Umora
I recalled the word at the end of March, when we piled into Pavlina's green Kia and drove to Buhovo to plant some flowers at the grave of her grandmother and visit Maggie's friend.
Proleten umora. Spring fatigue. A Bulgarian friend described it as "when the winter is over and you want to quit your job and do something else."
I didn't want to quit my job, but the sky burned blue behind the black branches of the trees and the my back bent under the weight of the sunlight and the shoving breeze. It was a beautiful spring day; just the sort of weather I hate.
Umora. Like umoren sam. "I'm tired." Or morya se "I get tired" and, more distantly, koshmar. "Nightmare." Smart. "Death."(1)
Something was terribly wrong. I could feel it. Wrangling the kids, buying trowels and tulip bulbs, I ground forward with our plan for the day. Everything was perfect on the outside and impossibly difficult on the inside, just like when I was sick, before they removed the tumor.
I know exactly what this is. I was in pain all through the spring of 2016 and now I associate lovely spring weather with suffering. It doesn't take a genius to make the connection, especially since it's happened every year for the past 8 years. Some springs the Umora lasted from the first cherry blossoms of March to the first of June, when the ritual of Korban finally dispelled it.
I was grateful to finally have something to call it. Up until then, I would say, "I'm having a hard time" or "it's my spring-time sadness." But the first one is too long, and whenever I say the second one, my head fills with that aggravating pop song from 2012. "Umora" fits a lot better. I battled it all through the shopping and the drive to Buhovo, when we got a call from Pavlina's mom.
"Are Maggie and Ellie listening?" she asked over the car's sound-system.
"Hi, grandma!" They said.
"You'd better just tell us," said Pavlina.
"Well...the cat is fine now."
My stomach panged.
"Ama Pavlinche, he jumped from the bathroom window on the fourth floor! I found him crying on the roof of the garage. But I think he's all right. He's walking and eating.
"Does he need to go to the vet?" Pavlina was remembering the same medical emergencies as me. Me, when I had cancer. Maggie, who was born with hip dysplasia. Hospitals and legs sound like something is terribly wrong.
Convincing ourselves that we didn't need to spend the rest of the day in a medical emergency, we drove on. Company helped. Maggie and Ellie played with their friend while Pavlina and I talked to her dad and grandparents, also from the same little town as Pavlina's father's family.
We walked up the hill north of the village and had a picnic of grapes under a flowering apple tree. On the way back, Maggie fell and skinned her knee. It was too much. We had to go. Maybe to the hospital if we couldn't get a tetanus shot at home. Do you see her leg? Do you see the dirt ground into the blood? Maggie, how could you! You can't run down hills. This can't happen again. Can the cat even still walk? We need to buy netting to put up over the windows.
"If we don't, maybe the cat will die," said Maggie.
We were in the car by then. I turned around in my seat to shout at her. "Do you understand why that was a stupid thing to say? Just shut up, all right?"
That was the fuse tripping. Pavlina and I came back to ourselves and realized we had to get a grip. We couldn't just push through the umora. We had to stop using it as an excuse for acting crazy and get rid of it.
It's the sort of thing you have to tell yourself more than once. You see it, you deal with it, but the umora sneaks back up on you. It helped that the weather was cold and rainy the next week. The week after that we went on vacation to Serbia, where none of us had ever gone to the hospital. Today, it's sunny again, the drain in the bathroom clogged, and I feel the temptation to snap. But it's just the umora. I work out, I got swimming, I read C.S. Lewis and Tolstoy to make my life more different from when I was sick. Every year the umora gets a little weaker.
This month I looked at my calendar and decided it was time to start the next revision of Wealthgiver. We're on track for serialization in October, and in the mean time, I'll try to post some Thracian language stuff. Stay tuned.
The World's Other Side has gathered four reviews, all thoughtful, not to mention positive. Some highlights: "It was a fun ride", "with subtle romance and always wry humor," "I genuinely found myself caring about them all." "It's intricate, tightly wound, and shines with the sheer amount of thought that was poured into this by the author." If you've read book, please leave a review and tell other people what you thought.
Petrolea is being serialized on Royal Road, Substack and right here on Patreon. It isn't getting as many readers as I'd like, and I'm not sure what to do about that. It's hard to care about an old story when I've got a new one to work on.
And I read some stuff this month:
The Great Divorce and the Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis - I need to read more of this kind of stuff. Aside from being entertaining and thought-provoking, it gives me ways to express what I already know. If you figure out how to live in heaven, your time in hell will have only been purgatory. Treat your readers like birds learning to fly, not like birds you plan to sell as breasts and drumsticks. Good advice.
