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