Aborted

Encounters I just walk away from or can't bear to continue: in what ways do these define which Others I am ready to engage with?

Walking away: I've not been able to finish War and Peace.  In the middle of the book, I find myself disappointed with Natasha after having been so taken with her in the first pages. Is she going to become ordinary? Of course, the mid-section of a novel, especially one of this scope, is a challenge for any novelist--and I should trust Tolstoy to keep his characters from becoming terminally neurotic and dispirited. Perhaps he's got redemption through war sacrifice up his sleeve.

Then there's the Wilkie Collins novel No Name that I can't get through because morally corrosive desperation of the characters.

Lots of TV shows, especially the quick quip, fast paced variety that produces a crisis or two every week, have narrative drive but don't compel me. Some of it seems extremely well contrived, but over and over the contrivance become more evident. A murder a week detective, for instance: how could such a person bear to live? Isn't that the real mystery to be solved? Happy-ever-afterings--after a while they're just too ridiculous.

Couldn't bear to finish Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps with Michael Douglas. The set up for betrayal of disciple and daughter by dad made my stomach churn. I understand there is a happy ending but the cruel insincerity of Gordon Gekko's expression looking into the face of one he had corrupted just stopped me dead.

The low budget movie Frozen about  three arrogant kids abandoned on a ski chair lost me after the first broken legs.

Horror movies, dismemberments, decapitations, enviscerations, hopeless wailing cornered terror: I will have nothing to do with them.

What I learn from these is that I'm squeamish, impatient, afraid, snobbish, mistrustful of authors and creators who have no trouble creating trouble for their characters. Perhaps certain situations--progressive entrapment and futile flailing against inexorable destruction--access my nightmares, so, no, I refuse to go there.

I can see pusillanimity and pettiness in my decisions to bail out of certain encounters. That which exhibits relentless remorseless mercilessness or persistent evasive non-seriousness is easy not to like but I can let myself disengage too soon. Something may be learned. I can address these Others as 'you' no matter how they appear to me in my impatience and panic. I can learn to trust Tolstoy better, and finish War and Peace.