It is Always Going to Hurt

It's a joyful surprise to find similar threads of thought running through or hoping from novel to novel in our book club. This month in the Henrik Ibsen play A Doll's House, the trend continues.

I'm seeing the anxiety of identity and rejection that various characters find themselves in from John Steinbeck's East of Eden. 

The fantasy of the hitchhiker to start over from Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.

The cost others pay for the hubris of Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.

The damage that roots itself in the fear we see in Scrooge in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

And while Fyodor Dostoyevsky projects a cautionary tale of the social changes of the late 19th century in his epic novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ibsen opens the reader to the potential of those social changes, but it comes with a warning. 

Again with the anxiety of change, we are swimming in it. Does it make you tighten your fist and resist? Do you charge head first into it in desperation? Or, do you take it as it comes? 

If anything, A Doll's House exhibits the cost of change. In the end, Nora leaves her life of 8 years... home, children, and husband after realizing that she was sewn into an ill-fitting costume, performing a role. Leaves to discover who she really is. Is it a tale of feminist liberation? Existential freedom? The dawning of individual and democratic civic liberties in an era of fading monarchies? 

I think its all of those. Again its the concept of change, and change always comes with a price tag. 

The play in the end reminded me of a conversation in No Country for Old Men between the hitcher and Moss. The unnamed hitchhiker has dreams of starting her life over in California, and Moss aids her with a little spending money and a lot of advice...

It's not about knowin where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin over. Or anybody's. You don't start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it. You understand what I'm sayin?

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don't know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Looking forward to our conversation Monday.