The Autumn Rain

2012-02-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

I get to see him next week!

(Photo credit: my Ladybird.)

I was a ten-year-old existentialist

2012-02-05T13:19:00.000-08:00

Have you read Annie Dillard's An American Childhood? I love all of her books, not because they fundamentally changed my perspective on anything, but because they--more than any other book I read as a teenager--reinforced what I had already vaguely and inarticulately suspected: that the world was startling, that beauty was unexpected yet omnipresent, and that, as Dillard puts it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the least I could do was try to be there.

One of my favorite passages from An American Childhood describes what happens when children "wake up and find themselves here":

Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand: precisely, toe hits toe. The tern folds its wings to sit; its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast.

Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertip on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.

I never woke, at first, without recalling, chilled, all those other waking times, those similar stark views from similarly lighted precipices: dizzying precipices from which the distant glittering world revealed itself as a brooding and separated scene--and so let slip a queer implication, that I myself was both observer and observable, and so a possible object of my own humming awareness. (11-12)

Dillard claims that this awakening occurs at age ten, a number that seems arbitrary but is, in my case, uncannily accurate. One January, at the age of ten, I literally (but accidentally) fell into a pool, and it was also at about this age that my journal entries begin to shift from diligent records of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and houses I wanted to build (they all had personal libraries) to reflections on who I was. Like Dillard's "any child," the fit was perfect, the reflection accurate. Climbing out of the pool in January, with my bedraggled self sealed at the toes, I was not discomfited to find that I was the oldest of six, a sister, a daughter, a cousin, someone who went to church and moved across state lines, someone who liked to read and write, someone who did not like math but loved Jesus.

Satisfied with the present, I began to write about who I wanted (and believed I ought) to be: a mother, a good Christian, a writer, a traveler, possibly a missionary--although the attractiveness of this latter vocation was evidently dependent on whether the Southern Baptist church was currently holding a revival. In the turmoil of 1999, when all signs pointed to the death of computers, widespread famine, and interminable war ("Yikes!" my eleven-year-old self commented, having duly recorded these as possibilities), I prayed that the world would last long enough for me to go to college. I hoped that, the circumstances notwithstanding, this modest goal would not be too much to ask of a God whom I understood to be essentially kind and benevolent, if occasionally stern.

My own emergence into self-awareness, unlike Dillard's childhood self, was thus colored by the surprising discovery that the "I" under observation was in fact not a determinate object at all. The identities I had recently and happily owned were not static. Quite the contrary, I could see that myself was already on its way to being someone else, that I was waist-deep in possibility, and that the waters were rising fast.

Excellence

2012-02-03T09:50:00.000-08:00

The most virtuous man I have ever met was standing at the front of my church last Sunday morning. He was about four feet tall and had cheeks like apples, and he was shifting bashfully among the clutch of youngsters lined up on the first step of the altar. They were raising money for a cause, the teacher said. And so far the children had been diligent: one jar was already filled with coins and bills, the pocket-change of obliging adults and the occasional sacrifice of a month's allowance.

The apple-cheeked boy had led the drive, the teacher said, motivating the others to give with his extravagant weekly offerings. So she invited him to explain to the congregation why he had done so:

"Do you want to tell us about how God laid this on your heart?" (Her words, not mine; this is one stock phrase from my discourse community that makes me acutely uncomfortable.)

He accepted the proffered microphone, confused. He paused, collecting himself. And then:

"Well," he said. "Well. I knew it was the right thing to do. And so I did it."

Aristotle may have been moved to include our hero in a case study of virtue, its expression and acquisition. Plato would have been downright proud ("What did I say about the power of reason?!" we can imagine him saying.)

As for myself, I can only pray that I, too, may be granted such a purity of motive and action.

***
p.s. The comments thread on the previous post is good. Don't miss out!

"The Shape of a Woman's Heart"

2012-02-01T08:27:00.000-08:00

The Little Boots Liturgies has a series on The Shape of a Woman's Heart right now. It's a little about marriage and motherhood and a lot about identity. And even though I'm squarely in the "manicured twenty-something" category (well, sans the manicure, but twenty-something, yes), and a long way from what she describes, the series resonates. It makes me feel hopeful, and a little terrified, but mostly nourished. Because I know that I will almost certainly have to own some of these choices someday, and it's good to see someone else owning them too--someone who isn't afraid to admit how difficult they are.

From the first entry:

“Eve, don’t you want to be like God?” The allure wasn’t chocolate, or some sensual pleasure, or wealth... something that could be taken into the body and rolled around there and relished. The heart of the promise was identity. She could be more. She could be interesting, and powerful, and beautiful.

Jimminy, I feel this ache. And I know that I am not alone, because I have honest friends.

The older I get, the less my ache is to obtain. I have aged past most of the silly, superficial wants. The daily dying of living has shorn them all off, and my desire has been reduced to the core.

One beast is left, hands held out, begging and demanding. I want to be someone worth being treasured.

I want to elicit delight. I want to elicit interest. I want to have something within me worth lingering over, worth desiring, worth being wanted.

I am Eve. And yes, I do want to be like God. Very much so.

Read entries 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

From the travel journal: Vienna

2012-01-30T09:47:00.000-08:00

I woke this morning thinking of sitting at the Starbucks on Koenigsstr. in Stuttgart, laughing over cheesecake and coffee while the sun beat oppressively down on the summer thoroughfare outside. The moment seemed important because of what we were laughing about: Was it boys? A prospective fairytale? Plans for the future? I don't remember anymore. I do know that, chronologically, it was definitely before any of us had boys or prospective fairytales (unless you count the German to whom I'd been introduced once that summer who, out of the blue, sent me a dozen roses across the Atlantic the next winter.)

Anyhow. I went looking through my journals for the answer, but no luck. I found this instead, this pair of entries about Vienna:

23. August 2009
Wien doesn't call to me like Berlin does. The streets feel cramped and crowded and tourist-filled. Fewer people speak German with us, and things feel more staged--more commercial. People come here from all over the world looking for Europe, and the city exists to give them what they're after. I remember feeling this way about Salzburg, too.

24. August 2009
. . .In the evening, we took the U-Bahn one stop past our hotel to find dinner; what we found was Wien. Suddenly, the streets widened, the houses pulled themselves together, and the light--oh, the light: pouring in sheets over facades of pastel and marble, making the cobbled streets glow ebony by contrast. We bought bread and cheese and chocolate and picnicked beneath the sun-gilded dome of Karlskirche. "This is Europe," we told each other, watching bicyclists pass, letting the breeze dipping away from the fountain brush our faces.

And, "This is Europe," we told each other again, later, when we rounded a corner and found ourselves at the end of a broad, white avenue, luminous in the dusk, with a fountain of crystalline blue and purple and green and gold in the distance, flaming up towards the dark sky.

Our disappointment with the city, the dust and frustration of the train station, tiredness--all of it was swept away by the sudden, overwhelming sensation that we had arrived.

We could call this: Vienna delivers, with irony. We found what we were looking for; in a sense, we created it. And that rounding of the bend, the awesome, flaming light, remains one of the most startlingly beautiful memories of the trip.

Karlskirche in the evening (Vienna, 2009)

Gloaming

2012-01-29T00:00:00.000-08:00

Next to the word "slope," my favorite word in the English language is the word "gloaming." I have loved that word since before I knew what I wanted to do with my life: before college, before high school, before I read Anne and spent days afterwards dreaming of winning scholarships and studying English in remote Canadian schools. I've been reading Joan Didion's new book Blue Nights this week, which begins with a beautiful passage about this liminal space between afternoon and night:

The French called this time of day "l'heure bleue." To the English it was "the gloaming." The very word "gloaming" reverberates, echoes--the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour--carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come. (p. 4)

L'heure bleue. Gloaming. In my house, we've always called it "blue time," an unprecedented nod to our French brethren. Those particular hours when the light dims and the shadows feather, slide, and deepen.

How to celebrate an acceptance letter

2012-01-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

Colores del Sol

(the name of our wine, but also my name for these roses)

My sister came home with her arms full of flowers, and she brought, too, a Malbec from Argentina with hints of cherry, a loaf of fresh bread, and a local cheese. She made a delectable ganache-filled dessert and the soon-to-be brother-in-law suggested an Argentine film he's been wanting to show us (El Hijo de la novia). We were merry while the evening grew long. I felt very loved and very happy.

Do we get to celebrate every acceptance letter? they ask.

(I say, Why not?)

Good news!

2012-01-27T18:36:00.000-08:00

I received my first acceptance email today! The sky was just as blue as that day nearly two years ago, when I first heard about Toronto, and the email arrived at almost the same time. And there it was: the full-fledged possibility of a life in a bustling metropolis on the edge of Lake Michigan, in an outstanding department, with funding; an impossibly real possibility, springing up at me like an intricate, enormous scene from a pop-up book. I am so delighted and so thankful and so, so, so relieved.

It's too soon to tell what will happen. But I would be happy with just this--a top school from the top of my list. I only needed one "yes."

Maritime lullabye

2012-01-24T23:11:00.000-08:00

Tonight I am listening to the wind around a sleeping house. Anxious gusts are crashing against the pine trees and foaming through the wind chimes hanging from the front porch. The dark sound breaks and burbles, gasps and groans. We need sunshine--not these waves of rain, not these tides of water rising slowly in the fields, not these beachcomber roads, freshly-strewn each morning with forest refuse (pine needles; snapped branches and the occasional polished tree limb; stranded earthworms gasping out short, sandy breaths). I want a stillness hovering over the waters; I crave calm for my hilltop sea.

