For and From Dr. C

Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 11:11 PM
Dear Dr. C, 

Thank you so much for coming for the Vox concert tonight! You were right there, front center, and you were the person whom I could sing my heart out for. :)

I am very sorry for not keeping in touch with you lately, but I want to let you know that I love you and will miss you tremendously. I am so lucky to be taught by you. 

I will carry your contagious energy and laughter to Dartmouth!

Love,

Hannah 

Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 11:27 PM

Hannah,
I was so honored to be at that concert!  We have such talented students at LFA, I am amazed that you all do all that you do in school, then belt out those songs at the concert.  Very impressive Hannah.  Don't worry about not stopping by, I see you around and feel your presence all the time.  :)    You are one of those students who I will REALLY miss, more than words can describe.  That is the bad part of the job, getting close to students, then saying goodbye.  But we have another month to chat.  You should concentrate on your classes, AP tests and having fun with your friends.  I am looking forward to the end of the year festivities.  Enjoy these last few weeks because they will go by fast, and there are a lot of special moments that I want you to remember.  So take some time to absorb it all.  You are a one in a million student Hannah!

xox

Dr. C.

I would wake up the next morning and find a new bruise. A blue spot on my left wrist.

Say Yes

Writing, according to Tobias Wolff, is an "essentially optimistic art," for

the very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. ... So many of the things in our world tend to lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it's one of the affirming arts. ... A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.

I reread "Say Yes." I understand so much of it now--even the cryptic ending makes sense, how Ann tells her husband to turn off the light and she walks about the darkened room as "a stranger," how her husband is left nameless.

April 2, 2009

I felt an intense, urgent need to copy down a passage I was reading from Milan Kundera's Identity.

He rose and went toward the half-open door of the bathroom. There he stopped, and like a voyeur avid to steal a glimpse of some intimate scene, he watched her: yes, it was his Chantal as he had always known her: she was leaning over the basin, brushing her teeth and spitting out her saliva mingled with toothpaste, and she was so comically, so childishly focused on her activity that Jean-Marc grinned. Then, as if she felt his gaze, she pivoted about, saw him in the doorway, flared up, and ultimately let herself be kissed on her still quite white mouth (Kundera 34-35).

This scene, as I interpret, is love in everyday life than can be, should be seen among us. We forget too soon that love does not require or expect or demand much. That love is just like Jean-Marc, initially anticipating his love to be romantically erotic and then finding her somewhat funny brushing her teeth, finally giving her a kiss. This love, I love.

Bel Canto, Chapter One

There so taken by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

The book whose first sentence is my favorite: "When the lights went out, the accompanist kissed her." The author whose friendship with Lucy Grealy struck me in her memoir Truth and Beauty. 

I had wanted to read this book for a long time. I had kept it guardedly on my bookshelf as a reminder, like a reservation for a dinner table. And all this time I had saved it, but for what? I had gifted it to Katerina a couple years ago, by the first paragraph I had judged it a good book--she would like it, it's about music and love and why, it's the winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award. Katerina is a musician, Russian, neuroscience major--she wrote back and told me she loved it. And I am loving it. 

The chapters are long, about thirty pages each, containing voices, many spoken, one sung. Nevertheless I can hear them, not only in English but in Japanese and French and Spanish and Russian and Italian--and in music. On Gen's voice Patchett writes: "It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him [Mr. Hosokawa] like music." Perhaps the translator's music-like voice comes from his linguistic ability--a different language like a different key.

English must be in E major. Sing with me. 

December 24, 2010

     Dear Paul,
     I am writing to you because I don't know you. Hence my courage. You are somewhere inside my head. Perhaps if I am lucky, you are inside this very world. I could be anyone. You don't have to believe me. I am a poet, not a songwriter. But I wrote a song. It's a duet. You should sing it with me. But you can't yet because the music's unwritten. The composer and I are still working on it. His name is David. He's quite brilliant. He's the one who inspired me to write a short story about you. You're real in the sense that you are a relic of my fabrication. You're not supposed to be real, but you are because you exist in my own reality. You're there but I don't know where I can find you. Are you the one who gave me "delusional" in my dream? I turned that word inside my head a million times trying to understand whatever meaning it held for me. I did not succeed but that doesn't matter because--I don't know--it's meaningless to brood like that. I beg your pardon. You never gave me "delusional," you gave me "delusive." I can't believe my own confusion. Coffee doesn't taste like anything anymore. Do you still read her letters and keep them? I can't think of much else to say. Thank you for everything else. Be my "else." I'll be your everything.

