Escaping & The Distant Hours

The View From Where I Was

In the process of trying to write this post, the text you’re reading has gone through no less than one hundred drafts. It has easily been 15 years since I first bought Kate Morton’s novel The Distant Hours, and it remains one of my favorite stories of all time due to its cozy tone as an ode to creativity and solitude.The pages slid by much more quickly in those days than they tend to now, since I had no one and nowhere else to be but a suffering teenager. The interpersonal trauma I was experiencing at school and home was so corrosive that it devoured all else except the ability for books to dump intellectual medicine into my ailing mind. Clinging to life by a fraying shoestring, I would flop down onto my bed after a long day where I carried this book like a promise to myself of a feast when I got home. After the obligatory stare at the blank wall of my bedroom for at least an hour, I would muster the energy to crack open the cover again and begin dreaming. Much like Poe, the ever pulsing beat of my heart was a torment that reminded me another day would await me whether I found the means to temporarily escape the confines of hell or not. Reading became more than simply an escape- it became a meditative practice to find the current moment and rest my finger on its pulse for comfort. 

Every single day I was faced with a choice: either I find the ability to open the book and read myself into a potential future by quieting my mind- or I could lay there and surrender to a life spent in captivity that was suffocating me. It does great credit to Morton’s novel that it was capable of pulling me from the misery of chronic mental illness into furthering the story-I had very little at the time to keep me going. As I’d open the next chapter in Edie’s story, I made silent promises to myself that I would find a way to lead a life where I too could someday muster curiosity about the early life of my parents. The Distant Hours made me crave a life where I could find the energy again to give a shit, about myself and others, and their outcomes. Even as a struggling teenager, I knew magic when I touched it. So of all the places for this blog to begin, it’s only right that we start on the book that gave me so much of my life back. 

My old copy of The Distant Hours, still in its original dust jacket and complete with my old bookmarks from the last reread- pristine. Each time I dive back in, I try to ingest as much of the text as I did on the occasion prior- challenging my attention span in our world of expanding social media. It's a challenge these days, moreso than I'd like it to be.

The Plot

The story of the Distant Hours centers around a young woman named Edie that’s fresh out of an unexpected breakup, who happens upon a family mystery and then takes action to unravel it as a way to find a new road forward in her own life. At its core, it’s a story of both being curious about one’s parents as people before they became our parents- and a story of self discovery through immersive empathy about the things that did not happen in life due to near misses of great consequence. By walking back in time using her mother’s words, Edie transports herself into a place where words allow her to solve the mystery of Milderhurst Castle. The same castle where her mother years before stayed as a tenant during the forced evacuation of children during the second World War. Not only is the tale fabulous and riveting, but it carries a message that maintains its relevance into the present day: words carry a tremendous and potent magic, whether they are placed upon a page or merely confined to the boundaries of our minds. What we do with words, both in our minds and through our actions, will largely stand the test of time to define us long after the events have transpired as they will.

What begins as a letter that had been lost for ages in the post, culminates in a grand story that transports the reader through the English countryside into a domain of such exquisite heartbreak that it is almost impossible not to read this story and walk away desiring to do everything in one’s ability to ensure things always work out for others as optimally as possible. If I close my eyes, I can still remember the first time I concluded the novel and felt tears silently rolling down my cheeks for hours. I was happy, miserable, and relieved all at once- the great deed was done- but it was not enough. There was room inside me for more of Edie, I simply wanted more than mere suggestions to know that at this point the characters I had totally absorbed would walk away to truly happy endings- but Morton doesn’t give us that- she gives us the hint of contextual clues to snap up and follow. The ache that bloomed in my chest, and continues to do so, from the emotional power of this story- is impossible for me to properly convey in my own magical words. From the arrival of Juniper Blythe at the train station, to the sweeping conclusion of this tale that leaves one gasping for air with fingers splayed for more- The Distant Hours carries you into places you never knew that you could find within both yourself and others. 

The Essence and Vibe

The aesthetic and general sense of The Distant Hours is easiest to capture here: https://pin.it/2TsI0pn9w

Sneak Preview:

The View From Where I Am Now

I admit that if you were to ask all the different versions of me about their favorite stories at their respective ages, you’d get quite an eclectic mix. My shelves are filled to the brim with everything from obscure collections of Hungarian poetry and occult grimoires to the occasional romance novel tossed in when I’m feeling truly bored. With the ever escalating situation in my country being grim in its outlook and my own personal revelations unfolding alongside it, I’ve struggled with a desire to move towards doing anything that feels luxurious. Variety, at its core, is a luxurious concept. From picking up my favorite iced latte and strolling the graveyard where an ex partner lies, to perusing bookstores to see the trending titles- it all feels rather hollow when there are daily videos airing of normal people being dragged through the streets to their untimely deaths, or placed in detention camps for execution. 