Philosophy in action

2012-01-24T14:43:00.000-08:00

I really love this article in the Boston Review on "Citizen Philosophers." Carlos Fraenkel, a philosophy professor at McGill, talks about Brazil's recent legislation requiring philosophy courses in high school and some of the benefits from (as well as obstacles involved in) implementing the requirement.

On the plus side:

[G]iving students the basic semantic and logical tools they need to clarify their intuitions and to analyze arguments for and against their views, philosophy could help to extend and refine the debate that naturally arises in a pluralistic society from conflicting interests, values, and worldviews. And it could also help citizens make wise use of the power they have in a democracy. . .

Fraenkel isn't making this up either. He has evidence. In one high school philosophy class, the instructor

gives [students] the town hall’s phone number for complaints about infrastructure and asks them to find something in their street they want repaired. When one student calls, nothing happens. But when fifteen call, the city reacts. “You see that pothole?” she asks me. “It’s been closed. And that street lantern? It’s been fixed. Thanks to our philosophy class. . . . Politicians can’t afford disgruntled citizens who will vote them out of office.”

That's what I call results. You can read more here.

Never a dull moment

2012-01-23T15:48:00.000-08:00

In the last seven days, we have had snow, flooding, a windstorm, power outages, and a wedding. I have been in two different states, have accepted two new jobs, and am trying to arrange three separate schedules into one that is coherent and workable. My room looks a tornado tore through it (something to add to the list of natural excitement). So January progresses boldly apace, plowing straight through every Wednesday, leaving the spent days bobbing in its wake. And I check my email hopefully, still waiting.

What to do when there is only now

2012-01-19T09:59:00.000-08:00

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.

C.S. Lewis, "Learning in War-Time" (via The Little Boots Liturgies)

Timing

2012-01-18T22:58:00.000-08:00

This one's about timing. About how, when the applications were in and the problem of money loomed large, the phone calls came: for a few extra hours, for an interview for a third job, for tentative hours for a third high school writing student. The calls came no later than the applications were in and exactly no sooner. Because this year, there's no planning ahead; there are not even whispers of shadows of things to come; there's just now--this evening's overtime, this morning's interview, the hopeful casting of wide nets on the promise that, yes, there will be something, and it will be good.

Blue time tobogganing

2012-01-17T17:40:00.000-08:00

How to write clearly

2012-01-16T22:24:00.000-08:00

Back to work tomorrow. Chewing over Brandom's advice on writing this evening:

We professors tell our students that it is important to think and write clearly. No doubt it is. But this can be frustrating advice to receive. After all, presumably no students think that fuzzy thinking and fuzzy writing are better than the alternative. The hard thing is to tell the difference. What, exactly, is one supposed to do in order to think or write more clearly?. . .

Thinking clearly is a matter of knowing, for each claim that you make, what else you are committing yourself to by making it, what you are ruling out, and what would be evidence for or against it. . . . Of course, you may be mistaken about what really does follow from your claims. But that is just a mistake. So long as you are sure what you take to follow from and be evidence for your claim, your mistaken thought is at least clear.

And writing clearly is giving your reader enough clues that she can tell what you mean to be committing yourself to by the claims you make, what you would take to be evidence for or against them, what follows from them, and what they preclude. And once again, this is something you can check for yourself when writing, by asking yourself, for each important consequence you take to follow from one of your claims, how your reader is supposed to know that you take it to be a consequence: what clues have you given to that effect?

(Reason in Philosophy, p. 173; paragraphing mine)

Brandom loves him some italics, but his advice is sound. I only wish more professors would practice what they preach!

p.s. In case you hadn't noticed, the "Books" page now contains brief notes on books finished--not just a thematic list. Just so you know.

As predicted

2012-01-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

Feasting

2012-01-14T12:35:00.000-08:00

On Friday night, we cook rice and stir-fry in my brother's minuscule kitchen. There is a loaf of homemade bread warming in the oven and an open bottle of a peppery red wine on the counter. For appetizers, we slice tomatoes, top them with rounds of a moist smoked mozzarella, and garnish with olive oil, salt, and pepper. The laughter and the aromas draw out the roommates, and we all sit cross-legged on the floor around the low, laden, candle-lit table in the living room--extolling the virtues of rice-cookers and lamenting the stringent requirements of college physics classes and the recent drop in temperature in the Willamette Valley (snow expected tomorrow!). Later, there are the yellow and red walls of del Alma and the warm blend of Brazilian jazz with cups of dark coffee. We order white chocolate cheesecake drizzled with a bright, slightly tangy sauce of pineapple and ginger and indulge in a fruit cobbler bathed in aromatic spices and seasoned with dried cherry and walnut. So delectable it makes my taste-buds ache just remembering it! It was an excellent way to ring in the first week of the winter term and celebrate the end of the application madness.

{If you're ever in Corvallis, del Alma should be on your list of places to taste. And you should definitely try the mozzarella appetizers in the comfort of your own kitchen the next chance you get!}

$1126

2012-01-12T22:24:00.000-08:00

The total cost of my nine graduate school applications--including transcripts, GREs, postage, etc.--was kind of ridiculous. But as of tonight, they are all submitted and paid for.

Highs and lows of the application process.

Lows: (1) Some of the schools are using an online system that doesn't let you randomly navigate between application pages. That means every time you open that application, you have to click through all the pages you've already filled out in order to access the page you want to complete. Lame. (2) Having to compile a list of all assigned authors and texts in my coursework in philosophy--since freshman year! Only one school required this, but boy! was it a pain going through my closet and piles of books to recover forgotten syllabi. I'm sure my list is missing some texts. (3) The writing and rewriting of personal statement(s). Every school wanted something slightly different--some wanted two statements, some wanted one, and the lengths varied wildly (from 300-1000 words). (4) The cost. Obviously.

Highs: (1) Polishing my writing sample. I'm really happy with it now and am excited about getting to present a part of it next month! (2) Online applications that let you randomly navigate. Great time-savers. Every institution should use them. (3) The CV and personal statement (after writing and rewriting). I have accomplished a lot in the last five years, and I think I can tell a compelling story about it, which is half the battle. (4) Even the onerous author/text list made me feel good about myself. That was a 1600 word list, and it only included the titles and the authors that were assigned (not complete bibliographic entries, not things I've read on my own or for most of my term papers, and not including anything I've read for school that was not philosophy-related). I've been a reading fiend!

I'm really grateful that I was able to live at home, rent-free, after returning from Toronto. I don't know how a recent college graduate could afford both applications and rent. Work more, I suppose. But then that's less time to polish your writing sample and statements of purpose: I worked less than part-time in October and November, and when I wasn't working, I was writing; there wasn't a lot of time to spare. I really admire those of you who had to do it the hard way.

For now, though, it's over.

Time to wait.

Sunshine today:

2012-01-10T11:20:00.000-08:00

Seeds of light broadcast by the generous hand of a laughing god, a soaking radiance in the middle of gray winter. January is no time for planting and watering, as the good farmer knows, but hope springs eternal as illumination cascades.

Round-up

2012-01-09T09:49:00.000-08:00

I've had these two articles in the queue for a few weeks now. The fact that I still remember them, even after all the Christmas/New Year hullabaloo is a testimony to their quality.

"The Future of History" (Francis Fukuyma, Foreign Affairs):
(Great, great reflections on "outlining an ideology of the future"--an ideology that thinks beyond capitalism and leaves welfare liberalism in the dust. It's long though; the meat is in the last two sections. ***The free version of the article is only available until 2/12/12***)

. . . .Politically, the new ideology would need to reassert the supremacy of democratic politics over economics and legitimate anew government as an expression of the public interest. But the agenda it put forward to protect middle-class life could not simply rely on the existing mechanisms of the welfare state. The ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new, technology-empowered approaches to delivering services. It would have to argue forthrightly for more redistribution and present a realistic route to ending interest groups’ domination of politics.

Economically, the ideology could not begin with a denunciation of capitalism as such, as if old-fashioned socialism were still a viable alternative. It is more the variety of capitalism that is at stake and the degree to which governments should help societies adjust to change. Globalization need be seen not as an inexorable fact of life but rather as a challenge and an opportunity that must be carefully controlled politically. The new ideology would not see markets as an end in themselves; instead, it would value global trade and investment to the extent that they contributed to a flourishing middle class, not just to greater aggregate national wealth.

"Do the Classic Have a Future?" (Mary Beard, New York Review of Books):
(Think this is just another whingy piece about the decline of the humanities? Think again. And read on. I was so pleasantly surprised.)

The truth is that the classics are by definition in decline; even in what we now call the “Renaissance,” the humanists were not celebrating the “rebirth” of the classics; rather like Harrison’s “trackers,” they were for the most part engaged in a desperate last-ditch attempt to save the fleeting and fragile traces of the classics from oblivion. There has been no generation since at least the second century AD that has imagined that it was fostering the classical tradition better than its predecessors. But there is of course an up-side here. The sense of imminent loss, the perennial fear that we might just be on the verge of losing the classics entirely, is one very important thing that gives them—whether in professional study or creative reengagement—the energy and edginess that I think they still have.

From the Chapbook: Philosopher's Holiday

2012-01-05T23:35:00.000-08:00

I found Irwin Edman's book Philosopher's Holiday at a used bookstore shortly before Christmas, and C obligingly gifted it to me. Edman was a graduate student and professor at Columbia in the first half of the 20th century; Philosoher's Holiday was published in 1936, about midway through his career (he died in 1954). There were so many things I loved about this book: the reflections on teaching; the meditations on traveling; the relaxed, chummy writing style; and, of course, the sharp observations about philosophers and philosophy. Edman isn't trying to do philosophy in this book, but he does try to make the discipline a little more humane, a little more likeable, to outsiders, and along the way he manages to let us in on his own perspective of the world. He insists it isn't an autobiography, but it is.