"...death is like that (I can see); it happens every day, but when you see the mourners, they behave as if it were so new, this event, dying--someone you love dies--it has never happened before; it is so unexpected, so unfair, unique to you. ... Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they can't just go on and on, and if they can't go on and on, then they must go, but it is hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go." 

Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother

Music, When Soft Voices Die

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822

Mary Shelley's husband.

I wonder if he wrote it for his wife. The brilliant woman whose hand wrote Frankenstein at eighteen. What must it have been like to ask for the hand of a writer. 

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

Paul Tournier

Quote from William P. Young's The Shack. Paul Tournier was a Swiss physician, called as twentieth century's most famous Christian physician. 

     He was looking at her frank forehead as she looked down at her watch to tell him the time. Except she laughed and told him how much of an idiot she was for having it on backwards so it would read upside-down. He didn’t think she was an idiot. He didn’t tell her that because she might take his perfectly neutral opinion differently. He thought of what to say to her, but he could not find the words because there weren’t any inside his head except her name. Lorraine. It was a rare name to have, he thought. Antiquated, almost. Her name reminded him of a rainy day that would be adequately gloomy for him to think of her, a day in which rain would fall on your window with that persistence and rhythm. Her forehead was frank. He watched her try to read her watch upside-down, turning her wrist the other way. Now she looked like an idiot, he thought. He wondered if he should laugh. He wondered if she would take his casual laughter differently. But what did it matter. He liked her enough to stare at her forehead. (She was staring at his hands as she feigned to read her watch. His hands were quite fine for a guy who rarely held a pencil. They reminded her of her father’s hands. She always thought her father’s hands were ugly. They were not the hands of a pianist. But she loved his scars. The old, discolored scar on his right wrist that she called a tattoo, the many charred marks on his fingertips that turned so many pages--the streaks and blemishes that stained his ugly hands were all beautiful to her. She loved most the scar that ran the length of his left fourth finger. The tendons are not right, he had told her. She remembered that it didn’t stretch completely so it hurt him to play. She remembered that it also held his wedding ring. The scars were gone now because her father was dead. Perhaps that was why she took things differently. Yes, his hands are quite fine, she thought. She missed her father.) He boldly took a chance and laughed. She looked at him. Why did he just laugh, they both thought. I’m an idiot. But what did it matter. She looked at him. 

     (It was eight eleven.)

Written for the Teen Woolf project for AP English Literature. My second A+. 

The Fountainhead

Both men disliked Roark. He was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. He was a cold, disquieting presence in the room; his presence had a strange quality: it made itself felt and yet it made them feel that he was not there; or perhaps that he was and they weren't (52). 

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Love the simile of Roark's face to the door of a safety vault. You would need a key to open it, or you would need to break the door. 

My goal is to get to page 315 where Jack left off. It's the last fold in the book. I'm on page 61. 

Summer: It just wasn't me that you were right about.

500 Days of Summer

Jane Addams

I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.

Jane Addams

For Chris

Where has that old friend gone
Lost in a February song
Tell him it won't be long
Til he opens his eyes, opens his eyes

Where is that simple day
Before colors broke into shades
And how did I ever fade
Into this life, into this life

And I never want to let you down
Forgive me if I slip away
When all that I've known is lost and found
I promise you I, I'll come back to you one day

Morning is waking up
And sometimes it's more than just enough
When all that you need to love
Is in front of your eyes
It's in front of your eyes

And I never want to let you down
Forgive me if I slip away
Sometimes it's hard to find the ground
Cause I keep on falling as I try to get away
From this crazy world

And I never want to let you down
Forgive me if I slip away
When all that I've known is lost and found
I promise you I, I'll come back to you one day

Where has that old friend gone
Lost in a February song
Tell him it won't be long
Til he opens his eyes
Opens his eyes

Josh Groban, "February Song"

I knew what it meant when I heard it. When I read the words. When I told daddy, Daddy,  this song is for someone lost. He must have died in February. And then last year when I lost Chris in February I understood what it meant for real.

