woman again, to be near her. It’s a kind of fascination that doesn’t really subside even as the two fall in love. The woman’s name is Carol.
Carol is tall, blonde and elegant, her eyes are gray yet colorless. She’s the first person Therese has been in love with. Therese is 19 years old, essentially an orphan though her estranged mother is still alive. It makes sense for a girl like that to fall in love with someone she sees across the room. She is, in Carol’s words, flung out of space. Therese is not very vivid as a person, but as a character she’s brilliant.
“An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to know, know anything, for certain, had jammed itself in her throat so for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe.”
Therese remarks at one point that she feels like an actor. She creates sets but has no permanent real setting of her own. She and Carol leave New York for a road trip and she wanders alone in these small towns, living a small, simple life.
“The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was stranded on the brink.”
Love rearranges Therese, fills her in a bit more. Clearly she’s growing up.
“I feel I am in love with you, and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.”
I’m about a decade older than Therese, but I still feel aimless. Or maybe it’s restlessness. This may be a season of hibernation but it’s the time these feelings are reawakened. Just as well. The heat makes you dull and sluggish, but winter keeps you alert. That’s why the old year dies in winter and a new one is born in it too.