I had a hard time winnowing down my quotes for this entry, but have included some of my very, very favorites below. (Keep reading. I've saved the best for last.)

***
p. 21: Everyone has had the sense, on making a chance acquaintance. . ., of having known that person always in essence and of two spirits' having for a long time been, unknown to each other, travelling-companions on the same road. One has the sense of having moved in parallel lines, of having touched the same beauties, shared the same truths, or nourished the same errors, found light by or aspired toward the same stars.

p. 108: "I may as well tell you at once," he said, "I do not approve of your country. I am sorry, but I do not. I do not approve of it at all." . . . "Many Americans do not approve of it completely," I said, "though we are not so thorough-going. There are lots of things we Americans do not approve of in our own country."

[NB: I am totally going to say this the next time some confronts me about my country. So good.]

p. 148: There is indeed a good deal to be said against the modern habit of segregating "philosophers" as a special group attached to universities. . . Teaching breeds the habit of thinking in terms that have a specious lucidity or a dangerous winsomeness or credibility. Moving in "professional" philosophical circles nourishes the tendency, moreover, to become involved in the technique of controversy for its own sake, to become calloused to, negligent of, what Plato called "the great business itself." The amateur philosopher outside the academy may often be loose, and frequently inept, but he will, if he has anything of "philosophy" in him, keep to essential issues in philosophy, the only ones there are, and ultimate things; in philosophy there should be no others.

[NB: I think Edman has a rather optimistic view--in this passage and elsewhere--of what the amateur philosopher can actually accomplish on her own. He praises Spinoza, who was a remarkably successful "non-professional" philosopher, but who was also, I am inclined to think, one of a kind. I appreciate the point about "the technique of controversy" though.]

p. 232: I rather wish now that youngsters were brought to philosophy when it naturally springs upon their imaginations. When they come upon it in college, it is a thing to be studied. But I am sure many of them, like myself, come upon it much earlier. The stick broken in the water, the sense of something deep & far, felt by the sea or in the hills on a summer day, the puzzle & the pathos of time, the uneasiness about the good, have raised questions that one ought not to have to wait until late in one's college career to hear treated as questions worthy of being answered--or of being asked.

[NB: Yes, yes, yes. One of my favorite undergraduate courses was Philosophy for Children. I am just waiting for the moment when I can put what I learned to use.]

p. 265-266: For many with the future looming before us so ominous and desperate, it seems illicit to enjoy the present at all. Yet surely. . .the quality of life is the ultimate aim of any way of living. . . . The desperate uneasiness of our lives (the insecurity is moral even where it is not economic) has brought it about that many people one meets have a scorn for the simple or the ultimate things which alone prevent living from being a harried road to nowhere. . . . One of the tragic destructions effected by the bombs, and a reason for nourishing the delicate and the best, is that they are destroying the peace, the clarity, and the sense of proportion of places and persons far beyond their physical range. The goods of life are not evil because they are insecure. Friends do not cease to be precious because the age is torn with enmities, and because there is gathering darkness we should not put out all lights.

***
See? I told you: best for last. I am so grateful for light.

Rites of passage

2012-01-03T22:02:00.000-08:00

The night before he leaves, he stands on the back porch, barefoot, shirtless, and shivering, while our sister, E, shaves his head. It is already short, but he insists--cheaper now than later, under the shears of a fort barber. The shorn head sets his cheekbones and chin in sharp relief, makes his blue eyes brighter. Our baby, our soldier, all grown up and in camo.

A day later and I am clipping plastic clothespins on bridal gowns with B, making selections on whims and with excellent taste. Who knew there could be so many shades of white and ivory! Who would have guessed the varieties of taffeta, silk, and chiffon! She emerges from the dressing room to showcase sweetheart necklines, empire waists, bows and sashes, trains, bustles, and veils. My little sister, all grown up and glowing in lace.

***

My hair is long, and I'm wearing blue jeans, not lace. But I'm making my own kind of progress. I'm two applications shy of being done, and the writing sample just got accepted to a conference in North Carolina--my first grown-up presentation. It's an auspicious beginning to the year.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T21:06:00.000-08:00

The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year.

It is that we should have a new soul.

G.K. Chesterton

From the Chapbook: Mr. Palomar

2011-12-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of Transparent Things, Vladimir Nabokov writes about the surface of things:

A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. (p. 2)

I recalled these words often as I read Italo Calvino's luminous little book Mr. Palomar. For what Mr. Palomar does is precisely what Nabokov cautions against: he breaks the veneer of reality with all the grit of a philosopher and the naivete of a child. He considers the waves, his front lawn, a gecko who climbs on his window at night, the stars, and the cheeses in a favorite cheese shop, drawing from each of these his own, idiosyncratic conclusions about the universe, his place in it, and ours.

On language:

A stone, a figure, a sign, a word reaching us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign, or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they have shown us, they also have a hidden face, is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning. (p. 97)

On speaking or keeping silent:

Whether he should refrain from expressing his ideas is more debatable. In times of general silence, conforming to the silence of the majority is certainly wrong. In times when everybody says too much, the important thing is not merely to say what is right, which in any event would be engulfed in the flood of words, but to say it on the basis of premises and consequences, so that what is said acquires the maximum value. (p. 103)

On the difficulty of having knowledge, especially of the habits of a flock of starlings:

Mr. Palomar has not yet managed to understand. The explanations offered are all a bit dubious, conditioned by hypotheses, wavering among various alternatives; and that is only natural, since these are rumors that pass from mouth to mouth, while even science, which should confirm or deny them, is apparently uncertain, approximate. Things being as they are, then, Mr. Palomar has decided to confine himself to watching, to establishing down to the slightest detail what little he sees, sticking to the immediate ideas that what he sees suggests. (p. 62)

If the possibility of acquiring knowledge is as bleak as Mr. Palomar concludes, then why bother undertaking an investigation like his in the first place? Here Mr. Palomar does discover something:

Each individual is made up of what he has lived and the way he lived it, and no one can take this away from him. (p. 125)

Is Nabokov right to say that the only way to fully inhabit the present is to refrain from breaking through the surface of things? I'm not so sure. Perhaps, after all, the best way to be is to shatter the tension, to descend open-eyed, like Mr. Palomar, among the impossible fish.

Setting foot in the same river

2011-12-29T12:15:00.000-08:00

Winter Flock (from the archives)

One Friday, pace Heraclitus, I walked through the same flock of birds twice. They were scattered thickly across the sidewalk, a black pool of feathers and pulsing hearts. When I approached, they burst upwards like a geyser, swirled breathlessly around my head, and then settled down across the concrete a few feet in front of me. Foolish, nearsighted birds; I was unstoppable. Three more feet and the pebbles of my stride sent ripples over the surface of the soft water, parted the anxious host. Up they burst; in concert for a second time; a persistent, incorrigible whole.

"creature of milk and black sky"

2011-12-27T22:45:00.000-08:00

The new Ruminate is out (and there's a new version of the website to go with it). My name is in the letters section this season. We wrote in about "things being up in the air;" I wrote about waking up every day 2,600 miles away from my heart.

My favorite poem in this issue is by Karina Borowicz.

***

One Chance

The child's skin is transparent
at the inner corner of the eyes
back of the neck
up along the small soft arm
the veins are being written
in a language we weren't meant
to comprehend

she will grow
neither beautiful nor plain
it is written
there will be work
at the cotton mill
these tiny fingers will spin
barrelsful of the resinous mass
into miles of fine thread
around a towering bobbin

the love of a poor cabinet-maker
eight children
the verses of happiness written
into her body
along with psalms of loss
the black rosary wound
around her daughter's small
cold hands

creature of milk and black sky
the words being written now
upon your body
have been coiled inside their own
silence for so long
waiting for your arrival
their one chance
to be spoken

***

Borowicz has a book forthcoming, The Bees are Waiting. I'm looking forward to it.

Surely goodness and mercy

2011-12-26T23:47:00.000-08:00

It was a gray, happy Christmas here. Among the many things that my parents have done well is to teach us how to give. And so, come Christmastide, we gift elaborately to one another, practically swimming in the ocean of wrapping paper, literally basking in the goodness of generous, grateful hearts. Sometimes I wonder vaguely if it's too much, and of course it is. We don't need all these shiny things. But love itself is a little like this, isn't it? It just keeps welling up. And it doesn't have to be that way, but there it is: overflowing our hollowed hands.

The Way I See It: Birth

2011-12-21T20:19:00.000-08:00

When I first started thinking about Molly's prompt this week, I thought I would share some of my family's Christmas traditions and the special things we do to mark the coming of the Christ child.

Like placing a baby doll in a handmade cradle under the Christmas tree, a reminder of God's gift to us:

Or like the Advent calendars we have used over the years and the snub-nosed holy family, made of more-or-less durable plastic, that we have had since before I was born:

Both these traditions help keep our hearts centered in the midst of the baking-buying, celebratory chaos of the holiday season, although in recent years we have neglected the Advent calender in favor of Advent devotionals.

But then, before I even managed to take pictures, Mama outdid all our previous Christmas observances by announcing a new baby. A real one. Not the kind you put in a cradle under the tree or in a plastic mini-manger of straw. The kind that is birthed into the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the world to grow and live. We are all terrifically excited--my erstwhile-youngest sister most of all, I think. She is keeping track of Baby G's progress in a book that was a staple in our house when I was little:

This week's image:

There is nothing quite like the promise of a real baby to rekindle the joy and thrill of this time of waiting. If you have any "G" names for either a boy or a girl, we are currently accepting submissions ("G" is next in the alphabet).