Dear Chris, this is the day I cried for you in the car and on the bed staring into the ceiling until I fell asleep and when I woke up, nothing felt different because you were still dead and I was still alive. But I want to wake up with a dream of you. An uncalled memory of you. You were really the only close guy friend I had. I don't know what I meant to you, but you mean so much to me. Thank you for being in my life. I am fortunate to have known you for the few years I knew you. And I know this is a letter without an address. And I know you can't read a letter without an address, but Chris, I want to revive you in this ink. Can I? Annie Dillard said, "write as if you're dying." For the life of you will I write to my death. I remember you showing your Notre Dame letter to me in the science wing hallway and you were smiling with this happiness I would only come to know a year later when I would get my own. Thank you for sharing your smile with me. I could go on and tell you too late of the things I should have thanked you for. I have no picture of us together. I didn't give you much save for the hugs and laughter. You have given me so much--tears, yes, in thinking of you, in missing you--but you have given me gratitude for the little things in life that matter. I wish I could write better than this for you. It'll sound so strange but I am thankful for your death as much as your life. I don't know--I don't know if you or anyone would understand what I just wrote. But it's true. That Thursday when I saw you last, I wish I spent more time with you. I wish I hugged you longer. If I had known, I wanted to say, "Please don't die." I wish I could have stopped that train for you. Do you know what is stranger? Yesterday at the memorial service I didn't cry. I don't know if that was right or brave. Perhaps it was wrong and cowardly. Or even indifferent. But Chris, this is my fear. I am afraid that I am forgetting the fear of forgetting you. Because I don't want to forget you. I am afraid I moved on too fast. I want to hold on to the tears for you. I know it's okay to cry. I don't know if it's okay not to. I want you to come back, come to school tomorrow as an alum. Call my name at the end of the hallway so I can turn around and see you, run to you and give you a flying hug. Please? Because I would like to call your name back at the end of the hallway for the sake that you are standing there. Instead here I am, standing for you. 

500 Days of Summer

Summer: I just... I just woke up one day and I knew.

Tom: Knew what?

Summer: What I was never sure of with you. 

Watched 500 Days of Summer last night again. It's such a lovely film that beautifully escapes cliche. I wish it were a book. 

I suddenly remembered the time you had cheerios. You helped me carry something to Field and I gave you a high five. That was last year. I forgot to thank you.

Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 6:26 PM, Me

I only walked you to the dorms carrying your books because you made it seem like I had to, I was in a good mood, and I had nothing to do. But if you were to ask me to help you with your books right now, I'd do it because I want to. 

Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 6:56 PM, David

That's so sweet of you David. I should ask you to carry my books sometimes. And I should continue to offer you cookies. 

Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 9:35 PM, Me

Sweet. If girls think it's sweet when people say things like that, I should say more stuff like that to girls.
Some day I'll take your cookie.

Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 9:57 PM, David

Say, "I'd do it because I want to" to girls and they will believe you sweet. But David, I said that because it's true. You're sweet in a childish way like Paul. I love Paul. I want to marry him if I could. I want him to walk out of the page, forget his wife, and we can have a lovely life overlooking the lake sipping tea and talking. Except I would have to make Paul talk because he doesn't talk very much.

Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Me

Great! I'll put that down in my list of things to say to a girl. Thank you.
You should find a dude like Paul and marry him. Or just marry Jack so things are a lot easier. Less searching. 

Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 11:16 PM, David

All this in one day. 

Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 11:40 PM, David

The girl who almost gave me a heart attack probably thinks I'm a stalker. 
There was that one time at lunch she was sitting at a very far table. She was facing away from me. I was looking at the back of her head. 
Eventually, her friend who was sitting across from her told her to turn around, and she saw me. 
I quickly looked away, but I'm sure it didn't work. 

Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 11:40 PM, David

Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Me

“The geography of the brain ought to be taught in school, like the countries of the world. The deeply folded cortex forms the outer layer. There are the twin hemispheres, right brain and left brain. (We may be of two minds.) There are the four lobes: frontal in front, occipital (visual cortex) in back, parietal (motor cortex) on top, and temporal behind the ears. There’s the limbic system (seat of emotion and memory) at the center. There’s the brain stem, whose structures keep us awake (required for consciousness) or put us to sleep (required for regeneration of neurotransmitters).” --Priscilla Long, “My Brain on My Mind,” The American Scholar

Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:41 PM, Email from David

No I don't think I wrote about her in my journal. I didn't want to because I don't trust the world with thoughts that I put down on paper. I kept it all in my head. It's safer there. 
And no you cannot ask her name. 

Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:41 PM, David

The fear of having your thoughts read by someone else is the risk you have to take when you write them down. The reason I write in my journal is because thoughts contained inside my head are not safe there; I might forget. To me, it is this fear of forgetting that compels me to write. 

Can I ask her initials? 

Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 9:00 PM, Me

No you cannot ask her initials. ...
Maybe I'll tell you some time later.

Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 10:13 PM, David

Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 6:49 PM, Email from David

Summer was alright. I don't know what it is about her that is just not that attractive to me. 
Maybe it's because she's an actress. There was this girl at Northwestern's music camp thing last summer with dark hair and blue eyes. It was really really amazing. Whenever I see her, I could feel adrenaline rush through my body and my heart would start pounding. It was ridiculous. 
She plays the piano. 
On the first day, my mother asked her where the library was, and later than day when my mother left, she asked me if I found the library. I told her "that was my mom" but it didn't really make much sense. She acted like it made sense. We had this short 4 sentence conversation outside the girl dorm door. She kept pulling on the door while she was talking to me but it didn't open because you're supposed to scan your key thing on the sensor to unlock it. I took out my key thing and scanned it on the sensor to unlock it for her. She laughed and called herself an idiot jokingly. 

I stalked her a lot. Whenever I'm in my friend Andrew's room, I would look out the window. 
There was this one day she was walking outside his window. She was wearing a white dress. It was awesome.

She sat in the seat across from me once during lunch. I ended up finishing my food very quickly and leaving because it was just too much for me to handle. 
If I stayed I'd probably get a heart attack. 

Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 6:49 PM, Email from David

I'm going to publish you. Please grant me the permission to publish what you wrote about the girl who almost gave you a heart attack.

Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 7:44 PM, My reply to David

Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 10:27 PM, Email from David

If you practice something and it sounds good, it means you're not doing it right. 
Practice is supposed to sound terrible, and once you sound terrible long enough, you start sounding good, and then your piece becomes ready.

Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 10:27 PM, Email from David

I love the part when you talked about practice. I should quote you in my journal. I wrote about you in my journal. I wrote about Paul. I wrote to Paul even though I knew he doesn't exist but David he's there inside my head and hence he's real. You're the impression of Paul. And you're really real. Mr. Lewis liked my short story about Paul. He liked the part about his eidetic, detailed memory. After my reading last summer the audience asked me if you (David) were in the room, would he know that Paul is like you in a way? I said I don't think so. But I think I lied. Emily was there. At some point when I was answering questions, I looked right into her eyes and said, "so it's different, but the same." And we smiled at each other across the threshold and it was a very good feeling. I should have invited Jack because then he could have said it himself and he could have got the joke.

Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 11:21 PM, My reply to David

There's Nothing I Wouldn't Do

I want to lick your stamps
I want to squeeze your fruit
I want to copy your keys
I want to polish your skis
I want to dry clean your suit
I long to renew your passport
I want to walk your collie
Get you Nova Scotia salmon you can put on your bialy
'Cause baby, when it comes to you,
There's nothing I wouldn't do
I wouldn't do

"There's Nothing I Wouldn't Do"

Music by Marcy Heisler, words by Zina Goldrich

When I first heard it at the concert last night, it made me laugh so hard right on beat. The words are so thoughtful and funny and the nouns are unexpected. I want to write like that. 

Oh, How I Loved You

I could think about the unimpressive way you said goodbye
Relief and immaturity combined
I could recollect the nothing that you made of what we shared
Chalk it up to being young and scared and blind
I could summon all the grace inside me, surely,
And maturely I could leave the past behind
But when I think about you
And I think about you
There's only one small thing that comes to mind

Oh, how I loved you
Oh, how I loved you
Strange and unfamiliar
Ridiculous and true
Oh how I loved you

And you can look at me and tell me I am crazy
It's true I can be crazy now and then
And I can take advantage of the comfort, and believe me,
There is comfort in the arms of other men
On the wall there is a China's worth of writing
And it's citing all the reasons we should part
I can put the past behind me
It's behind me
Save for one small thing that lingers in my heart

Oh, how I loved you
Oh, how I loved you
Dumb and unrelenting
And as the sky is blue
Oh how I loved you

Seasonless and reasonless and infinite and strong
Frightening, enlightening and pure
Cautionless and logicless and limitless and long
Wondrous, all-consuming
And impossible

I could think of your rejection, how it shook me to the core
How your unexpected exit broke my heart
How I learned that love you lose feels like a gently slamming door
A door you keep a lock on if you're smart
I could look into the mirror, and could rightly place some blame
On the histrionic games I love to win
But if I write the story
And I will write the story
I know just how the story will begin

Oh, how I loved you
Oh, how I loved you
Sweet and unbelievable
And if you only knew
Oh, how I loved you

"Oh, How I Loved You"

Words by Marcy Heisler, music by Zina Goldrich

Met Marcy and Zina yesterday and today. During our master class, Zina told us this is her favorite song. 

