Exciting Times Finding Villette
you find books, books find you, etc.
There has only been where and when you were when a book made itself a part of you. Places are reduced to lines on a page, and time is warped by universal truths found in books both old and new. Your life history becomes characterized by quotes, passages, and themes that encapsulate your experience better than memory can. A train going from Salem to Boston, shooting through the foggy Massachusetts landscape, only becomes relevant as the place I was when I first read Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan, subconsciously burrowing Ava’s post-grad plan to teach English in a foreign country deep in my brain. A trip to Glasgow is extended when I am given a copy of Villette by Charlotte Brontë, which a month later will assure me teaching English has long been the default vocation for lost young women. It doesn’t matter that these events occurred more than a year apart from each other. They could have happened yesterday, or they could be waiting to happen tomorrow. The search for logic amidst insurmountable feeling collapses time and only exists in the now and then.
Bored and aimless, I found myself recently graduated from college, living in a quiet beach town on the coast of Spain. I was to spend the year teaching English in a mountain village home to six-hundred habitants, and I hoped it would prove to be the right course of action. Everyone else seemed to think so–– my family encouraged my decision wholeheartedly, and my friends, who had been able to find salaried positions immediately upon graduating, excitedly expressed how jealous they were that I was untethered and able to travel. They demanded details of my life here, like how beautiful the climate was or how happy I was to be in Europe. I responded in the positive to all inquiries, eliding details of the tropical storm that raged my first week and of the way the only other residents of the town, old jubilados, possessed wrinkled stares that exposed me as the outsider I was. They rendered me transparent, as if they knew my presence in their country was merely a faulty step taken in no direction.
My first month in Spain passed in relative solitude; my roommate hadn’t yet arrived, meaning there was no one to distract me from various stressors. Spanish bureaucracy was proving impossibly frustrating, and grocery shopping was overwhelming as I used Google to translate names of food. An anxiety curdled within me; I rarely left the house and reasons to doubt myself flitted through my head. In the undercurrent of all my thoughts, there was the sensation of being lost at sea, adrift amidst the seemingly endless ways my life could unravel, yet unable to choose an option that inspired within me the steadfast certainty I was craving. I’d believed making a commitment to live and work on another continent would displace my problems, but they remained, as ever, in their constant location: my head. To quell the internal noise, I decided to pick up Exciting Times, which I hadn’t read a page of since that fateful train ride nearly a year prior, but now sought out to reinforce the confidence in my decision to go abroad.
In her debut, Naoise Dolan tells the story of Ava, a young Irish woman who moved to Hong Kong to teach English. Ava, who comes from a working-class background and possesses very left-wing views, strikes up a sexual relationship with English banker Julian and eventually moves into his stunning bachelor pad of an apartment. When Julian goes on a months-long business trip, Ava begins developing unexpected emotional feelings for a lawyer from Hong Kong named Edith, who had gone to boarding school in England. The book’s self-aware narrating style has often been compared to that of Sally Rooney’s work, and was another reason I decided to re-read it–– if only so I could get a moment’s reprieve from my own punitively self-studying dialogue.
I took solace in Ava’s reasoning for moving to another continent–– “I’d been sad in Dublin, decided it was Dublin’s fault, and thought Hong Kong would help”–– as much as I was comforted by her experience at work. Working with children proved more difficult than expected: their energy constantly absorbed mine until I felt utterly empty by the end of the day and my inability to explain seemingly simple grammatical or spelling rules (why do the British add a ‘u’ where the Americans don’t? why do you pronounce cough like that? why are there, their, and they’re the same sound?) made me feel foolish. I similarly struggled to fully connect with my coworkers for reasons partly to do with language and culture, and partly because of some weird tension that lingered between the main English teacher and I. The school’s administration had added more classes to her teaching schedule, and when she wasn’t working she was completing her Master’s course or taking her dad to medical appointments. Every morning when I arrived to carpool with her, she surely saw me as another burden sent to drain time and energy away from herself. I made sure to arrive at her apartment early, where I would wait outside until she emerged and we’d exchange morning pleasantries. I never knew what to expect when we got in the car–– the atmosphere was different every day, dependent upon a pendulum swinging our relationship between genuine friends who could talk about The Vampire Diaries and mere coworkers whose communication consisted of only the bare necessities.
In the mornings, I would wait until the last minute to get out of bed, entertaining excuses to avoid work. Despite having no right, I felt overly burdened and ungrateful; this in turn produced a flush of shame and I found myself in the same struggle as Ava: “Some mornings I didn’t leave the bed because then I’d have to brush my teeth, followed by a series of actions that amounted to living my life as the person I was… I told myself I was disgusting and lazy and I’d be late and they’d fire me, and then I got up. If you were really sick you couldn’t just harness your self-loathing like that, so I knew I was fine.” I also wasn’t sick, so I’d get up and shove a sweater over my unbrushed hair, throw on baggy pants, eat my overnight oats, rush to make the bus on time, and go through another day of my life.
Sometimes after I returned home I would smoke a joint just to lay in bed and stare at the ceiling, which would become the stage onto which I projected my thoughts. Images flashed through my mind: the picturesque countryside I drove through every morning, the thin patience on the banker’s face as I tried to open an account in my broken Spanish, the hot pavement of the streets left vacant during siesta. I didn’t know what my expectations had been or even why I had expected anything; my friends and family were completely right when they said “You’re in Spain, it can’t be that bad,” but a sense of being deprived of one last thing persisted. Facile grievances and self-pity proliferated in my thoughts like weeds in an abandoned lot; fittingly, Ava was indulging her own belief in a singular hurt, prompting one of her friends to deliver a cutting observation: “You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special… but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.”
