Howard's End #1: Trying to "Only Connect" After The Boston Marathon Bombings

So much of the news yesterday in Boston centered on four suspected murderers:  Whitey Bulger, Aaron Hernandez, George Zimmerman, and Dzhokar Tsarnaev. 

Over the last few weeks in general, the media's accounts of courtroom events have testified relentlessly to the disastrous judgments and hideous actions of which people are capable. Furthermore, witnesses' conflicting memories of events in the Bulger and Zimmerman trials have made me wonder whether young people following the news think that the standard courtroom procedure of having witnesses swear to tell the truth is anything but a formality. I've felt cynical watching these proceedings from afar.  The silence of the dead is deafening.

But yesterday, when Dzhokar* was arraigned, "afar" wasn't part of my reaction equation:  the combination of rage, sadness, and existential bewilderment that I usually keep relatively contained and "manageable" in some basement room of my psyche began seeping up through the floorboards. Dzhokar's seven-minute court appearance gave me a taste of how difficult his trial is going to be for so many.  For a large number of people, I suspect it will be unsettling and disturbing, awakening the questions, feelings, and interpersonal tensions of this past spring.  For a smaller group, the victims who have been living at Marathon Ground Zero, I imagine it will be yet another challenge to face on the strange, difficult, and sometimes lonely journey they are already making.

So what does this have to do with Howard's End, the novel that E.M. Forster wrote in 1920 (and published in 1921 -- there's a World War between these two dates)? I'll try to explain.

The Marathon bombings happened on Monday, April 15; on Monday, April 22, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where I am a teacher, re-opened its post-vacation doors to students and staff, all of whom had different connections to the event's victims and alleged perpetrators. For the first two weeks, we simply "got through," doing what we were supposed to do as best we could.  Concentration was difficult, if not impossible.  At the end of each school day, I hoped that we as a school community had taken one more small collective step back toward normalcy.  

I also felt that I could hardly wait to get home.  My "home" isn't the kind of place that makes visitors say, "It would be so wonderful to live here!"  A small condominium in a large converted factory building, it's almost identical to my neighbors' in terms of features, layout, and appliances. It offers no lovely views of nature, and it doesn't have a fireplace in front of which I can hunker down while the snow is piling up and the wind is howling. But it does offer lots of wall space for my husband's wonderful paintings -- and lots of windows that admit plenty of natural light.  It's comfortable and functional and cheerful, and it has plenty of space for the books and CDs that often take good care of my spirit.

By the second week of May, the school as a whole seemed back on course.  My students' writing became more focused and developed again, and their homework began to come in regularly and on time -- a good thing since the AP exam was May 9!  I also became productive, and with that sense of rediscovered productivity came some relief. 

But I was hardly back to "normal" -- and who knew if "normal" was the best aspiration, anyway? I felt untethered. Drifting -- sometimes sadly, sometimes sullenly, sometimes emptily -- I needed something that might make me feel less existentially adrift.  I wondered if reading would provide me with the lifeline I could use to pull myself back to something or some place that would anchor me, at least temporarily. Still easily distracted and prone to thinking about nothing, I decided that a book that would require too much persistent, rigorous attention wouldn't work for me; nor would one that required too little. The solution seemed to be to reread a good, literary novel: the combination of anticipating what I already knew and moving beyond it would keep me engaged.

With this plan made, I thought of Howard's End almost immediately. The first time I'd used the word "untethered" to describe how I was feeling, Forster's "Only connect" had come to mind almost immediately.  The comfort I was taking in being home -- just sitting in my living room and doing next to nothing -- had gotten me thinking of Mrs. Wilcox's continual longing for her childhood home, for which the novel is named. Furthermore, I knew I still had the old, beaten copy of the novel that I'd read inattentively in college. It was the right size and weight to bring with me on the train every day. I could look forward to immersing myself in the novel between my periodic scans of the the station or car to see that there were no unattended backpacks needing to be reported.

It didn't take me long to locate the novel.  When I opened it to the title, page, I had my first inkling of homecoming:  there were the words "'Only connect . . .'" sitting right above the Vintage Books logo.  By the bottom of the third page, I had already laughed:  Helen Schlegel had asked her sister Margaret in a letter written at Howard's End, "Meg, shall we ever learn to talk less?" I have several very verbal friends named Meg, and even more verbal friends named Margaret -- so we talk a lot. I doubt we'll learn to talk less.

It felt good to laugh about something after the events of the previous weeks. And so began my connecting to Howard's End.

* As a CRLS teacher, I always call CRLS graduates by their first names.