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! 

Fiction

Jon shouldn't have fallen in love with Edie. But he did, hence the story. I had to read it over a couple times because time is elapsed and Joyce is much older by the end. How Christie was so aloof about her own work and did not even have the faintest recollection of her violin teacher. In that way, she is like a piece of fiction herself. How she fabricated her identity not only as a writer but also as her own character.

You couldn't even be sure that she had recognized the title of her on story. You would think she had nothing to do with it. As if it was just something she wriggled out of and left on the grass.

Alice Munro, "Fiction"

Mr. Darcy Words

In my growing list of vocabulary:
606. chivalrous
806. dapper
819. debonaire
832. decorum

Council of Dads

I believe my daughters will have plenty of resources in their lives. They’ll have loving families. They’ll have welcoming homes. They’ll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad.

Will you help be their dad? 

--Bruce Feiler, Council of Dads

I came across this excerpt quite fortuitously. I was reading an article about the modern trend of married couples sleeping in separate beds by Bruce Feiler on the New York Times. At the end, it said that Feiler was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and asked six important men to be surrogate dads to his daughters, would I want to read an excerpt from his book? Of course--hence this lovely letter to his six friends. 

After nine months since his diagnosis, Feiler has been cancer-free, wrote the above New York Times article just a couple days ago, and is an affectionate dad to his two daughters. 

On Writers

"A writer is on whom nothing is wasted." --Henry James


"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." --Mark Twain


"The job of the writer is not to be immersed in experience but to contemplate it." --Flannery O'Connor

Coming back from forgetfulness. 


I had the best week of my summer July 12 to 16 at Ragdale. For the second time, I had these amazing writers sitting next to and in front of me writing and reading their works. I quoted some of their works for they were all so good I wished to steal them. The kind of phrases you think, I wish I could write like that. 


"I move through life, frame by frame." --Nina
"time thaws" --Kamal
"You cannot simply take down the picture." --Nicole
"dangling from the strings of your heart" --Molly

While I was searching our school's online archives, I came across this remarkable history I had not known about Ferry Hall: 


Traditionally at Ferry Hall each graduate chose an underclass girl to escort her down the aisle. After its merger with the Academy in 1974, girls began choosing male or female escorts, usually a relative or a friend. By the 1990s, however, this practice was abandoned for it was thought antiquated that girls needed support coming down the aisle. 


Today the graduating girls at the Academy process with confident independence in their lovely white dresses. 

“Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He’s the happiest man on earth when he’s performing, but when the show is over, he’s sad and troubled. I wish he could live in the eternal present, because in the theater everything remains in memories and photographs. Literature, on the other hand, allows you to live in the present and to remain in the pantheon of the future. Literature is a way to say, I was here, this is what I thought, this is what I perceived. This is my signature, this is my name.”

Ilan Stavans, Professor of Spanish, Amherst College

From “The Writer in Exile: an interview with Ilan Stavans” by Saideh Pakravan for the fall 1993 issue of The Literary Review

Amherst gave me five choices. I chose to write about this one. 

I am going to write about Chris, but this is immensely difficult. I failed my first few drafts. I try to imagine Ann writing about Lucy. 

I wish I could say to him, I missed you. Instead of, I miss you. I will never be able to answer Nick's question if dying is hard. 

I have a reason for choosing to do this. In my journal last night I had written, "I want to remember and honor you by writing about you. In language I would like to have you. I would like to keep you." 

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet."

--Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I was watching "The Road" when I thought of these two sentences. Nothing was more alive than the father's language and memory. 

Literature remains. 

Mushroom Man

"The fact that there are people who say this will never work is proof I'm onto something unique and novel." 

--Paul Stamets

Here is a man who believes in mushrooms. He believes they can cure diseases like cancer and tuberculosis, clean up the environment, serve as a potential biofuel, and become an alternative to insecticides. 

So don't give up. 

http://www.conservationmagazine.org/2009/01/the-mushroom-messiah/

The Embrace

You weren't well or really ill yet either,
just a little tired, your handsomeness
tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. 


