Mail

I also worried that learning how to use e-mail would be like learning how to program our VCR, an unsuccessful project that had confirmed what excellent judgment we had shown in not purchasing a car, etc.

Anne Fadiman, At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

Reminds me of my old-fashioned self. I enjoy hand-written letters over emails. I don't text: I call. I prefer walking close distances: I'm terrified of public transportation. I dislike fast food: I cook. And yet I'm typing on this intangible page with a machine whose technology I know so little about. 

Seeing Ben

I saw Ben. We were in a coffeeshop in Lake Forest. The coffeeshop was Starbucks. (You had asked him where he will drink coffee when he's eighteen. He said Starbucks.) And there he was, standing there, smiling, reminiscent of you. Then I woke up.

Chapter 21: Suicide

8.
In picturing my death, I imagined myself in the role of audience to my own extinction, something that could never really happen in reality, when I would simply be dead, and hence denied my ultimate wish—namely, to be both dead and alive. ... It was not a question of being or not being. My answer to Hamlet was to be and not to be.

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love, "Suicide," 186-187.

For a while I had regarded death:

How am I still alive if I don't want to live? // What happens if I die young?

Journal entry in Book Four, October 3, 2011

And death had regarded me: 

I had a dream last night in which I was going to die—they were trying to kill me. I had two minutes to live and the first thing I did was to fall on my knees and pray. And all the while I was afraid. [The subtext of the dream/reality parallel was that I had wanted to die, yet in the face of having my wish come true I no longer wanted it.] ... 

     If I die young, will he come to my funeral? 

Ibid., October 10, 2011

I had a friend some years back who wanted to learn about death in college. Her name was also Hannah. We were in middle school and she was so mature and profound—and also brave—to want to learn about death. 

In life, death is a leitmotif more frequent than life itself. 

Chapter 16: The Fear of Happiness

17.
Lovers may kill their own love story only because they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love, "The Fear of Happiness," 141.

His house showed me not only a wealth of information but the information of his wealth. Walking in his house felt like touring an art gallery: the paintings that hung on each wall, the creatively arranged furnitures, the lights and windows that allowed perfect luminosity and view all displayed art itself. I loved its inhabitant as I loved its design.

For Emily. A tribute to our date at the Art Institute. 

If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

Vincent Van Gogh

When I told her Theo was Vincent's brother, she said, Theo Gogh? She thought Van was his first name. 

The Scandal of Christ's Crucfixion

My blog post on Tolle Lege for the Dartmouth Apologia.

Today I read my journal entries I had written in the summer—the dead cold summer whose mornings I spent mourning—for what? (For whom.) I felt silly and sad. 

The Worst You Ever Feel

Until he was ten, whenever Aaron was sick or bleeding, his father would say the same thing: "May this be the worst pain you ever feel." 

Rebecca Makkai's "The Worst You Ever Feel"

"...there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it..."

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference."

Rebecca Pippert, Hope Has Its Reasons

"...the final symptom of despair is silence." 

Tobias Wolff

I used to write down my thoughts after these quotes, but I am beginning to lose them inside my head. Don't they speak for themselves? I ask wantonly. 

A Grief Observed: Chapter II

And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. ... Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"We have all the time in the world," he had said. 

Break my eyes so that I may never hope to see him again.

August 25, 2011

Three days later I saw him. 

Montaigne

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

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship"

There is no reason that can explain friendship but friendship itself. And as for love, only loving. 

My heart still wears your name

2 years ago my father died after a 10 year battle with brain cancer. This song was written after seeing the heartache and despair my mother faced in losing the love of her life. It is written from her perspective and based on conversations I had with her. After the song was finished, I played the whole thing for her and let her pick the title. She chose the last line, "My heart still wears your name."

Written by Daniel Eakins
©2008 Into the Hill Music (BMI)

My heart still wears your name

My sky turned gray
The day you went away
I dream of your face
I miss you

Our friends wore black
But that won't bring you back
And they all ask what I need
But I need you

This is a love song
Even though I know you're gone
If you can hear me
I miss you
I miss you

It's been two years
Two years full of tears
But tears won't bring you here
I miss you

This is a love song
Even though I know you're gone
If you can hear me
I miss you
I miss you

There is a danger in love
For to love and lose is an earth shattering fall
But better to have loved and lost
Than never loved at all

This is a love song
Even though I know you're gone
If you can hear me
I miss you
I miss you

They say the pain goes away
But I'll never be the same
My heart still wears your name

A Grief Observed

If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in Him. Who'd bother about substitutes when he has the thing itself?

