In Regards to Chapter 8 of
Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place
27 April 1999
Norway is ostentatiously the home of Aud. But does she really go back home? Can you ever really go home again once you've left. When I first left Union Township for Pomona, when I came back, neither myself nor Union were the same. Union could never be my home, in any comfortable and real sense, ever again. Every subsequent escape from Union has reinforced that alienation. So, how does Aud who has been out of Norway for thirteen years (I think?) return home... it just seems to easy and comfortable for her.
It didn't surprise me that "the old world" was portrayed as better than America; I've been saying the same for nearly a decade. This is especially true with how many of them treat nature and handle interrelationships between different classes. As for how we view history and nature, we are inclined to think of history only as its taught by American propogandists and by antique or collectables dealers. We have no sense of longevity. As for nature, our fast paced, workaholic society has little tine for such that does not conciously answer to American utilitarinist ideas, so we don't think about them.
And the work ethic in this country is absurd. We produce much more than we need or want, destroy produced items to keep prices up, pay workers as little as possible, insist that people should be employed, regardless of what does or doesn't need to be done and the resources we have available. The work ethic is pobably one of the greatest tragedies befalling America today; worse since education and housekeeping are not considered in keeping with the work ethic. Then we wonder about the delingints our culture is breeding. So we work to make money, more for other people than for ourselves, and we leave ourselves so drained of time and energy from work that our lives have little left in terms of quality.
I didn't make much of Julia mistaking the eggs for pollution. It's ashame that pollution is so ridiculous in this country that we would only be so surpised to see what seems to be so much of it. But in this industrial age, unless we had heard of this phenomenia before, it seems obvious to blame mankind.
I didn't make much of Aud's "We. How odd," when I read it. But then it is something I can sympathize with very strongly... you reach a point where you are used to being alone, responsible or answerable to nobody and expecting as much from anyone else. It can be unsettling when life takes a course which changes that independence.
I don't think love really made Aud so much more vulnerable. She still seemed in control; "the man" of the relationship, if you will.