Hyper-Detailed Narratives in the Quarantine World

Evan Kindley from The New Yorker discusses connections between Mrs. Dalloway's story and our lives under quarantine in this article: [link]

Although we haven't read much of this novel, it's interesting to see the points Kindley makes about the sudden growth in consequence of formerly normal acts like walking to the store or crossing a street. Even in the novel The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, where the reader is thrust into a hyper-analyzed account of going up an escalator, readers in 2020 can relate deeply with the ironic significance of such a simple deed. However, this does bring up the question of "Are we supposed to relate to these personal accounts?". Did the authors of these novels truly mean for the reader to have a personal connection with their accounts or are the stories enclosed meant more to be a "time-capsule" or snapshot of a single individual's life? 

As we read more of Mrs. Dalloway, I expect that we will continue to make connections with our modern predicament and Mrs. Dalloway's adventure. 

Aurelius and Howie

Arguably the most violent reaction the reader witnesses from Howie in The Mezzanine is the one that occurs after he reads a passage from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. As a bit of background, Meditations is a collection of 12 books that Aurelius wrote to himself about the "importance of analyzing one's judgment of self and others and the development of a cosmic perspective" (Wikipedia). The specific passage that Howie reads discusses the triviality and the transience of life and during our discussion in class, we spoke a lot about the the aspect of the trivial. Another general consensus our class came to is that Howie inherently disagrees with Aurelius and his beliefs. However, when I reread the passage in The Mezzanine I noticed that the narrative of Howie was very similar to Aurelius's Meditations in the sense that both are very private, "intimate" narrations of each own's life. The only difference is that Howie seems to separate trivial and transient as two separate things. 

For Howie, the "trivial" things in his life enable him to manipulate his flow of time and give a sense of permanence to passing events. The juxtaposition of his deep analysis of his milk and cookies into his analysis of Aurelius's passage further emphasizes this idea. In Howie's life, the most important things are the "trivial" and the things he longs for and remembers the most deeply are the "transient". Aurelius's "definition" of life completely contradicts this belief, which causes this reaction.