Since Facebook has buried all of my meticulously curated quotations on my profile, I leave them here in their original form. At least someone can read them, even if the someone is just me. 


And yes, many are from Doctor Who. 

----


"I need, therefore I imagine." -Carlos Fuentes 


Rule #27: Never knowingly be serious.

"If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-- you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." -Ray Bradbury

"My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure."
-Abraham Lincoln 


“No one looks stupid when they’re having fun” - Amy Poehler


"Language is a strange thing, but she is my mistress."-Stephen Fry


"Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards."- Alain de Botton


Isabelle: It’s a shame you’re not a girl.
Xavier: The world is made badly. 
-L'Auberge Espangnole


"I can’t conceive of art without a social context. It’s not just what you as an individual want to express; it must be understandable by others." -Maria Yampolsky


"There is no point in being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes."-The Doctor (Four)


"The thing that will choke your art before anything is capitalism." -Lisa Schlessinger 


"Identity can be so gelatinous sometimes."- Neil Gaiman


"It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive. " --Rilke


“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? —it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. ”— Jack Kerouac


"I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all." - Leo Rosten


"Oh, did you have to [say] 'There's no turning back?' That's almost as bad as 'Nothing can possibly go wrong' or 'These are going to be the best Christmas waffles I've ever had!'" --Doctor Who


A Quote By Ira Glass

I'm not quite sure where this came from. It was tumblrd by the lovely NPR Fresh Air Tumblr and I fell in love.

I was lucky enough to hear Ira Glass speak last spring. I grinned like a fool throughout the entire thing. And much to the chagrin of my date for the evening, ardently took notes through the event. It was one of the best nights out.

I have listened to Ira Glass for what seems forever. And these are just great and inspirational words from a gem of a person.



-------



"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

- Ira Glass

Without using the phrase "Grammar Nazis," Stephen Fry denounces these pedants of linguistics and language in this lovely animated bit. He comes two shakes away from yelling "Language is a living thriving creature! Get over yourself!" albeit in a fantastic British way.





Also, two of my favorite Anglophones who love language have a show called A Way with Words on NPR. It is brilliant and silly and always always a joyous celebration of language. Check them out.

http://www.waywordradio.org/

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

I meant to read this book before I moved to Brooklyn, and then when I was living there, I fingered the book in my favorite book store, flipping through the pages casually and thinking, "well, maybe now." But instead I picked up the opus Infinite Jest and went on my way.



Upon arriving back to my roots in Dallas, my dad handed me a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He had read it when he was younger. He actually met Ms. Betty Smith on an occassion in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. One Halloween, he and my uncle and my aunt all dressed up as some creatures in the days before pre-fab costumes, they knocked on Ms. Smith's door and hollared "Trick or treat!" She handed out sweets to them and they took them into their pillowcases and skipped off. Unaware they had meet a great American writer, they just considered her a nice old lady who smiled and gave out treats.

By the time I started to read the book, I had little idea what it was going to be about. It's a coming of age story in a country that was coming of age. We follow Francie Nolan as she grows in the first two decades of the 1900s. We see her family of immigrant stock deal with tennantment living and a lack of land. We hear her wax poetically about The City--seeing Manhattan as some far off fairyland that she might, if she is lucky be able to visit (not as I viewed it, as a horrid chore that I had to force myself to go to each day). We are with her mother as she scraps and cleans and works every single day to keep their little family above water. There are parts that are hard to read, dense and such emotion-filled that you ache for the little girl sharing this story.

This section I'm sharing is, for me, the most poignant part of the book. It was the moment when she stops being a girl and becomes, well, a more grown-up girl. It is a moment always found in coming-of-age novels (or Bildungsroman if you want to be pretentious). And Ms. Smith eloquently weaves that horrible moment when the fog of youth disappears and you can see all the ugly in the world.

I suppose we like to reflect on these moments so that we can choose to put those glasses on from time-to-time. So that we can not completely kill that little child inside. So that we can really find the amusement in the little things in life, the shine of a bright copper pot or the simplicity of a tree growing in an area that hinders abundance.


The second selection is also about growing up but also about travel dissappointment and building things up so much only to be let down. I also like this clip because of it's disinterested views on New York, but that's just me.



