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

Paul, Chapter Two

            I was reading Kafka crossed-legged on the bed. It was ten. I knew I had to sleep but he was playing Liszt downstairs. I closed my eyes and counted the notes. I imagined his right foot pedaling. It was two when I woke to the sound of rain. His pillow was soft and cold. I walked out the room holding Kafka, turned the hallways lights on, and stood by the doorway rubbing my eyes. He was coming out of the guest room, I thought. He called my name. Was I all right? I’m okay, I told the wall. He took my Kafka. Something blinded me. It was not the light. It was his hand. Did he wake me? No, I told him. And then he hugged me. I blinked inside his hand. He never took anything from my hands, always was the one to be hugged. He smelled of coffee and he was shivering. I became lost. I must owe him so many apologies. I felt Kafka drop on my foot. I took away his hand to see, but he leaned on the wall, his head on my shoulder, shaking, so that the lights went off. I had not the faintest idea why he was awake at two, or why he had come out of the guestroom where there was nothing except my grandfather’s old rocking chair. I did not know what made him cry. He was saying my name, brokenly and incorrectly. Paul. Did you have a bad dream? I’m here. Please don’t cry. Paul? He was crying aloud. Tears and saliva and perspiration felt warm on my shoulder. I did not know what to do. I wanted to pat his back, but the wall was blocking. I held his hand. He hiccupped. Let’s go sit on the bed, I told him. Kafka felt wet under my bare feet.

            Please don’t cry. I said please like it would stop him from crying altogether. It was a word that became almost obsolete. It was thought as an antiquated symbol of man having to ask for something. But sometimes I would use the word, say things like “Please eat,” although he ate well. I got him a box of Kleenex and touched his ear. I waited, like he has always done with me, until he was done crying. I listened to the rain. I did not say anything. I studied his shirt become polka-dotted, thought of the day we married when I cried in the bathroom because everybody told me I was making a terrible mistake. Except grandfather, of course. He was always on my side. 

Paul

I wondered if ever he was tired of waiting for someone to talk to him first. Because he always waited. In the hallway walking toward him he would not smile nor wave nor say hi unless you smiled or waved or said hi first. I remember in class he never asked questions and never answered them.

            When I met him after college, he was reading the book I was looking for. It was called Jane Eyre, which went out of print and there remained only a handful of copies left. It was a rare luxury to have such a book in your possession.

            After we married, he would tell me about his dreams he dreamt every night. They were all strange and ethereal to me. I became jealous of him whenever in those few words he told me how real everything appeared inside his eyes. As if nothing was real inside this world. I never dream. So listening to him always made me want to go to bed, to see if something happened inside my own eyes. There is a reason why I never dream. I am an insomniac and in those sleepless nights I write him letters. Letters about what I would like to dream about and whether he is still waiting.

            Dear Paul,

            It is raining outside and I can hear the raindrops quietly drumming the ceiling. They make me think of your dreams, how it would rain at six in the morning and you would stand in this room, holding a yellow umbrella. “It was raining inside,” you told me. How all the books on our shelf dripped of black liquid because the rain was washing away the ink.

            I wish I could dream about you, to understand the parts of you that I fail to understand now and before. To find out why you often sing and only sometimes talk

            And at the end of every letter I would write, Until when will you wait? Then I would quietly place it on the piano next to his dense sheets of music. We never talked about the letters, but I knew he read them and kept them somewhere.

            I think there is something behind or beneath him that he avoids to tell me. I know he has a remarkably good memory that sometimes scares me. He remembers every meticulous detail, about a face or a sound or anything else. I imagine it must be immensely difficult to live a life like that. To carry with you the memories and dreams and times you hardly speak of.

            There is no distinct reason why I decided to marry him. Rather, I wanted to read Jane Eyre with him, loved him because he did not mind being together. He liked to be hugged and was always hungry. And in that way, he was still a child. He used rare words like “lovely” and “quaint” when he spoke. No one talked like that anymore. I loved him also because I did not want him to wait. To love him was to stop him from waiting.  