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Then what if love were a substitute for God? God is love, but love is not a god. 

If I die young, I will die remembering you.

Paul Bloom: The origins of pleasure | Video on TED.com

Paul Bloom: The origins of pleasure | Video on TED.com

Plan

I came here without a plan, but I'm not leaving without one.

My dad, at a bakery-cafe after our reserved (no one was there, though) Italian lunch, shared me something that I wrote down in my notebook. (Yes, I had always known that my dad would tell me something meaningful no other dad could say.) This was what a pastor in a sermon he listened to said:

Those who do not plan plan failure. (계획하지 않는 자는 실패를 계획한다. He said this in Korean, so I think it's fair to quote the original.)

And I gave him a high five for that. I think. (Did I give him a high five?) Let's say I did.

I came here without a plan. My plan did not fail because there was no plan to fail in the first place. But I did. I failed.

Graham Harwood

Among all those initials in his senior shout-out, I see my name, spelt out whole, "Hannah." And then the next four words:

few deserve success more.

Was this for me? If it was, then I cannot close my mouth, for Graham said something so remarkable, so eloquent, in so few words that I don't even deserve to read. It is as if each word accounts for each one of the four years of high school: few (I was one of the few), deserve (I wanted to earn something), success (my lesson in failing successfully), more (I had more than I needed). Ah Graham. I did not know he regarded me so highly. I will remember this. I will remember to thank him for this.

Dr. Seuss

"Be who you are, and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."

Dr. Seuss

I was flipping through the year book and this is the first sentence Alexa had written for her senior shout-out. (What am I going to do every morning without my breakfast buddy to take out the raisins from our Raisin Bran?) 

What Dr. Seuss (our Dartmouth alum!) said is so true. I am going to be who I am, and say what I feel, because I don't mind and I would like to matter. 

No One So Much As You

At the end of a final letter I should write:

"That is all: I have kept / Only a fretting // That I could not return / All that you gave"

Edward Thomas, "No One So Much As You"

In conjunction with the Jane Addams' quote

We're better than men, so we don't need to be equal to them.

Anne Fadiman, "True Womanhood," in Ex Libris

Easy love has taught me the hard way that love is hard.

I hadn't understood this poem when I first read it. I just knew that it is about love and that it is very beautiful. Perhaps now, perhaps because I am experiencing what Creeley must have experienced, I am coming closer to his meaning. Easy love has taught me the hard way that love is hard. "if you did not / I wouldn't either" Ah the reciprocality of love. If you did not love me I wouldn't either. But would you still love me if I didn't?

Upon re-reading Robert Creeley's "For Love"

Love only hurts if you feel it too much. I learned it the hard way that love is hard (hard, because it is so impossibly difficult, and hard, because it is sometimes like a head-on collision to something solid and unmovable).

Upon writing back to Emily on love

Essays in Love

Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant.

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love

I cannot find the right words, but I find comfort in the words above. Perhaps the reason I write so much is because I am looking for the right words, hoping I will, in the end, have them in my hands, but I realize that I can only come closer to finding them. 

August 1, 2011

I am scared of You. I am scared You will do something terrible to me. And I am scared of this fear.

     Something terrible did happen to me but I refuse to be terrified.

Written prayer, August 1, 2011 

One Day, Today

"Call me or I'll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it's not a competition. You don't lose if you phone first" (Nicholls, 434).

I had thought that it was a competition--one that required careful tactics, practiced flair, blasé attitude--and if it were, then I had lost so many times to him. But who would care? He doesn't know he's winning.

I finished the book. It was supposed to be Lizzy's belated birthday gift but I had never read the book myself, so I took the chance and read the first two chapters of it. Phenomenal. What impressed me most was that Nicholls knew not only of the human mind, but of the female mind in particular. I understood so much of Emma. She was me, I was her. So--sorry Lizzy if you're reading this, but I kept on reading to the end, and now I know you will love your birthday gift.

