J.K. Rowling

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


On the benefits of failure and the importance of imagination:

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

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

...

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

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

J.K. Rowling

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

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

Robert Frost

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

Robert Frost

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

Elizabeth Gilbert

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

Norman Mailer

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

Norman Mailer

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

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

Hemingway / Kafka

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

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

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

            “Of course.”

            “I always wanted you to admire my fasting.”

            “Certainly we admire it.”

            “But you shouldn’t.”

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

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

            “Why can’t you help it?”

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

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

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

The Road "Un-scene"

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

            Did you dream a good dream Papa?

            Almost. 

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

"Prose is coffee. Poetry is espresso."

Mr. Freeman

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

Heart of Darkness

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

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

And this is why we work so hard. 

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

Walden

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

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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

My Brain on my Mind / E

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

Priscilla Long, The American Scholar

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

Dreaming

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

William Carlos Williams

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

Linda Wagner, Poetry Foundation

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

My Brain on My Mind / B

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

The geography of the brain ought to be taught in school, like the countries of the world. The deeply folded cortex forms the outer layer. There are the twin hemispheres, right brain and left brain. (We may be of two minds.) There are the four lobes: frontal in front, occipital (visual cortex) in back, parietal (motor cortex) on top, and temporal behind the ears. There's the limbic system (seat of emotion and memory) at the center. There's the brain stem, whose structures keep us awake (required for consciousness) or put us to sleep (required for regeneration of neurotransmitters.)

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

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

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

An abecedarium dedicated in memory of Long's grandfather. 

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

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

I would like to write from the beginning.

Leap Year

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

--Leap Year (2010)

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

The Blind Assassin

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

--Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

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

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

Persuasion / 2

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

Jane Austen, Persuasion

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

Persuasion

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

Jane Austen, Persuasion

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

Character

Do you have any regrets?

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

A Farewell to Arms

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

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

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

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