For those who have been wrecked that they weren't called to Hogwarts or let into Narnia. Or, for existential nerds.

(Note: This post quotes heavily from the book.  It was the only way I could process through it. And it's rather long. I have some opinions about the narrative being so inner-thought heavy that the reader doesn't have to infer, but those are neither here nor there for the purposes of this post.)

Fillory had yet to give Quentin the surcease from unhappiness he was counting on, and he was damned if he was leaving before he got what he wanted.  Relief was out there, he knew it, he just needed to get deeper in...He had to jump the tracks, get out of his Earth-story, which wasn't going so well, and into the Fillory-story, where the upside was infinitely higher (304).

The Magicians by Lev Grossman is a coming of age story that begins when Quentin Coldwater, brilliant and bored, is a senior in high school in Brooklyn.  He has never left behind his Fillory books--a series Grossman made up, very similar to Narnia, and deeply believes without irony that if only he could find his way into a land like Fillory that life would make sense.  "He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world--he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the evidence that it in fact was, " (37).  His existence is defined by his longing for Fillory and all that it represents: wholeness, beauty, peace, fulfillment, adventure.  One day, though, Quentin unexpectedly finds himself walking through a garden and onto the campus of Brakebills, a college in the Hudson River Valley for magical training, and not visible to the non magical eye.  

When Quentin arrives at this school that does indeed exist on Earth and not in Fillory, a professor tells him: "Most people are blind to magic.  They move through a blank and empty world.  They're bored with their lives, and there's nothing they can do about it.  They're eaten alive by longing, and they're dead before they're alive (88).  For Quentin, this makes sense, because they haven't been able to step through to the magic.  The twist of expectation here, though, is that Quentin's experiences with the magical realm are disappointing, and he finds himself struggling with the same kinds of things: "This was the kind of disaster Quentin thought he'd left behind the day he walked into that garden in Brooklyn.  Things like this didn't happen in Fillory: there was conflict, and even violence, but it was always heroic and ennobling, and anybody really good and important who bought it along way came back to life at the end of the book.  Now there was a rip in the corner of his perfect world, and fear and sadness were pouring in like freezing filthy water through a busted dam," (148).

As it would turn out, one of his magical friends finds that not only does Fillory actually exist (even among the magicians, they see Fillory as a children's story), but he's found a way to get in.  Quentin remained convinced that life would finally become ok: "He was in Fillory. There was no question about it now.  And now that he was here it would finally be all right," (288). And I suppose that this is how it goes for most adventures: the initial thrill and newness of a move, a new job, a new relationship can make one think that life will be different.  And, of course in the book there is a feeling of true adventure for a while, but ultimately Quentin has to face the same existentialism that has plagued him all along: "Why now, when it was actually happening, did the seductions of Fillory feel so crude and unwanted? He thought he left this feeling behind long ago in Brooklyn, or at least at Brakebills.  How far did he have to run? If Fillory failed him he would have nothing left! A wave of frustration and panic surged through him," (311).  

The Magicians could be described as a grown up's Narnia or Harry Potter--it turned the magical into the ordinary and made the concept of fighting evil much more postmodern, and in turn, depressing.  The characters at the end just settle for a different brand of discontent.  There is not one clear foe or one clean answer in which to rest and find peace.  

I don't want to be so jaded or realistic that there isn't room for magic--or at least hope.  Reading Quentin's story, I was surprised how much I related to parts of his mental journey.  At this point in the story, one would think that something would happen to re-instill Quentin's hope in magic, but it takes a turn for pretty stark realism: He should have stayed in Brooklyn, in the real world.  He should have nursed his depression and his grudge against the world from the relative safety of mundane reality...Sure you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster.  Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead...The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power.  That was courage: the courage not to live anyone or hope for anything. The funny thing was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered (382-383). 

One of the professors at Brakebills seemed to be describe coming of age: "Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it.  Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children.  The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded," (216).

And yet, C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series, pressed into the longing: "The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing--to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from...Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back." Readers and thinkers have to wonder if there is a space in the world for magic--and could the longing point to something real? Lewis, in his non-fiction writings on his Christian faith, explained that the longing was for Heaven and that life once again became magical for him when he realized that the longing was not in vain, but that it as was made him alive.  Grossman's book seems to be a critique of the Narnia-like longings.  I can't decide if Grossman himself would find Quentin a pathetic character in the hopes he had for magical lands. The bleakness of who Quentin becomes at the near-end of the story suggests that intellectual, passionless realism is the best way to cope with the disappointments of the world.  

And yet. There are some universal truths woven into the story: love, sacrifice, human fallenness and the pain of longing.  

So.

in the company of those who struggle.

I came across Mary Karr's book Lit after I read an article in New York Magazine about her, David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan Franzen.  I had read all of the authors except for her and sought out to get a copy of The Liars Club.  Then I found Lit, an incredibly written memoir based in Karr's alcohol abuse, the dissolution of her marriage and recovery, on a brownstone's stoop and decided that would work.   I later found out that a few friends of mine had recently read and loved it, so I moved it to the top of my "to read" stack.

{I've learned that sometimes I love to share the story of how I stumbled upon a story.  Thanks for indulging me.}

There are a few parts from Lit that I haven't stopped thinking about. One was that her recovery and redemption came in the company of those who struggled, too.  Karr found herself in AA with a mix of every kind of person imaginable, none of whom she would have sought out on her own.  The friends she made there were from across the social spectrum, people whose paths would have never crossed otherwise. And yet, they became a lifeline for one another because they deeply understood that struggle is best endured together. No one lives immune to hurt--and that means that each of us has something in common with every person we meet.  

I would not normally call myself a cynic, but in the winter it happens from time to time. For some reason that was the space my mind was inhabiting in the week I was reading this book: not in response to the book, but just in response to life.  I often get frustrated at the instagram-portrayed life.  Don't get me wrong, I think small moments of life's poetry are worth sharing, but sometimes it is easy to start thinking that everyone around has a perfectly curated life.  I know this theory is false.  Or, I start soaking in cynicism about the self promotion social media induces.   I've found that when I remember that I am always in (and a part of) the company of those who struggle, my heart seems to grow in compassion.  

