The Invisible Wall

I was recently reading about vanity and how Buddhists--since they do not believe in the self--feel that vanity is therefore a delusion. I have always been intrigued with the stoicism of Buddhist teachings. Minutes ago, I finished reading a book that a friend had sent to me in the mail. I had never heard of the book, let alone the movie based on the book. It is The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. How fitting that this book arrived to me during these dystopian times. I don't read a lot of fiction, but I was just finishing Robin Wall Kimmerer's tome Braiding Sweetgrass and yearned for a different form of narrative. The Wall concerns a woman, who during a stay in a hunting cabin with family, wakes up and learns that she is living within the confines of an invisible dome. Alone in a valley at the base of the Alps, she only (initially) has a dog, cow, and a cat as companions. Sure, this strikes similar tones to Stephen King's Under the Dome (which I have not read) but I was intrigued, regardless. The letter that accompanied this book from my friend told me to not read it if my mind wasn't in a good place. My mind is rarely in a good place, so I read it anyway.

I was very taken by the main character's stoicism throughout the novel. The novel is simply her "report" of the goings-on over the past two or so years therefore it is in first-person...an entwicklungsroman* genre, if you will. A widow and a mother of grown children, she rarely brings up her family (everyone outside the dome is dead). She also endures many other hardships but continues on with her narrative as if it wasn't a horrendous event but a simple bug bite. Here's a passage that I throughly enjoyed:

I pity animals, and I pity people, because they're thrown into this life without being consulted. Maybe people are more deserving of pity, because they have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things. It has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable. All the same, life could have been lived differently. There is no impulse more rational than love. It makes life more bearable for the lover and the loved one. We should have recognized in time that this was our only chance, our only hope for a better life. For an endless army of the dead, mankind's only chance has vanished for ever. I keep thinking about that. I can't understand why we had to take the wrong path. I only know it's too late.

I have those moments, sometimes (or all the time lately) where I realize that my feelings toward many things may appear as apathy, depression, or selfishness. Over the past year or so, in bits and spurts, I have been very unconcerned about things that used to concern me. It's not for lack of or dwindling care. It's actually quite the opposite. I don't need to share examples, but it has become quite regular for me to even see others continue to care about these things. I respect it, but feel bad for humans. I feel very bad for humans. I am human.

Next book up is Barbara Ehrenreich's Living with a Wild God after reading her outlook regarding Covid-19.

*Entwicklungsroman is a genre related to the popular bildungsroman. Bildungsroman is a german term for a coming-of-age novel typically told in third-person narration. Entwicklingsroman is about personal growth in general, regardless of age, and is typically in first-person narration.