An elegy haiku for Robert Frost

Who else can take on
Two roads and a pathless wood
For once, than Someone?

George Szell

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

George Szell

Even when you're humming. 

I'm Not Afraid of Anything by Jason Robert Brown

The creation of a character's history:

Jennie and Katie and daddy and mama. Me. David.

The question I have to keep asking myself while singing this song is, What am I afraid of? Because Jennie's afraid of water, Katie's afraid of darkness, daddy's afraid of babies, mama's afraid of crying. And David, well, he's afraid of me. (Why is David afraid of me? Why does he have to be afraid of love?) Perhaps I am afraid of love. Perhaps I am afraid of David being afraid to love me. There is a volta in this song; it is the "intense and tight" part that the music becomes an undercurrent of the A2 chord, drumming a million heartbeats in syncopation. And afterwards I keep singing, David loves me, David loves me, David loves me. Do I love David?

By the end of the song, after the volta, why, of course: yes. I am not afraid of anything or anyone because I love David more than he fears loving me. In the end, love prevails.

But going back to my parenthetical questions about David, I want to ask, why are we afraid of love? Are we not brave enough?

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A.H.H."

The Integumentary System

There is no magician's mantle to compare with the skin in its diverse roles of waterproof, overcoat, sunshade, suit of armor and refrigerator, sensitive to the touch of a feather, to temperature, and to pain, withstanding the wear and tear of three score years and ten, and executing its own running repairs.

Lockhart, R.D., Hamilton, G.F., Fyfe, F.W., Anatomy: The Human Body, 1965

A wonderful way to explain the epidermis. There is prose, but there is also poetry in the art of medicine. 

The migraineur

So I come back to Priscilla Long's article "My Brain on My Mind"--particularly because I happen to hit a sudden memory of reading about migraines. I had underlined and circled and densely annotated the part about it--for its scientific information and the poetry behind it, how Long also shares this "profound despair" with me.

When we have a migraine, three hundred times the normal amount of blood rushes to the brain in order to fire neurons in the chaotic electrical brainstorm. This firing neurons secrete an excitatory neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, which constricts cranial blood vessels. But we migraineurs generally have an insufficient supply of norepinephrine, and when it sadly diminishes, dopamine, which counterbalances norepinephrine, distends blood vessels, activating trigeminal nerves. And alas begins the great and overriding despondency of migraine.

I think there is something else in that hour of excruciating pain besides all this. When I'm not suffering a migraine, I am thinking. I try to do the things I won't be able to do when I'm struck by that mean inconvenience. I am thinking about David--the person I am in love with while I sing JRB's "I'm Not Afraid of Anything" although thinking about him might induce a migraine. I can forfeit a fraction of my time for him--because I am trying to find out the history of my character she carries while she sings. Or I think of my own history and my own song I am living.

Prozac for the Planet

Perhaps it comes down to this: In an era of scientific illiteracy, commodity fascism, political shortsightedness, minute attention spans, and hyperactive media, the only overarching narrative about climate change may be, ironically, the weather itself. We may have to wait for truly heinous and bizarre weather to capture public and political attention. The lived, daily experience of global weirding may be what leads to the fraught denouement of geoengineering, which itself will be the beginning of another narrative about who we are, what time is, what the climate means, how nature matters.

Christopher Cokinos, "Prozac for the Planet," The American Scholar

Dr. Cedergren has talked to our AP chemistry class about this viewpoint. That our last resort may lie in that emergency moment of some unexpected and tragic and extraordinary climatic event. Do people really care about the environment? I can almost say, "no." During the summer I volunteered at the Field Museum, a special exhibit called Climate Change opened. It was not popular. Visitors were uninterested and unimpressed. To me it was quite saddening to know this--that perhaps the idea of a greener environment has become trite and palled. 

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo


On the benefits of failure and the importance of imagination:

I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

...

