"She Is Not Really Beautiful But Only Looks That Way:" About Seemingly Good Ideas

She is not really beautiful, but only looks that way! I heard this statement from a friend of mine years ago in order to introduce its inherent paradox. Still we agreed that it did make sense. Sometimes, in first impression,  people seem to be beautiful—. Yet  if we look a little closer, we realize that they may be symmetrical, or have a good figure,  but beautiful they are not. This is a matter of aesthetic preference, I don’t  refer here to the opposite case when upon knowing the person we grow to view them as more or less 

beautiful. But it was an interesting point to observe and discuss.

In a similar fashion, there are some ideas which  at first seem quite great, and only later when we  analyze the consequences we understand that, although they had some merit,  they  were never good.

After living several months in Iowa City my husband Tzvi and I decided that it was time to buy a house. Since it was Tzvi’s first year at his job at the university and I was home with the baby, it was up to me to find us the perfect home.  And then Tzvi  announced:  “I don’t need to see any of the houses which you consider,  it is entirely up to you.  If you don’t take it, then there is no need for me to see that house, and if you do I shall see it enough once we live there." It sounded  like an empowering and efficient idea.

I spent quite a bit of time with  the realtor, we knew that we didn’t want to buy an expensive house. After being poor students in graduate school we finally had some money  and  we wanted to be able to enjoy it rather than spending it on a big mortgage

Finally I found us a 3 bedroom, no-nonsense, modern, and efficient house. It was within  our budget , in a nice neighbourhood near the park. We even  had a good friend  living down  the street. In short, it was  perfect..

Only that it wasn’t, as we moved into to that house I realized that it was a huge mistake.I never liked that house and  grew to dislike it even more.

 Since it was only I who saw the houses I tried to look at them through Tzv’s eyes, I searched for one which will suit him best. He was an  engineer, thus I found  us a highly functional house, but it was  boring and lacked charm, Tzvi wasn’t. I somehow reduced his wishes  into a schematic notion that in his reality didn't reflect the taste of either one of us. It would never have happened  had we looked at houses together. 

On the surface, Tzvi’s idea made a perfect sense, but it paralyzed me and took away my creativity, and the ability to express myself. Tzvi himself  later confessed  that he never liked the house because  it was so unlike me.

Three years later we moved into our second house which we chose together, and  there we spent the rest of our time in Iowa City.

Of course Tzvi is not the only one to come up with perfectly logical ideas that in reality turn out to be quite terrible. Times of war make me wonder about those.  

How NOT to Write About Motherhood

 MAY.10.2013 

Since Sunday is Mother's Day in the US; in Israel, alas, this day has already turned into "Family Day," I decided to use the opportunity to bring up a minor yet important point about motherhood and fiction.

Rereading Jane and Prudence  (1953) Barbara Pym’s third novel, I was surprised to read that  Jane, one of the heroines, states that she  does not feel much like a mother, since she only has one child. At first, this statement didn’t register,  I glossed over it. But then I kept thinking and  realized that this was a major error. Even in fiction, the feeling of motherhood does not depend on how many children you have. I believe  that  the narrator here reveals  the lack of knowledge and inexperience of the  author, who herself never married and had no children of her own.  

It is true that Jane, a clergyman’s wife, has romantic notions about her role and the life that comes with it. She regards her inability to produce a large family, like the ones exemplified in the clerical novels by Charlotte Yonge, as a personal failure.  However, to me this does not feel like an authentic emotion that could come from a mother.

Before our first daughter was born my husband and I took prenatal Lamaze classes. I remember that on the last class the instructor suggested, “before you go to the hospital to have the baby take a good look around your home, it will never be the same.” Although it seems like a  cliché, this statement could not have been more accurate. Coming back with our first baby life has never been the same. And I felt like a mother and could not feel stronger about it when I  had another child.

I don’t subscribe to the belief that in order to write about something you have to personally  experience it, although it does help as it provides a shortcut. But if I don’t have personal  experience about divorce, for example, I will have to compensate for it. Since it means that I don’t have  instincts or  intuitions to rely upon I will have to conduct  thorough research on divorce.

Moreover, because I don't have that personal experience, even when I do conduct thorough research, my knowledge will lack a certain depth and could never be equal to someone who had life experience. There  could always be surprises -- those issues that I didn’t even know  existed.

On the other hand, not going through the experience myself means that I am not bound by reality, granting me the freedom to write about the subject in a novel way. But I still have to be careful, since I cannot rely on my own experience and intuition I would likely want to consult with esxperts. The most obvious way is  to find an informed reader and  especially a good editor.

Barbara Pym does not make many mistakes, generally her information is reliable and the sentiments of her characters ring true, to the extent that her novels are often used as a source for social and church historians.

 In a way it is gratifying to find a flaw in an otherwise great writer. It encourages me that even Barbara Pym can  make such a silly mistake.