I love the ending. I love how Nicholls goes back to that first day Emma and Dexter meet. And I love what Dexter tells her. Call me or I'll call you. You don't lose if you phone first. I wish I knew sooner. Take down the book, pick up the phone.

" 'If I loved you I would have written differently.' " 

Alice Munro, "Too Much Happiness"

If I hated you I wouldn't have written at all. 

For Mr. Less

The buzzword at General Electric these days is "Six Sigma," meaning that its goal is to make product defects so rare that in statistical terms they are more than six standard deviations away from being a matter of chance--almost a one-in-a-million occurrence. 

--Atul Gawande, "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science"

I was reading this book on Gawande's experience as a general surgeon and suddenly thought of Mr. Less at the words "sigma" and "standard deviations." If I had his email address, I would have sent it right away. I remember the joke about CLT. Central Limit Theorem. Also the airport at Charlotte, Virginia--where he is now. 

my dream that happened at the beach of Rome, which is contradictory because there is no beach in Rome

I woke up with the wish it were real. I wished you were real. I wished to see you again, but I no longer felt your lips on mine, and like a blown candle I could no longer revive my dream as I cannot revive the flame that went out. What was left behind was only the vivid, eidetic feeling that I did kiss you, a memory, like how the faint smoke is evidence of the flame that was just blown out. 

One Day

So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. 

--David Nicholls, One Day 

I had felt like Emma. "Composing" is the right word, if not the only word, to describe how I wrote letters to him. I wrote them thoughtfully, proofread them critically. I was the soi-disant poet-master of composing those "long, intense letters." They were smart, funny, expressive. You could tell I loved him. They were just so good. And what I got as replies, after hiatuses of three or more business days (as if he were FedEx-ing his emails), were several lines of objective, general pieces of irrelevant fact. There was not much feeling. Or was there? Did I fail once again to discover the hidden meaning underneath "I just got back home from Rome"? I had weighed every word, punctuation, emoticon, line break and still I could not understand him. He was fleeting me. His emails were so short that I memorized each one. I recited them to my mother, and afterwards she'd look at me in this incredulous, vicarious, sympathetic disappointment and ask, "That's it?" 

Marilyn Monroe

"I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together."

Quote given from my best friend Emily

Then let us fall apart so that I can fall for someone better.

You

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say.

Tobias Wolff

  So finish your coffee. Let’s have a conversation. 

I woke up one morning with this unbreakable fact inside my eyes that you are irreplaceable, that you are impossible to be substituted by anything or anyone else. You are not basil that can be traded in for parsley on my pasta. I cannot fabricate you like I created Paul (whom I wrote unsent letters to, justifying myself that he is real because he exists in my own reality). You are not imagined or supposed. You are here reading me. (Paul could never do that; he could only be read.) You certainly surpass my idea of a perfect character.

I wish I could tell you exactly the things you need me to say. 

There needed to be weeks and months of uninterrupted time to say all the things that needed to be said.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

I want to read your mind. What are you thinking about? You look nostalgic. Say it. 

Home. 

I’ve not been home for three years. I don’t know what it looks like, save for the detail that it’s on the seventeenth floor. I always had to move back and forth between two countries so that the coming would become the going and the going would become the coming back. I had to leave the people I loved. Or they left me. (Please don’t leave me yet.) Perhaps this is why I read books so much. Books never left me. The characters all stayed--as if belonging home--in the pages which were bound, on which I could underline, fold to remember, come back to. And one day you came into my life as if you walked out from a book, and I found that you're better than books, that you defy the impossibilities of literature. 

So I write. To go back home, to wake up again, to be your coffee as you are mine. 

An attempt at satire

  Did I ask you for a cake on my birthday? Of course not. I knew something like cake would be too much to handle for you. You’d first have to order, then drive to the bakery, pick it up, bring it to me, and pray dear God let chocolate be her favorite cake, which it’s not. I only wanted a handwritten card. Was that too much to ask? I wanted something to hold in my hands what you had held before, that caused you to turn over the words inside your head how best to pen them down. I wanted to feel the same difficult endeavor you underwent of saying something so banal in a moving novelty. Defy cliché. I wanted to guess which verbs you lost, admire and smile at the blithe then wobbly penmanship across the page. The choice of paper, the time and thought it took you, the color of ink that wrote my name and yours. I wanted to feel the careful pressure in my fingers opening the envelope you had sealed, like a child opening a wrapped gift, suppressing the jumpy eagerness at something so happily rare. 