I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling

(Original text found at http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/06/text-of-j-k-rowling-speech/)

At twenty-one, Rowling was not afraid of poverty. She was afraid of failure. What will I be afraid of when I'm twenty-one? Because right now,  I am already afraid of so many things. I am afraid of jellyfish and trains and insects. I am afraid of forgetting Chris. I am afraid of losing, both in the transitive and intransitive verb. But listening to Rowling, I realize it is my choice to be afraid. I can choose to let go of my fears and just be. 

Robert Frost

"No tears in the writing, no tears in the reading. No surprise in the writing, no surprise in the reading."

Robert Frost

Simply true--even from the man who wrote "Directive," who deliberately confuses his readers inside and beyond his poems. 

Elizabeth Gilbert

I have not read Eat, Pray, Love. I only know of its phenomenal success. Emily did a scene of it for Shakespearean Idol our junior year, and I thought it was absolutely poignant and witty. I do agree with Gilbert--being, and really, succeeding as a writer is not easy. But I think the challenge is worth it. Worth every word you put down, even the scribbled and crossed out ones that end up next to the apple core.

Norman Mailer

"Every one of my books has killed me a little more."

Norman Mailer

How do you live a creative life when it can kill you? 

I think of Franz Kafka, the insomniac who wrote during his sleepless nights. Kafka's creativity actually revived him, I believe, because what other anchor could he have held onto? 

Hemingway / Kafka

 The clock is in the cage with me and though it is the only furniture I have I do not recognize its ticking. The straws are yellow and thin and many, but I never touch them but only sit on them. On days when things went well I would stare into the sky and count how many colors I saw in it. These days things are not going well. There are not as many people as there used to be before and I see more colors in the sky.

            I remember the children when they came and stayed longer than any adult. They held hands with each other with mouths open and eyes wide looking at me as if I were a goat. But children meant that things were going well and after they have gone I felt very good.

            Things are unsuccessful now. I do not know how many days I have been fasting for no one is keeping count. I myself have given up counting. One day I was lying on the straws thinking about the children when the manager came to me and said, “Are you still fasting?”
            “Forgive me,” I told him.

            “Of course.”

            “I always wanted you to admire my fasting.”

            “Certainly we admire it.”

            “But you shouldn’t.”

            “All right, we don’t admire it. But why shouldn’t we?”

            “I can’t help it. I have to fast.”

            “Why can’t you help it?”

            “Because. I couldn’t find the food I liked.”

I saw in the manager the same look the children always had. And then I closed my eyes and he went away but the clock still ticked and the straw felt hard. 

This is my rendering of Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" in Hemingway' s monotony and surface simplicity. I actually like it. I wonder what Kafka or Hemingway might say when they read it. I wonder whether they'll recognize their works imbued in mine. 

The Road "Un-scene"

And afterwards he would dream about the library or what remained of it and in those dreams the books were always wet and ashen. When it rained they dripped of black ink, like some sacred ablution. There remained nothing inside the books for there was nothing left to leave behind. Empty pages. He thought of her books stacked on the piano. Books by authors whose names were long forgotten and meaningless to recall. She wrote in them, he could not read her dense writing but he knew it was profound. In another dream the boy was with him in the dank library. As they walked the pages rustled beneath their feet. There was no floor. Only ripped chapters of a bygone world. The man looked for food and shoes. He did not know why but in a dream there is an otherwise. She will come back from the dark. She will spare the third bullet. The boy bent down and lifted a book. A tome. The smell of burnt candles. He knew what it was but dared not touch it. Only the boy had the sanctity to hold it. What is it? the boy said. He could not say. That it was the beginning and you are holding it. It began to rain and the man woke up. The boy was next to him.

            Did you dream a good dream Papa?

            Almost. 

A scene from McCarthy's The Road that I imagine could have happened. I wanted to write about "the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water." I wanted to write like McCarthy, in his voice and timbre. 

"Prose is coffee. Poetry is espresso."