So, I hope you like this little snippets. If you haven't read the book, please do.




And enjoy!


-------------







Excerpt from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith



Italics are Ms. Smith’s.


Excerpt from Chapter XXVIII

The future was a near thing to Katie. She had a way of saying, “Christmas will be here before you know it.” Or, at the beginning of a vacation, “School will be starting up before you know it.”

In the spring when Francie discarded her long drawers and joyously flung them away, mama made her pick them up again saying, “You’ll need them soon enough again. Winter will be here before you know it.” What was mama talking about? Spring had just started. The winter would never come again.

A small child has little idea of the future. Next week is as far ahead as his future stretches and the year between Christmas and Christmas again is an eternity. So time was with Francie up until her eleventh year.

Between her eleventh and twelfth birthday, things changed. The future came along quicker; the days seemed shorter and the weeks seemed to have less days in them. Henny Gaddis died and this had something to do with it. She had always heard that Henny was going to die. She heard about it so much that she finally got to believe he would die. But that would be a long, long time away. Now the long time had come. The something which had been a future was now a present and would become a past. Francie wondered whether someone had to die to make that clear to a child. But no, Grandfather Rommely had died when she was nine, a week after she had made her first Communion and she remembered, Christmas still had seemed far away at that time.

Things were changing so fast for Francie now, that she got mixed up. Neeley who was a year younger than she, grew suddenly and got to be a head taller. Maudie Donavan moved away. When she returned on a visit three months later, Francie found her different. Maudie had developed in a womanly way during those three months.

Francie, who knew mama was always right, found out that she was wrong once in a while. She discovered that some of the things she loved so much in her father were considered very comical to other people. The scales at the tea store did not shine brightly any more and she found the bins were chipped and shabby looking.

She stopped watching for Mr. Tomony to come home on Saturday nights from his New York jaunts. All of a sudden she thought it was silly that he lived so and went to New York and came home longing for where he had been. He had money. Why didn’t he just go over to New York and live there if he liked it so much?

Everything was changing. Francie was in a panic. Her world was slipping away from her and what would take its place? Still, what was different anyhow? She read a page in the Bible and Shakespeare every night the same as always. She practiced the piano every day for an hour. She put the pennies in the tin-can bank. The junk shop was still there; the stores were all the same. Nothing was changing. She was the one who was changing.

She told papa about it. He made her stick out her tongue and he felt her wrist. He shook his head sadly and said,

“You have a bad case, a very bad case.”

“Of what?

“Growing up.”

Growing up spoiled a lot of things. It spoiled the nice game they had when there was nothing to eat in the house. When money gave out and food ran low, Katie and the children pretended they were explorers discovering the North Pole and had been trapped by a blizzard in a cave with just a little food. They had to make it last till help came. Mama divided up what food there was in the cupboard and called its rations and when the children were still hungry after a meal, she’d say, “Courage, my men, help will come soon.” When some money came in and mama bought a lot of groceries, she bought a little cake as celebration, and she’s stick a penny flag in it and say, “We made it, men. We got to the North Pole.”


One day after one of those “rescues” Francie asked mama:

“When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it’s for a reason. Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?”

Katie looked tired all of the sudden. She said something Francie didn’t understand at the time. She said, “You found the catch in it.”



------------------


Excerpt from Chapter XLIV

[Francie has gotten a job in the City]


She had been excited about going to work in New York. Since such a tiny thing as a flower in a brown bowl at the library had thrilled her so, she expected that the great city of New York would thrill her a hundred times more. But it was not so.


The Bridge had been the first disappointment. Looking at it from the roof of her house, she had thought that crossing it would make me her feel like a gossamer-winged fairy flying though the air. But the actual ride over the Bridge was no different that the ride above the Brooklyn streets. The Bridge was paved in sidewalks and traffic roads like the streets of Broadway and the tracks were the same tracks. There was no different feeling about the train as it went over the Bridge. New York was disappointing. The buildings were higher and the crowds thicker; otherwise, it was a little different from Brooklyn. From now on, would all new things be disappointing she wondered?


