Anita Mathias | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

"The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

Hmm. I admire this book. It is exquisitely well-constructed. It is original. I love the way Roy plays with language and creates a language of her own. I love her vivid descriptions, and the exactitude and verisimilitude of her childhood memories. I can relate to what she mentions–the Indian childhood; the passion for “The Sound of Music;” the mean, very mean female relatives whose greed and pettiness eventually drove them crazy; the casual, mean and cruel bullying of children, especially free spirits; the repressive and pervasive smallness of mind that can drive free spirits crazy; the favouring of males. Oh overall, the sadness of it, the waste through repression and conformity of what might have been.

Having mentioned these things, it is not surprising that I found it very painful to read. The casual sacrifice and brutalizing of the lower-caste lover was unbearably painful, and then the subsequent ostracism of Ammu herself, which drove her to her early death; traumatized her son, so that he parted with his sanity; and left her daughter barely functioning, though traumatized. And then, the stereotypical vicious unmarried aunt, the villianness of the piece, who inherits all the gold–and wears it all at once, driven to a kind of craziness by her unrestrained greed.

I do recommend it, but will probably not read it again myself. It rouses a flood of anger and inchoate memories in me, all of them painful!

On Setting Down Roots in Oxford

By Anita Mathias

The plum trees that we planted in 2006 have been covered with the sweetest, most delicious plums this year. Interestingly it took them 3.5 years to bear fruit.
Hmm. My life has been marked by moves from city to city, from country to country.

Here is its trajectory–Born in Jamshedpur, India; moved to boarding school in Nainital, India when I was 9, volunteered with Mother Teresa in Orissa and Calcutta when I was 17-18, then lived in Madras, then in Oxford, England, then Columbus, Ohio, USA; Binghamton, New York; and then I got married. As a married couple, we’ve lived in Cornell, New York; Palo Alto, California; Williamsburg, Virginia; Minnesota, Minneapolis; then back to Williamsburg, Virginia for another 11 years, then back to England, to Manchester, Lancashire; and then back to Oxford, England where we’ve lived for 5.5 years. I hope we have come full circle, that this is our metaphorical Ithaca, where we will stay for good.

We have lived in 10 homes over our married life of 20 years. So, on average, a move every 2 years!! No wonder, we have not been productive. Moving takes an enormous amount of physical and emotional energy, not to mention the necessity of making new friends, and establishing new networks. We love where we live now, and have no serious plans to move–ever.

I really enjoy slowing putting metaphorical roots into the soil of Oxford, getting to know people, a wide range of people, investing in their lives, slowly establishing friendships which steadily deepen. Getting to know this town even better, setting up rhythms, routines, and a life here. I am very happy here, and love living here.

“My Grandmothers and I” A Memoir by Diana Holman-Hunt

By Anita Mathias

“My Grandmothers and I” A Memoir by Diana Holman-Hunt

Diana was the granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman-Hunt,and the great-niece of Millais. A more interesting lineage than most, and one which provided her a more rarefied childhood than most.

Rarefied, not necessarily happy. She was abandoned into the care of these grandmothers by a childish, selfish father, who does suddenly appear from governing the Empire, and rescue her from the boarding school at which she was desperately unhappy–then vanishes again. Her paternal grandmother was entirely selfish, and stingy to a psychopatic degree, dissolving into tears when money was demanded of her, so that Diana often lets her off. Her other grandmother was too absorbed in her pleasant country life to take much notice of Diana.

But notice things Diana did, and little of Edwardian country life, or her grandmother’s manipulations, pretensions and little stinginesses escapes her eagle eye.

Though she escaped somehow, not unscarred, but free.

Her memoir is written in little vignettes, building up detail by detail, through significant and well-remembered episodes. Its construction is brilliant–a memoir that reads as charmingly as a novel!

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Does Exercise Make You a Better Person?

By Anita Mathias

When I had a David Lloyd, Oxford, membership, I used to be surprised by how happy everyone seemed. Smiley, happy, positive and ebullient.

Most or all of the staff were probably not Christians, so there was no spiritual explanation at work. I had to look for natural explanations for why they seemed more happy and upbeat than the average person.

Undoubtedly, it was partly because of good management. Bad and mean management hurts business because employees become disgruntled.

However, the number of exercise classes the staff led each day, and the endorphins pumping through their bodies no doubt made them feel better physically, which made them feel better emotionally. And, if they were spiritual, the glowing health, and the well-stretched muscles, would have made it easier for them to experience God.