Wishing you all a blessed Christmas and an equally felicitous New Year.

***

This week's exquisitely apt photo prompt courtesy of Molly at Close to Home.

2011-12-17T22:20:00.000-08:00

Arise, shine, for your light has dawned;
The Presence of the Lord has shone upon you!
Behold! Darkness shall cover the earth,
And thick clouds the peoples;
But upon you the Lord will shine,
And His Presence be seen over you.
And nations shall walk by your light,
Kings, by your shining radiance.

Raise your eyes and look about:
They have all gathered and come to you.
Your sons shall be brought from afar,
Your daughters like babes on the shoulders.
As you behold, you will glow;
Your heart will throb and thrill--
For the wealth of the sea shall pass on to you,
The riches of nations shall flow to you.
Dust clouds of camels shall cover you,
Dromedaries of Midian and Ephah.
They shall all come from Sheba;
They shall bear gold and frankincense,
And shall herald the glories of the Lord.
***
And I will add glory to My glorious House.

(from Isaiah 60, in Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures)

Friday round-up

2011-12-16T21:06:00.000-08:00

"Do as I say, not as I do": "Living by Default" (James Surowiecki, The New Yorker)

When it comes to debt, then, the corporate attitude is do as I say, not as I do. And, while homeowners are cautioned to think of more than the bottom line, banks, naturally, have done business in coldly rational terms. . .

Of course, many borrowers made bad decisions and acted irresponsibly. But so did lenders—by handing out too much money and not requiring sensible down payments. So far, banks have been partially insulated from the consequences of those bad decisions, because Americans have been so obliging about paying off overinflated mortgages.

Research simplified: ReadCube: Free Reference Manager
Ht: The Philosophy Smoker. I've been needing something like this for my burgeoning collection of .pdf's. The annotation feature is especially attractive--but I haven't had much time to play around with it yet.

College tuition and faculty salaries: "Buying the Professor a BMW" (Perry Zirckel and Jean Johnson, Inside Higher Ed)

[T]he relationship between parental costs and faculty compensation is far from direct or one-for-one. In analyzing the complex picture, most experts have concluded that the biggest driver of spiraling tuition costs for public colleges and universities has been the decline in state appropriations.

Making theism safe for science: "Philosopher Sticks Up for God" (Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times)

Mr. Plantinga says he accepts the scientific theory of evolution, as all Christians should. Mr. Dennett and his fellow atheists, he argues, are the ones who are misreading Darwin. Their belief that evolution rules out the existence of God — including a God who purposely created human beings through a process of guided evolution — is not a scientific claim, he writes, but “a metaphysical or theological addition.”

Chilly, chilling fiction. This short story will make you uncomfortable: "Stone Mattress" (Margaret Atwood, The New Yorker)

Why should she be the only one to have suffered for that night? She’d been stupid, granted, but Bob had been vicious. And he’d gone scot-free, without consequences or remorse, whereas her entire life had been distorted. The Verna of the day before had died, and a different Verna had solidified in her place: stunted, twisted, mangled. It was Bob who’d taught her that only the strong can win, that weakness should be mercilessly exploited. It was Bob who’d turned her into—why not say the word?—a murderer.

The little engine that could

2011-12-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

More deadlines tomorrow. Personal statements are practically second nature by now. And my writing sample? It's just getting better and better--thanks to much revising and, of course, thanks to copious feedback from generous readers (you know who you are). Just when I think I can't change another thing, I discover I can, and I do.

The Way I See It: White

2011-12-11T17:31:00.000-08:00

Some years, this is as close as we get to a white Christmas:

Just these billows of pale, dying grass and the chill blue of a clear sky.
Or translucent beads of rain strung along green threads.

We know it's December, though--by the way the air burns in our lungs when we leave the house and by the way a coat is never enough. The weather leaves us rummaging through drawers for gloves and scarves, and the days are strangely volatile: clouds burst, sun shines, fog descends,

and bows--the essence of white--

they just break inexplicably through:

***
This is my contribution to Molly's "The Way I See It" photo meme. Join the fun here.

Where were you...

2011-12-09T21:16:00.001-08:00

...on July 24, 2010?

See what the rest of the world was doing here.*

Compiled from over 80,000 YouTube submissions by contributors in 192 countries, Life in a Day presents a microcosmic view of our daily experiences as a global society. From the mundane to the profound, everything has its place as we spend 90 minutes gaining greater insight into the lives of people who may be more like us than we ever suspected, despite the fact that we're separated by incredible distances.

It will be the most beautiful and exhilarating 90 minutes of home video you will ever see. Promise.

*My sister and I actually recognized one of the contributors--a local who stops by the campus library to sell eggs to the staff. In the video, she describes the contents of her purse.

What keeps me up at night:

2011-12-08T11:43:00.001-08:00

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy. I had to try the first book twice. The first time, I gave up after a few pages of the simple, mediocre prose; the second time, I made it to the plot and couldn't stop until it was done. Collins is not a word-smith, but she's a fantastic story-teller. What made the books for me was the smart blend of Greek mythology and reality TV, plus an intriguing post-apocalypse setting. Not a masterpiece, but definitely worth reading. Recommended.

Today, 2011:

2011-12-07T19:26:00.001-08:00

The Writing Center's annual Christmas party. Hot soups and bread. Mashed potatoes. Shrimp and rice concoctions. Frosted cake balls, pumpkin cookies, peppermint fudge. We exchanged gifts and talked about the highlights of 2011. When it was my turn, I said: Falling in love. Which about sums it up.

Like link

2011-12-06T20:05:00.001-08:00

The Good Women Project had a great post on "Anger, Cat-calls, and Forgiveness" last week. This topic is a near and dear one, although I don't talk about it much here. Until I moved away from home last year, I was surrounded by men who respected me for what I could do and who I was, and not just for what I looked like or how I could make them feel. In Toronto, I realized that not everyone thinks about or relates to women this way, and I was horrified. Really. Sometimes walking down the street or into a particular conversation made me feel like I had regressed about 100 years. I hated it: it was threatening and derogatory, and it made me feel helpless, because there was nothing I could do to change those attitudes or disarm those words and what they implied about women (even if they weren't directed at me and even if the people saying them were otherwise genuinely nice).

I don't have any solutions to offer, but I do think Grace is on the right track: setting aside the large-scale social and political changes that would have to occur to make environments more hospitable to women, the best thing individual women can do is to react to these kinds of situations out of a spirit of graciousness and forgiveness rather than anger. You can read the whole post here. The comments are interesting too.

Notes and recommendations

2011-12-01T17:25:00.001-08:00

So November is over and done in a swirl of leaves and paper. My first PhD application is due next Tuesday with the others following throughout the month, and today I submitted two applications--one for a conference, the other for a summer seminar. Work is winding up, too, since finals are approaching and papers are coming due.

Christmas looms ever nearer. I am looking forward to garland-making and story-telling and Christmas shopping. Last year I did all of my Christmas shopping in three hectic hours at the Eaton Centre during a forced break from paper-writing. It was a success, but not nearly as enjoyable as it ought to have been. However, if Thanksgiving is a reliable indicator, I will relish it this year (this Thanksgiving, for the first time in five years, I wasn't writing a philosophy paper).

Highly recommended:

Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. I don't even care that this recommendation is over a decade late: read it.

Cassio Vianna's new album Letters to Grace. Yes, he's my sister's fiance, but my recommendation goes beyond family loyalty. I've had the CD on repeat in my car for the last week. It's Brazil meets Oregon: rain meets samba. Many of the lyrics were translated from Portuguese by Donna Henderson, whose poetry inspired this post. My favorite songs are "Rain Samba" and "Letter to Grace." Download a song for free here.

Merry Christmas!

2011-11-25T23:57:00.001-08:00

My camera appears to be dying, but I wanted to share these three shots from my recent trip to Toronto. I love them, blurriness notwithstanding.

Rain-shine

2011-11-23T20:49:00.001-08:00

I drove south through the fiercest weather this morning. It was still dark when I left; the rain came down in waves; the wind blustered and buffeted. I arrived sore and tense but in one piece.

I took a long exam. The results were good, and I am hoping that they will be the tipping point for the applications. I am applying to places so far beyond my reach it scares me. Do one thing every day that scares you. Right, Eleanor? We never know until we try.

I drove home through equally forbidding weather. The truckers were plowing north in caravans, competing with each other to be first in line. I got left behind with walls of water rushing across the windshield. The sun had been up for five hours, but you would never have guessed that: the air was still the solid gray of morning.

Home, I read and cleaned. I've been shelving Barbara Kingsolver's book The Poisonwood Bible at libraries since highschool. Since highschool, I've been secretly turning my nose up at it. Anything that flies off the shelves that quickly can't be much good! I was wrong. It's that good.

In the late afternoon, the sky peeled back at the edge like an orange to reveal a glowing center. She said, I just want to stand in it. And she did, stood in that palpable glow with the water falling down and the light cascading. I was so grateful to be there.

I am even more grateful to be here, still standing on the brink of uncertainty, yes, but emboldened by the brightness.

Return

2011-11-20T10:54:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I was in Toronto, Denver, Las Vegas, and Portland. To accomplish this feat, I had to rise at 4.15am, after three hours of sleep, and then travel for over ten. But the descent into Portland was magnificent: we sailed down through mountain ranges of cumulus clouds which fissured at the roots to reveal stretches of russet and baring trees, the sinuous curl of rivers, and the rain-steaming earth of fields. The man next to me admitted that he had been to LA and Chicago, but never had he been anywhere so beautiful as this. "I don't know why people would want to live anywhere else," he said. And I, though regretting the physical separation that the landscape now tokens, had to agree.