I am always trying to teach my students that books make us better people because we learn to empathize with almost any character once we understand the ins and outs of his or her story.  Sometimes the teacher needs to remember this, too. 

 I also didn't realize just how much spirituality was a part of Karr's journey, and when added to a life rich in real community, a portrait of how beautiful--and simple--life can be rose before me. 

"Therapy rescued me in my twenties by taking me inward, leaching off pockets of poison in my head left over from the past.  But the spiritual lens--even just the nightly gratitude list and going over each day's actions--is starting to rewrite the story of my life in the present, and I begin to feel like somebody snatched out of the fire, salvaged, saved," (304).

I really can't add much to her words, except that by allowing herself to consider, and ultimately accept, the way faith, not religious duty, could change a life, her life and mental landscape began to change.  Sometimes I forget this--and reading Karr's story became one of the brightest reminders of my winter--and my own cold weather induced cynicism and anger has begun to slip away.  

Unbroken.

So many people have recommended Unbroken, the life story of Louie Zamperini--Olympic runner and Air Force bomber and POW in the Pacific during World War Two, by Laura Hillenbrand to me over the past few months.  It worked out perfectly that my mom had recently read it, so I curled up for many hours of my visit home for Christmas in front of the fireplace with it .  I love history, but realized that my knowledge of the Pacific front of the war was incredibly small, which is sad to me because my grandfather was on the Underwater Demolition Team, the precursor to the Navy SEALS, in Japan. Hillenbrand's book provided a well researched overview of what went on and some of the facts I learned in the book shocked me.  The narrative arch in the book, though, took my breath away.

I wrote my last post about my struggle in thinking about the lost in war, and this one I realized is one about the survivors. It still leaves me thinking: at what cost will humans ever stop?  I cannot imagine surviving through what these men faced as prisoners.  It was impossible for me to read this story without feeling sick to my stomach about the complaints that arise about my own life circumstances.  What stood out to me the most in reading this book is the incredible fortitude of the human spirit. It saddens me that this phrase might sound cliched, because if I look at the hardships people have faced faced throughout history and the fact that they have survived--be it a global war or a personal one--is truly miraculous.  And in the case of surviving the war, making it home was only half of the battle:

"The Pacific POWs who went home in 1945 were a torn-down men.  They had an intimate understanding of man's vast capacity to experience suffering, as well as his equally vast capacity, and hungry willingness, to inflict it.  They carried unspeakable memories of torture and humiliation, and an acute sense of vulnerability that attended the knowledge of how readily they could be disarmed and dehumanized.  Many felt lonely and isolated, having endured abuses that ordinary people couldn't understand...Coming home was an experience of profound, perilous aloneness.  For these men, the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness.  There was no one right way to peace; every man had to find his own path, according to his own history.  Some succeeded.  For others, the war would never really end," (349).


In my city there are times that it feels like a superficial quest for outward beauty: to maintain the posture that every aspect of one's life is meticulously curated.  But, as most New Yorkers know, there is beauty in the broken and in the faces that no fashion magazine would ever run.  There is beauty to be found in the mess and in the trying.

In my last post, I wrote about how wars are often fought for freedom of some sort, and that for the opposing forces there seems nothing left to do but to obliterate the other side.  It seems to me as though this can stand for a metaphor for living--for those who can't escape the messiness of being human, anyway.  It feels as though my reading life is bleeding one book into the next, because I am about to finish Lit by Mary Karr, which is the story of her battle with alcoholism--finding freedom and everyday fighting against the blackness.  I can't help but think about how she needed to find her way to peace.  I just saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (one of my favorite books) and was broken watching Oskar, the 11 year old main character who lost his father on 9/11, struggle and fight through his pain, in a way different from everyone else around him.

My students often complain about why they have to learn something that they think they will never have to use.  I have set answers for every subject area, but my one for social studies is always that I think that the best president, and any kind of leader for that matter, will always be the one who not only looks anxiously into the future, but one who is able to look back into the past--understanding both the macro and micro horrors and hardships.  For it is understanding--and experiencing--struggle that enables us to live and lead in a just, compassionate way.  Louie Zamperini's story was a reminder to me of many things, but the most heavy one to me was to know the stories that make up our collective past: to learn what others have been through and to let that lead me into a life of greater compassion and understanding--as well as hope for the moments when I find myself fighting a battle that seems greater than myself.  The incredible part about it, to me, was that this was not a work of fiction--but rather, a demonstration of the patterns that great works of fiction try to portray.

War and letters and stories.

I had a rough start with For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.  As his is typical style, it was written in a matter of fact, moment by moment description, in this case mostly from the voice of Robert Jordan, an American fighting with the revolutionary guerillas in the Spanish Civil War.  But, Hemingway accomplished his goal and while reading it I felt like I was there with him, moment by moment, which is probably also the reason why I never made it past 3-5 pages when reading it before bed and why it took multiple in-flight reading swathes of time and my break from school to finish.

About two thirds of the way through, Jordan spends time reading the letters found in the pockets of a dead opposing cavalryman, which spurs on one of the longest inner conversations that the reader hears in the story. The entire account is fascinating, and is Jordan thinking about who and why he has killed.  Here are a few excerpts:

"You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself," (302)...

"How many of those you have killed have been real fascists? Very few. But they are all the enemy to whose force we are opposing force," (304).

"Listen, he told himself. You better cut this out.  This is very bad for you and your work," (304).

I would argue, and actually don't think it's that controversial of a theory, that the reading of his dead enemy's letters were what brought on his mental struggle with the death that accompanies war.  What I find interesting about this, though, is that it comes back to the core of my own beliefs: once you know someone's personal story, even the bits of daily minutia detailed in letters Jordan read, it is near impossible to view them in the same way.

I struggle with war because whenever I read about it.  I am constantly thinking about the lives of the lost--on either side--and generally it is the daily minutia that destroys me.  The first time I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., it was the displays of the personal effects those sent to concentration camps gave up: the piles of brushes and razors, the pile of shoes.

This is what creates empathy in literature and I why I plead with people to read...and write.  To me, reading is the great metaphor for understanding humanity and a reminder for me to remember that everyone in front of me has a story--whether it's a student who is driving me crazy, the driver who is honking at me to walk faster through a crosswalk, a stranger I pass on a run.