* * *

I used to hate PE and games at school. I am now surprised at how good I feel after vigorous exercise, like a run. How euphoric even, how tolerant of human annoyingness, how clear-headed, how able to work for long hours. So resistant to annoyance and disappointment.

It’s like an inoculation of the mind and emotions, making me able to work longer and harder, to withstand reverses, to handle rudeness or shortness with equanimity.

Exercise makes us better people. It may not change the heart, make a stingy person generous, a malicious or malevolent person benevolent. But its short-term effects improve our personalities. If persisted with, it would change our characters (not least of all, in developing discipline). We become sunnier. Happier. Easier to live with. We sleep better. Think better, more clearly and rationally. We work better and for longer.

It injects sunshine into the personality. We are much less irritable and snappish; our mood is better; we feel better about ourselves. We feel more energetic, positive, optimistic, calm, forbearing, tolerant. In other words, we feel more like Christians.

In fact, perhaps exercise makes it easier for us to take up our cross and follow Jesus. I do believe it.

I have been struggling to develop the habit of daily exercise for 22 months (during which I have lost 24 pounds!!), and it’s still not as much of a habit as writing is, say. But I do exercise at least a little most days, and am miserable and cranky when I do not.

I am convinced of its benefits, and enjoy it once I have hit my stride, and so I will persist, until it is as much of a habit as writing is.

“My Grandmothers and I”: A Memoir by Diana Holman-Hunt

By Anita Mathias

Diana was the granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman-Hunt, and the great-niece of Millais. A more interesting lineage than most, and one which provided her a more rarefied childhood than most.

Rarefied, not necessarily happy. She was abandoned into the care of these grandmothers by a childish, selfish father, who does suddenly appear from governing the Empire, and rescue her from the boarding school at which she was desperately unhappy–then vanishes again. Her paternal grandmother was entirely selfish, and stingy to a psychopatic degree, dissolving into tears when money was demanded of her, so that Diana often lets her off. Her other grandmother was too absorbed in her pleasant country life to take much notice of Diana.

But notice things Diana did, and little of Edwardian country life, or her grandmother’s manipulations, pretensions and little stinginesses escapes her eagle eye.

Though she escaped somehow, not unscarred, but free.

Her memoir is written in little vignettes, building up detail by detail, through significant and well-remembered episodes. Its construction is brilliant–a memoir that reads as charmingly as a novel!

When God tells you to build a ship in the desert! And He is simply outrageous

By Anita Mathias

When is it God for sure? When it is rational and commonsensical? Sometimes. Since we are made in the image of God who gave us common-sense, he presumably employs it himself.

However, what happens when God tells you to do something mind-blowing and outrageous?

What if you live in a desert, surrounded by sand and barrenness, and God tells you to build a ship? Because a flood is coming! A flood? In a desert?

There are these tests of faith along the Christian way, when God asks us to think outside the box, outside the human box. To do the humanly stupid which will be proved wise.

Passing these tests means that God can trust us with further revelation! And directions!

The Folly of Speed-reading literature!

By Anita Mathias

Blurred text — Get all that? … the closing lines of Pride and Prejudice given a speed read. Photograph: Frank Baron

The celebrated academic Harold Bloom is a lightning fast reader; blink and he’s probably turned the page – twice. In his prime he could churn through 1,000 pages an hour, which means he could have digested Jane Eyre during his lunch break and still had time to chew through half of Ulysses before returning to classes. I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel like a slow, slack-jawed simian struggling in the frontal-lobe department.

The average reader snails through prose at a rate of about 250-300 words per minute, which roughly equates to about one page per minute. Bloom is surely cut from a rare cloth of reading comprehension because he whips through more than 16 pages per minute and still remembers almost everything he reads. For the rest of us, it’s not so easy. In the World Championship Speed Reading Competition the top contestants typically read around 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute, but only manage about 50% comprehension. That’s just not good enough for literature. What’s the point if you’re reading, say, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, with its panoply of characters, and you only understand 50% of the text? You wouldn’t be able to understand anything much at all.