2011-11-16T14:18:00.001-08:00

Courtyard, Trinity College Library (Toronto, November, 2011)

In case you were wondering: I'm still here; still in Toronto. But Saturday looms. Whenever I think about this, I feel like the mask in the previous post looks. So I try to think less and just be with. More later when I return to my home on the mountain in the Pacific Northwest.

p.s. My sister got engaged! See here.

Home sweet Canada

2011-11-06T23:19:00.000-08:00

I sent this picture to my philosopher today. "Me without you," the subject line of the email read. Thankfully, however, it won't be that way for long. On Wednesday, I'll be boarding a plane for a quick visit to the other side of the border--an anniversary surprise from him to me! We both have work to do (essays to write, exams to prep for, translations to prepare), but it will be so much nicer to do it in one another's company. I can't wait!

Autumn at the end of Cooper Hollow

2011-11-05T11:06:00.001-07:00

"Trying to use words,

2011-11-03T23:01:00.000-07:00

...and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling..."

(T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets: East Coker" via Tolle Scribe)

***
I have a draft. I am ready to return to the world again, to quit asking the same questions three times in a row, to remember for more than five minutes what people have expressly told me, and to wear matching accessories to school (earrings, for example). Above all to sleep and to sleep.

***

Tonight after a session someone asked me what my major was. I told her, Philosophy.

"That's cute," she said.

Yes

2011-11-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

November 1

2011-11-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

This morning, for the first time this season, we had to scrape ice off the windshield. The fields, plowed but overgrown, were marked with the crystalline crop-circles of an alien visit. My hands and feet rebel. We are not ready for the cold.

***
Still (re)writing by the way. Like a pit bull finally sinking its teeth in deep, I refuse to let go until I've said it--and said it right. Sometimes the truth requires more than wrestling. Dislocation is the least of my worries.

End of October

2011-10-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

Accomplished in the last seven days: revised personal statement, updated CV, two writing lessons planned and taught, much writing consulting, 20 pages of new draft of writing sample.

Still to be done: better (much better!) draft of writing sample so that it can be circulated, GRE prep, finalize list of applications, lesson-planning and consulting forever.

Embrace the work.

Wonder

2011-10-27T23:58:00.000-07:00

Every morning I wake up and the world is wonderful. It is wonderful even when my hair is angry from a bad night's sleep and when I crash into the kitchen, eyes still closed, in my three-sizes-too-big boot-slippers that my brother bequeathed me when he left. The valley is saturated with October light, whole swathes of it wafting down over the lime-covered fields and the blazing trees, settling around bright-falling leaves, sifting among the acorns and scattered seeds. I gulp down coffee and write papers and drive back and forth to school, and the world crackles with wonder. God knows we have a problem with evil. But riddle me this: whence all the good?

On Being Human

2011-10-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

by C.S. Lewis

Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence
Behold the Forms of nature. They discern
Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities
Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.
Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,
Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,
High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal
Huge Principles appear.

The Tree-ness of the tree they know-the meaning of
Arboreal life, how from earth's salty lap
The solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;

But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us
-An angel has no skin.

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it
Drink the whole summer down into the breast.
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The tremor on the rippled pool of memory
That from each smell in widening circles goes,
The pleasure and the pang --can angels measure it?
An angel has no nose.

The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes
On death, and why, they utterly know; but not
The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries.
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves,
Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges.
—An angel has no nerves.

Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery
Guards us like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours, not theirs.

***
"The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes." That is a terrific line. I had never thought of "nourishing" and "flourishing" together, but it makes marvelous aesthetic and philosophical sense.

I read this after finishing a twelve-hour day of writing. Do angels know what it is to write? I suspect not. I suspect it may be another of those sensual, terrible boons that only we have been granted.

Letters home

2011-10-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

My brother writes home regularly. He says often that he is tired and sore, that he would like to eat at a normal pace, and that he loves us. He says he loves us at the beginning and in the middle and at the end of each letter. But you know what else he says? That he is going to succeed; that the things he is learning now will last him the rest of his life.

I am so very proud of his confidence and his determination.
He's growing up.

Proportionate equality

2011-10-25T00:34:00.000-07:00

"Yes, Callicles, wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order, my friend, and not an undisciplined world-disorder. I believe that you don't pay attention to these facts, even though you're a wise man in these matters. You've failed to notice that proportionate equality has great power among both god and men..." (Socrates in Plato's Gorgias)

"I'm kind of a big kettle"

2011-10-24T23:18:00.000-07:00

I am writing again, trying to make a deadline. (But you couldn't tell that, right?) In one of my procastinatory stints, I read this fantastic article on Haruki Murakami in the NYTMagazine. It was so good that it really belonged in The New Yorker.

I'm including a longish excerpt below, but strongly recommend the entire article: "The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami" (Sam Anderson).

***

After another year and another novel — this one featuring a possibly sentient pinball machine — Murakami sold his jazz club in order to devote himself, full time, to writing.

“Full time,” for Murakami, means something different from what it does for most people. For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.”

“Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” he said. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.”

That daily boiling has produced, over time, one of the world’s most distinctive bodies of work: three decades of addictive weirdness that falls into an oddly fascinating hole between genres (sci-fi, fantasy, realist, hard-boiled) and cultures (Japan, America), a hole that no writer has ever explored before, or at least nowhere near this deep. Over the years, Murakami’s novels have tended to grow longer and more serious — the sitcom references have given way, for the most part, to symphonies — and now, after a particularly furious and sustained boil, he has produced his longest, strangest, most serious book yet.

***
I've never read anything by Murakami. Have any of you? Is it as weird and wonderful as it sounds?

"but often stretch out thy hands"

2011-10-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

"They asked the abbot Macarius, saying, 'How ought we to pray?' and the old man said, 'There is no need of much speaking in prayer, but often stretch out thy hands and say, 'Lord, as Thou wilt and as Thou knowest, have mercy upon me.' But if there is war in thy soul, add, 'Help me,' and because he knoweth what we have need of he sheweth us his mercy."

(Helen Waddell on prayer, qtd. in A Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L'Engle, p. 162)

Paragraphing exercise

2011-10-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

No one pays attention to the paragraph. If you ask students, they will tell you the paragraph is a unit of writing 3-5 sentences long. When pressed they may volunteer the additional insight that the first of these sentences should be devoted to identifying a topic or main point, the several following to developing the main point, and the final sentence to summarizing, analyzing, or transitioning. But most of the time no one pays attention to these all-purpose vehicles of persuasion and exposition.

We remember the paragraph like we remember to breathe. We exhale these units of writing unconsciously, intuitively. Sometimes, in a rush to express ourselves, we try to cram it all into one breath, holding it, holding it, holding it, until we and the reader are blue in the face. People have tried to commit suicide this way, but these attempts fail. Unless the breath is restricted by something else (the end of the book, perhaps?), the author merely loses consciousness and breathing resumes, triggered by high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood--air hunger, they call it, the deep hunger to take it all in. At other times, perhaps more and more often these days, we hyperventilate. We express our units in short bursts,
using lines to do the work of italics and deliberate phrasing,
using one word lines to mask our

uncertainty

about how our thoughts fit together,
hiding behind trendy ambiguity.
This cannot be sustained. Carbon dioxide levels drop, cutting blood and oxygen supply to vital organs. The author who does this deliberately might faint; they might deliberately faint.

Pay attention to your breathing, especially if you know your intuitions are primed for suspension or hyperventilation. It may take some time before you are habituated to the new, unconscious cycle. Breathing exercises may be required: in, out; slowly, but not too slow; sating your hunger.

Song and Dance

2011-10-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

by Alan Schapiro

Did you ever have a family?

Dark

dining room,

bright kitchen,

white steam

from the big pot my mother’s stirring

reaching in wavy tendrils to her face,

around her face, all the way around

to me at the table, then beyond me

into the darkness where my brother is.

Were you ever a child?

I’m hungry

but I know we’ll

eat soon,

even the hunger’s sweet.

Did you ever really have a brother?

He’s singing

there in the dark

corner

beside the stereo,

the volume turned down so low

all we hear is him, his voice, and

his eyes are closed so that there’s

nothing around him anywhere

that might reveal he isn’t

who the song insists he is.

And that is?

Irresistible,

unforgettable,

someone

to whom

as in imaginary gardens

where “the nectarine and curious

peach into my hands themselves

do reach,” love comes as soon

as called, comes just as dreamed.

Did any of this ever happen?

The hunger’s

sweet,

it’s as if

the song weaves

through the fragrance of the braiding

steam from him to me to her

to me to him because her eyes

are closed now too; her

slippered feet tap, caper

a soft shoe while the ladle

sways in her hand as she stirs.

Were you ever a child?

I know

I’ll eat soon.

Did you ever really have a brother?

You should have

heard him,

his voice was

unforgettable, irresistible, his voice

was an imaginary garden woven through with fragrance.

Did you ever have a family?

Their eyes are closed.

That’s how I know

we’re there

inside it,

it’s made of sound and steam

that weaves between dark

dining room, bright kitchen.

We’re there because I’m hungry,

and we’ll all be eating soon

together, and the hunger’s sweet.

***

HT: Molly.

October politics

2011-10-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(e.e. cummings)

For two days blue October skies pummeled us with light. Tree tops blazed with molten brightness, showering us with flaming sparks as big as our hands and bigger than our wide-delighted eyes. The mornings burst with smoky promise and blew rings through perfect afternoons. Evening met us with earthy, charcoaled hands--the fragrance of plowed fields and the ashes of leaves.