The interesting part of this excerpt from the book, though, is that Jordan says that thinking in this vein is very bad for his work--which is true.  To fight for his cause in this context, personalizing the enemy would lead to failure.  He talks himself through the fact that he must do what he is doing to create a better world for the future: and yet, there are people fighting on the other side who believe the same thing, whether it is war on a national level or between two people.  And sometimes, looking back, there is a clear, right side.  Sometimes there isn't.

I wonder a lot about the fact that throughout history, it has come down to fighting to achieve freedom. I wonder a lot about what this says about us as people.  I wonder about what would create a world (or nation or state or city or home) without violence.  I don't think it's possible to live without conflict, but I wonder what it would take to teach us to handle it differently. Over the next week or so, I'm going to be writing about it as many of my recent reads have been about war, both fiction and non fiction, adult and young adult.   I have no answers and it only gets more complicated, but reading and writing is the only way for me to work through it all.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

I read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby in one sitting a few weeks ago, as I was left sitting in the wake of my family leaving town.  After suffering a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome, he could only blink his left eye.  He composed the book in his head and dictated it by blinking his eye, with the help of Claude Mendibil. Of course, much has been said in the history of words about taking goodness for granted, but the way that Bauby approached his memories without being able to do anything physical about them was astounding--and the very existence of this book--of producing a creative work in his condition is the ultimate story of triumph and the power of art. 


I'm struggling about responding to this book under the umbrella of not taking life for granted, for that feels so trite.  What saves me from this, I hope, is the depth of pain with which he wrote--this book is no "go get 'em, pursue your dreams, you can accomplish anything" story.  It distills the goodness of human existence while enduring physical impossibilities and deep existential struggle.  No matter how shallow my own wrestling seemed in comparison, this memoir made me want to live actively remembering what is real and good and true--a theme that keeps repeating itself to me in recent months.  


Here are three of my favorite excerpts from the book that underline the way that I want to live--and the kinds of things that keep popping up in every meaningful conversation I've had in the past month. 


Taking joy in and being thankful for small pleasures, rather than constantly looking forward to the next big item or trip that money can buy.
The delectable moment when I sink into the tub is quickly followed by nostalgia for the protracted immersions that were the joy of my previous life.  Armed with a cup of tea or Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I would soak for hours, maneuvering the taps with my toes.  Rarely do I feel my condition so cruelly as when I am recalling such pleasures.


Feeling deeply and not allowing busyness or struggle to make me feel numb.
I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours. But to keep my mind sharp, to avoid descending into resigned indifference, I maintain a level of resentment and anger, neither too much or too little, just as a pressure cooker has a safety valve to keep it from exploding.


Living life with good people.
Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me deeply than all the rest.  A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark...I hoard these letters like treasure.  One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.

The Pain of Beloved.

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"Anything dead coming back to life hurts," (42).

"Can't nothing heal without pain, you know," (92).

These quotes stayed with me throughout reading Beloved by Toni Morrison because at its core, it is a book about existential hurt, impossible choices and living with their ghosts and yet, it is about moving forward--and the story itself feels like a way to let the hauntings go.

I finished the book weeks ago and am still  thinking about what a powerful, important, disturbing read it was.  The plot centers around a former slave named Sethe who escapes to Cincinnati where her children are already living, giving birth to her fourth child along the way.  Less than a year after her and her childrens' escape , she is in the backyard of the house she shares with her mother in law and sees a man from the plantation where she spent her life ready to call upon the Fugitive Slave Act.  Sethe chooses to gather her four children and attempts to kill them, rather than allowing them to be brought back into slavery.  Three of the four are spared.  The bulk of the story is set over a decade later when her house is haunted by the child's ghost.  Two people arrive: Paul D, a man who was also a slave on the plantation with Sethe, with whom she begins a relationship.  For a time, he is able to scare the ghost away, but then a girl arrives who Sethe and her daughter Denver believe to be the incarnated ghost, which completely rocks and changes Sethe, forcing her to face her past decisions. The book is about the spiral of Sethe wrestling with her demons and the definition of love, of finding and losing herself.

As a reader, I couldn't discern if the ghost-girl was literal or figurative--and at different moments I think could be either.  So I've been thinking about the questions Beloved poses in terms of healing: on both a personal and corporate level.  It is much too heavy of a story to simply say that it ends with hope--it is a beautiful mess of a narrative that left me a wreck while reading it.

Sethe's turmoil through Morrison's writing feels weighty enough to be corporate.  It is not just her story, it is the story of the psychological effects of slavery.  On this level, I felt as though I had no place to judge Sethe for her choices--and how she chose to define the love she had for her children.  Sethe writhes with her choice and it is impossible as a reader not to do so right along with her.  It feels an impossible situation, where I can't decide if the healing of an entire nation after such an abomination on humanity or the healing of a single heart engulfed it it feels more difficult.

This is when I come back to the quotes I cited at the beginning, that came in the first third of the story and were spoken to Paul D, but shaped what I began to see as the purpose of the whole book: that Sethe had to wrestle with the pain and had to feel it deeply.  There was no way to move forward without it.  Paul D says to Sethe toward at the end, when Sethe is still is the ashes of her life: "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.  We need some kind of tomorrow."  This seems so simple and almost trite, but only out of context.  The poetry and pain of this story--individual pain of the characters and the pain of looking at our history of a nation-- echo for anyone who has felt the complicated brokenness of tragedy and the reluctance to even try to heal. What Morrison leaves the reader with is the idea that there is still life.  There is still life.

The length of an hour. Or, hope, and finding it even when it feels far away..

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(A note:  Reading The Hours after Mrs. Dalloway was incredible.  The research and allusion that went into Cunningham's book is tremendous, though it is incredibly thought provoking on its own as well.)

The Hours haunted me for days after reading it--mainly two of the ideas that Cunningham explores.  First, each choice a person makes leaves a trail of missed opportunities behind him or her--lives that weren't lived.   Almost all of the characters in Mrs. Dalloway consider the decisions they made--and what Cunningham does in his book is give those alternate stories life.  It is through the alternate stories that the reader must face some inevitable truths.