She had often studied the map of the United States and crossed its plains, mountains, deserts, and rivers in her imagination. And it had seemed a wonderful thing. Now she wondered whether she wouldn’t be disappointed in that, too. Supposing, she thought, she was to walk across this great country. She’d start out at seven in the morning, say, and walk westward. She’d put one foot down in front of the other to cover distance, and, as she walked to the west, she’d be so busy with her feet and with the realization that her footsteps were part of a chain that had started in Brooklyn, that she might think nothing at all of the mountains, rivers, plains and deserts she came upon. All she’d notice was that some things were strange because they reminded her of Brooklyn and that other things were strange because they were so different from Brooklyn. “I guess there is nothing new, then, in the world,” decided Francie unhappily. “If there is anything new or different, some part of it must be in Brooklyn and I must be used to it and wouldn’t be able to notice it if I came across it.” Like Alexander the Great, Francis grieved, being convinced that there were no new worlds to conquer.




Goodbye To All That by Joan Didion

I orginally read this in the Fall of 2003 when I first moved to Chicago. I was floored, as I often am with Ms. Didion, by her ability to make me feel and understand things I knew little about. At that time I had only been to New York once and only for a few hours looking at Columbia University in the Fall of 2002. I didn't know I was going to move there in six years. I didn't know I would move out nine months later. I didn't know anything about the City.

But I did know that feeling of despair that builds slowly and steadily. Of that moment when something that you worked on and should be oh-so-good is just shambles. Of fighting against something that you shouldn't be fighting against for no other reason than you think you should be. Like when a child announces that he is not sleepy and then once forcibly taken to bed and tucked in, he zonks out. I knew of these moments, but I didn't know New York. Knowing New York, and running from New York, only makes this essay more intimate to me.

This was my introduction to Didion, and will always have a special place in my heart. I hope you enjoy it.


Goodbye To All That by Joan Didion


How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and and ten—
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again—
If your feet are nimble and light
You can get there by candlelight.






It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.

---

In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along. Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those years appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—the Seagram Building fountains dissolve into snowflakes, I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street. But most particularly I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already spelt with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.

It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I was making only $65 or $70 then a week then (“Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands,” I was advised without the slightest trace of irony by an editor of the magazine for which I worked), so little money that some weeks I had to charge food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop in order to eat, a fact which went unmentioned in the letters I wrote to California. I never told my father that I needed money because then he would have sent it, and I would never know if I could do it by myself. At that time making a living seemed a game to me, with arbitrary but quite inflexible rules. And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that—except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of would matter.

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what the called “the Big C,” the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (“I’m well connected on the Big C, honey,” he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and list two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.

You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers’ places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country.

Which is precisely what we were. I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to appreciate entirely what New York, the idea of New York, means to those of us who came out of the West and the South. To an Eastern child, particularly a child who has always has an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin, New York is just a city, albeit the city, a plausible place for people to live, But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not “live” at Xanadu.

In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposĂ©s of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engagĂ© only about our most private lives.)

All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.

---

That is what it was all about, wasn’t it? Promises? Now when New York comes back to me it comes in hallucinatory flashes, so clinically detailed that I sometimes wish that memory would effect the distortion with which it is commonly credited. For a lot of the time I was in New York I used a perfume called Fleurs de Rocaille, and then L’Air du Temps, and now the slightest trace of either can short-circuit my connections for the rest of the day. Nor can I smell Henri Bendel jasmine soap without falling back into the past, or the particular mixture of spices used for boiling crabs. There were barrels of crab boil in a Czech place in the Eighties where I once shopped. Smells, of course, are notorious memory stimuli, but there are other things which affect me the same way. Blue-and-white striped sheets. Vermouth cassis. Some faded nightgowns which were new in 1959 or 1960, and some chiffon scarves I bought about the same time.

I suppose that a lot of us who have been very young in New York have the same scenes in our home screens. I remember sitting in a lot of apartments with a slight headache about five o’clock in the morning. I had a friend who could not sleep, and he knew a few other people who had the same trouble, and we would watch the sky lighten and have a last drink with no ice and then go home in the early morning, when the streets were clean and wet (had it rained in the night? we never knew) and the few cruising taxis still had their headlights on and the only color was the red and green of traffic signals. The White Rose bars opened very early in the morning; I recall waiting in one of them to watch an astronaut go into space, waiting so long that at the moment it actually happened I had my eyes not on the television screen but on a cockroach on the tile floor. I liked the bleak branches above Washington Square at dawn, and the monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.