The largesse of those days burnt itself out, as generosity is wont to do. Today we woke to the democratic gray of the fire's aftermath; a pale, evenhanded chill in the air; and the leveling spread of a fine rain. The only color is the occasional scarlet of a still-smoldering maple or birch, ready to explode at the slightest touch of joy.

"not just a manifesto for learning..."

2011-10-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

The Phantom Tollbooth is one of the few "standardly assigned" books that I've heard other students my age recall with fondness. I distinctly remember someone using Milo as an example in a class a few years back; afterwards, the rest of the room erupted with comments and memories about their own experiences with Norton Juster's classic.

The book is 50 years old this year. Adam Gopnik wrote a celebratory piece in this week's New Yorker, "Broken Kingdom: Fifty Years of The Phantom Tollbooth". Highly recommended.

Some highlights:

As with every classic of children’s literature, its real subject is education . . . Milo learns to trust the wisdom of others—to admire the truly learned—and to find the marvellous not in the heavens above or in the middle earth below but in the textbooks at hand. He’s the perfect first-generation American undergraduate, scanning the course catalogue, wide-eyed. . . . Milo doesn’t educate himself; he gets educated. His epiphany is that math and reading and even spelling are themselves subjects of adventure, if seen from the right angle. The point of “The Phantom Tollbooth” is not that there’s more to life than school; it’s that normal school subjects can be wonderful if you don’t have to experience them as normal schooling.

***

For “The Phantom Tollbooth” is not just a manifesto for learning; it is a manifesto for the liberal arts, for a liberal education, and even for the liberal-arts college. . . . What Milo discovers is that math and literature, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, should assume their places not under the pentagon of Purpose and Power but under the presidency of Rhyme and Reason. Learning isn’t a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.

***

Against those who worried that the liberal arts could not help us “win the future,” Juster argued for the love of knowledge, and against narrow specialization. “The Phantom Tollbooth” was for learning, against usefulness. “Many of the things I’m supposed to know seem so useless that I can’t see the purpose in learning them at all,” Milo complains to Rhyme and Reason. They don’t tell him to listen to his inner spirit, or trust the Force. Instead, Reason says, “You may not see it now, but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else. . . . Whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.”

Solitude

2011-10-16T11:57:00.000-07:00

What a lovely surprise to discover how unlonely being alone can be. (Ellen Burstyn)

What a failure of the imagination looks like

2011-10-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

This made me cry on the way to work today:

“I just had hoped that I could show this picture and say, ‘This happened, and that happened, and now…’ and there is no ‘now’,” [Nancy Rousseau] said. “And that makes me sad. It makes me sad for them, it makes me sad for the future students at our school, and for the history books, because I’d like a happy ending. And we don’t have that.”

(from "Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan: the story behind the photograph that shamed America," by David Margolick; ht: Ann.)

Later I read this:

The more I travel, the more I observe that Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.

What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue, falls away.

(from "The Fraying of a Nation," by Anand Giridharadas)

***

Don't ever stop imagining, ok? If an idea or a group or a movement doesn't have scope for the imagination, run like your life depends on it. Because it does.

Post-preview day

2011-10-15T14:17:00.000-07:00

Early this morning I drove down Fishback Mountain into the russet hollow where there are two main streets: one for campus and one for the locals. I spent two hours watching high school seniors and their parents troop through a student services fair. The seniors looked like babies. Did I look like that five years ago? All doe-eyed and afraid?

I met the provost today, and I told him, "This school--it's an amazing place. The people who make it work are doing something right."

My evidence for this is that I am less doe-eyed and less afraid than I was five years ago. I know what I want and I have some ideas about how to get it. More importantly, I have a much better idea of who I want to be.

College should be about both those things, I think--both about making career plans and about discovering something about your own character and identity. If those aren't your goals when you go to college, and if the college you attend isn't supporting you in those endeavors, and if the society you live in isn't making political or economic space for those projects a priority, then something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. And we need to fix it.

Big words, those. Hefty commitments.

But that's the thing about growing up: you learn that to be an adult is to be in the business of making commitments and following through with them.

Interacting with the fresh-faced high schoolers today made me feel old, but I didn't mind. I imagine that, at its best, growing old is only growing up. It's about having a mind of one's own, sure, but it's also about acting on one's ideas and living by them. No one else is going to make my life their project; that one's up to me, for better or worse.

The Way I See It: Growth

2011-10-14T10:22:00.000-07:00

Things grow in the small, don't they? Sometime it takes going away and coming back before you can see it. It can take hours of grading papers, writing papers, and asking questions before craft stirs and art awakens, and you realize: hey! I'm good at this!

A year later, having gone away and come back, I find that I am better at what I love. I am better at teaching. I can feel it when I sit next to someone and read their work aloud: how I can talk from conventions to organization and content (and back) so much more fluently; how I can set better boundaries, explaining that this is the part of the assignment that has to be done on one's own; how my questions are less confusing, more helpful.

And I say this, not because I think I am the best, but because I know I am better than I was. It is a sweet, sweet thing to finally be able to taste the fruit of a year's labor, to be able to look back and see how I was growing all along.

***

The Way I See It is hosted by Molly at Close to Home. Join us next week as we reflect on community.

Tree planters

2011-10-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

My parents are 25 today. I am grateful for them.

Aren't they a handsome couple?

This song ("Planting Trees") seems appropriate:

2011-10-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

Hello, work. Thanks for reminding me why I am doing all of this.

I am pondering these words in my heart this week, stored up from summer reading:

A teacher can change a person's life. A good teacher or a bad teacher. Each can change a person's life . . . But only if the person is ready to be changed. A teacher rarely causes such a change . . . I am not saying it is impossible. Do not misunderstand me. I am saying it is rare. More often he can only occasion such a change. You understand what I am saying . . . You are a student of philosophy and logic. I am certain you understand." (The Promise, Chaim Potok, 116-117)

With such a cloud as this

2011-10-09T23:37:00.000-07:00

"Whom, in the dark at my desk, do I write for? That's the core of my question." (13)

My favorite piece in the new Ruminate Magazine is an essay by Jessie van Eerden, "So Great a Cloud." Not an essay really--an extended reflection on that passage in Hebrews where the author writes that we are "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses."

A whole cloud of witnesses. What are they doing out there? I mean this sincerely. If they're ghosts or spooks, they are not welcome.

In van Eerden's essay, those witnesses are our mentors: the men and women and authors and teachers and family members who have encouraged us to create and challenged us to be honest to ourselves and the world, who have encouraged us, as van Eerden puts it, to "tell the story true."

"I have the idea that the composition of my cloud determines the tenor and timbre of my work. Cloud of witnesses: its population density, its demographic, whose names are on the membership roll." (16)

Van Eerden is writing about her own experiences as a creative writer, but her take on the Hebraic cloud is applicable to anyone, whoever they are, whatever life they're living. Because we are all of us creatives. Some of us write and others teach; still others raise babies or tend fields; and some of us wait tables or make investments. But we are all here to craft something beautiful and good and worthwhile out of this hand-breadth we've been given, to nourish somehow this flying spark, and we all have our witnesses.

"I am always in company when I write. I desire to be original, yes. I write for the deepest part of me, sure enough. But down deep, there's a host, a motley crew. Most of these people are not there by invitation, I can't help that. But, by my own volition, I can choose whom to invite close-up, an inner circle to surround me in the mist, neighbors strung tight by tin-can phones." (16)

I've been reflecting on my cloud this weekend.

Whom do I write [or speak or work or live] for? Where "for" does not necessarily mean "to," but rather "on behalf of" or "in memory of."

Better, to whom do I hold myself accountable to "tell [or live] the story true"?

I have some ideas. Many of my host are books, some are teachers, some are friends, some I have only known in passing. They don't all agree with each other. Sometimes I wish desperately that they did, because this would make all of our lives much easier. But I suspect that in the grand scheme of things, it's better this way. If everyone agreed, the living would be too easy, wouldn't it? It would be too easy to fill someone else's shoes instead of growing into your own.

"Most in my cloud don't even know they're in my cloud. Probably never will. Most come from where I come from, the hollows and ridges, some from where I've been since, some from my bookshelves, some from where I live now. Some are dreamed up, in whole or in part. Some are dead. Every one of them makes me homesick for the home inside myself. . . A few might well beg off, wishing to be elsewhere and not stuck with me. Still, I call on them. . ." (18)

And still, they come, one after another: the unaware and the selfless, the angry and the meek, the articulate and the wordless loving. All boons on this grace-filled journey; all joy in this cloud-filled sky; so many, many witnesses, to whom I owe great swathes of this created and creative life.

"We're all growing into our eyes"

2011-10-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

Lanier writes an especially thought-provoking post this week. "Beyond Our Ken" is a reflection on the modern experience of the unexplainable. It made me want to pull out my old George MacDonald books and reread all of them.

Why is the average modern life so strangely insulated from the unexplained?

Is it because we’re all inside watching TV? “Distracted from distraction by distraction”? Or have we grown too old and wise as a race to admit that there are things in this world—things Scripture is silent on and Science can’t explain—that we will never understand till we shake off this mortal coil? As Christians we are fortified by the promise that we’re peering through a glass on the eternal verities, that God in his grace has given us a view from a window the world can’t see. But it’s a dark glass, and things pass before it that our time-bound vision just can’t distinguish yet. Like a character in a George MacDonald fantasy, we’re all growing into our eyes and learning the meaning of a dual citizenship. We’re learning to see what’s at the end of our nose.