For instance, in Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa, feeling dissatisfied, daydreams about what life might have looked like if she had been able to choose her best friend Sally as a life partner instead of her husband Richard.  In The Hours, we see that desire played out as the character of Clarissa is a modern woman in her fifties in New York City living with her partner of 18 years, Sally. Cunningham creates other nuances that continue the conversation Woolf started 77 years before--but there is meaning behind this even to people who haven't read either book: even when the characters are given the cultural freedom to pursue what they want, no one feels completely satisfied.  In both novels, the characters tell themselves stories and imagine different lives for themselves to cope with the reality they are actually faced with.

It is easy to look back on missed opportunities poetically, imagining the happiness that might have been. But such is the illusion of fantasy: we are stuck in the real world with flawed people and to not address this is to not be honest with oneself. Such truth is burdensome to the reader throughout the entire book, whether it be in small, internal conflicts of the characters or tragic ends.

What seems to bridge that concept to any kind of hope at all, is Cunningham's address of hours themselves--not all hours carry the weight or are even the same symbolical length.

Richard, who is dying of AIDS, says: "But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick."  As Clarissa is processing Richard's illness, remembering their summer-long relationship, perfect in each of their memories, as well as her current anxiety, she finds:  "There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult.  Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."

It is the small moments we wish we could have frozen in time that keep us moving forward--and become long as they are played over and over again in our minds, and the long monotonous hours that make us human...and I think, I think remind us that we are not made for a world with such brokenness because even if we make all the right choices, the longing remains.  And that is when we, when I, must run for my life to hear a pedal steel and a banjo, or chase an urban sunset for good measure and a good reminding that there is abundant life to be had.

Oskar Schell: tiny existentialist and breaker of of my heart. Or, there is no freedom from feeling.

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First, a note. I read and wrote about this book in 2007, claimed it as one of my favorites but haven't read it since.  I've been thinking that I want to start rereading all the books I call my favorites this year. Also, as I mentioned in my last post, all of my recent reads are connected by the thread of freedom and I want to spend some time thinking that through.  So.

Nine year old Oskar Schell's family line includes grandparents who grew up in the same town in Germany and survived the bombing of Dresden during World War Two, but didn't get married until years later after running into each other in New York City.  Their stories are complex and sorrowful, and their marriage a union of two who completely understand loss, and yet the other's presence is a constant reminder of their pain.   The grandfather by this time has given up speaking altogether and communicates only though writing.  In an attempt to not be swallowed by the weight of their grief, they literally made rules for how their apartment and their lives would function: "We made safe places in the apartment where you could go and not exist." 

Interestingly, forty years later, Oskar made rules for his own life to manage his grief over losing his father on September 11th: he finds a key in his father's things and creates a quest to find what it opens: "...until I found it, I didn't love Dad enough."  He is seeking both a reason to exist and a closeness with his father.  I originally wrote about the idea of safety when I first read the book--which is ultimately what these characters are all looking for.  The more I thought about it, I realized how fleeting emotional safety actually is--and I think that Oskar somehow knew this .  Though Oskar shares the tendency toward an existential existence with his grandparents, the rules of his journey come with the hope that he will ultimately find catharsis--and that will free him from his current emotional paralysis and take him back to the safety he felt when he was with his father.  Oskar invents when he is upset, often of ways to keep people emotionally safe: 

"I loved having a dad who was smarter than the New York Times, and I loved how my cheek could feel the hairs on his chest through his T-shirt, and how he always smelled like shaving, even at the end of the day. Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing."

"We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe." 

"In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York is in heavy boots." 

"[S]o if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU! GOODBYE! I LOVE YOU!" 


It is incredibly painful to read this happening to a nine year old boy.


 Emotional safety is fleeting--and that is a tragedy of human existence. The last scene of this book (which I won't tell you because you should really just go read it yourself) pulls my heart in a way that few books can.  And yet, freedom comes from allowing ourselves to hurt--and by that allowance we are not completely swallowed.

in the small and ordinary.

"We live, each of us, to preserve our fragment, in a state of perpetual regret and longing for a place we only know existed because we remember a keyhole, a tile, the way the threshold was worn under an open door." from Great House by Nicole Krauss

It is the small objects; the ones that look so ordinary but hold the secrets of all that make us human.  The most striking realization I had of this was the first time I walked through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. It was impossible to walk around without a weight on my heart, reading about the beasts humans can be to one another.  Most overbearing for me, though, was the small display of personal effects, collected from victims in the camps: hairbrushes, razors, the small kinds of objects that have no meaning, really, in the context of their daily use. But when considered in light of loss, these tiny items haunted me with the humanity that was denied to their owners, so much so that I had no other option but to retreat to the dark, concrete room where you hear stories of survivors piped in through speakers and let the darkness settle. 

This narrator is an antiques dealer, specializing in objects seized by the Nazis.  He searches all over the world to find the objects that hold the weight in the world within them for some.  I love how Krauss' characters often have a respect for the small details of life that speak volumes of who we are as a people. The fate of this dealer, though, is wrapped in the inability to put the pieces of his broken life back together again--the impossibility to curate a moment that has passed, and he is left standing the burden of unbearable longing, which I think is humanity's signature. 

An Illusion? A mess? The American Pastoral?

I had a bit of a packing quandary when I was leaving New York for two months.  Determined only to have a carry on, I did not realize the impact this would have on my reading life.  I only had room for three books, which I hoped would last me through my trip to Colorado, 5 weeks later. Fail. This is the only time I found myself wishing I had a Sony Reader (take a look how Sony has been supporting education here, thanks to Kenneth Byers), as the idea of reading books electronically skeeves me out a little bit, but would have been so practical for the summer.  Anyway, I spotted American Pastoral by Philip Roth on a San Diego neighbor's bookshelf and borrowed it.  I justify buying books all of the time, so this is a pretty big step for me. It is also my first jump off my summer reading list.  Sometimes I type the way I talk and give a lot of background information.  Anyway.