Even with social media app blockers, mindfulness reminders, proper medication, regular therapy, and video games to stream so I can carry on as “normal”- it’s hard not to experience the sensation of being unjustly fortunate at the hand I’ve been dealt. The daily toll of that guilt puts blood on my palms, because I can sit here typing out this blog post without facing undue levels of terror in my cozy New Jersey home. Do I deserve comfort, escapism, and the luxurious time to read? Shouldn’t I be doing more? Couldn’t I be doing more? I ask myself daily if perhaps my desire to return to my hobbies is selfish, and perhaps even useless in the face of a world that seems determined to hand us all the worst daily news possible. The daily grind of it all feels inescapable, and I desperately desire an exit route. So, I want to begin this blog with some support from my Scientist Side that explains why it’s important for us all to return to hobbies and interests: flexibility and resilience. 

A Bolster From Science

Through the darkest times in history, we often see that those with the highest measurable degree of emotional and mental flexibility found room internally for their perseverance through darkness by engaging in escapist acts like daydreaming and visualization (Mičić, Barbara & Musil, Bojan. (2020). From the countless books written by Holocaust survivors that I have studied in recent years, everyone from Edith Eva Eger to Imre Kertesz discusses the healthy daydreaming and escapism that victims of internment experienced that would invoke enough playfulness to keep them holding on to remnants of their former selves. This notion is further supported by the testimony of those survivors that did not go on to become well-renowned authors, which allows room as history has progressed for us to see the population that survived as exemplary for intuitively engaging in these methods to foster cognitive flexibility in the midst of Hell itself (Miller 1996). 

In psychological research, we categorize escapism as an emotion-focused method for coping with stress, characterized as finding the means to deter internal frameworks that could be dangerous to our ongoing survival in crisis (e.g. guilt, anxiety, powerlessness) (Longeway, J.L. 1990). What the means of escapism actually are for an individual can vary widely, and the desire to seek an escape has largely been thought of as justifiably negative due to the fact that much of prior data has focused on escapist methods using elements of self-destruction rather than self-improvement (Baumeister, R.F. and Scher S.J.,(1988).

As time marches on, as science continues to progress in parallel to current events, we see a return to concepts modeled in history that retain a timeless capability to influence our future ideas about how to cope in a crisis. Not all escapism is inherently negative, but biologically engages circuits that correspond to our ability to focus and maintain attention while we are participating in tasks that demand elevated cognitive load such as studying a language or instrument (González-Yubero et al., 2025).  Circuits such as the interaction between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the insula, and subcortical structures like the amygdala, are vital due to the role they play in offering regulatory feedback for emotional processing that enable one to remain in the flow of focus without frequent breaks for distraction where one might ingest more information pertaining to the crises at hand (Etkin et al., 2015). Without adequate emotional processing, we are unable to learn as efficiently as we ought- which can lead to all sorts of deficits across the lifespan, and one thing we could all perhaps stand to collectively unlearn is our inherent attention deficit that imposing cultural standards have normalized. 

Figure 2. from Etkin et al., 2015

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Scher, S. J. (1988). Self-defeating behavior patterns among normal individuals: Review and analysis of common self-destructive tendencies. 104(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-2909.104.1.3

Etkin, A., Büchel, C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). The neural bases of emotion regulation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(11), 693–700. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn4044

González-Yubero, S., Palomera, R., Mauri, M., & Falcón, C. (2025). The role of resilient coping as a mediator between trait emotional intelligence and academic motivation in university students. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 100272–100272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2025.100272

Longeway, J. L. (1990). The Rationality of Escapism and SelfDeception. Behavior and Philosophy, 18(2), 1–20. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27759220

Mičić, B., & Musil, B. (2020). Escapism: suppression of self or its expansion? Studia Historica Slovenica, 20 (2020)(1), 279–308.

https://doi.org/10.32874/shs.2020-09

Miller, J. (1996). Coping strategies and adaptation mechanisms utilized by female Holocaust survivors from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.