  But an email? At 11:32 PM? What terrible things technology has done to you. I thought you knew better. I thought that you were different, that you’re this unabashedly old-fashioned person, but I guess that’s my impossible conjecture. Do you remember, there was a time when people took out a book, a newspaper from coat pockets, backpacks, and began reading, at airport terminals, subways, and I would silently gauge what they read from the titles and peeked passages. Now their sophisticated hands and ears and mouths and eyes are behind phones. Can you believe it? You’ve become one of them. 

  Books don’t look like books anymore. Letters don’t send like letters. Are you even the same person? (Yes, I know, you’re different yet the same.) 

Ex Libris Vocabulary

From Anne Fadiman's "Marrying Libraries"

1. quarantine: v. placed in isolation
2. balkanize: v. divide (a region or body) into smaller groups
3. finicky: adj. (of a person) fussy about one's needs
4. capitulate: v. cease to resist; surrender
5. acolyte: n. a person assisting the celebrant in a religious service / procession; follower
6. plaintive: adj. sounding sad and mournful

He picked up the phone today.

So he had been perfectly fine while I wondered if he was still alive. So what do you after you feel like a complete idiot?

 Let your blue be my mark. 

I memorized your number unintentionally, unconsciously. Let this be my compliance to what the automatic female voice has requested me to do, over and over and over and again and again to please leave a message after the beep. Beep. Hi (insert name), it's Hannah. I just called to talk to you and here I am leaving you a stupid voice message flaunting my insensitivity to the unspoken rule that I shouldn't have called you first. Why don't you call me on your own? 


Why don't you. 

The late-night-monologue showers must stop. I must stop the late-night-monologue showers.

Paul, published

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 did 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.

            He told me about his dreams every night after we married. 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. Listening to him always made me want to go to bed, to see if something happened inside my own eyes. But I am a dreamless insomniac and in those sleepless nights I wrote 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 the rain came through and you stood in this room, holding my umbrella. How all the books on our shelves dripped of black liquid because the rain was washing away the ink. Except Jane Eyre, you said. 

            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.

            Behind or beneath, he avoids to tell me something. I know he has a remarkably good memory that sometimes scares me. He remembers every meticulous detail--the scar under your lip, the flat F#. 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. What are you waiting for. 

            I loved reading Jane Eyre with him, loved him because he did not mind the silences when we chewed our food. He loved to be hugged and was always hungry. And in that way, he was still a child. He used rare words like “beautiful” and “quaint” when he spoke. No one talked like that anymore. I loved searching the house for the places he kept my letters, playing hide-and-seek by myself. I loved that he whisper-sung in my ear when I couldn’t fall asleep. I loved him because I did not want him to wait. To love him was to keep him from waiting. 

To love him was to keep him. 

11:55 PM David: its like, a story written from inside me
Paul was inspired by David. His constant waiting, tacit demeanor, unusual dreams, keen memory, the piano. But this is only the character. The characterization of Paul was inspired by someone else. Save that he read the classics, the details are from Jack. The easy opulence of having books on his shelf, the natural sensitivity of being pitch perfect, the pauses when we would eat together. Jack is the best person that happened in my life; David, the best character-like person in real life. Subsequently when a writer applies these two people in her short story to create a character, Paul becomes perfect, organic. 

anatomy of a heartbreak

My heart gets cold and empty as it sinks with every beat. I don't know if that's what you feel when your heart is being broken.

I had imagined you could actually hear the heart splinter into its atria and ventricles, into its four chambers; and the atrioventricular and sinoatrial nodes would rip, the strings of your heart dangling from its walls; and your capillaries would burst into bruises; your veins, greener, mapping out the sad traffic of your body; your arteries, purpler, as if your heart was once drenched in his wine.

We were looking at each other without knowing that we were. Then, as when you suddenly hear the clock tick as if for the first time, this realization struck me--that the clcok has been ticking all along, that we've been loving each other for so long.

I wake up with a new bruise, fall asleep with another scar.

a simile

David: Your feelings get hurt easily.
Me: Yes.
David: It's like my skin. I understand.

a wish and a fear

I want an eidetic memory of you lest I never see you again.