I love her adjectives, her rhymes, her simile of love to door. How this is a song and yet a poem in itself. 

Afterword

Because a great many otherwise admirable men do not read books American women write, I wanted to use a decidedly male pseudonym. ... Still i intended to publish the book as A. Dillard, hoping--as we all hope, and hope in vain--someone might notice only the text, not considering its jacket, its picture, or the advertising; and not remembering someone else's impression of the book, or its writer, or its other readers; and not knowing the writer's gender, or age, or nationality--just read the book, starting cold with the first sentence.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Chapter 15: The Waters of Separation, Revisited

Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I will. 

Chapter 15: The Waters of Separation

"For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see," said Ruysbroeck, "and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else." But what is that word? ... A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones...

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"Pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones"--that's how you say "up and down my spine" in Dillard. 

Chapter 14: Northing

One entomologist says that walking sticks, along with monarch butterflies, are able to feign death--although I don't know ho you could determine if a walking stick was feigning death or twigginess.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The word is funny--twigginess. The idea is funnier. That's what makes me laugh. Even in her poetic, meditative prose, Dillard can make me laugh, make me write "funny" and "cute" in the margins. 

Chapter 13: The Horns of the Altar

"We are all of us clocks," says Eddington, "whose faces tell the passing years." The young man proudly names his scars for his lover; the old man alone before a mirror erases his scars with his eyes and sees himself whole.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Don't you just love Dillard? I had to read the last sentence twice to fully appreciate it. The imagery is solidary, lovely, and--my favorite word I learned from Dillard--eidetic. Because I see an old man. Because I see the young man through the old man's eyes. And I see myself, countless times before a mirror, erasing away my scars and tears weather-beaten by the passing years. Then you're perfect, aren't you, to yourself and no one else, in that unselfish self-consciousness. 

Chapter 12: Nightwatch

A bobwhite who is still calling in summer is lorn; he has never found a mate. When I first read this piece of information, every bobwhite call I heard sounded tinged with desperation, suicidally miserable. But now I am somehow cheered on my way by that solitary signal. The bobwhite's very helplessness, his obstinate Johnny-two-notedness, takes on an aura of dogged pluck. God knows what he is thinking in those pendant silences between calls. God knows what I am. But: bobwhite.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In the margin I had written, "a sad, scientific truth." But as I type Dillard here, I think again. Sadness is no longer; hope replaces sadness. I imagine a bobwhite singing, singing, singing for his love and when he is not, he is hoping, hoping, hoping. You still sing because of hope. Without it you would stop singing altogether. (And you'd be called bobblack or bobbrown or bobguacamole or some other bob-hopelessness.) But what extra breath and chance you're taking to sing-- with that "dogged pluck"! 

Chapter 11: Stalking Part III

Rather, we know now for sure that there is no knowing. ... physicists are saying that they cannot study nature per se, but only their own investigation of nature.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dillard's response to Werner Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy: "you cannot know both a particle's velocity and position." I've been looking for this idea for some time, trying to recall whose it was, for I only remembered what he said. (It's funny how one day a name came to me and that was Bohr.) But Heisenberg--when he was only twenty-six! 

Chapter 11: Stalking

I found out the hard way that waiting is better than pursuing.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In stalking, that is. Otherwise, I would pursue first and wait later. But what do you stalk? Whom do you stalk? Dillard stalks muskrats. I stalk Dillard. 

Chapter 10: Fecundity

A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

And Dillard calls it a contract: "if you want to live, you have to die." F=ma. The iterated algorithm. The last waltz of Stoppard's Arcadia. 

Chapter 9: Flood

I expect to see anything at all.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In Chapter 2: Seeing Dillard writes, "I see what I expect." Now she is seeing more, being seen less. She has mastered the art of sight. 