***

Over at The Rabbit Room, Andrew Peterson posted an excerpt from one of George MacDonald's sermons, which, I think, expresses beautifully what MacDonald says in all his other prose, poetry, and fantasy:

For a moment, imagine such a friend as you would like. Imagine the perfection of the ideal of your soul. I do not care, for a moment, how low you are. I know that a creature that God made must imagine an ideal. I say if you are the lowest and most sensual creature in the world, imagine honestly, what you think your ideal man to be. Then I say to the loftiest of you, dream your highest dream, your highest ideal, your loftiest dream, your most glorious fancy, if you will, of what a friend, a man, a hero, and a perfect human being might be, and he is standing at your door, and knocking to get into your heart, only he is a thousand times grander than it is possible for you to think. He is always knocking and always wanting to get in. It seems to me that we are surrounded on all sides by an infinite sea of truth and love, pressing on all sides of us, in order that we might be benefited thereby.

If you're new to MacDonald, I recommend starting with The Princess and the Goblin and The Wise Woman. (And if you're hesitant to start, it's worth noting that this was the man who inspired C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. You can't go wrong!)

The Way I See It: Peace

2011-10-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

They ask if I am sad to have left behind the action--the big bustling of the city. And I say, No. Not really. Because I like to walk away from the crowds.

I like the bright stillness and the sound of my own breathing.

The down-drifting of leaves and long stretches of farm wire are a balm to my city-weary soul.

It turns out that being a town girl doesn't come as naturally as I thought it would. Which is odd, because for years I thought of myself as very cosmopolitan, very city-wise, very ready. (I know, I know. Implausible but true!)

My eyes need space and my ears need silence and my mind craves unchecked simplicity. Not all the time. But often enough. And it's hard to get that when you share space with more than 2.7 million people.

There is a time for crowds, of course, and even a calling to them. But I also know that there is a part of this pilgrimage to be set aside for the quiet taking-in of the goodness around us, a solitary Sabbath of the heart.

Never impossible in the city, but always harder to come by. First, you have to make your way through the crowds.

***
The Way I See It is hosted by Molly at Close to Home. Next week's theme is growth.

"correctly and fundamentally"

2011-10-04T22:26:00.000-07:00

I found a prayer by St. Thomas Aquinas over at Quiet Life today that I really liked. I've been thinking about Aquinas because he took a beating in the class I'm auditing. It was insinuated that his philosophy was really only Church propaganda. This is just false: St. Thomas loved the truth, and he was committing to sorting out truth from falsehood (this doesn't guarantee that everything he said was true of course, but it does mean that his philosophizing was genuine, that he wasn't just paying lip-service to reason). The prayer Donna posted only strengthens my conviction. Here's what Aquinas wrote:

Creator of all things,
true source of light and wisdom,
origin of all being,
graciously let a ray of your light penetrate
the darkness of my understanding.

Take from me the double darkness
in which I have been born,
an obscurity of sin and ignorance.

Give me a keen understanding,
a retentive memory, and
the ability to grasp things
correctly and fundamentally.

Grant me the talent
of being exact in my explanations
and the ability to express myself
with thoroughness and charm.

Point out the beginning,
direct the progress,
and help in the completion.

I ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen

***

This sounds suspiciously like someone who esteems reason, not like someone who's decided to betray it.

Goodbying

2011-10-02T23:09:00.000-07:00

My littlest brother leaves for boot camp tomorrow.

His hair doesn't look like this anymore. It's short now. Actually, we've all grown up. We know this because at the restaurant today, the waitress asked if she should split the check. We said: No, we have a sugar daddy. He still treats us all to dinner.

After we ate, my brother made a heart out of the wrapper from his after-dinner mint and gave it to me. I pinned it on my jacket.

We love you too. So very much.

***

Pray for him, won't you? Six months is a long time.

Now we are one year old

2011-10-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

Last year in October, I wrote on Facebook:

Why conjunctions are better than disjunctions: coffee & philosophy talks & sushi & used bookstores & new (to me) books & explosions of color & good company & rain & an umbrella & German chocolate. (QED)

A year later, the umbrella is broken (done in by a sneaky gust of wind), but the company is still good.

Happy first year to my philosopher and me!

Photo: My talented sister, Elaina

The Way I See It: Evening

2011-09-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

The moon is my friend.

In the city.

In the country.

On the mild nights and on the bright ones.

When I first went to Germany, I mailed home a German copy of Guess How Much I Love You with an English translation that I had carefully penciled in the margins. My favorite lines were the last ones in the book: "I love you to the moon and back!"

Last evening was a wine-and-cheese-while-I-graded-and-planned-lessons kind of evening. And the moon was just a sliver tossed in the sky, but so bright:

I said yesterday that I will be glad when I have four or five years secure, when I know what's happening for the next longish stretch. And that's the truth. I really don't like being able to see only one year ahead, and this is my third year of it!

But then the moon comes out, and the evening stretches long, and I am reminded that being able to see from day to day to day--to love to the moon and back--is itself no small thing.

****

The Way I See It is hosted by Molly at Close to Home. Next week's theme is peace.

This is beautiful

2011-09-28T21:09:00.000-07:00

Chesterton at Elkhorn (September 2011)

In the woods!
In the woods!
Where the great, green trees are rustling
Ever rustling.
The great, green trees.
That golden-green shock of hair
Exploding with sunlight
It's chock full of dreams.
Shake now, Green One, shake…
Yes!
Already I feel dreams sinking down
Like heavy, red wine
Into me.

-Hans Arp, 1903

HT: Erin, who found this for me in Berlin. I really love it.

Long distance heart

2011-09-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

On the way to the airport that last day, I remarked on the irony of it all. For years my closest friends have also been the friends who were farthest away. In the beginning, it was my cousins, and then, as we began to move, it was the wonderful mentors and kindred spirits who were left behind with each change of state and city, and then it was my college friends, as they graduated, or moved home after a foreign exchange, or simply moved away. And now it is my philosopher--2,500 miles away. Ironic, right?

***

One of the first things I did when I moved back home was to go through my correspondence. I have stacks of letters, organized by year, bound with ribbon, and stuffed into an old leather briefcase whose combination I keep forgetting. The briefcase is overflowing now, and the letters are still coming. The Toronto correspondence has been stored in a new compartment of a different desk. There simply isn't space for it all.

That's just the physical manifestation of this long distance heart, of course. I gave up trying to imagine what would happen if those bundles included the emails, messages, comments, and chat threads spun out across the world wide web from me to my loved ones, dating back to my first years of high school. I can no longer fathom the potential stacks of CD-ROMs with recordings of Skype and Gtalk video calls. I'm not a serious world-traveler, but my words have carved a hefty electronic trail through the Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades, across the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and around the Great Lakes.

My sister once told me, "You know what you're really good at? Keeping in touch."

I have some practice with that, yes.

***

I was thinking today about that trip to the airport a few weeks ago, about how it felt to say goodbye without knowing when or where we would see each other again. And it strikes me that it is remarkably fitting that after all those years of learning to say goodbye and stay in touch, this important, unfamiliar stage of life requires exactly the skills I already have. I don't have to scramble to come up with a 101 ways to say "this relationship is not on hold" because I already know them: I've been collecting and practicing them since I was a child.

In case you were wondering, this is what the English majors call poetic justice. Irony, as it turns out, has nothing to do with it.

Now it is fall

2011-09-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

The time of the hummingbirds is past,

and those clouds hovering over the fields? They are here to stay.

Today the graduates and undergraduates went back to school, and I did not. I drove to work under rain-heavy clouds (and conducted some lengthy negotiations with a rafter of turkeys who couldn't decide whether or not to cross the road). I made plans for tackling the growing application to-do list: the GRE, the writing sample, the personal statement.

So, autumn has come, a new season both figuratively and literally, and I feel productive and calm. I even feel prepared for the stormy season of waiting that is just around the corner. But of course it's easy to wait in the abstract.

I really like A Circle of Quiet's Friday Clive this week:

I am sure that some are born to write as trees are born to bear leaves: for these, writing is a necessary mode of their own development. If the impulse to write survives the hope of success, then one is among these. If not, then the impulse was at best only pardonable vanity, and it will certainly disappear when the hope is withdrawn.

I hope I am one of those who keep writing.

***

I'm participating in The Way I See It this week. Next week's theme is evening.

Counting, thanking, memorizing

2011-09-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

These blessings.

(1) My coworkers. Bright, energetic, focused. Ready to serve. Because teaching is a kind of service, right? It's a kneeling down and a washing of feet--no matter how smart or stupid, or worthy, or hardworking you think that student is. Just a pouring out and a scattering forth without worrying too much about whether you are wasting your precious pearls.

(2) My siblings. Affectionate, articulate, and genuinely kind. Three of us went to Karen King's talk on spirituality in the midst of violence tonight. We learned about early Christian responses to Roman persecution and about the pre-canon, inter-religious debates about the role of suffering in the human life. Afterwards my brother said, "Well, she broke the rule: she made me think!" But then of course we talked about those thoughts the whole way home.

(3) Strangers. Like the couple sitting next to us at the talk who smiled at everyone around them, asked us where we were from, and suggested a concert we would like.

(4) Universities. Those enormous, conflicted spaces of reason, for what they are trying to do, even when the future looks dim.

Such sweet blessings. So undeserved.

Autumn new year

2011-09-19T21:27:00.000-07:00

It's almost the autumn equinox--night and dark are almost equal. And new things are coming my way.