Mr. Freeman

Had to write this down in class the moment he said it. Coffee and espresso both contain the same substance; only, espresso is more condensed and stronger. 

Heart of Darkness

I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

And this is why we work so hard. 

I was reading William Deresiewicz's article "Solitude and Leadership," and there the passage was! It runs parallel with Thoreau's deliberate life in the woods, to place yourself where other people's realities can't bother you. I would like to find my own reality, something me-driven. And in work I want to be happy.

Walden

"I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

There is purpose in life, and Thoreau says it here. But there is also solitude. "To live deliberately" is to live in solitude, without distractions, without that directionless chaos. We all need this kind of lifestyle at some point in our lives, to take our time, to be alone in our thoughts. 

My Brain on my Mind / E

When you remember your grandfather's face, what are your neurons doing?

Priscilla Long, The American Scholar

What are your neurons doing? Other than making a million connections, sending signals along axons, shooting extraordinary starbursts? When I remember my grandfather's face I see inside my head his dented lines on his forehead, his dark skin, his still black hair. Does he have dimples? I cannot recall. And perhaps this is when my neurons are failing to make the marvelous zaps and fireworks. 

Dreaming

Can the blind still dream? I would like to know. For it must be the brain that dreams, not the eyes. And if the blind can dream, then perhaps it is less unfair. For seers may have insomnia or rarely dream. 

William Carlos Williams

"[Williams] was willing to live the kind of rushed existence that would be necessary, crowding two full lifetimes into one,... learning from the first and then understanding through the second." 

Linda Wagner, Poetry Foundation

The doctor who wrote his poems on prescription blanks, who still found the time to write between patient visits. I want to be like him. I would like to become him. 

My Brain on My Mind / B

The Brain, wrote Emily Dickinson, is wider than the Sky, since it contains both Sky and You. ...

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.)

The brain also has glial cells, white matter. Glial cells surround and support neurons, carry nutrients to neurons, and eat dead neurons. Some glial cells regulate transmission and pulverize post-transmission neurotransmitters. Others produce myelin, which surrounds and protects axons. Glial cells are no longer thought to be mere glue. When stimulated , they make, not electricity as neurons do, but waves of calcium atoms. They also produce neurotransmitters--glutamate (excitatory) and adenosine (inhibitory).

So there you have the brain: a three-pound bagful of neurons, electrical pulses, chemical messengers, glial cells. There, too, you have the biological basis of the mind. "Anything can happen," says the poet C. D. Wright, "in the strange cities of the mind." And whatever does happen--any thought, mood, song, perception, delusion--is provided to us by this throbbing sack of cells and cerebral substances.

Priscilla Long, "My Brain on My Mind," The American Scholar

An abecedarium dedicated in memory of Long's grandfather. 

Last Saturday morning, I woke up and began reading this. I could not get out of bed until I finished the last alphabet of the abecedarium. This was just what I was looking for. A scholarly, artistic, literary, scientific piece of writing for someone like me, who has been searching for that middle ground, that intersection, that convergence.

"Medicine is an art." I believe some ancient Greek philosopher said this, and I very much agree. But it is literature that encompasses both medicine and its own art. I would like to write that. 

I would like to write from the beginning.

Leap Year

"I don't want to interrupt a good party, but I want to say thank you to my husband. I want to say, May you never steal, lie, or cheat. But if you must steal, then steal away my sorrows. And if you must lie, lie with me all the nights of my life. And if you must cheat, then please cheat death, because I couldn't live a day without you."

--Leap Year (2010)

Bride to her husband at her wedding. I wrote these lines down when I was watching the movie again. They're true. Any bride would want all this from her husband--because she has no misgivings about him. 

The Blind Assassin

I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering, What is it about me? What is it that is so besotting? The mirror was full-length: in it I tried to catch the back view of myself, but of course you never can. You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else--to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know--because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose.

--Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Atwood is so original, so Canadian. There is no reason to stop reading any of her work. It is almost as if she knows, in her writing, that you will keep reading her. 