Chapter 8: Intricacy, revisited

If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Why haven't AP biology and AP chemistry taught me this? I learn from Dillard in so many other dimensions. I drew five stars and wrote "Love Love Love!!!" in the margins. Here is the middle ground I've been looking for--between literature and science.

Chapter 8: Intricacy

I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This happens to me, particularly when it's one of those happier, luckier dreams--I don't want to wake up, but I am, either almost or already. So I just lay there with eyes shut and try to beckon that lovely dream. Let nothing wake me. Don't find me. But I'm losing my dream. I can't see him anymore. Come back. Please? Come back inside my eyes. I'm awake. Oh, dear. When I close my eyes again, he's not there. I am found, but I lost him. 

The rest of the day I walk around this world looking for him. 

Gravity, to Copernicus, is the nostalgia of things to become spheres.

Arthur Koestler

Meditation on Seeing / Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty wrote a review on Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Here, click and read it. Published March 24, 1974. Just after the arrival of Pilgrim.

Chapter 6: The Present Part II, Revisited

Oh, but what about that heave in the wrist when I saw the tree with the lights in it, and my heart ceased, but I am still there?

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Mrs. Bell let me see the tree with the lights in it. That was three years ago. Do you think I can see it again--come across that breathing picture? 

Chapter 6: The Present Part II

Thomas Merton wrote, in a light passage in one of his Gethsemane journals: "Suggested emendation in the Lord's Prayer: Take out 'Thy Kingdom come' and substitute 'Give us time!'" But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Yes--what we have and lack, at the same time, is time. And in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, Valentine and Septimus, each at different times, are talking about time, at the same time! 

Chapter 6: The Present Part I

This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain. ... as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This vaguely certain kind of recognition to an almost forgotten lover. There is a delight and there is a sadness. The present will always slip away. But the memories will not. You can hold on to them, at least, for as long as time allows you to. 

Consciousness itself does not hinder living in the present. Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people--the novelist's world, not the poet's. ... Innocence is a better world. What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. 

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

As an afterthought I add this in. It's so me, the glimpse I cast myself on a storefront window, how we are constantly turning around to see if we're being seen. But what does it matter--as long as you're living in the present and at that moment? You're true then. 

Chapter 5: Untying the Knot

Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky. Of course we have no idea which arc on the loop is our time, let alone where the loop itself is, so to speak, or down whose lofty flight of stairs the Slinky so uncannily walks.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In a five-page chapter I found this paragraph about time. 

The thing is: I can't seem to add anything more than what Dillard has already put down. My ideas and thoughts seem meaningless next to hers. 

It's winter break. I should keep writing. I should write like I've never done before, for I have all the time in the world now that I'm committed to this lovely college called Dartmouth and this lovely town called Hanover. What keeps me from writing more? I had thought I abandoned the fear of being wrong a long time ago. I should just keep writing nevertheless. 

Chapter 4: The Fixed

It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness. ... It is motion without direction, force without power... that our every arabesque and grande jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall.

The world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Can she illume me more than she already has? 

Chapter 3: Winter

It was like dying, this watching the world recede into deeper and deeper blues while the snow piled; silence swelled and extended, distance dissolved, and soon only concentration at the largest shadows let me make out the movement of falling snow, and that too failed.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

This sentence becomes lovelier as I reread it. The tremendous and yet subtle beauty outweighs the initial sense of wonder, that mild feeling of confusion because the words are simply too gorgeous to take it all in at once. I like that Dillard compares her experience of watching a "curious nightfall" to dying and not death. Because they are two very different matters. It's like love and loving; there is a fine line between the two sets of truth. The gerund, then, is more profound than its original word. 

Chapter 2: Seeing

"As soon as you forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer."

Stewart Edward White

The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. ... The point is that I just don't know what the lover knows; I just can't see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

What do you see in the one you love? You must love and know that person quite well because Emily asked me this. I told her I see his center in him. 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Decided to read Annie Dillard in the morning, one chapter at a time, as my two-week project. I always wanted to read her. Mrs. Bell photocopied a chapter entitled "Seeing" for us in Fresh English and I absolutely loved it. So for my birthday I bought the book with the gift card I received, and after some months of having it sit on my shelf, I'm finally perusing it!

"Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block."

Annie Dillard 

Arcadia poster

Hannah – An absolutely superb job on your Arcadia  poster.  The fact that it’s two-sided only adds to its impressiveness – the title side is evocative, visually striking, and aesthetically perfect – I love the dropped red “A” even if I’m unsure of its (possibly many) significances.  Simply beautiful!

