Hope Was Here

I hate leaving places I love.

--Hope Was Here by Joan Bauer

Shakespearean Idol

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.

            Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much else getting in the way, so much whispering, so much speculation about others, so much gossip that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much creeping about and secrecy. And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulant.

            I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.

            Nevertheless it hurts me to tell it over, over again. Once was enough: wasn't once enough for me at the time? But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it, as I will hear yours too if I ever get the chance, if I meet you or if you escape, in the future or in heaven or in prison or underground, some other place. ... By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. 

--Excerpt from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Offred's tape recording lest she does not get to tell her story to anyone. A tape recording because she's not allowed to read or write. I imagined her hushed voice, somewhat urgent and with hopeful desperation. 

When Mr. Lewis asked me what my favorite book was, I told him it was this one. Because a favorite book should definitely make an under-pressure junior read and stay up late and finish it in three days--forget the pile of homework she has. So I picked it as my Shakespearean Idol piece during spring break and would say it like some lucky spell. It became a lucky spell.  

Hannah--

What a delightful occupation: to sink into one's couch, rain falling outside and read your thoughts on your reading! These are wonderful explorations of literature. Keep up the good work!

Mrs. Bell

Frankenstein

It's incredible Mary Shelly conceived Frankenstein when she was only eighteen, and threw bold sentences like "But revenge kept me alive; I dared not die, and leave my adversary in being" (205). How horrid it must have been for Frankenstein to see with his own eyes the destruction and death his creation has done. And to hear it say to him, "You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself" (224). I imagined Frankenstein's face, his old and weary face after years of chasing and being chased, when he hears this. I imagined sadness pass over his tired eyes as he finally understood the  infinite dejection of the brute he created. 

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

     He had the same attitude to his life as a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. One of novelist's inalienable rights is to be able to rework his novel. If he takes a dislike to the beginning, he can rewrite it or cross it out entirely. But Zdena's existence deprived Mirek of his prerogative as an author. Zdena insisted on remaining part of the opening pages of the novel. She refused to be crossed out.  --From Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting


I like this passage. It's about forgetting. And here is why it is funny: "She was ugly." Hence The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.  It may not be funny at all if one has not read the book, or does not know Kundera as an author. He said that humor is "a trustworthy sign of recognition," I believe, between the reader and himself. 

Veronika Decides to Die

     "I want to feel the rain on my face, to smile at any man I feel attracted to, to accept all the coffees men might buy for me. I want to kiss my mother, tell her I love her, weep in her lap, unashamed of showing my feelings, because they were always there even though I hid them.
     I might go into a church and look at those images that never meant anything to me and see if they say something to me now... I want to give myself to one man, to the city, to life and, finally, to death." --From Paulo Coelho's Veronika Decides to Die

Veronika's speech after her failed suicide attempt. After being told she only has a few months to live. She was not poor, grew up in a good family, healthy, beautiful. Young. She is talking to Dr. Igor. I wonder what he is thinking about the patient he carefully saved. But I hoped Veronika told this to Eduard instead. Because later he tells her:

"I want to tell you that I love you. You don't have to believe me."

But I believe him, even though he has schizophrenia.

Milk

Drinking milk before bedtime may induce sleep because milk contains large amounts of tryptophan, the amino acid from which serotonin is synthesized. --Biology, Neil Campbell and Jane Reece

Serotonin is the neurotransmitter of sleep-producing centers in the brain.  I've always wished to fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow. Perhaps I should stop wishing and drink milk before bed. And so should have Kafka.

Bible

I did it again. I flipped the page and there was nothing more than:

Where was she now, this Clara? What had become of her, this ardent, hopeful girl in her white dress, surrounded by her family, godparents, friends, that her Bible should end up in a Goodwill bin? Even if she no longer read it, or believed it, she wouldn't have thrown it away, would she? Had something happened? Ah, girl, where were you? --From Tobias Wolff's "Bible"

The last sentence is in past tense. I wouldn't have flipped the page if it were in present.

Puppy

... Josh had said, such nostalgia in his voice, "Mom, remember when Goochie was a puppy?" Which was when Abbie had burst into tears, because, being only five, she had no memory of Goochie as a puppy. --From George Saunders' "Puppy"

After the first page, I was at a loss of knowing what was happening. I was reading every word, knew what each word meant, but when those words are sprawled with narration--with all-over-the-place, hilarious narration with "ha ha ha" and "ho HO"s--I had no idea what they became. So I don't know why I didn't stop reading. I don't know why I kept turning the pages. Perhaps it was because once in a while I would come to a part where I understood wholeheartedly what it all meant, like the passage above. Or below.

Marie stepped to the window and, anthropologically pulling the blind aside, was shocked, so shocked that she dropped the blind and shook her head, as if trying to wake herself, shocked to see a young boy, just a few years younger than Josh, harnessed and chained to a tree, via some sort of doohickey by which--she pulled the blind back again, sure she could not have seen what she thought she had--(Saunders, 265)

So much childish suspense. Like I just dropped the blind.

