1. “Glorious Mundane”- Diana Saverin, Aeon
“I once exalted the extraordinary,” begins Diana Saverin, “But as I’ve learned from Virginia Woolf, indelible beauty is also found in the everyday.”
When she was younger, Saverin romanticized what Woolf called “moments of being”—those “exceptional moments that stand out in memory.” In such instants of heightened experience, you feel completely alive and awake: time slows, solidifies. A moment of being is an out-of-the-ordinary event that encodes itself into your hippocampus. If life were a novel, moments of being would be the climax.
In her twenties, Saverin thought a worthy life was defined by novelty and excitement. As an accomplished outdoors woman, she always chased the next thrill, the next heart-stopping chapter of her story. Skiing 250 miles across Brooks Range in the middle of winter. Camping in the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness. Getting lost in a frigid, frost-covered forest.
But when she becomes a stay-at-home mom in her thirties, her life becomes distinctly less exciting. Her days follow the rhythm of regular routines: nursing her newborn baby, making oatmeal and orange juice, doing laundry. Time begins to slip into what Woolf called “moments of non-being”—what Maria Popova so poetically phrased as “the lull of habit and mindless routine that drags us through our days in a state of near-living.”
Saverin begins to wonder: can meaning be found in the mundane?
Interestingly, Woolf becomes her patron saint of the ordinary (after all, doesn’t her most important work, Mrs. Dalloway, follow an ordinary woman, Clarissa, on a rather unremarkable day?). As Clarissa prepares for a party, she does rather commonplace things—buys flowers, strolls through the city—but the novel takes on Homeric proportions as Clarissa mentally teleports between past and present, through time and memory.
Woolf challenges the idea that only “exciting events make meaningful stories.” The everyday—Saverin realizes—is worth examining.
In our culture, a meaningful life is often a man’s life. To be significant, you have to accomplish great feats and do grand things: sail across the South Seas, search for orchids in the Amazon. You have to be Thoreau living in secluded solitude on Walden Pond or Papa Hemingway spotting leopards on safari and hunting lions in East Africa.
We tend to devalue women’s work. Much feminism insists the home is a kind of prison (Betty Friedan went so far as to call the domestic space a “comfortable concentration camp”). To be truly free—the idea goes—women have to transcend their roles as wives and mothers; they have to escape the shackles of domestic labor and break out of the penitentiary of the private sphere. Fulfillment can’t be found in diapers and dry cleaning—it can only be found elsewhere.
After the daring escapades of her twenties, Saverin feels ashamed of her quiet life as a stay-at-home mother. Returning to the home feels regressive after feminists fought to liberate women from the bondage of homemaking.
Shouldn’t she be girl-bossing and shattering glass ceilings?
The work of being a mother seems unimportant, uninteresting. Much of daily life, all the small, Sisyphean chores that comprise living—making sweet potato and lentil soup, baking bread, reading bedtime stories—accelerates in a blur of “non-being.”
But what if these domestic tasks weren’t drudgery? what if they were a way to consecrate the commonplace?
What if nurturing another human being was just as adventurous and wild as going on African safari?
“Glorious and Mundane” is a lovely, lyrical meditation on motherhood, women’s work, simple pleasures, time, and memory, best savored on a slow Sunday morning with a cup of chamomile tea.
2. “How Would Jane Austen Define an ‘Accomplished Woman’ Today?- Grace Aldridge, LitHub
Grace Aldridge’s thoughtful essay “How Would Jane Austen Define an ‘Accomplished Woman’ Today?” also interrogates what it means to live a meaningful life but through the lens of the master of the marriage plot, Jane Austen.
As a young woman, Aldridge romanticized Austen’s novels, which always ended in a blissful union. Growing up religious in rural Georgia, Aldridge—much like Austen’s prim and proper Regency-era protagonists—believed the ultimate goal was marriage. Worth and fulfillment came from motherhood and marriage, a white picket fence and a gaggle of rugrats.
After getting a divorce at 33, Aldridge wonders: how would Jane Austen define an accomplished woman today?
In the world of Pride and Prejudice, an accomplished woman was one who could secure the proper husband. She was intelligent, cultured, charming; she had exquisite etiquette and an impressive knowledge of modern languages.
But in modern times, a woman’s worth doesn’t come from marriageability but from autonomy and achievement.
For most of human history, women depended on marriage for economic security. Marriage was an economic transaction, a way to join families and build wealth—not an emotional decision based on something as impractical as love or compatibility (if you’re interested in the history of marriage, definitely read Stephanie Coontz’s thought-provoking essay “The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love”).
But today, women don’t need marriage.
Marriage is a choice.
Aldridge encourages her readers to choose wisely. Much like Miss Austen’s independent-minded protagonists (and Austen herself, who curiously never got married), we must be willing to say “no” to the wrong relationship.