A+

Email from Mr. Freeman, December 9, 2010

It is not your defeat to be wrong; it is wrong to be self-defeatist.

Me, yesterday while brushing my teeth

It pains me to know that my friend is in pain. How do you deal with sadness--when something terrible has happened to her and just knowing that makes you feel terrible? Ann Patchett must have dealt with this all the time. With Lucy. I've become so careful for her that I don't quite know what to do. To be there, to still love her and care for her and understand her. To pray for her.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

Vladimir Nabokov

Just like William Carlos Williams!

Primal

The word Mr. Paul Goldstein '92 used to describe Dartmouth. From Latin root primus, meaning "first."

Mr. Bennett (on Mr. Darcy to Lizzy)

"I could not have parted with you for anyone less."

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Lizzy (my 10-year friend who happens to possess the same lovely name) quoted this in her facebook message to me. I absolutely adore her. 

From my violin teacher

Dear Hannah,

I was delighted to hear from you and so sorry it took me such a long time to respond. I'm sure your senior year continues to be eventful. I hope playing is going well for you. You were a good student. If you ever want to come to Chicago for a single lesson, it would be fun to see you again. I really enjoyed working on the Bach and talking to you about literature. I've been reading Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" which is a lengthy undertaking but it is really good. Remarkable descriptive language. Wish I could read it in French. ...

From Myra Patterson's email to me, November 12, 2010

Reading this made me happy like a child. I had wondered, assumed, convinced myself that my email got lost in the middle and that she never received it. But here is the reply I've been secretly waiting for for almost three months! I admired Myra for all the musician, reader, philosopher, and genuinely good person she was (and still do)--she let me see that yes, it is absolutely possible that you possess, master, and teach multiple arts at the same time. From her I learned more than how to train my ear to the right pitch, but also how to breathe Bach, peruse Forster, and laugh at the meaningfully funny jokes she would tell me. I came to her expecting to learn the forte, the staccato, the A minor but she taught me more than the technical. 

She told me she had her first violin lesson when she was eighteen, which was ten years ago. Her maturity of music is what still strikes me; her 10 years of practice is definitely worth more than the necessary 10,000 hours. People thought she'd never make it, but she did. The judge at her audition later sold his prized viola to her (very cheaply)--he was probably blown-away impressed by her audacity and hard work, felt bad that he dismissed her at her first audition, when, the very next year he sat next to her in the orchestra). 

November 20, 2010

David! I had fun not being afraid of you in my JRB song yesterday and thank you for your incredible music. You made me love it more as I listened to it, and in the middle of the song, I looked back at you to where you stood and I could see the brilliance of it all, behind and before and beyond me. And do you know what I love about your music? "To live a creative life we must lose our own fear of being wrong." --Joseph Chilton Pearce -- Your music is fearlessly created and creative. Oh, and happy belated birthday. I should give you a flying hug next time I see you.

Me, Facebook wall post to David Lin

So on Monday during our voice lesson, Mrs. Plambeck and I had a conversation instead of a song, and I think that was the best voice lesson I had this semester. Because we talked about music and the art of carrying that inside you. Because we talked about music that comes from the heart and not from the head, and making that music yours. And because she told me it's okay not to have found David in the audience--she told me there will come the perfect moment. I need not look for it. It will come to me first.

"In music, one must think with the heart and feel with the brain."

George Szell

A million heartbeats and neurons in harmony and syncopation.

I don't know if I found David.

Two years ago, Tony performed JRB's "Someone to Fall Back on" for all-school meeting. As he delivered the last line, "I'll be someone to fall back on" he looked right into my eyes. I was sitting in the end seat of the last row. I don't know how he found me, but that moment when his every note and beat and glint fell into mine, it was the loveliest, most incredible feeling. And after he hit the last word, he looked down, and smiled and suddenly I wanted to do what he just did for me. To sing into the eyes of someone in the audience with meaning, to imbue that someone with music and myself.

I wanted that someone to be my David last night. But I still don't know if I found him.

November 16, 2010 Part II

"And there is this David," said Mrs. Plambeck after she finished playing JRB's "I'm Not Afraid of Anything" for me. Who is he? is a question, but the greater question is, Who am I to David? I believe David is in the audience. During my performance [on the 19th] I would find him, sitting, listening, his eyes on mine--or standing because he was late, leaning on a wall, sideways but attentive.
     Please love me and stay.