Awake

A beautiful and blinding morning

The world outside begins to breathe

See clouds arriving without warning

I need you here to shelter me

And I know that only time will tell us how

To carry on without each other

So keep me awake to memorize you

--From Josh Groban's "Awake"

I had this as my wake-up song last year. Never got tired of it. Especially when you get to hear your favorite singer's voice every morning! 

At the Art Institute

The man looks infinitely old, almost to death. Only his hands seem alive in flesh, his hands that once held pen and book before he was blind.

I did not intend to see Henry Fuseli’s “Milton Dictating to His Daughter.” I only intended to see Antonio Mancini’s “Resting.” Katherine wrote about it, alluded to it in her essay “Captive: A Love Story.” I always wished to see it. The painting looked as if Mancini himself was sick as he drew the sick woman in his picture. It was blurred, groggy. Her hair did not seem to be intact; it was as if it were matted by some thick wig.

Anyway. I did not know Milton was blind. Became blind, at least. And in the painting he is carefully dictating “Paradise Lost” to his daughter, with lips slightly parted. I wish I could read his lips. 

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/44739  

Bel Canto

"When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her."

That's the first sentence of Ann Patchett's Bel Canto. She's a Ragdale alum. Ms. Hawkins was reading all the first sentences of alumni books and this one's my favorite. So later that summer I went to the bookstore and happened to spot the book right there, and right there I started reading. I don't judge books by its first page, or its first sentence for that matter, but I loved it so much I bought it. And then here is what happened. I kept the book on my shelf, unread, and then one day sent it to Katerina in Maryland. I don't gift books I've not finished reading, but I knew it would be good and I wanted her to read it so much I forwent reading it myself.

The King of Sentences

At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant 625 slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies. 

--from Jonathan Lethem's "The King of Sentences"

Perhaps Jonathan Lethem is the King of Sentences himself. 

Man and Wife

"On sick days you could escape the movement of the world. It was always difficult to get back into it, to catch up on schoolwork and eat real food again, but this time I wasn't sure I ever wanted to rejoin the world." --Mary Ellen from Katie Chase's "Man and Wife"

Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me

Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me! 

Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me, 


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


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


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


And sullen hymns of defeat?

 --Walt Whitman's "Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me"

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

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

--from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173476 

I read the poem. I have not the faintest idea, but loved this stanza. That time will hold its breath lest it goes away, that you and I will both have it--"the time to murder and create," "that lift and drop a question on your plate." I don't think Eliot uses any hard language here, although he did knock me over by the word "etherized" in the beginning. And what does it mean to have measured your life with a teaspoon, like Prufrock states he has? I cannot even dare to try and analyze this poem, or a line of it. I just like it. 

Hamlet

So I've been very curious about it. About him, actually. How he pretends to be insane after hearing that his father was murdered by his uncle. How clever of him, to act like he's mad but carefully choosing his words, like here:
POLONIUS: Do you know me, my lord?
HAMLET: Excellent well. You are a fishmonger.
Of course literally a fishmonger is someone who sells fish, but what Hamlet implies underneath means one who deals with flesh. He is slyly mocking the King's advisor in a double blow, first calling him a lowly salesperson, then as a dirty dealer.

I just picked up Hamlet a few days ago, and I can't wait to finish it. I had read it in Korean several years ago, had no idea what was happening, gave up, and thought it would be so much better to read it in Shakespeare's own language. So much better, yes, but so much more difficult because of his brilliance.

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” 

When I went to Mrs. Freeman's reading on that Wednesday night in the Garden Room, the line I remember and loved was this line. I understood. I've had such experiences. There need not be some intricate connection with Aaron, who can sense ghosts, nor his father who had felt all the pain of "getting out." ("And so what was wrong with getting out? Except that escaping is its own brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls that didn't save themselves.") I don't know much about the Communist takeover in the 1940s (not much about history, for that matter). But there must be some other attaching force that makes you nod your head, makes you stay up late, almost sense the ghosts Aaron does, feel the painful guilt of Aaron's father. 

Child's Play

It was one of those stories that make you stay up late, even though you know it's a school day and you'll regret the next morning wanting to sleep more. But I read on anyway. I thought I'd rather finish up a good story than wait until tomorrow. I'm one of those people who has to finish something right there and then or else I'll have wandering thoughts, out of nowhere, just like that. Well. I was almost done reading, I had one more page to go, so I flipped it, but that was it. The last page. The end. I uttered an obviously audible "oh" out loud, as though that would make appear a line I missed. But of course--the reason why Alice Munro's stories are so good is that she leaves you hanging, so blasé. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father. --Anna's sister in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Inredibily Close