Reflection: The Light of the World

In a quest to read the books I missed last year, I prepared a list. On that list Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World is listed third and next to it in parentheses, “First Lady.” I unabashedly took note of her favorite book of the year and upon reading its first paragraph, felt the familiar excitement of knowing there is so much left to read. “Poetry logic is my logic,” the author explains, and the book is as close to poetry as prose can be. Here is the first paragraph:

“The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”

The Light of the World is a moving portrait of the author’s husband——an impressive man named Ficre Ghebreyesus——their love story, and how she copes with his sudden death. She discusses Africa, art, flowers, and food (there are recipes); she annotates poems on death; she recalls dreams; she introduces an endless stream of family and friends; she shares the most intimate details of marriage (“We shared days I can only call divine,” she writes).

As I neared the book’s end, I prolonged the inevitable by flipping back through the pages, revisiting scenes and scanning for marks I made. “Memories are what you no longer want to remember,” Joan Didion writes in Blue Nights, her own memoir of loss. But perhaps in their very ability to awaken the past, memories alone are redemptive. Within his wife’s prose, there is still Ficre, his presence strong.

Reflections on death, especially ones written so beautifully, can be tricky to process. As a reader it can be tempting to romanticize heartache, to become lost in its reverie. But there is no such luxury in The Light of the World. Love and loss sit side-by-side only to emphasize each other, to draw out each other’s extremes. “Ficre everywhere, Ficre nowhere,” she writes, and the magnitude of that is felt on every page.

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The Light of the World
By Elizabeth Alexander
Published 2015 by Grand Central Publishing

Note: Two Weekends


I woke up two Saturdays ago with the ocean in mind, so off we drove to the Sonoma Coast, where we passed beaches with names like Salmon Creek, Goat Rock, Portuguese and Schoolhouse. Of all the new neighbors this move has introduced, these beaches are by far my favorite, and I hope they will tolerate my frequent and unannounced visits. The ocean was loud, its waves wild, which I bet means catching it on a good day, in high spirits. Grays, blues and whites intertwined to create a palette familiar to those who have spent a winter in California.
 
The following weekend, last weekend, we headed west once more. The subject of octopuses has lingered on my mind since reading and then re-reading The Soul of an Octopus, so off we drove 170 miles to Monterey, to go see one. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has several species of octopus on exhibit, but as with siblings and seasons and most everything else, a clear favorite quickly emerged. The Day Octopus was mesmerizing, stretching itself to its full length, plastering itself onto the glass, and changing color and texture on the fly. It was clearly showing off for us spectators – alone in its tank, without the bleating commands of trainers – which I thought generous and kind. How special that it puts forth such effort. Does it care what we think? We responded approvingly, with exclamations of awe and clicks of the camera.
 
The trip to Monterey confirms books to be reservoirs of ideas waiting to inspire our lives, often in the simplest of ways; like when I tell a friend a bee won’t sting her if she sends it love because “every little thing wants to be loved” (The Secret Life of Bees), or recommending a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk to someone in distress (Franny). I save songs referenced in books so that that gems like Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in G Minor, Opus 23” (All My Puny Sorrows) and Yusef Lateef’s “The Plum Blossom” (The Light of the World) boldly slip into an otherwise humble music collection. If reading just a few books can inspire habits or playlists or weekend outings, surely reading hundreds of books can eventually inspire a life, and what is yet to be discovered excites me endlessly.
 
Best, Yuri
@yuriroho