It is relatively hard to fight at six-thirty or seven in the morning, without any sleep, which was perhaps one reason why we stayed up all night, and it seemed to me a pleasant time of day. The windows were shuttered in that apartment in the Nineties and I could sleep for a few hours and then go to work. I could work the on two or three hours’ sleep and a container of coffee from Chock Full O’ Nuts. I liked going to work, liked the soothing and satisfactory rhythm of getting out a magazine, liked the orderly progression of four-color closings and two-color closings and black-and-white closings and then The Product, no abstraction but something which looked effortlessly glossy and could be picked up on a newsstand and weighed in the hand. I liked all the minutiae of proofs and layouts, liked working late on the nights the magazines went to press, sitting and reading Variety and waiting for the copy desk to call. From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockeffeler Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.

Some years passed, but I still did not lose that sense of wonder about New York. I began to cherish the loneliness of it, the sense that at any given time no one need know where I was or what I was doing. I liked walking, from the East River over to the Hudson and back on brisk days, down around the Village on warm days. A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the West Village when she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because by that time the telephone was beginning to bother me (the canker, you see, was already in the rose) and not many people had that number. I remember one day when someone who did have the West Village number came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better. I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.

And even that late in the game I still liked going to parties, all parties, bad parties, Saturday-afternoon parties given by recently married couples who lived in Stuyvesant Town, West Side parties given by unpublished or failed writers who served cheap red wine and talked about going to Guatalajara, Village parties where all the guests worked for advertising agencies and voted for Reform Democrats, press parties at Sardi’s, the worst kind of parties. You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.

---

I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede’s, and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. One day I could not go into a Schrafft’s; the next it would be the Bonwit Teller.

I hurt the people I cared about, and insulted those I did not. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, I cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor, he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and that I should see a “specialist.” He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go.

Instead I got married, which as it turned out was a very good thing to do but badly timed, since I still could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings and still could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries. I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called and told me that he wanted to get out of New York for a while, that he would take a six-month leave of absence, that we would go somewhere.

It was three years ago he told me that, and we have lived in Los Angeles since. Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives. I talk about how difficult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York right now, about how much “space” we need, All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago.

[1967]

On Asthma by Seneca

Been quite lackadaisical about updating this guy. I've got some great pieces from Seneca, Didion, and Rilke to share. Today, a classic.

In March, I had a severe asthma attack. Working outdoors in the cold at least one day a week, finally caught up with me and stuck me in the ER. While at the hospital, I was reminded by the young attending that "people still die from asthma." I nodded sheepishly, fully aware of the stupid position I had put myself in. She put me under house arrest for five days. During this time, I made some big decisions about my life and where I wanted it to head (as well as watching innumerable movies and eating lots of soup). I decided to leave New York. I decided to stop pussyfooting and to write. And that's why I'm in Texas now, and writing. The move back South is being chronicled over at The Yellow Rose Returns. Anyway, on to the essay!

This was one of the first Creative Non-Fiction essays I read with the knowledge of what CNF actually is, and I've loved it ever since.


Chronicled, once again, in superb The Art of the Personal Essay by Philip Lopate.

------------



On Asthma by Seneca
Translated by Robin Campbell




Ill health—which had granted me quite a long spell of leave—has attacked me without warning again. “What kind of ill health?” you will be asking. And well you may, for there isn’t a single kind I haven’t experienced. There’s one particular ailment, though, for which I’ve always been singled out, so to speak. I see no reason why I should call it by its Greek name, difficulty in breathing being a particularly good way of describing it. Its onslaught is of very brief duration—like a squall, it is generally over within an hour. One could hardly, after all, expect anyone to keep on drawing his last breathe for long, could one? I’ve been visited by all the troublesome or dangerous complaints there are, and none of them, in my opinion, is more unpleasant than this one—which is hardly surprising, is it, when you consider that with anything else you’re merely ill, while with this you’re constantly at your last gasp? This is why doctors have nicknamed it “rehearsing death,” since sooner or later the breath does just what I has been trying to do all those times. Do you imagine that as I write this I must be feeling in high spirits at having escaped this time? No, it would be just as absurd for me to feel overjoyed at its being over—as if this meant I was a healthy man again—as it would be for a person to think he has won his case on obtaining an extension of time before the trial.