Years later I would see your brother. No, not in a coffeeshop but in his room, watching his favorite cartoon on his bed, in his blue PJs, all of a sudden sitting up, happy to see me. He's eight. You're there beside me in the warmly-lit room, your hands on me, look who's here Ben, but I can't see you. I'm remembering your brother.

His lambent eyes

I can't see you.

Afterwards, I would open my eyes and see in the dark his lambent eyes, pupils dilated.

I can see you so clearly now.

You

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say.

Tobias Wolff

  So finish your coffee. Let’s have a conversation. 

I woke up one morning with this unbreakable fact inside my eyes that you are irreplaceable, that you are impossible to be substituted by anything or anyone else. You are not basil that can be traded in for parsley on my pasta. I cannot fabricate you like I created Paul (whom I wrote unsent letters to, justifying myself that he is real because he exists in my own reality). You are not imagined or supposed. You are here reading me. (Paul could never do that; he could only be read.) You certainly surpass my idea of a perfect character.

I wish I could tell you exactly the things you need me to say. 

There needed to be weeks and months of uninterrupted time to say all the things that needed to be said.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

I want to read your mind. What are you thinking about? You look nostalgic. Say it. 

Home. 

I’ve not been home for three years. I don’t know what it looks like, save for the detail that it’s on the seventeenth floor. I always had to move back and forth between two countries so that the coming would become the going and the going would become the coming back. I had to leave the people I loved. Or they left me. (Please don’t leave me yet.) Perhaps this is why I read books so much. Books never left me. The characters all stayed--as if belonging home--in the pages which were bound, on which I could underline, fold to remember, come back to. And one day you came into my life as if you walked out from a book, and I found that you're better than books, that you defy the impossibilities of literature. 

So I write. To go back home, to wake up again, to be your coffee as you are mine. 

An attempt at satire

     Did I ask you for a cake on my birthday? Of course not. I knew something like cake would be too much to handle for you. You’d first have to order, then drive to the bakery, pick it up, bring it to me, and pray dear God let chocolate be her favorite cake, which it's not. I only wanted a handwritten card. Was that too much to ask? I wanted something to hold in my hands what you had held before, that caused you to turn over the words inside your head how best to pen them down. I wanted to feel the same difficult endeavor you underwent of saying something so banal in a moving novelty. Defy cliché. I wanted to guess which verbs you lost, admire and smile at the blithe then wobbly penmanship across the page. The choice of paper, the time and thought it took you, the color of ink that wrote my name and yours. I wanted to feel the careful pressure in my fingers opening the envelope you had sealed, like a child opening a wrapped gift, suppressing the jumpy eagerness at something so happily rare. 


     But an email? At 11:32 PM? What terrible things technology has done to you. I thought you knew better. I thought that you were different, that you’re this unabashedly old-fashioned person, but I guess that’s my impossible conjecture. Do you remember, there was a time when people took out a book, a newspaper from coat pockets, backpacks, and began reading, at airport terminals, subways, and I would silently gauge what they read from the titles and peeked passages. Now their sophisticated hands and ears and mouths and eyes are behind phones. Can you believe it? You’ve become one of them. 


     Books don’t look like books anymore. Letters don’t send like letters. Are you even the same person? (Yes, I know, you’re different yet the same.) 

more nights I couldn't fall asleep trying not to think about you than those I fell asleep thinking of you

For Love

BY ROBERT CREELEY 1926–2005

for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above   

the others to me

important because all

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.   

Today, what is it that   

is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own   

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

If the moon did not ...

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but   

what would I not

do, what prevention, what   

thing so quickly stopped.   

That is love yesterday   

or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must   

I think of everything

as earned. Now love also   

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and   

whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image   

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me   

because it is my own.

Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,   

what have I made you into,

companion, good company,   

crossed legs with skirt, or   

soft body under

the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything   

but that which it wishes   

would come true, fears   

what else might happen in

some other place, some   

other time not this one.   

A voice in my place, an   

echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into

not the confession but   

the obsession I begin with   

now. For you

also (also)

some time beyond place, or   

place beyond time, no   

mind left to

say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love   

it all returns.

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.