Mail

I also worried that learning how to use e-mail would be like learning how to program our VCR, an unsuccessful project that had confirmed what excellent judgment we had shown in not purchasing a car, etc.

Anne Fadiman, At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

Reminds me of my old-fashioned self. I enjoy hand-written letters over emails. I don't text: I call. I prefer walking close distances: I'm terrified of public transportation. I dislike fast food: I cook. And yet I'm typing on this intangible page with a machine whose technology I know so little about. 

Seeing Ben

I saw Ben. We were in a coffeeshop in Lake Forest. The coffeeshop was Starbucks. (You had asked him where he will drink coffee when he's eighteen. He said Starbucks.) And there he was, standing there, smiling, reminiscent of you. Then I woke up.

Chapter 21: Suicide

8.
In picturing my death, I imagined myself in the role of audience to my own extinction, something that could never really happen in reality, when I would simply be dead, and hence denied my ultimate wish—namely, to be both dead and alive. ... It was not a question of being or not being. My answer to Hamlet was to be and not to be.

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love, "Suicide," 186-187.

For a while I had regarded death:

How am I still alive if I don't want to live? // What happens if I die young?

Journal entry in Book Four, October 3, 2011

And death had regarded me: 

I had a dream last night in which I was going to die—they were trying to kill me. I had two minutes to live and the first thing I did was to fall on my knees and pray. And all the while I was afraid. [The subtext of the dream/reality parallel was that I had wanted to die, yet in the face of having my wish come true I no longer wanted it.] ... 

     If I die young, will he come to my funeral? 

Ibid., October 10, 2011

I had a friend some years back who wanted to learn about death in college. Her name was also Hannah. We were in middle school and she was so mature and profound—and also brave—to want to learn about death. 

In life, death is a leitmotif more frequent than life itself. 

Chapter 16: The Fear of Happiness

17.
Lovers may kill their own love story only because they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love, "The Fear of Happiness," 141.

His house showed me not only a wealth of information but the information of his wealth. Walking in his house felt like touring an art gallery: the paintings that hung on each wall, the creatively arranged furnitures, the lights and windows that allowed perfect luminosity and view all displayed art itself. I loved its inhabitant as I loved its design.

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.