November 16, 2010 Part I

I want to get away from this unhappiness. I want this unhappiness to get away from me. So rip away the pages of my life and make me a new book.

Mornings

When the sun is not yet up and the child is already crying, when you wish you had gone to bed earlier instead of holding on to that book, when you have to turn off your insistent alarm clock for the fourth time, when you want to go back to that lovely dream where the guy in your calculus class said hi. You just stay there, your head heavy with thoughts.

The Age of Innocence, Chapter 22

He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.

Edtih Wharton, The Age of Innocence

This is lovely, I had written in the margin. Newland's marriage to May does not turn away his love for Ellen. Instead it is intensified--the world without Ellen is "empty" to Newland, and only if he could just see the patch of dirt Ellen's feet have pressed, that is enough to make him whole. 

When her glasses are thoughtfully placed next to your journal, what do you assume? That she must have read your journal, of course.

It's funny how our minds think. Because we often think first of the what and not of the what if and what else.

An addendum

There is no one in the library now
besides you and me;
The librarian is too old to hear us
anyway

Song in half an hour

When there is no one else in the library
except the old librarian who doesn't listen anymore
I would like to ask you,
"Did I love you?"
But with your heavy books
on top of mine I cannot say
anything
except maybe ask you the time.
And then maybe you or I would
take those heavy books,
shove them into our already heavy backpacks
and leave.

What I want to ask you is to
stay.
Don't come and don't
leave.
Please
erase away this note, this beat, this
song, so I won't have to sing again.

But you're not supposed to talk
in the library, and there are people who always listen
so I cannot ask you to stay.
So you and I come back and back
into the heaviness, the bookishness
we go--to forgo time,
for I cannot forgo
you.

What I want to ask you is to
stay.
Don't come and don't
leave.
Please
erase away this word, this voice, this
song, so I won't have to sing again.

So did I love
you?
Well, I must have
because I'm still singing
and you haven't yet erased
me.

Missing Daddy

I did some calculations in my own time, and on average for the past three years I've seen daddy approximately 10 days a year. And I've had phone calls with him on average once in two weeks, of which last roughly five minutes.

No wonder there are days when I want so much to "go home," to come back from school to where daddy is.

The Age of Innocence, Chapter 9

"Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

I love Ellen. She owns this bold beauty that penetrates my densely annotated pages of Wharton. Ellen is rebellious and lovely and peculiar and frank and ineffably charming to Newland. He just doesn't realize he loves her yet. Because he is confined to the societal expectations of New York. Because he is a coward who does not and cannot step out of his fear of being wrong or socially unacceptable. But Ellen has flouted all this effortlessly. Ironically it is she who is more independent and free than he. 

Ferry Hall Advisory Board Meeting

She was talking about creative ways to bring Ferry Hall alumni together when she turned to look at me and said, "Projects like yours have lifetime trajectories." And right there I believed and confirmed that being Ferry Hall Prefect is so much more than carrying a name; it is to carry a legacy of these incredible ladies within me.

Rev. Young Winston Davis

His reason for marrying was "to give some lady the privilege and see how it feels to be called husband."

On Chesil Beach

     And she loved Edward, not with the hot, moist passion she had read about, but warmly, deeply, sometimes like a daughter, sometimes almost maternally. ... She thought he was original, unlike anyone she had ever met. He always had a paper back book, usually history, in his jacket pocket in case he found himself in a queue or a waiting room. He marked what he read with a pencil stub. He was virtually the only man Florence had met who did not smoke. None of his socks matched. He had only one tie, narrow, knitted, dark blue, which he wore nearly all the time with a white shirt.

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

Suddenly remembered this passage today. (I had to pull out my journal and flip to August 24, 2009 to find it.) I don't know how it struck me. Must have been something about Edward's originality, something about his tie. Yes, most likely his tie. 

I would ask my mom, What made you fall in love with daddy? And she would say, He's, you know, kind. Yes, mom, I know already daddy's kind. What else? And the else was what I've tried to find, in people and in characters. It's just that Florence found it first in Edward. 

"The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Dillard is talking about the running water under the bridge she crosses. But I fail to grasp what "the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed" must mean here. I try to imagine Tinker Creek, to set my mind in the natural context. But I cannot. Because in another dimension, under a different light, the moment of being dreamed is more beautiful than the dream itself. 

It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.

Heraclitus