I didn't for a moment doubt you were dead.
I knew that to be true still, even in the dream.
You'd been out--at work maybe?--
having a good day, almost energetic.


We seemed to be moving from some old house 
where we'd lived, boxes everywhere, things
in disarray: that was the story of my dream,
but even asleep I was shocked out of narrative


by your face, the physical face of your face:
inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert.
Why so difficult, remembering the actual look
of you? Without a photograph, without stain?


So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face,
your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth 
and clarity of you--warm brown tea--we held
each other for the time the dream allowed.


Bless you. You came back, so I could see you
once more, plainly, so I could rest against you
without thinking this happiness lessened anything,
without thinking you were alive again.

Mark Doty, "The Embrace"

Reminds me of Chris. Some nights before I go to bed I think of how he is so there inside my head and why he is not here. There is a picture of him inside my journal. It is black-and-white but I can almost see the colors emerging behind it, as real as life. 

The Rain

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.


What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon 
so often? Is it


that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me


something other than this
something not so insistent--
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.


Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out


of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet 
with a decent happiness. 

Robert Creeley, "The Rain"

In my dorm room the ceiling is rather thin and I can hear the raindrops fall against it. I have always thought that the sound is very poetic, and it reminds me of Jane's poem that starts, "I have fallen / I have fallen in love with rain." After I read this poem during my final week of school, although rain rarely fell and I missed the sound of raindrops, I could almost hear it in this poem. In my imagination of Creeley's voice, the sound of raindrops fall between his words and commas. 

I adore the last two stanzas. To me it is more than love; it is loving. And with the last sentence the rain stops falling. 

PSYC 110: Introduction to Psychology/Yale

One other thing on Freud--just a story of the falsification of Freud. I was taking my younger child home from a play date on Sunday and he asked me out of the blue, "Why can't you marry your mother or your father?" Now, that's actually a difficult question to ask--to answer for a child, but I tried my best to give him an answer. And then I said--then I thought back on the Freud lecture and so I asked him, "If you could marry anybody you want, who would it be?" imagining he'd make explicit the Oedipal complex and name his mother. Instead, he paused for a moment and said, "I would marry a donkey and a big bag of peanuts." [laughter] Both his parents are psychologists and he hates these questions and at times he just screws around with us. [laughter]

--Professor Paul Bloom, Session 4, Foundations: Skinner

It was purely by serendipitous chance I came across Yale's open course lectures. I was actually looking for a free audiobook download online, for something like Jane Austen's Persuasion or Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. Instead I found professor Bloom.

A piece of iceberg. He meant the top part. Daddy was telling me on the phone that what can be seen may be deceptive. This talk was apparently linked to my applying to college, but I don't see the connection. A piece of iceberg--hopefully this is an encouragement.

Dimensions

     I will just say then: I have seen the children.
     I have seen and talked to them.
     There. What are you thinking at the moment? ... But I want to tell you ... they exist. I say they exist, not they are alive, because alive means in our particular Dimension, and I am not saying that is where they are. In fact I think they are not. But they do exist and it must be there is another Dimension or maybe innumerable Dimensions, but what I know is that I have got across to whatever one they are in. 

From Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness

He is not a criminal. Lloyd is only criminally insane. The only mystery I had yet to figure out in the back of my mind was whether he killed the children. 

He did. He used pillows to stifle them. And Sasha--he was a tricky one because was smart--he tried to escape. So for Lloyd to say that he saw the children in another "Dimension"--does that justify anything for Doree?

Doree intended to see Lloyd, to talk to him about the children and their "Dimensions" in her undisguised, truthful self. In the very end, however, she decides not to go to London. She decides to bring a young man's life back instead. Perhaps she finally finds the Dimension she belongs to.  

Too Much Happiness

In the bookstore I considered buying Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness. It was on the top of a very tall shelf. I  reached for it on the ladder and carefully considered the weight of its pages. There on the ladder I read the first pages of the last chapter. Of course I could tell it was going to be a good story. But I did not buy it and I did not regret it. Because three weeks ago I got it from my favorite teacher.

Last

"Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either. And nothing passes just because nothing lasts."

Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Chapter Eighteen.

     After I hung up the phone, it rang a minute later.
     "You think I'm talented, don't you?" Lucy said.
     "Of course I think you're talented."
     "Okay. I was just checking. Good-bye again."
     And then she was gone.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

The last chapter. The last words Ann exchanges with Lucy. I can't remember what my last words were to Chris. It was a Thursday evening the last time I saw him. I wish I had been a better friend. 

Is it okay to write letters to a dead person? One reason a letter can be mailed back to you is the recipient's death. I don't know if that's right or fair. But I guess you can't do anything about it. 

Written in my journal a week ago. Because I don't want to fail my memory. 

Chapter Seventeen

     "Don't stop loving me."

     "I'm always going to love you."

     "Don't stop taking my calls."

     "Lucy," I said. "Check your answering machine sometime. I call you every day."

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Chapter Sixteen 2

"I have the most extraordinary friends. I've never really understood why everyone has been so good to me, and now I can interview them, talk to them and see." Then she added as a gift, "I'll write a whole chapter about you."
     "I could write an entire book about you," I said, and laughed.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

She did. Beautifully. 

Chapter Sixteen

     When we were walking home, she softened and maybe felt a little sorry for making a scene, if only because she knew I hated scenes. She twisted her arm around mine. "Don't listen to me," she said. "I just get going sometimes. You know that."
     "I do."
     She pushed her head into my shoulder. "And you still love me?"
     I was still mad at her, furious with her, but that wasn't the question. The question was did I love her. And I always loved her.

--From Ann Pathcett's Truth and Beauty 

Such friendships are rare. The kind you always love and understand and forgive. The kind you see each other in years at a restaurant and slip into a conversation so easily. A first and singular and irreplaceable kind of friendship.

I pride myself in having one. And one is enough because Lizzy is brilliant and funny and of course, the only person I know who has read almost every Russian author's thick and impossibly long books. The letters and phone calls cover our fourteen-hour distance and although I have not seen her in--I lost count--six years, I know she's always there for me. 

Chapter Fifteen

Dearest Anngora, my cynical pirate of the elusive heart, my self winding watch, my showpiece, my shoelace, how are you?

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy's letter to Ann. One beautiful way to ask Ann about the depth of her life. 

Chapter Fourteen

"What happened?" was the first question. ...
     "Hives," I said. I was getting used to them.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I completely understand Ann. I imagine her million red blotches, constantly imploring to be scratched.  I remember when I had hives all over me--I was utterly shocked by the fact that I was, in fact, allergic to something in this world, for the first time in my life. I stopped using shampoo, body wash, lotion once at a time but even after three immensely long months, could not determine what I was allergic to. I rubbed all kinds of skin ointment, scrupulously medicated myself Benadryl, and tried very hard to resist the urge to give a little scratch. So after five months, I was on the verge of giving up. 

In the end, it turned out to be my laundry detergent. I therefore immediately banned my use of All and bought Tide--the one that's fragrance-free, colorless, and most importantly, dermatologist-tested. My hives began to disappear. You don't know how liberating that felt--to not have any more red blotches that became bumps that eventually bled and finally left scars. To not be sleepy and tempted all the time. To not be asked questions. 

Chapter Thirteen

Then she got a note from George Staphanopoulos. 
...
Of course that must have been the thing that everyone was thinking, everyone she told the story to. Did you tell him about your face?
     After that she asked me constantly, "Why didn't he call me again?" 
     "You said that he wouldn't. You said mutually no sparks."
     "It's because I'm ugly," she said. "I know why."

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Poor Lucy. Mr. Staphanopoulos should have known better. Lucy was a brilliant writer--successful, famous, adventurous. Perfect, except she thought of her small defect called a face too much. She needn't.

Chapter Twelve

     "You're a poet," I said when she read me everything she had.
     "I want to be a novelist."
     "You're a novelist, too. Don't worry about that." I believed at that moment there was nothing to worry about. Her writing was gorgeous. She could write a novel as long as she could find a way to stay in her chair.

From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I wish I could be a poet and a novelist at the same time like Lucy. 

