The Road / Cormac McCarthy

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, don't you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
"To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong." Joseph Chilton Pearce

"If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed,
except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I."
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship"

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me




Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me! 
Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me, 

A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me, 

Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself, 

Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled? 

And sullen hymns of defeat?
 --Walt Whitman's "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me"

I thought of my junior year when I read this poem. Some poems you feel it right down your spine, and this was it. Last summer I slowly dreaded my junior year. I thought of all those unpleasant Saturday mornings with a standardized test in front of me. I imagined myself with dark circles, with unkempt hair, as a time chaser. And afterwards, into my junior year, when tragedies came I thought of this poem. And then I thought of Whitman. The man I tried to analyze, the man whom I thought was so difficult a poet I peeked in Sparknotes for the first time. But I understood him. That he must have gone through so much more than I have. That I wasn't the only one. 
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