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.