I read a very worthwhile passage in the SAT yesterday. It said that one needs 10,000 hours of practice to become an eclat professional in whatever skill one wanted to perfect. 20 hours a week for 10 years. I think Lucy became one in less than 10,000 hours. 

Chapter Eleven

      Lucy knew which cat wanted to be held and which one wanted to be smacked. The weight she put on things so often struck me as backwards, but in some ways she had a deep understanding of the logic of the world. I would have thought that the prospect of getting teeth after twenty years spent without them would have been thrilling or daunting, but she shrugged it off. She had no interest in obsessing over possible outcomes. She would simply go and see what they had to say and that was all there was to do. And she was right.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Getting teeth. Most of her teeth was gone because of radioactivity since she was ten. So chewing and swallowing was a very strenuous undertaking for Lucy. She was humiliated lest anyone see her drooling, unclosed mouth. She was embarrassed to eat in front of people. So getting teeth was supposed to be exciting for her. After talking with good doctors who suggested her nearly impossible options, she cried. But Lucy didn't lose hope. Perhaps she was so hopeful that she chased after even the most impossible.

Chapter Ten 2

     "I didn't remember it," Lucy said pointedly. "I wrote it. I'm a writer."
     This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Because it is so good I write another post on chapter ten. 

 There are those gaps you have to fill in. There are those names and faces and places and things you do not remember precisely. So nonfiction cannot be completely true. But what Lucy wrote was true nonfiction. She was a cancer survivor, yes, but a better writer first.

Chapter Ten

Lucy's favorite rhetorical question was, "Will I ever have sex again?"

     Lucy had plenty of other questions as well: "Do you love me?" "You think I'm pretty, don't you?" "Do you think I'm a good writer?" But the odd part was they were all so interchangeable. What all of the questions really meant was, "Everything is going to be okay, right?" 

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beuaty

Lucy wanted to make sure she was going to be all right in the end. Lucy had her question answered in complete affirmation by Ann, almost all the time without any objection to why she was asked so many times a day and why so many variations? I can only imagine how hard it must be to have a face that is constantly changing. How confounding you would find yourself before a mirror and see how the face you remember from last week is replaced by a new one. So you don't know who you are, really. There is no connection between your face and your name. But you would be special--to be on TV and have friends all around you and be a bestselling writer. To be Lucy Grealy. 

Chapter Nine

     "I'm ugly," she said.
     "You aren't ugly."
     "I'm ugly and I'm going to be alone for the rest of my life."
     "Listen to me, pet. What you're going through is awful, it's really awful, but it isn't a judgment on your future. You aren't ugly and you aren't going to be alone forever just because things didn't work out with this guy."

     --From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy always wanted to be loved. And for that, she thought being beautiful was what it required. Lucy kept thinking she would never be picked up by anyone and thought that it was because she was ugly. I don't think she is ugly. She has eyes that draws you in and I can almost see her long lashes make shadows as she reads or writes a famous book. She is like a child. I think she is quite beautiful. 

Chapter Eight

There are trails to walk in the woods and rules that say if you pass someone during the day you may simply drop your gaze to the path as a signal you are thinking seriously about your work and do not wish to engage in conversation.

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I like this rule. I don't think it's rude because I would like to walk on those trails and see what it feels like to drop my gaze when I meet someone. I can only be jealous of Lucy and Ann whom I imagine to have walked those trails countless times and dropped gazes at many other writers at Yaddo. 

Chapter Seven

Levi did kill himself after all, but it interests me greatly precisely because I am at a total loss to describe how I am different, how what I know now differs from what I knew then. This is a language problem: the disparity between the two selves, between the two sets of truths, is very real and clear to me, yet my ability to control this knowledge in any sort of narrative or verbal way veers off constantly. 

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beatuy, an excerpt from Lucy's letter to Ann

Lucy comes to believe that there are some people out there who has suffered far more pain than she did. Levi is one of them. And here in her letter, Lucy is trying to find out the subtle difference "between the two sets of truths"--that separates her accusations of ingratitude towards others and her own lack of gratitude for what she already has: life. Later, in her book Autobiography of a Face, Lucy writes a very truthful and beautiful story of herself, ultimately about that difference, with stupendous poignancy. 