American Pastoral is a book that beyond its intricate narration and literary value, covers a lot of material between its cover: ethnic relations, industrial history, politics, war and family, but most of all it is a book about illusion and coming to grips with reality.  Reading this as I've been rewatching Mad Men episodes and watching the premiere, the question that I can't stop thinking about is how do we cultivate lives filled with meaning? The number of movies and television shows and books dedicated to the emptiness that people feel (Catcher in the Rye, Revolutionary Road, etc.) can make the world feel bleak.

The illusions. 
The book is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who shows up in a number of Roth's books.  Through a series of events, including his a 45 year high school reunion, he learns the adult story of Seymour "The Swede" Levov, his (and his town's) adolescent idol, whose athletic victories helped ease the weariness of World War Two.  Zuckerman, well into adulthood, was under the impression that the Swede's life maintained its childhood perfection.  He learns facts that prove otherwise and begins to ponder about the nature of human relationships: "The pictures we have of one another. Layers and layers of misunderstanding. Completely cocked up.  Only we go ahead and we live by these pictures. "

I started to think about the pictures that our culture has of one another: advertisements that allow us to misunderstand what will add value to life.  Photoshopped pictures in magazines that allow us to misunderstand what beauty is.  Even facebook photos allow us to think that everyone else's life is anything but lonely.   I can picture these misunderstandings snowballing in our minds--layers and layers--and as we live by them we are only more disillusioned and further from what is actually true.

The messes.
The structure of the book speaks volumes in and of itself.  The first section, "Paradise Remembered" is about the youth of the narrator and the main character, a time when following the local high school sports team is an umbrella from reality, where despite the larger fears that have swallowed the adult population, the narrator remembers the safety of childhood.  Aptly named, the second part is "The Fall," when the main character, Seymour "Swede" Levov's daughter commits an act of political terrorism and all of the Swede's visions of his American pastoral are shattered.  The final section, "Paradise Lost" follows how his life essentially falls apart in the aftermath:

"Initiating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of utopian thinking...The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its anthithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral--into the indigenous American berserk."

Is the American berserk a better description for what happens to us? It was jarring for me that the book ends in the midst of the berserk--or, rather, that the world continued to be out of control and the characters are left to choose how to respond.  I watched the characters become paralyzed at the realization that life had not come to what they always thought it would.

This post has remained in draft form for a few days because I have no idea how to wrap it up.  The shattering of illusion and the inability to deal with the mess that is life hits the reader over the head as the story weaves in and out of countless moments in the past that lead up to the disastrous state we find the characters in at the end.  I could think and talk about this book for a long time. But here are a few conclusions.  We cannot control anything.  It is easy to create illusions. It is easy to believe illusions.  We cannot prevent messes.

I think that the book critiques obviously the absurdities of the American culture of privilege and entitlement.  And though I really believe that hope can change our lives, if we are hoping in what is purely material or the idea that it's possible to cultivate a life on earth insulated from pain and suffering, we will surely find ourselves wandering in the American berserk.  So, I guess rather than going on about ideas on how to cultivate a life of real meaning, I will leave you to think about it.  Or call me to get some coffee.  I will absolutely be thinking about this for some time to come.

reading. history. and reading historical fiction.

David Brooks is pretty solid.  One of his editorials this week was about the importance of liberal arts degrees in an economic time when it seems more smarter to study something that is more directly practical to a specific job. Reading (and looking at art/studying history/listening to music, etc.) makes us people more in touch with the complex depths of humanity that cannot be measured, quantified or simply named.

Last weekend, a student asked me to read Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosay. Though it will never be a book award winner, it was a relatively well written, powerful story about July 16, 1942, when the French government rounded up thousands of its own men, women and children to be delivered to to concentration camps.  Sadly, this event was not something that was taught in French history classes until recently--which is sadly too often the case for the darkest moments of any country's history.

The story follows a ten year old girl who was taken from her home and a modern American woman who moved to Paris after college and has lived there for 25 years stumbles up on her story and realizes her personal connection to it.  As she visits the lonely, rarely visited places of the roundup, the plaques read "remember and never forget," though she realizes that most people have intentionally chosen to forget, believing that it is a safer, less painful path.

In relation to historical fiction, without story, history often becomes memories of menial note taking and impersonal timelines.  We lose the deep, complex narrative of the human race.  I was appalled that I had no idea this happened in France. Similarly, I was appalled that I moved to New York with a college degree in hand, and had no idea about what happening in the Sudan.  I took two classes about African women writers. Curses.

The moment people begin to forget its own dark corners is the moment that they become closer to resurfacing.  And, on the opposite end, the second we begin to forget the bright moments is when we lose our grasp on what is real, good and true and therefore lose everything, collectively or as individuals.

On clouds. Sort of.

If I count my college friends and their current careers, I am not joking when I say that all of them (ten or more) are currently employed as teachers, counselors or youth workers. I do think this is something of an anomaly, but still, crazy.  It was amazing to live life with people whose passions overlapped so deeply with my own.  

Obviously the world opened up in a million different ways when I moved to New York seven years ago.  One of which is that I made friends in every field possible: finance, consulting in every capacity, fashion, art, real estate, non profits, law.  Being around all these different kinds of people only enhanced my nerd-like nature and made me want to be constantly learning more.  It has been through knowing such a group of diversified interests that has fueled my interest in uncovering the need the world has for a balance of macro thinkers (simply, how the world needs to change and operate on a large scale) and micro thinkers (how the world needs to change and operate on a small scale). 

I am a micro person.  My best skills are found in a single classroom of thousands in Brooklyn alone.  My best moments in my career typically occur while having a conference with a thirteen year old student about a book they read or a story they wrote.  But, my current theory is that micros need to be macro-ly aware and macros need to be micro-ly aware. 

So. Finally, my point. Literature lends itself to knowing more about both.  Therefore, everyone should read more books. 

I have been on a historical kick lately.  I'm currently reading two books about Vietnam: All the Broken Pieces (young adult) by Ann E. Burg and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.  I am learning the broad strokes of the war, through the narratives themselves and the research they have both led me to: causes, complications, perspectives from both sides.  And then, obviously, there are the stories of the characters where the Vietnam war begins to have faces, reminding the reader that war is intensely personal and involves hearts and hopes, devastation and destruction.   A good friend of mine  recently posted a quotation on his blog, via Wired Magazine, that I haven't been able to get out of my mind for some time: 

"Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds."


