more later, of course, but
I’d like to mention before I get caught up in this weekend’s impending college whirlwind that I’m really enjoying O’Conner’s use of the word “cadaverous” in Wise Blood. It’s been used to describe a face multiple times; it’s such a striking image. Points to her, though I don’t know how I’d feel about living in a world painted by Flannery O’Connor’s descriptions.
the yellow-cotton smell
The reality of it is that Binx just isn’t that great a listener, much as he flatters himself otherwise. However, The Moviegoer does convey the urgency of such an activity. Collecting bits of other people in forms as whole as possible, carrying them around with you as an aid to personal growth and development — perhaps this at least lines the edges of what it means to be a human being.
I’ve always wanted to be a psychologist. I don’t know how well I’d do at patting backs and handing out tissues, trying to analyze and aid simultaneously, but I can think of nothing more I’d like to do with my life than sit in a small room and listen to people share their stories all day. At the end of the day, I’d pack all the new humanity inside myself and go home to cook dinner. It’s a lovely fantasy. Sometimes I wonder, though: would it be stealing to collect my own experiences via others? Would it be parasitic or cowardly? Would I miss the precious opportunity to create my own story?
Binx has his own story, it’s true. But there are so many pieces tacked on for their own sake that it’s hard to discern his own truth. What does that mean?
i love myself
I was recently introduced to the French expression “l’esprit de l’escalier”, which refers to the all too common phenomenon of coming up with the perfect retort just when it’s no longer relevant or useful. In the case of my Friday night, I didn’t miss a retort, but I did miss the perfect costume opportunity for Night at the Library.
Harriet M. Welsch, the protagonist of my all-time favorite children’s book, Harriet the Spy, would have provided the perfect costume for Friday night’s festivities: oversized sweatshirt, baggy pants, spy tool belt. Easy to recreate. I’d have an excuse to walk around with a notebook and write down observations about the people and decor.
Let’s be honest: from the first time I read the novel, I wanted to be Harriet. Having completed it many times since then, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that Harriet isn’t actually too likable a character — but to this day, she remains one of my greatest inspirations. She’s a force of nature. She likes to take in the world from afar, which renders her a generally detached but secretly dynamic observer. There are layers to Harriet: she stomps through the kitchen demanding cake at the top of her lungs while her cook is preparing a delicate souffle, but she isn’t afraid to address some of the most fundamental existential questions of humanity. Above all, she feels deeply and in a very real way. I read Harriet the Spy for the first time when I was six years old, and I remember plodding into the kitchen, defeated, when I was only halfway through to explain to my dad that I couldn’t see the page anymore because there were too many tears in my eyes. He hugged me, and I made it the rest of the way through for the first time. I’ve cried at the same point every time since.
“…you are going to have to do two things, and you don’t like either one of them:
2) You have to lie.
Otherwise you are going to lose a friend. Little lies that make people feel better are not bad, like thanking someone for a meal they made even if you hated it, or telling a sick person they look better when they don’t, or someone with a hideous new hat that it’s lovely. Remember that writing is to put love in the world, not to use against your friends. But to yourself you must always tell the truth.
Another thing. If you’re missing me I want you to know I’m not missing you. Gone is gone. I never miss anything or anyone because it all becomes a lovely memory. I guard my memories and love them, but I don’t get in them and lie down. You can even make stories from yours, but remember, they don’t come back. Just think how awful it would be if they did. You don’t need me now. You’re eleven years old which is old enough to get busy at growing up to be the person you want to be.
No more nonsense.”
elope with me in private and we’ll set something ablaze
I’m always a bit hesitant to profess my love for anything or anyone because such a declaration would seem to imply mastery, to some degree, of the party in question. If you say you love to dance, people generally assume it means you’re good at it. People are quick to associate a relationship classified as loving with smoothness and success. So when I make the confession I’m about to, please don’t read anything more into it than what I say.
I love words.
I love the way they sound, the ways in which they fit together, the art of trying to fit them as closely as possible to an abstract meaning. I love the aesthetic comfort in words like “catastrophe” and “tweed”, and I love the emotional comfort in assigning labels to concepts too wide to comprehend otherwise. I love puns.
I’ve spent much of the week ruminating on the idea that they haven’t always been ours (that is, mine and everyone else’s alive in the English-speaking world today). As I’ve spent more time actively trying to maneuver language than work my own muscles, it’s difficult to keep in mind that learning how to use words is like raiding an ancient relative’s closet and figuring out how best to configure my findings. When I write something, it’s nothing more than a speck in the constantly expanding literary and linguistic picture that’s existed for centuries. There are so many words I don’t know and so many lying unused in the periphery of my lexicon. There are so many ways to arrange sentences and to articulate ideas I’ve not yet encountered.
Isn’t that amazing? Just by speaking to each other, we’re making the picture fuller every day, and it never will stop growing and changing. All we can do is treat language as gently as possible, as we would any other inherited object.
(ps- I realize this blog post is incredibly cheesy, but the point arose during one day’s reading of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. I’ve also been inspired/excited lately by words from the likes of Virginia Woolf, Belle & Sebastian, fellow AP Lit students, authors of submissions from old issues of Pendragon, Dar Williams, my choir director, Vladimir Nabokov, Lemony Snicket, my friends, and Mr. Lucia — to name a few.)
a strange combination of lust and innocence
I have to be honest: I’m not much enjoying my experience reading Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.
