fragments

Just finished with Joyce, now I have to read up and make points for the essay test next Tuesday. Reading Joyce becomes rewarding as one reaches the end. As if there is the maturity in thought, personality, the soul, and then into the unknown, the flight of Icarus, the ‘Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead’. I remember, scribbling on the first page of my copy of The Portrait when I was seventeen, waiting for my turn inside the hospital in the remote, perhaps anxious – I was either about to declare to the doctors there that I could not stand being depressed, or probably just taking the usual escape from classes I have no whatsoever passion about – life assailed me, suffocated with trivialities left and right.  The Portrait, or at least a part of it, that I managed to understand and read, left some sort of impact that is to not be afraid of going against things that are against your being.

Bildungsroman. It was T that first mentioned the term to you. He was talking of The Catcher in the Rye. You haven’t read it yet, so on the weekend of your fifteenth birthday, you went to Kinokuniya with your father and you picked four books; Salinger’s, The Dictionary of Philosophy, Mensa’s IQ Test Book, and Mein Kampf. The last one your father didn’t agree on. How very telling. Here was M, just turned fifteen, about to launch into the real world, believing herself to be super intelligent and enthusiastic about the many disciplines of the liberal arts. The second trip with your father, he bought you Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, after fiddling around it for ten minutes or so. It was beyond him.

It was also beyond you that you would end up, now, about to turn twenty two, in your final year of engineering. What happened, as you ponder, after being talking to your English tutor, her saying ‘how brave’ you are, and strange that you would take this. Out of pure interest, I said. And I like Woolf. The motivation behind every single action cannot be told simply in short sentences. It is an accumulation of sentiments, memories, experience, knowledge, and blind hope that brings us to that single momentous decision, “I shall now…“.

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Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Also, do not simply put words into people’s mouth. Above all, be silent and severe your tongue.

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Spoke to F again. Always a delight. He now uses the words, ‘weather through’. He probably doesn’t remember that I took it from Rilke’s letter to Lou-Salome.

“It is not enough for two people to find each other, it is also very important that they find each other at the right moment and hold deep, quiet festivals in which their desires merge so that they can fight as one against storms. How many people have parted ways because they did not find the time slowly to grow close to each other? Before two people can experience unhappiness together, they have to have been blissful together and possess a sacred memory of that time, which evokes a kindred smile on their lips and a kindred longing in their souls. They become like children who have lived through the festivities of a Christmas night together; when they find a few minutes to catch their breath during the pale, drawn-out days, they will sit down together and tell each other with glowing cheeks about that pin-tree-scented nighttime full of sparkling lights . . .
Such people will weather all storms together.”

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Tonight; Birthday cake, cupcakes, thesis progress report, Annemarie Schimmel, essay points.

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Just started reading Rumi’s Mathnawi. Will try to make it a point to read it every two days or so. Annotations.