I think, that if are to move forward as a people, be it in energy, poverty, healthcare or education, we have to remember that we are a universe of clouds: we cannot figure it all out in a theoretical equation, but without the theoretical equation we may not be able to progress.  I also think that if we all read more books, the world would be a better place. Just saying. 

Anyway. These are just thoughts. 

3 Books. 1 Train of Thought.

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I am reading All the Broken Pieces, set in the United States just after the Vietnam War, to my seventh graders.  For context, I've been teaching lessons on the Vietnam War and its causes, the atmosphere in the United States afterwards and asking students to think about war in general. The main character is a Vietnamese boy, Matt Ping, who has been adopted by an American family. The book is in verse and one of the metaphors that Matt uses is that freedom is the color of his toddler brother's red shoes on the swing.  When I asked my students what they thought that meant, I was blown away by their understanding that demonstrated a (newfound) awareness of the world outside the safety of childhood. In response to the metaphor, a student said that freedom is the ability to live without the burden and weight of the knowledge of things like war.

This came after I realized that my reading life has been inundated lately with the question of how we are meant to live in light of what we know to be true and good. This question is never far from my mind, but I've found easy to hide from.

I am finally reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, which is the story of Chris McCandless: his disdain for modern American culture and his journey across the country and eventually to his death in the Alaskan wilderness, a place where he sought out true existence off of land, inspired by the trancendentalists and Tolstoy and Jack London, completely away from all that society has become and all the ways it burdened him.

Krakauer writes of Chris' love of London: "He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness."  I guess this is the struggle that exists between idealism and realism, which is incredibly frustrating.  The question always becomes how are we supposed to live in a world that is so broken and seems to worship all the things that don't have true value?

Krakauer includes the following quote before a chapter describing Chris' reasons for deserting the lifestyle he was raised in: "To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and rxiles. Here the leaders of the great religious have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality." (Paul Shepard) McCandless was seeking the same kind of exile.  A fiction character who embarked on a completely different kind of exile is John Andrew Corrigan of Let the Great World Spin: 

"Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where he was supposed to go. He stayed where he was needed. He took little or nothing along. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery...What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties."  Corrigan was a secret man of faith--who left Ireland to live in the Bronx, bought coffee for the prostitutes he befriended and owned next to nothing. Like McCandless, he gave away almost everything he acquired. But unlike McCandless, he sought out beauty in the people the world forgets rather than in solitude and nature.

So. What all this translates into in my mind is how are we choosing to live?  It is far too easy to slip into patterns that try mimic glossy advertisements and mistake things for reasons for being.  When I read of people like McCandless and Corrigan (though fictional) I always wonder how they live out of such unselfish ideals.  Though, my favorite part of the book is how Corrigan poetically and painfullly grapples with his and humanity's fallenness...and I suppose that it will always be just that: each day making choices for the things that really matter.  Stepping out of the conditioned false securities that we cling to.  Having the courage to be a bit unconventional. 

All that said, I highly recommend all of these books.  

The missing piece.

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"From a hundred paces, Salome could see the dirt under these girls' fingernails, but not their wings," (12).  This. breaks. my. heart. 


The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver gave me so much to think about that I've had a really hard time choosing how exactly to respond.  Its creative structure of journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings and archivist's notes tells the life story of Harrison Shepherd, half Mexican, half American, who begins the story as a a lonely yet adventurous boy on an island in Mexico.  His path crosses with the lives of some of history's most interesting character's: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky.  He goes on to move to North Carolina and lead a very quiet life as a writer.  There aren't enough pages to go into all that the story touches on: The 1932 Bonus March in Washington, DC, the culture of the Red Scare, the relationship between art and politics...so for now I will zoom in on what I thought was one of the most relevant themes in the book, the title itself. 


The word lacuna has multiple meanings, but I want to focus on one: it means "the missing piece" and in the story refers to the fact that "...you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece...That is the heart of the story," (325).  


This is the heart wrenching complexity of human relations: we are quick to judge without knowing someone's story and yet, once we do hear it, there is typically some kind of inner backlash: 


I wish I would have known that.
That completely changes the way I thought of that person.
Oh, it all makes sense. 
Now I'm the ass. 


I like to settle myself into the optimist's camp (that I don't think is mutually exclusive with naivete), believing that if we looked at people differently, the world would change.  It pains me that even as I type this it seems like a banal idea. But really, if we looked for, or even lived under the assumption that everyone has a complex story, layered with wrongs given and wrongs received, fragile hearts despite iron exterior, I think we'd all be a little less angry.  A little less annoyed. A little more forgiving. A little more apt to see the beautiful?


Kingsolver's treatment of this concept in the book is much more deep and complex than I could ever begin to explore in a blog post, but it all underlines what I love about literature: that you get to know the inner lives and motivations of characters and have a bit of a window into humanity.  Kingsolver said in a recent interview:  "Literature will always be political: It cultivates empathy for a theoretical stranger by putting you inside his head, allowing you to experience life from his point of view." 


Sigh. 

Mean Girls. And a bit more on how a tea kettle or coffee pot just might save the world.

Starting a few months ago, The Help by Kathryn Stockett seemed to be everywhere.  I saw it on book blogs, heard people casually mention it in passing and saw it reviewed in a few magazines.  My mom read it, so I planned on it being my Christmas break read: a hardcover that I wouldn't have to transport in my suitcase because I'd read the whole thing in Kentucky.  But somehow between the family watching season one of our favorite show, The Closer, and my mom and I basking in both of our weeks off from work by gallavanting around Louisville and the movie theater, I had to haul the book back to New York. Anyway.

The Help chronicles the story of the black housekeepers who worked for white families in Jackson, Mississippi during the most intense times of the Civil Rights movement.  Jackson seemed a world away from the activism that is occurring all over the country, tucked into its own social hierarchies.  One of the main characters nicknamed Skeeter comes from a white family.  Skeeter, now out of college with no husband, feels her singleness as she watches her friends from high school get married, purchase homes and have children.  She struggles as she wants to have these things, but at the same time has aspirations and ideas that surpass her friends' contentment with where they are in life and the pity they feel for her for not having attained those same things yet.  