Do people really attempt to speed read literature? If so, why? I guess, most simply, it is so a person can boast about how much they’ve read – or how often. Andrew Marr claims to have read War and Peace “at least” 15 times. Not 12 or 13, but 15. I read this and thought, well, if you took out all the passages he’s skimmed over, he’s probably only read it 10. Even so, it is a remarkable achievement. I found it difficult to concentrate on certain passages of War and Peace the first (and only) time I read it. I can’t imagine reading over those same passages 15 times and paying attention.

Most speed reading courses teach people to read the words off the page without imagining the corresponding sounds in their minds (called subvocalisation). Skim reading is slightly different; it teaches people to read the keywords in a sentence and ignore all the smaller words, creating some kind of semantic register in shorthand. Anyone who has read that other Tolstoy tome, Anna Karenina, has probably been tempted to skim read certain passages, such as Levin’s theories of Russian agrarianism. I know I was tempted, quite recently, but in my efforts to pick up the reading pace I found my attention was divided: part of my mind was thinking about Levin’s thoughts and actions, as described on the page, but an equal part of my mind was devoted to the novel process of speed/skim reading. What are the keywords? I wondered. Sometimes my mind was entirely distracted by this question, and while debating which half of a subjunctive conditional I could ignore while retaining the sense of the clause, I would speed read two or three more paragraphs without taking anything in.

There is something quite unseemly about the notion of skimming over the literary canon. In some inverted, abstract sense it reminds me of liposuction: you’re putting on intellectual weight without acquiring the mental health benefits, and there’s always a downside to cutting corners.

Did the world’s great novelists really spend years agonising over the pitch and rhythm of their sentences so some time-efficient post-modern reader could skim over the text like a political spin doctor searching for soundbites in the transcript of a ministerial speech? I don’t think so. Speed reading might be an effective tool for office documents, textbooks, and letters of unrequited love, but the prose of great literature should be savoured, should it not? Part of the joy of reading comes from “hearing” our psychic palates pronouncing the words in the mind’s ear; the imagined speech, “richly flavoured like a nut or an apple”.

Compare this classic Dickensian opening line with the skimmed version that follows, and ask yourself, is it really worth tearing through great prose like Gordon Gecko tearing through the assets of a newly acquired company?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Best times/worst times, age wisdom/foolishness, epoch belief/incredulity, season Light/Darkness, spring hope, winter despair.

Charles Dickens, the skimmed version.

Notwithstanding the aesthetic pleasure derived from reading, how well can one appreciate the nuances of character and circumstance in a novel if one is reading 10 pages per minutes sans Bloomian comprehension skills? I’m not convinced that the average person can ever learn to read at speed and contemplate at leisure. Speed reading is a bit like trying to appreciate the sights of Paris while racing through the streets at 200 kmph.

I know this is the era in which we measure internet connection speeds in fractions of seconds and thumb SMS sentiments like “gr8 2 c u”, I know this is the era of speed-living and 20-20 cricket, but I’m not convinced that we should adapt our reading habits to fit in with the speed of modern life. Rather, reading should be seen as a pleasure where time is forgotten, if only for a moment.

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401 Ways to get Your Children to Work at Home by Bonnie McCullough

By Anita Mathias

401 Ways to get Your Children to Work at Home
Bonnie McCullough
I strongly recommend this book. I bought it when Zoe was three, and it gives step by step suggestions for all the tasks a child should have mastered between the age of 2 and 18–age-appropriate suggestions for what a child could do to help out in the kitchen, with the laundry, with cleaning, shopping, in the garden, mending, phone-calls re. hair-cuts, taking a bus, managing money etc.

On each of Zoe’s birthdays, we would look at what she should be able to do in terms of ironing, mending, cooking, vacuuming etc. At 15, she can cook and serve a 3 course meal to guests, (and has been able to for many years) handle her own laundry, clean if necessary (though we do have a cleaner) mend her own clothes, and do most domestic tasks. She will be supremely able to run her own little house when she is 18.

Irene has not been as enthusiastic about learning these age-appropriate tasks, but can do most things on the 11 year old list.

I would highly recommend this book so that when kids leave home, they have all the survival skills they need. I grew up in a home with a live in cook, live in maid, and live in gardener, and got married without the faintest idea of how to cook or clean, and just a faint idea of how to do laundry. Domesticity has been an uphill battle for me–but not for the generation I have brought into the world–if I have anything to say about it!

Having everyone pitch in leads to more family time, more family fun, a less frazzled mum, and more confident, less intense, and better-rounded children!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ways-Your-Kids-Work-Home/dp/0312299931/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1282256543&sr=8-1