Even as I fought for breath, though, I never ceased to find comfort in cheerful and courageous reflections. “What’s this?” I said. “So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Let him, then! I had a try at him a long while ago myself.” “When was this?” you’ll say. Before I was born. Death is not just being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me. If there is any torment in the later state, there must also have be torment in the period before we saw the light of day; yet we never felt conscious of any distress then. I ask you, wouldn’t you say that anyone who took the view that lamp was worse off when it was put out than it was before it was lit was an utter idiot? We, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquility. For, unless I’m mistaken, we are wrong, my dear Lucilius, in holding that death follows after, when in fact it precedes as well as succeeds. Death is all that was before us. What does it matter, after all, whether you cease to be or never begin, when the result of either is that you do not exist?

I kept on talking to myself in these and similar terms—silently, needless to say, words being out of the question. Then little by little the affliction in my breathing, which was coming to be little more than a panting now, came on at longer intervals and slackened away. It has lasted on, all the same, and in spite of the passing of this attack, my breathing is not yet coming naturally. I feel a sort of catch and hesitation in it. Let it do as it pleases, though, so long as the sighs aren’t heartfelt. You can feel assured on my score of this: I shall not be afraid when the last hour comes—I’m already prepared, not planning as much as a day ahead. The man, though, whom you should admire and imitate, is the one who finds it a joy to live and in spite of that is not reluctant to die. For where’s the virtue about my case: I’m in the process of being thrown out, certainly, but the manner of it as if I were going out. And the reason why it never happens to a wise man is that being thrown out signifies expulsion from a place one is reluctant to depart from, and there is nothing the wise man does reluctantly. He escapes necessity because he wills what necessity is going to force on him.

Inaugural Benediction

On Tuesday when many people were fervently watching Obama be sworn in and speak, most people switched off their TVs or computers after his last line. This was a shame because they missed my favorite speaker of the day: a little old black man named Reverend Joseph Lowery. The whole ceremony I was hoping that someone would speak that was part of the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't enough that it was held the day after MLK day. It needed to have someone there who had seen it all and was finally able to see this.

Just like the Little Rock 9 had been invited and given choice seats, someone on the front line who made this possible for Obama needed to speak and tell us how important this is. And they definitely found one in Rev. Lowery.

Obama's inauguration meant something different to nearly everyone who watched it. Some people saw it as a desperate change, a revolt against the Bush administration. Some people saw it as a final barrier broken and destroyed with hope. Some people saw it as something new and fresh and not the typical Washington. And, of course, some people saw it as the end of the American way of life.

I saw it with faith, and wished my grandparents could have watched it too. My grandparents had so much faith in America. My Mexican grandfather who sent all his children to college--including his daughters--who told people when they asked that he wanted his girls to be able to leave their husbands if they were bad to them. My abuelitos who worked and worked creating the foundation for a cannery out of their blood and sweat that is now decrepit and empty. Who had to make tamales for Mrs. Roettele because my grandmother was expected to, and she was never paid. My huelito who taught himself English so he could become a citizen. My huelitos who left everything for something beter. Oh, how I wish they could have seen this!



-------------------------------------------------------------
Rev. Lowery Inauguration Benediction Transcript
(click link for source)

Transcript courtesy Federal News Service

LOWERY: God of our weary years, god of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our god, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.

Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this day.

We pay now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration.

He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national, and indeed the global, fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations.

Our faith does not shrink though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you are able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union.

And while we have sown the seeds of greed -- the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountain top, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together as children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone.

With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around...

(LAUGHTER)

... when yellow will be mellow...

(LAUGHTER)

LOWERY: ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen.

LOWERY: Say Amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen.

LOWERY: And Amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen.

(APPLAUSE)








Amen.

Blogger Templates by Blog Forum