Through a course of events, Skeeter attempts to put her dream of writing into reality by writing the stories of the black housekeepers in the towns.  Two of those women, Aibileen and Minny, make up the other two narrative voices.  Skeeter's eyes are opened to the reality and deep seated racism that exists in her hometown, in the homes of her friends, her boyfriend, her parents and herself.  Two big ideas were running through my mind as I read this book.

One, Skeeter's friends drove me crazy (as I think they were supposed to).  Adult women acting like catty teenagers rallying around the most popular girl is disgusting.  I will never fully understand the spell that happens to girls who desperately want approval from the girl who has proven herself to be the meanest, but also the most powerful.  Watching this in the lives of my students is heartbreaking.  Watching this in the lives of grown women is infuriating.  Skeeter's best friend from high school is painted as the archenemy, doing whatever it takes to maintain the lines of racism, privilege and power in Jackson.  To go against her is to throw oneself into social isolation.  It was interesting to see how Stockett crafted the development the these female characters. 

The part that I enjoyed the most in the story was watching the unlikely friendships form between Skeeter and the women she interviewed in order to write their stories.  Though at first uncomfortable and risky  for all parties involved, evening interviews at Aibileen's house over coffee and tea was when barriers began to break down.  These women were able to see each other as people with stories and struggle to the point where Skeeter felt more comfortable on "the other side of town" than she did on her own.  I was reading Three Cups of Tea at the same time as The Help and I did not expect them to overlap in this way, though it underlines the fact that taking the time to know people is the best way for healing and peace.  And true friendship. 

An artist.

Although I've read Sylvia Plath, I've never really studied her work in depth.  Although I vaguely knew her story of passion, poetry and suicide, I did not read The Bell Jar until I took a class about Literature and Cold War Culture.  It offered a completely different immersion into the era: though McCarthyism and the Rosenburgs linger at the edges of the text, it addresses themes of art, women's roles and depression.  In graduate school I had a four hour writing class once a week where we convinced our teacher that we should go see Sylvia and discuss it over drinks afterward instead of class.  She agreed so long as we studied and wrote about her poetry in preparation. Done. By the end of all this, I could hold a  decent conversation on her and haven't read much of her since.

A lot of my students in Brooklyn are much more intellectual than I ever was in middle school and I'm always trying to find books that will inspire them and sate their curiosity. I heard about Your Own, Sylvia last year at a conference and it has been sitting on my book shelf ever since. I've been trying to do research about young adult literature for girls and various genre writing for kids in general, so I finally picked it up. By the end, I was pretty floored. (See previous post for general overview and style notes.)  Though I am not the primary audience for the book, the research and footnotes were incredibly helpful and the poems the book was written in impressive. But this is not what I want to mainly discuss.

I had a few students in mind who I thought would really fall in love with Plath...they are girls who see through the sometimes shallow, always awkward, existence that is middle school.  They read with feminist lenses at the age of 12. As I was reading Your Own, Sylvia, I realized that though Plath is different from the average woman in the 1950's in so many ways, she was at core a struggler, just like the rest of us.  She was painfully meticulous, studious and ambitious while at the same time dating multiple people at once and when she married, seemed to fall just behind her husband.  But she wrestled and lived with her heart--and that may be what makes an artist: one who struggles rather than succumbs.

And so, I relearned what the world has been trying to make me see for the past seven years or so: that beauty comes from struggle and no one really has their act together. And perhaps that is what the adolescent girls who read this book need to hear most of all.

The House of the Spirits.

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Isabel Allende's epic of the Trueba and del Valle families is filled with every provocative theme in literature: love, violence, betrayal, mysticism, wealth, poverty, and politics. My book club picked it in direct response to The Savage Detectives, whose author Roberto Bolano detested Allende along with the established canon of Latin American literature.

Stylistically and developmentally, they couldn't be more different. The thread that runs through both of them is a desire to have life restored to what we (first person plural because I think that this is in all of us to some degree) feel it should be: beautiful. The following passages serve almost as a call to action from Allende's voice herself: to tell the the stories that need to be told and to search for beauty in the broken. First:

"Cement walls were erected to hide the most unsightly shantytowns from the eyes of tourists and others who preferred not to see them. In a single night, as if by magic, beautifully pruned gardens and flowerbeds appeared on the avenues; they had been planted by the unemployed, to create the illusion of a peaceful spring."

This creating of an illusion is present in the smallest of ways in our lives like not admitting to failure, or being more concerned with image rather than person and not wanting to get mixed up with other people's messes. And in the largest: gated communities, displacement of people in the name of development, serving those with the most money to throw at the economy. I want to be a person who prefers to see the messes and know the people. Living in illusion to truth seems more dangerous than the other way around.

And second:
"Clara also brought the saving idea of writing in her mind, without paper or pencil, to keep her [Alba's] thoughts occupied and to escape from the doghouse and live. She suggested that she write a testimony that might one day call attention to the terrible secret she was living through, so that the world would know about this horror that was taking place parallel to the peaceful existence of those who did not want to know, who could afford the illusion of a normal life, and of those who could deny that they were on a raft adrift in a sea of sorrow, ignoring, despite all evidence, that only blocks away from their happy world there were others, these others who live or die on the dark side."

If we are to break down the illusion, we need books and art and music that are courageous enough to tell the story of the mess of humanity. And people who are not scared to steep in these stories for a while and be changed.

And I think that if we start letting grace seep into our own messes and of those closest to us, we'd be a step closer to abandoning the illusion and finding beauty and hope in the broken?

The Shock Doctrine and an english major's never ending existential struggle with economics.

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My concession before you read this is that somehow I got away with never taking an economics class. I even got away with linguistics in lieu of statistics or calculus in college. But. Being a literature major enabled me to know pieces the human story. I'm not exactly sure of how to frame what I'm thinking, so bear with me and my apologies if I sound a bit scattered.