She did not veer off. 

Chapter Six

     As much as Lucy liked my friends, it was important for her to know at every moment that she was my uncontested favorite. There was nothing subtle in her methodology. When we had lunch with Elizabeth, Lucy would inevitably leave her chair at some point during the meal and come and sit in my lap.
     ..."Do you love me?" she said.
     "Of course I love you."
     "Best?"
     "Yes best, but you are crushing my thigh."

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Lucy has been frozen in her ten-year-old self; she is like a child even in her mid-twenties. She wants to be loved and she wants that love to be expressed to her directly. She asks for it, too, like a child. 

I used to be like Lucy. Did not want to feel less important. Asked the same question Lucy did to Ann, except I asked mom and hoped and hoped I was far more important and lovable than--well, of course--my younger brother. 

Chapter Five

There on Scottish TV in the dead of night was Allan Gurganus, talking about the publication of his first novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Allan had been my most important teacher in college. He was the person who had taught me to write. Now he was there in the living room in Aberdeen, handsome in his bow tie, calmly discussing his life as a writer. ... I decided then and there that I would be like Lucy. I would be like Allan. I vowed that I would write my way into another life. I, too, would try for everything.

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

Ann says she decided to try for everything by becoming a writer. She doesn't say she would try everything; there is a distinction, I think, that Ann adds the preposition "for." 

I know Ann is not happy on page 71. She has gone through so much with Lucy and without her. She is twenty-five and divorced. She is broke. She is a waitress in Tennessee. She does not write much, save her letters to Lucy. And here Ann decides to become a writer, to "try for everything." For Lucy. 

Chapter Four

     One night after work I was sitting on the edge of my mother's bed, reading her Lucy's letter.
     "Save all of those," she told me when I was finished.
     "I save some of them," I said, but she and I both knew I never was much on saving anything.
     My mother said it again. I was to save them all. "Someday you'll both be famous writers," she said. "And these letters will be very important to you."

--Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I save those long letters from friends faraway. I tuck them inside my journal. They are the extra pages of my book, and the book has become quite thick and ajar since I've tucked them all in. 

I love letters. I love photographs. Anything that contains the essence of a person. I even keep the article about open source with daddy's picture in it, even though I have no technological understanding of what great work he does. I keep your emails too, Mrs. Bell! (I know--this is beginning to sound like some fan letter...) 

I'm glad Ann read Lucy's letter to Mrs. Patchett. I'm glad Mrs. Patchett told her daughter to save them. I wonder how she knew Ann and Lucy were both going to be famous. She was more right than the fortune teller who told Ann she was forever going to be with Dennis (whom she divorced a year after their marriage) and told Lucy nobody's ever going to find her (Ann did!). I should listen to my mom more. 

Chapter Three

Grief isn't something to 'be gotten through.' It has no life of its own like that, it's just plain and simply there. It's one of the things which tells us we're human. It's funny, but I'm always forgetting I had cancer. It seems like a different person that happened to. ...
     It's much the same with my father. Like the chemo he comes back to haunt me all the time, but it's often a detached sort of haunting. Or it is very emotional, very joyous. That might sound odd, but often I feel better able to live and love life through remembering my father. James Tate has a wonderful poem about his father called "The Lost Pilot" (also the name of the book); have you ever read it? It's about the advantages (I don't mean to be crude, using that word) of his father's early death, how now as an adult he realizes his father would already be dead, or very old and decrepit. I have a very pure image of my own father, one that is almost a myth. It has more to do with me than with him. 

--from Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

One of the letters from Lucy that Patchett kept. Or I should call her Ann. Reading her memoir brings me very close to her. Like I've known her at Sarah Lawrence or in Iowa or Nashville or the TGI Friday's she waited tables at. So I shall call her Ann. 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177311 

Probably Ann has already read this poem. I just finished reading it. It's lovely. I'm listening to him now. I think in every person who was once a child there is an image of whoever was dear to him or her kept frozen in time. I'm reminded of this frozen image. 

