“There’s a reluctance in all writers in early stages of their development to really commit themselves to trust their interests as being actually focused on things that are interesting. To realize that they do not have to talk in the same dialect that is being talked around them, in terms of literary convention and all the rest of it.” — Marilynne Robinson
Went to mass today, for those keeping tabs on my soul.
Called my mom for fathers’ day.
Entrances.
When I was in Singapore my boss was a big fan of Thornton Wilder’s short novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He wanted me to teach it to my 13-year-old students, even though this book was a tough one for me to work my way through. It has a lot of college-level vocab that’s fallen out of usage and a weird narrative arc. It’s about 5 people who die on a bridge, but none of them know each other. The novel traces the lives of these people to their meeting on the bridge. I think only one of my students read it, or read the last line at least, because the only question I got was to explain the last line, which is:
“But soon we will die, and all memories of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love. The only survival, the only meaning.”
In my panic about how I was going to explain this weird book about Peru to a bunch of teenager and all the class prep that came with that, I had missed that line, or at least how profound that line was.
I remember answering by drawing a waterfall on the classroom’s white board. At the top I put grandparents or great grandparents or great great grandparents. The water was their love which fell on their kids at the bottom, who sparked their own waterfalls, and on down and on down. This doesn’t really explain “impulses of love return to the love…” but I think captures the rest. (And compare it to what the Christians say: Love comes from God, as if he’s a love radiator at the center of the universe. Ah, no. It’s a chain, from the first mammal who nursed to you letting your kids sleep in your bed. Amen, right?)
—email to Jessica
Bears are just humans in bear bodies.
I’m growing chives. Hi Chives!
Why do I even write in notebooks? I fill them with things like these:
“We were investigating the ways people live. The ways they congregate into cities and states. Do they hold their palms up for others to see or do they not? Often they do not.”
“The tongue laps out. The tongue, warm, itself snail-like. The rich, snail-like word.”
“Suddenly everyone is writing about genitalia. It’s like, ‘Hello. We have just discovered our genitals.’”
There’s also a drawing of a beagle.
Just had a small fantasy of some farm animals, let’s say cows, escaping, hiding in glens and woods and caves, and soon living in the fear of their new haphazard life, but dizzy with freedom. The novelty of it all: Old age, the lack of routine, a people-less existence. They start their own small clan there in the nooks of the world.
This must have happened. This must be happening still.
The myths are as important as the science.
Here is another picture of Hala. It may as well have been a dream. All of it.
I was a little sad a moment ago because I don’t know how Woodrow feels. I was holding him, singing an R.E.M. song. Here is a picture of him with Hala. This was two or three lives ago. I wonder if he remembers. If she does.
“The happiness of a reader is beyond that of a writer, for a reader need feel no trouble, no anxiety: he is merely out for happiness. And happiness, when you are a reader, is frequent.”
—Borges, lecture to Harvard
“I think that what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes—yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.”
—Borges, lecture to Harvard
“I could kiss you there on that palm-tree porch in the daybright sun forever.”