My first poem I officially analyzed and wrote an expository essay on was Sylvia Plath's "Mirror." Atwood here reminds me of that poem. That nameless woman looking into another, almost falling into her, colliding. But in Iris there is something different. Searching, innocent. How did Richard look at her back? She must constantly have felt that she was being watched. Unknowingly, uncannily. It must have been daunting, to always feel that you are watched, objectively but like a voyeur, subjectively but like a critic. How did she manage to live with a man like Richard, I would never grasp. For her father, for his money. Not for herself. And in the end, what did she salvage? Neither her father nor his money. But Laura, whom Iris would lose anyway. 

Persuasion / 2

     "It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved."
     Captain Harville smiled, as much as to say, "Do you claim that for your sex?" and she answered the question, smiling also, "Yes. We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us."

Jane Austen, Persuasion

It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved to forget her truly beloved man. Because we cannot. Unlike men who have businesses in the city or hunt in the country, women are so restricted to the walls of the house that they can only remember. What is there to busy or entertain them but their own art of memory? 

Persuasion

...We shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you--all stories, prose and verse. ... I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman's fickleness. But, perhaps, you will say, these were all written by men.

Jane Austen, Persuasion

As I was reading this past midnight, I thought, Finally--Austen does it here! I can only imagine how confined women like Anne Elliot must have been in Victorian England, in almost anywhere else at that time.We have been constantly persuaded by men, yes, but also by other women, that we are inferior, we do not stand alongside our husbands and brothers and uncles but behind them. As her last book to write before her death, Austen sends out a final message to all those men and women who will be reading this, centuries later, on the persuasion we will have come to flout.

Character

Do you have any regrets?

What Margaret asked each of our characters. We all said yes. For what will you do without regrets? They make you better in the end. Almost.

A Farewell to Arms

"I'm afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it."

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

This is the moment the reader whips out her pencil and scribbles a question mark. Oh? This striking imagery of Catherine seeing herself in the rain, dead and wet. There is something about the rain she is alluding to. It is persistent and unpredictable and dripping. Yes, but also  foreboding. To Frederic. 

In the end she will die, the reader predicts. She does. It is Frederic who walks in the rain afterwards, barely alive and hardly dry. 

Chapter XX: The End of the Middle Ages

He carried her to the window, so that she, too, saw all the view.

--E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

He, being George Emerson, being the room with a view. 

Chapter IX: Lucy as a Work of Art

Lucy thinks of Cecil as a "drawing-room"--a room without a view--although to Cecil, Lucy is his only view. The paradox here of how they regard each other foreshadows their separation. For there cannot be a view in a drawilfng-room, and Cecil is left as a confined, selfish man despite his affected ambience of sophistication. When he asks Lucy what kind of room he is to her, and with what view, she unequivocally answers, "With no view, I fancy" and adds the rejoinder, "Why not?" as if Cecil should have known this already. As if it is no question whether Cecil is a windowless room, for he undeniably is. 

One Writer's Beginnings

I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it.

These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words—there's so much more of life that only words can convey— strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. 

Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

I was reading the Smithonian and stumbled upon this article about Welty--not only the writer, but also the photographer. I had read and analyzed a brief piece of her work in my AP English Language class for only forty-five minutes, but that was enough to convince me of her great writing. How as a young girl she had to put up with the "dragon" librarian and still kept reading nevertheless. How she became a writer--and also an artist.

I am done, I would like to say. I am done with words, as I write down my three thousand two hundred ninety-seventh word zephyr. But of course I will never be done. Never with words.

"The word is a flame burning in a dark glass."

--Shelia Watson

1452

1452. Frond: the leaf of leaflike part of a palm, fern, or similar plant


Freddy reared a freckled face and a pair of snowy shoulders out of the fronds.

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

I never thought I would come across a word like frond, except in biology books. But here is Forster using my 1452nd vocabulary!