Chapter Two

     "You girls pick up hitchhikers?"
     "I do," Lucy said, meaning that if she had a car she certainly would.
     He nodded and we watched the back of his head, his long ponytail caught up in a greasy knot. "I tried to hitch from Chicago to Cedar Rapids one time," he told us. "Didn't have enough money for a bus ticket. I started walking on the interstate and not one person stopped for me. Nobody. Ended up having to walk the whole way. It took me three days and I'll tell you, it was cold. Not one person cared if I needed help."
     We were all silent. I didn't know whether or not I should apologize, since I was sure I wouldn't have picked him up either.
     "You got to stop for people," he said, punctuating every word. "That's what you owe me for this ride. You have to pick up somebody else up. Do you understand me? Pick them up no matter what they look like."

--from Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty

I wonder if I ever picked anyone up. I remember my first time skiing. I was too scared to go down the hill. But then somebody held my hand. He was not like my kidnapper when I was six in any way. (By then I knew how to distinguish a kind stranger from a kidnapper.) He held my hand and went down the hill with me and told me, "this is what it is to ski." That this kind stranger who came to my rescue was a middle-aged African American man contains something anthropologically important. He picked me up.

Antique

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned
In the river of not having you, we lived
Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms
And we were parted for a thousand years.
Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover
The earth and have forgotten that we existed.
It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,
It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship
Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world
Without regret but with stormy recriminations.
Someday far down that corridor of horror the future
Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame
At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face
And decide to harbor it for a little while longer
From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

--Robert Pinsky's "Antique"

I had meant to post this poem since a long time ago. I don't know why I forgot to. There is something in its meaning I wish to understand better. Like drowning in a fire and burning in a river. Of having you. Who are you? What does it mean to have someone? And I am left hanging, bereft of a verb in the twelfth line. (Yet I did not come to know this until the third time I read it.) So the frame must be more beautiful than you for that someone in the horrid future buys the picture, but why are you being studied so, that he will keep you? And the verb harbor. Harbor: v. 1. to keep (a thought or feeling, typically a negative one) in one's mind, esp. secretly 2. to give a home or shelter to. You must have lost the battle and hence  become anonymous--perhaps why your are less beautiful. But are you alive? Or are you kept alive by that someone--become an antique relic of a past? 

March 24, 2010

I want to right write all over the page with feverish speed and intensity, like how I imagine Beethoven to have written his music. I wish I wouldn't hesitate too much lest I misspell or write crookedly. I wish this ink were infinite and time irrelevant to the clock. I wish my hand would never fail this pen. I wish this pen would never fail you--my reader.
     "But perfection is my enemy." --Francesca Battistelli's "Free"

Journal entry dated March 24, 2010

It's so funny I misspelled "write" the first time I wrote this. Perhaps I wished to write right. 

Sea Level

So this is what the ocean has been pushing across the table at us


all these years—

the dry, white spot that opens like a moon at the back of the throat


the quieted tongue, the last of all words.

Our ever-faithful dinner guest—who kept her wet fingers lined up at the edge


of the world, who politely folded and refolded her napkin—stops 


passing the peas, leans back quietly into her chair to watch

what we'll do now. She's done, the sea quits, stands without comment on the shore, is


just another dumb, beautiful animal considering the cliff, the final leap 


back into itself.

At least say we were among those who kept the conversation up for so long—


you and I handed always and never back and forth again and again

while our arms distressed the surface.


Let's just say the table was too large, that we lifted the heaviest dish


and got tired—

that only the ocean knows how to spoon salt over a great distance


under any kind of light. 

--"Sea Level" by Kim Van Voorhees

Mrs. Bell, you're finally published! I was doing calculus drawing the polar curve of r=4sin2x when I suddenly remembered to google you! I listened to you reading it and I read it again (and again) and your poem is just lovely--I am officially your fan. I am going to write it in my journal tonight and will probably be very tempted to rip it out and keep it in my pocket or something--or I might even memorize it. But that's okay with you, right, because I'm your fan? 

http://www.slate.com/id/2253446/#add-comment