Cannibal Gold by Chuck Dixon - Thank you Upstream Reviews for recommending this book, which did show me a good time. You got a band of time-travelling soldiers rescuing some scientists from a tribe of ice-age hominins. Lots of blood and explosions. My favorite part was the beginning, when we met all the characters. What they actually do felt a bit underdeveloped, though. I wanted to spend more time in paleolithic North America with the Denisovan ghost lineage.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton - It begins with an argument over the merits of civilization versus savagry ("You see the tree by the light of the lamp post, I wonder if you could ever see a lamp post by the light of a tree.") Then the table turns...literally! I enjoyed that one. And I was glad this nightmare had a happy ending. I got some comfort out of it when I laid it over our current situation. Maybe you will too.
A Hero of Our Own Times by Mikhail Lermontov - In one story, the narrator describes a cad. A Russian soldier in the 1820s Caucasus kidnaps a Tatar girl. In the next, the cad himself becomes the narrator. At first, his own words make him seem a better man. Later, a worse one. Also of interest is the story of the Serb, the mad Circassian, and the nature of fate.
The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolf - I am sad to write this review, which reminds me that I finished The Book of the New Sun, and will have to wait before I can begin reading it again. The good news is that there are so many layers to this book, my third reading will surely reward me.
"Have I told you all I promised? I am aware that at various places in my narrative I have pledged that this or that should be made clear in the knitting up of the story. I remember them all, I am sure, but then I remember so much else. Before you assume that I have cheated you, read again, as I will write again."
Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold - What number re-read is this? The fourth? It's a good mystery, on par with Brothers in Arms, except we don't get rewarded with a new character joining the series at the end. Like most of the rest of the Vorkosigan books, a theme shines through: children change things fundamentally.
The Kreutzer Sonata by Lev Tolstoy - This short story is a transcript of everyone's worst public-transport nightmare. The narrator is stuck in a train car with an old man who begins "he who looks upon a woman in lust has already committed adultery," and extends this logic to "They think that I killed my wife on the 5th of October. It was long before that that I immolated her." Just as Tolstoy took us step by step through death in Ivan Ilych, now he shows us what it is like to murder.
Millennium by Marty Phillips - This isn't a quick book, but it's one worth relishing. Of its four connected short stories, I like the first one best, in which a suicide falling from one of the Twin Towers gets to relive the events of September 11th over and over. The second and fourth stories are more open-ended, really the first halves of stories that I wish the author had finished. But still, thoroughly enjoyable.
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Lev Tolstoy - Tolstoy shows us what it's like to be a well-to-do Russian at the turn of the century. Having lived his life in vain, he finally comes face to face with death and self-awareness. I think it's actually a happy ending if you believe in heaven.
The Histories by Herodotus - It's a long one, and the sort of thing I'll need to re-read at some point with a pen in my hand. This first pass was an audiobook, narrated by the excellent David Timson. Herodotus tells the story of the Persian Wars, with many asides about the people and places of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 5th century BC and before. There's even some good life lessons in there: a bow breaks if it is never un-strung.
The Book of Feasts and Seasons by John C. Wright - This book is a series of short stories based on the important dates of the Catholic Liturgical Year. The one that stands out is "Pale Realms of Shade," the Easter Sunday story, about a ghost of a detective who is forced to see through himself. The whole thing is on Kindle Unlimited, and I'd say it's worth checking out for that story alone.
Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré - The last novel le Carré completed before his death. Agent Running in the Field is one of the very few words of fiction I've read that gets any kind of grip on the world we live in. It takes place soon after Brexit and Trump, when an elderly spy makes the acquaintance of an angry young man. The young man wants to play tennis and rant about the rise of neo-Fascism. The old man subjects himself to both and stumbles into a very tangled international situation. The spy plot sounds very real, and so do the characters.
Undead on Arrival by Trilby Black - Full disclosure: I am a friend of the author and critiqued an earlier version of this book. I then read the current version and wrote this review. This is a story about a policeman who wishes he was more brutal. He sees the merciless gestapo of his post-apocalyptic city state and thinks "if I only was cool enough to join the Blood Guard." Then he gets bitten by a zombie. This book is about the trade-off between justice and mercy. I wish it dug deeper, but it gets us far enough.
Dismantling America by Thomas Sowell - This is a series of essays by the economist Thomas Sowell, whose a perspective I wish I'd had during the early 2010s. Of particular interest are his essay about Israel's retaliation against Hamas, which shows what he turned out to be wrong about. I've also gotten a lot of mileage out of the Lincoln quote about the dog with five legs. Go read it.
(1) The Bulgarian root "mor-," goes back to Proto-Balto-Slavic *marás, from the Proto-European *mór-o-, which in Germanic yielded the -mare in English "nightmare," and the -mar in Bulgarian "koshmar," which is loan-word from French. *mór-o- is the o-grade of original *mer-, "to die," of which the noun was *mértis, the ancestor of modern Bulgarian smart or "death." You see, it all hangs together.
See you next month