I am a fan of organization and productive work. I also work for New York City and am fully aware of how inefficient the system is. My hope is always that someday someone will be in charge who not only understands how to run the enormous school system with financial intelligence but who also understands education: children and learning are not equations where you can guarantee an certain outcome because life gets in the way. The variables in my job include broken homes, hormones, poverty, peer pressure, family pressure, teenage angst, the list goes on. But this post isn't just about education.

I hate the reality that in our society people are rarely, if ever, the bottom line.

While reading The Shock Doctrine I learned of countless examples of the government and the wealthy "shocking" a financial system with the hope that it would eventually create a healthier living environment for people, but that ultimately provided themselves with more wealth while the average person faced with huge struggles to make ends meet and reconfigure themselves in a different world while waiting for it all to get better.

In the introduction to the fourth part of the book, Klein includes the following quote: "The worst of times give rise to the best of opportunities for those who understand the need for fundamental economic reform" (Haggard/Williamson). My question is what kind of opportunities are being sought after? Opportunities to make our world sustainable? Opportunities to enable the majority of people to have peaceful, fulfilling lives? Who benefits? "Are they [free market idealogues] driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment...or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered freedom while still invoking an altruistic motive?" (297).

It's not that I don't understand capitalism. Competition and compensation provide motive. Communism failed. But money can't always be the bottom line, even in individual lives: if we accumulate wealth but then spend all of our time working, what is the point? Does a one or two week vacation make up for living life in an office? Having money makes life easier, but doesn't necessarily make life good. Good living is laughing with family. Eating with friends. Breathing deeply and looking for the beautiful. I'm sure at this point you may be laughing and calling me naive, old fashioned (or midwestern!) but I'm ok with that.

Klein talks a lot about the privatization of government jobs and current government responsibilities and I feel like this quote does a good job explaining my frustrations (from the introduction to chapter 15): "There's something civil servants have that the private sector doesn't. And that is the duty of loyalty to the greater good--the duty of loyalty to the collective best interest of all rather than the interest of a few. Companies have duties of loyalty to their shareholders, not to the country"(David M. Walker, comptroller). Privatization can provide greater efficiency, but is the value of life and the human narrative figured into the equation or just the financial bottom line? I just think that before policies are made, the policy-makers should look at the faces of the people it will affect and hear their stories.

I'll close with this: no matter where you fall politically, I feel like this was a highlight of Obama's speech last week:

"You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, and the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter – that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves."

poetry is a metaphor.

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Signs of a good weekend: 16 miles on a yellow vintage bike, a long brunch with favorites, strolling in my city, crazy summer storms seen through my window while making risotto for tonight and polenta for tomorrow, finishing the book I started in Barcelona (yes, that was on July 31st)

True to form, in Spain I packed up my fear of being without ample reading material for each spare moment and brought 3 books. It is a bit of a blow to my pride to admit that I didn't finish one of them, but not for lack of trying. The Savage Detectives was a long one and I'm not even sure how to approach writing about this book, as what I really need is a college lit class to unpack it all in the context of post modern Latin American writing.

Roberto Bolano sandwiches the book with journal entries of a boy that tell the story of a three month adventure with the two main characters, poets Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, the founders of the "visceral realist" poetry movement in Mexico. The middle of the book tells their story from almost every possible perspective except their own.

Bolano is quoted in the introduction to the English translation as saying "All of Latin America is sown with the bones of its forgotten youths." I cannot get this quotation out of my mind; that what is most true and most representative of a people is lost in those whose faces deemed not worth knowing, words not worth believing, voices not worth hearing. In The Savage Detectives, these youth are resurrected, but in such a fleeting, poetic manner that the reader is not quite sure how to hold onto or even respond to them.

One of the narrators is an older man, haunted by the poetry of his youth and fascinated by the young poets he finds in front of him. This passage speaks volumes:

Like so many Mexicans, I too, gave up poetry. Like so many thousands of Mexicans, I too turned my back on poetry. Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too, when the moment came, stopped writing and reading poetry. From then on, my life proceeded along the drabbest course you can imagine.

Do we grow up and forget the poetry of our own youth? Is the poetry of the youths most likely forgotten too painful to bear? Too close to our own? Too much of a reminder of what defines actual life?

Revolutionary Road. Do not watch this before going to bed unless you want to be up all night.

Last night I watched Revolutionary Road and I'm trying to think of words to describe it other than "bleak and utterly depressing."

If you haven't seen it or read the book, it follows the story of April and Frank Wheeler who, with a slight chip on their shoulders, believe that they are better than their suburban Connecticut counterparts; that they aren't going to buy into the delusion of the American dream despite their picturesque home, 2 children and his good (though unfulfilling) job. The 1955 setting adds to April's feeling of entrapment and some of the social pressure Frank feels.

It's interesting because I usually associate entitlement with my own generation...but usually that entitlement still resounds within the modern American Dream...wanting the life that it took our parents decades to build almost immediately after college. The Wheelers sense of entitlement is that they think that there should be something more to life for them.

And they're right. There is something more to life--but I think I think I think that it is completely separate from our place and our things (though I am in love with my city and I am guilty of saying my life would be perfect if I only had a porch and a grill). My sweet poet friend Shannon titled a photo album "The Land of the Living" and that phrase jumped out at me (as I was online after watching this movie, trying not to fall asleep thinking about the bleak and utterly depressing film). I guess I feel like the minute we...I start living out of routine and checking the boxes of what needs to get done I stop living. But when I remember that its about loving people and that everyone has a story to tell and that there are little moments waiting to make me smile, I am reminded about what living really is.

So my question is what makes up your land of the living? What are the things that remind you that life is beautiful?

One of my favorites is from 2002 when I was driving with a caravan of 3 mini vans back to Ohio from a spring break spent camping trip on an island in Florida. Sitting in the front passenger seat, playing my favorite songs with the windows down and my hand rising and falling with the air outside of it and orange blossoms in bloom, my friend Sarah and I could do nothing but smile and declare ironically at the end of a vacation, on our way back to gray Ohio March that life is good. A passage from The Secret Life of Bees describes this feeling perfectly:

"I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked back from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way."

And even though they're fictional, I wish that the Wheelers could see how such small moments connect the dots of our existence--giving it beauty and meaning alongside the sorrow and disappointments.