What was written on that page echoed loud with reverberations that, in conjunction with the slithery passage of time, slowly made me feel better, even thankful, for moving to Spain. My roommate arrived a month into my stay, and we hit it off immediately; soon we made more friends and I was establishing a semblance of a life. One of my new friends was a girl from Scotland, who invited me to spend Christmas with her and her family in Glasgow. As it was my first Christmas spent away from my own family, I happily accepted the invitation— though once I’d arrived I immediately found myself out of my element. My Christmases had always been casual; there were never any winter snowfalls or carolers making noise with shrill bells to cement the holiday spirit. Rather, when I was younger the most festive my family would get was going to see Mall Santa, decorating a Christmas tree, and hanging a string of lights sourced from the Dollar Tree. As I got older, we began to forgo even this, and presents became Zelle transfers or gift cards. Christmas had only ever been a time of year to spend time with family, not an actual ritual to be practiced.
That was not the case in Scotland. On Christmas Eve, my friend took me to see Edinburgh. We spent almost all day drinking mulled wine and walking through the Christmas market, weaving in and out of the thick, festive crowd; the sugary-sweet air permeated the full, grey clouds and rested upon the swaths of people browsing the vendors’ stalls or waiting to ride the ferris wheel. Later that night, my friend’s family gifted me matching Christmas pajamas in which I was to sleep and, upon waking the next morning, open presents. My gift-giving muscles were weak and flabby, but I handed her parents a giant Toblerone bar and a scented candle to say thank you for their incredible hospitality. I’d been expecting merely a place to stay and fun times with my friend, but I was made to feel like a genuine member of the family, and was even given my own pile of gifts: a scarf, chocolate, and a stack of books. One of the books, given to me because it was a favorite of my friend’s, was Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, a 1853 novel about an Englishwoman named Lucy Snowe who, spurned by luck and fortune, becomes an English teacher at a boardinghouse in the fictional French village of Villette.
After Christmas, I had embarked on two weeks of traveling, during which I explored the cobbled streets of storied cities and drunkenly charmed geographically diverse strangers I met in hostels. My floundering ego had been reinforced, and by the time I returned to Spain I was in a bubble of self-absorbed euphoria I felt nothing could puncture. Even work was better; kids surprised me with their elementary art and the morning car rides took on a more relaxed air after the holidays. It was the beginning of the new year and in its freshness the idea of a blank slate enticed me to the point of delusion. As Lucy Snowe herself would later mention, “wise people say it is folly to think anybody [or anything] perfect,” and let’s just say I was flirting with folly. Out of a precarious optimism and a facile sense of lightness emerged a fierce aversion to thinking beyond the immediate present. I certainly hadn’t wanted nor been seeking out a dark, seemingly hopeless Gothic novel woven through with unignorable philosophical jewels, but this desire for intellectual ease and convenience, like most others, proved to be irrelevant and misguided once I started reading.
Initially, Lucy’s bleak attitude annoyed me. I understood her decision to teach abroad was because, in her time and society, a woman had almost no other alternative recourse to take if she wanted to be independent, but did she have to be so self-serious? Why was she so socially ascetic, hiding in her sleeping quarters and later depriving herself of a happy reunion with the Brettons? “But afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life - no true home - nothing to be dearer to me than myself?” These words possess a multitude of interpretations, but to me they provided the first bitterly resonant connection between Lucy and me: through Lucy’s own isolationism and biting internal dialogue, I recognized myself during my first month of Spain and was therefore affronted with piercing evidence that my current care-free attitude wasn’t how I’d always been, nor was it a promise that could be kept by the ever-changing impulses of reality.
My vested interest in focusing only on what I felt made myself worthy–– charming strangers, collecting stories, being desired–– and aggressively ignoring my insecure anxieties meant I was missing the persistent hope taking refuge in the folds of the narrative. As if prepared for such an ignorant reader, Charlotte Brontë wrote the book as an immovable impasse: there is no way to avoid the brutal confrontations with the intractable entanglement of life, its push and pull of forces that run contradictory to one another–– nor is there a desire to. Phrases of wisdom seemed to glow off the page, irresistibly beckoning me to resonate with them. One such passage in particular stuck out to me: “Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.” Like magic, I felt the scales of my ego balance: my self-aggrandizing delirium floated down from its heights while my nauseating self-doubt emerged from its depths to meet on equal ground and be transformed into a sigh of relief. No longer was it necessary to swing between the extremes of my emotional wellbeing in order to cope with the future’s unintelligible compass; the energy spent on cultivating my delusions could instead be invested in maintaining this newfound equilibrium and heavy peace.
Neither Exciting Times nor Villette end particularly clearly–– the former leaves the reader on a cliffhanger that pulses with a subtle optimism, while the latter’s final page depicts a soul-crushing scene whose chance for any elaboration or resolution is left wholly up to the perplexed imagination of the reader. These are frustrating, though appropriate, conclusions for two books whose narrators attempt to find sense in the confounding ebb and flow of life’s whims, which never seem to have any rhyme or reason but somehow have the privilege of knowing when and where you need to be. I first read Exciting Times on a cold train in a Massachusetts winter made more biting by my fear of what lay beyond graduation; Villette was gifted to me during a Scottish winter made warm by touching thoughtfulness and hospitality. Both books helped me anchor myself in the unnerving reality of an experience I expected would magically direct my life in a clear direction, but was in actuality something I would still have to be an active, decisive participant in.
But even now, after the books’ collective wisdom has been burrowed into my psyche, I can’t completely fault myself for indulging the more dramatic extremes of my emotions. There’s a line in Villette that reads, “...[M]y inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose. I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.” It’s easy to get swept up in that kind of excitement, good or bad; the danger lies in forgetting life always offers more than just a taste.
Header image is a painting by David Hettinger.