If I weren’t reading it in conjunction with Mrs. Dalloway, perhaps I would have a different opinion. Despite the fact that in class we agreed that Cunningham expects his readers to have prior knowledge of both Virginia Woolf and her novel, as The Hours is a celebration of both, I think that I could easily have read this as a stand-alone novel. I imagine I would have appreciated the plots and characters just as much (if not more) as I do at this point. It’s a high-quality piece of literature; it offers complex, real characters, thoughts on identity, and some daring social commentary.
But reading Mrs. Dalloway felt like a reason to be alive. The incredible fullness in the way the words flowed together, the depth of thought — I connected so much with the text and felt simultaneously awed and captivated every time I picked it up. The Hours seems like a pale, empty shadow in comparison (a well-written shadow, but a shadow nonetheless). It’s not entirely the fault of the novel: the inherent problem with reading any piece and its inspiration side by side is that the stark comparison the reader is forced to make only highlights the disparities between the two.
Who knows. Maybe this summer, after I have some time and distance on my side, I’ll pick The Hours up again and have an entirely different experience. Or maybe it’s just getting started, and I’ll enjoy it more as it picks up speed. However, I’m stubbornly not quite ready to let go of Mrs. Dalloway at this moment in my life.
lolloping away on the green sea waves
Mrs. Dalloway is one of those novels that delights in its own lush vocabulary and rich phrasing. It’s a dangerous thing for a novel to be because if it doesn’t work out perfectly, the words end up sounding absurdly pretentious and hollow. When it does work, though, it’s amazing. It was mentioned in class that Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of moments, and the moments I spend reading it throughout my day are charged with the same kind of beauty it describes in small bits. It’s also arrived in my life at a very apt time. There are some points in life that feel like slow progressions, but there are some times that, like the novel, seem to be created moment by moment. The beginning of the second semester of my twelfth year at Providence Day School feels much more like the latter: refreshing college websites frantically in hopes of receiving any news at all, filling out senior superlative worksheets, drinking peppermint tea and making my way through the buildup of math homework I’ve created for myself. Of course this is how life unfolds in general: moments turn to hours turn to days to weeks to years to a concrete overview you can place in a jar and comfortably label a complete life. But here, very much stuck between twelve to seventeen years of my past and four to who knows how many years of my future, the moments feel particularly poignant. Virginia Woolf’s gorgeous words couldn’t have entered my life at a better time.
one lick less
Of the various icebreaker questions that are routinely asked within awkward circles of strangers, the one I’m generally most happy to receive is “if you could have any superpower, what would it be?” It’s one of the few for which I have an answer ready to go: the ability to read minds. You could call it a desire to learn as much as possible about humanity, or you could call it nosiness. Either way, my limited point of view has always seemed a handicap to me when dealing with the quest to fully understand any concept or situation. So William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying is particularly intriguing to me for the omniscience it allows its readers. We get to witness a poignant moment in the life of a struggling family from the perspective of each family member. They share common outlooks and dialects in some cases, but even at this early stage in the novel, we can already tell that the subtle disparities among the narratives account for some of the deeper festering conflict. Faulkner is one of those authors who seems to afford his readers a great deal of trust — in this case, the confidence that we will be able to piece the narratives together to create a single, multidimensional picture. I find that such authors are often the most exciting to read.
for good measure
My two favorite poems on this topic:
Lament
Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I’ll make you little jackets;
I’ll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There’ll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Life must go on;
I forget just why.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
– W.H. Auden
Two versions of intense grief, one contained and one wildly unrepressed.
(Also, “pack up the moon and dismantle the sun”? That’s some of the most gorgeous and heartbreaking imagery imaginable.)
quartz contentment
I’d forgotten about the AP Lit assignment over Thanksgiving break when I picked up The Bell Jar from the stack of books I’ve neglected this semester. The chance to lie in bed until noon reading a book I’d chosen for myself seemed so enticing that I didn’t realize until I was about three-quarters of the way through that I really wasn’t a fan of the book. When I returned to school and picked my way through the packet of Plath poems, it was almost a physically uncomfortable experience — a Plath overload. The writing is genius, of course (“I’m a riddle in nine syllables”? So perfect), but it’s a dark and sticky thing to read. Perhaps that’s her point: Sylvia Plath doesn’t seem the type to coddle anyone, including (especially?) her readers. But her treatment of death and its surrounding events is such a twisted one that I find it hard to relate.
Emily Dickinson’s poems, however, strike me harder because they’re easier to digest initially. Veiled in smooth rhythm and apparent simplicity, each piece contains small statements bursting with a very real sense of grief and humanity. Despite the quirky personality my limited knowledge of her life tells me she was known for, Dickinson treats death in a very realistic manner. It’s quiet. I like it.
sorrow
It’s something I’ve never experienced in so absolute a way, so it hurts my heart in a vague, fairy-tale sense to hear about other people’s losses. My heart can easily suffer and mend by proximity, however — I have no idea how devastatingly painful and numbing the actual experience of losing someone important permanently must be.
ORROW is my own yard– The Widow’s Lament In Springtime, William Carlos Williams
This poem is painful to read, partly because of the odd line breaks. It feels like the narrator is gasping for breath, that to finish an entire sentence is so difficult it takes several attempts. The imagery is perfect because it describes a glorious springtime, an idyllic backyard paradise, and the sharp contrast between it and the widow’s heart. Any description of the feelings the widow is actually experiencing would have likely been useless and inadequate; instead, the complementary terms in the poem describing what is not allow the readers the freedom to extrapolate and emote freely.
The last line is an expression of absolute despair. The narrator hasn’t even made a concrete wish for death; it seems that requires to much focused thought and energy. She simply wishes to “sink,” a strikingly appropriate word choice for the situation.
This poem’s simplicity is a little jarring. It’s raw, it’s real — it genuinely hurts.
