Tags
books, Carol Shields, Everything Affects Everyone, Fiction, grief, labyrinth, photography, Shawna Lemay
“Reality is full of secrets that everyone knows and refuses to acknowledge,” says Xaviere in Shawna Lemay’s novel Everything Affects Everyone. I had been reading the book earlier this month (as I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago), and I was reading slowly, savouring lines like this one and copying out quotations I wanted to remember.
In an interview with Xaviere’s friend Daphne, the photographer Irene Guernsey speaks about creating art: “There is above all a sacredness in creating something from nothing.” She says, “Art, itself, can bear quite a lot, and it can be enough, or close to enough.” It can be made in “isolated spots.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be noticed. The artist has to “be able to feel, to let things in.” And yet “The world is always at odds with the artist,” and “Maybe it has to be that way.” I liked finding Rilke in this novel: “You must change your life,” he says, and the women of Everything Affects Everyone recognize that they are all engaged in a process of transformation, as they work to understand the mysteries of art.
As I say, I had been reading the novel slowly, and then, last Friday, after I received news of the death of a family friend, someone I had known and loved all my life, I struggled to make sense of the shock and one of the first things I did was to curl up with Shawna’s novel and read the rest of it all at once. I suppose in a way I was trying to find out how this thing that had happened would affect all of us, everyone. Each loss is unique, of course, and yet all of us experience loss again and again, as we lose people we love, dreams we once cherished, visions of what might have been.
The Carol Shields Memorial Labyrinth in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which my family and I visited on a warm, sunny morning in late June of 2016 with our dear friend, who had lived in Winnipeg for many years.
Reading didn’t take away the pain, though I don’t think that’s the effect I was searching for. Like Xaviere, I felt I was learning that “I’m meant to breathe and live, and beyond that, I’m meant to appreciate the beauty of things in a heightened way.” I went looking for photos of the friend we had lost, and I found one—the last photo of her that I took during what turned out to be her last visit to Halifax—in which she is laughing, during a conversation with one of my aunts, and I could almost hear that familiar laugh. For a moment, she was with us again.
Quotations from Carol Shields
I won’t try to summarize the plot of Shawna’s beautiful novel. Indeed, as Xaviere says, her life “is to be without plot.” Things do happen in this book: transformation—even transfiguration—and theft, and reconciliation. But the plot isn’t the main point. A photograph stolen from an exhibition in Edmonton, Alberta called Snow Angels, Forgotten Angels, and Winged Beings is linked with the artworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990. Something about the empty frames that mark the locations of the crimes prompts people to talk about other things that have been stolen or lost.
The courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which I visited often during the years I lived in Boston and Cambridge. These photos are from a family holiday in 2017, several years after we had moved back to Canada. We spent a week with my sister Bethie and her family, just before they moved from Boston to Bonn.
Everything Affects Everyone draws attention to “the sense that there are no endings.” Beyond the “traditional narrative arc,” says a character named Michelangelo Dupree near the end of the novel, “There is an ongoingness that I wish to capture.” And maybe that’s the word I was looking for when I read Shawna’s book last Friday afternoon: ongoingness.
I often find myself quoting Aristotle, who says in the Nicomachean Ethics that “The things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” I heard an echo of this idea in Xaviere’s claim that “I need to know things that I will only learn by knowing them.” Practice. Education. Creativity. All of us know secrets about loss. Sometimes we can look at them and sometimes we can’t. Even when the frame is empty, maybe we can create something from nothing. Learn something by doing it. Know something by knowing it. Learn to grieve by grieving.
Snowshoeing in Kingston, Nova Scotia (sent by my friend Sandra, and taken by her sister Brenda)
Photos from Banff, Alberta, sent by my brother, Tom
Photos from Hawaii, sent by my sister Edie
My mother’s orchids
Photos from my recent walk with friends, and our dogs, at Fort Needham, in Halifax
Your post is so profound and moving that I find it difficult to comment. You write about art and the art of living and the strange power of grief and loss, as if these are all one thing. As perhaps they are… My condolences on the loss of your dear family friend, Sarah. As always, I love your photos too! (And I will request Lemay’s novel from the library.)
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Many thanks for your kind words, and thank you for reading. Your kindness means a great deal to me! I loved Shawna’s novel and I hope you enjoy reading it.
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Sarah, so sorry for the loss of your dear friend.
Today’s post is reflective, insightful and moving. Thank you.
I will certainly look for Lemay’s novel.
Sheila
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Thanks very much, Sheila. I knew her in Edmonton when I was a child, and our family enjoyed many visits with her in Winnipeg and Halifax over the years. Thank you for your kind words about the blog post. I’d be happy to lend you my copy of the novel, if you like.
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Thanks Sarah for the offer to lend me Lemay’s novel. I will be in touch.
Sheila
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I am sorry for your loss. The pain lessens a little bit with time.
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Thank you so much for your sympathy and kindness, and thank you for reading this. It helps to have company.
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I lost one of my dogs last year.
I’ve added the book to my wish-list, by the way 🙂
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Oh, I am so sad to hear of your loss. Sending sympathy and best wishes. Do you know this poem by Edith Wharton?
My little old dog:
A heart-beat
At my feet.
Lovely to know Shawna’s novel is on your wish-list.
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beautuful pictures you seem to have a varied and interesting life
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I’m so glad you enjoyed the photos–thanks so much for commenting.
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You have given us some lovely photographs!
Coping with a friend’s death is really hard, especially one you have known your whole life.
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Thanks very much for your kind words, Andrew. I feel grateful to have known her for such a long time.
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Sorry to hear about your friend, Sarah. This is such a beautiful post – it captures your memories, grief, and thoughts very well.
There’s so much variety in the photos sent by your siblings. I feel like the four of you are spread to the four corners of the earth!
I love seeing other people’s bookshelves (especially when I can make out the books on them.) Your mother and I share many of the same books. 🙂
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Thanks, Naomi. Reading Shawna’s novel and writing this short piece helped me a lot in those first days.
I suppose I could have added photos from the trip my brother-in-law made to Nepal not too long ago—that would have added another corner! Most of us are back in NS now (aside from the Bonn contingent, of course).
I too am a fan of that section of my parents’ library!
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