Yesterday I read A Celibate Season (published 2000) by Carol Shields (Republic of Love) and Blanche Howard, an epistolary tale of caution against spending too much time away from your spouse.  In the novel, a married couple with 2 teenage kids spend ten months apart with the whole of Canada between them; communicating almost wholly by letter they deal with financial strain, in-law angst, temptations, desires, and personal ambition.

This book is really funny and provoking.  It raises issues about the durability of marriage, now versus in previous generations; the pain of separation and the excitement of novelty; the desire for companionship and, ultimately, sex; and the need for connections of any kind as a buffer against loneliness.

The letters pass between husband and wife.  I won’t reveal whose side I was on in the marital battle than ensues.  I’ll leave it to you, readers, to decide which spouse was the more honorable during the separation.  Read the book and let me know what you think!

Despite A Celibate Season‘s basic hilarity,  there are some moments of genuine gravity, beautifully captured,  as quoted here:

“And if anyone were to ask him what is the meaning of life…he would have to say that it is bringing into consciousness those ancient and
primitive stirrings that are the building blocks of creativity.  By doing so one gradually realizes the self, and that is the purpose of life.”

This view of the meaning of the life,  to find oneself through one’s own internal ability to create, is very different from The Elegance of the Hedgehog,where it is the observation of beauty and the capturing of moments of beauty for internal safekeeping — an outward turning for inner sustenance — that is the meaning of life.  And we can contrast it again to The Emigrants where the meaning of life is life itself, our purpose being the span of our lifetime  within the gigantic history of mankind.