I am working again: teaching writing to homeschoolers, tutoring writing at my undergraduate campus, and saving every dime for those ridiculously expensive PhD applications. I have come to the unsavory conclusion that I need about $1,000 by Christmas, which is $1,000 more than I currently have. Next week, classes start at the undergraduate campus, and I have prevailed upon old professors to let me sit at their feet once more; I will be reading Novalis and Kant. When I am not earning money, working on my applications, or auditing, I will be doing Greek and making various ambitious sorties into the philosophical realm to see what I can glean on my own. My philosopher and I clocked nearly six hours on the first page and a half of the Symposium this afternoon (Skype is the best invention; clearly, we are still learning Greek). I have also started Brandom's Reason in Philosophy and Dewey's How We Think.

And it's all wonderful because not only do I have the time to indulge in delight-directed learning, but, suddenly, that deep uncertainty about what happens next has departed, has been driven into hiding by the rolling September hills, the long planes of afternoon light, the easy caress of an early autumn rain.

It's going to be a good year for this country-loving autodidact.

A good year indeed.

Rajah and Czar like the sunshine, too!

Home and happy

2011-09-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

Lincoln City (September 2011)

I love my cold, windy, rocky Pacific Northwest beaches. I have never seen anything else in this grand world quite like them. And that's a fact.

Photo credit: my philosopher, who is now very far away and hard at work conquering another academic year. I miss him. Every. single. day.

What one person (you!) can do about higher-ed

2011-09-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

I've been reflecting on Mark Edmundson's "Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?" this week. It's one of those sad, quasi-nostalgic looks at everything that's gone wrong with higher-ed (and in particular American higher-ed) over the last few decades; it's an essay about what college should be doing for you but isn't and about what your professors should be giving you but aren't.

College, Edmundson says, should be about self-discovery. It should be about figuring out who you are and how best to live your life. That's why the content of your courses is so important. Of course, it's good to develop perseverance and problem-solving skills, but that's not the substance of what college has to offer. The substance is the ideas. And that, of course, is just what Edmundson thinks is missing from today's college experience.

He says:

Your professors will give you some fine books to read, and they’ll probably help you understand them. What they won’t do, for reasons that perplex me, is to ask you if the books contain truths you could live your lives by.

(And then he goes on to cite Plato in a tone that does not bode well for Plato's usefulness in helping us live our lives. But anyhow.)

Edmundson also says that if you dare to ask about dangerous things like whether Plato's philosophy is true, or whether human history actually declines andor/ falls, or what the relationship is between evolution and creationism, you will probably be laughed at. Today's academic community doesn't make space for that kind of problem-solving.

To which I reply, but it does (some of the time). There are still some professors and adjuncts and even TA's who will help you think. I met a bunch of them as an undergraduate and a graduate. Granted, you may need to attend a smaller, less well-known institution to find people who are willing to talk to you. But they're out there; you just need to seek them out and ask. Some people will say no, but the vast majority of them are going to say yes. So, while the picture is bleak, it's not as bleak as Edmundson paints it.

The other thing I maintain is that if we want the picture to change--if we want colleges and universities to work for us, then we are going to have to change our thinking. Much of the time, when administrators make changes to programs they do it on the grounds that they're catering to the demands of students and parents and donors. They're moving away from content and toward resume-padding because that's what we've promised to pay for. It follows that if what we really want is something else, if what we're really willing to pay for is something else, then we should say so. And we should carry that attitude (that we want content not just a resume) with us into the classroom and to our professors. Institutions don't have incentive to change unless we pay for it; professors can't answer questions we haven't asked.

Oversimplified, yes. But the least we can do. Most of us will never be rich enough or powerful enough or persuasive enough to make perceptible changes to academia. We are, however, still consumers, and we still have spending power (even if we don't think about it very often). It would behoove us to make the most of it.

HT: Mental Multivitamin, whose links always make me think. Thanks!

Blackberry September

2011-09-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

Summer came late to Oregon this year: mid-September and there are still blackberries clustered on the vine--unripe, ripe, and withered. I went for a run this morning (ok, let's be honest--it was more walk than run) under gray fall clouds and through the heavy summer scent of ripening berries. It reminded me of the Seamus Heaney poem I've posted a couple of times, but it also reminded me of another blackberry poem I discovered in the spring issue of Ruminate:

***

Walking, with Blackberries
Charity Gingerich

There's nothing like walking in June in an aching body, discovering blackberries.
Like a fox swallowed by brush they hide, but light finds them out,
no less lovely for their wild abandonment in a burned-out lot, my greedy hands reaching,
reaching. If you insert the tongue just there's a surprising end to looking and grasping:
seeds tiny as sand, soft as new calf chin fuzz. The tongue, perplexed, withdraws,
but always wanders back for more: a lovely question never answered quite like this.

***

Subscribe to Ruminate here.

The most beautiful place in the world: in one week

2011-09-11T22:05:00.000-07:00

Mt. Hood from the plane (the sky)

At Elkhorn Lodge (the mountains)

Multnomah Falls (the Columbia River Gorge)

Pacific Sunset at Lincoln City (the beach)

I am so glad to be home.

(The last three photos are not by me. My philosopher took the third; my sister, E, took the last two. They were too breathtaking to not share.)

I survived.

2011-09-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

More to follow next week when the goodbying, helloing, and relaxing is over and real life resumes.

By Monday

2011-08-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

Move home (Wednesday)
Bridesmaiding (Friday and Saturday)
15-20 page paper (5pm Monday. So far: 1 great idea...0 pages)

Because every hectic year deserves an equally hectic ending

Right?
Right.

Cue that pouring rain.

Still here

2011-08-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

I'm a week away from my Pacific Northwest home now. Less than a week actually. And I've been packing and moving out and trying to write one last paper, but mostly I'm just trying to be here. Sometimes that can be harder than it sounds. The curious thing about moving is that you start to leave before you set foot on the plane or buckle into your seat. As a child, I experienced this palpably. I remember a striking sense of disembodiment, as if I were watching the packing up and moving out from outside of myself, as if I were hovering above our heads as we drove away.

These days the experience is less palpable but still striking. It shows up in the way I pace myself. Anxious to escape limbo, I dash haphazardly into the future. As my plans start outrunning the hours I have left, I race to catch up. What's here seems so much less concrete--so much less real--than what lies ahead.

And that's no way to say goodbye, is it? You miss things that way.

So I've been trying the slower way:
trying out patience,
praying for peace,

letting the days unfold like blossoms.

Tomorrow will come soon enough. It always does.

An American in Canada

2011-08-18T21:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one has to try very hard not to take offense. I said I was from the states, and she said, "I'll have to question your intelligence now." And then, "But seriously. It's good that you're here."

What?

I didn't come here to escape. I came here to learn for a while (because, yes, I think other countries, other non-American institutions, have something to offer), but I'm still an American. I understand that this is not a popular thing to be; that blind patriotism is fruitless and often dangerous; that we have behaved badly and unjustly; that we are not always right; that we are clearly not omniscient; that sometimes (often) we say stupid, arrogant things and are in fact ignorant about important things.

And yet, I'm an American, and I'm not ready to run away yet. I understand leaving a country for the sake of education or for the sake of quality of life or for the sake of uncompromising moral conviction. I don't understand leaving simply because you are fed up or disagree. Countries work because we work and because we work things out. And if we're upset with the way things are going, it's worth asking whether we're working hard enough.

I don't think we are. I hear a lot of spin from the media, and I hear a lot of name calling from just about everyone else, and I see people lunging for any spotlight they can find (and if it happens to be a political one, they'll deal). But I don't hear a lot of honest, respectful debate about the issues that divide us. And I don't just mean among politicians. I mean among us: you, me, other American citizens. When was the last time you talked to someone who disagrees with you about what you disagree about? Read a news source or listened to a talk show that is anti- everything you stand for? Tried to see past the labels and the slurs and the lies and see the people and their arguments or convictions?

Are we even trying?

Bi-partisan debate isn't a cure-all of course. I know that. Not everyone can be happy. But I also think that nations don't change; not by themselves anyhow. And groups or political parties? They don't change either. But people.

People change.

And if change is what we want, then each of us will have to embody it. Each us will have to make a first move towards dialogue; towards civility, wisdom, kindness. It will be a move toward disagreement, for sure, but that doesn't mean we can't be respectful about it.

You can't be the change for a country by running away, and running away isn't what the intelligent person does either. The intelligent person doesn't turn tail just because she's afraid to disagree or just because things are looking bad (they're pretty bad, folks). The intelligent person thinks things through and talks them out and sees what can be done. And then she makes a decision.

I suggest we start by thinking and talking.

This week in mid-August

2011-08-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

My philosopher returned bearing treasures. He unpacked his suitcase and backpack and satchels in the living room and the old world exploded into the new: painted wooden fans and a dress from an open-air market in Berlin; blouses and printed tees from Barcelona; lambswool scarves from Edinburgh; chocolate, champagne, and postcards from Paris; books in Greek and French.

Mostly, though, we are just happy to have him back.

I have been sleeping again at night, eating regularly (yay for sushi and poutine!), and working very little. In the morning, he cooks and I make coffee. We play Carcassonne with anyone we can convince to join us. I try to do some chapters of the Mastronarde (ok, a chapter--I'm a little out of practice). Today I will gather my wits, muster my courage, and try to work through some of the difficulties that brought my last paper to a grinding halt.

While I'm doing that, read this, won't you? It's a small celebration of Portland and books and people who care. It made my heart happy.

Ms. Moulton is Portland’s mobile librarian. Since early June Moulton has been bringing books to the public with her library-on-wheels Street Books, an outdoor library for people who live outside.

***

“Being able to give them a card and tell them, ‘I hope to see you again’ – that’s a powerful thing because these are people who cannot get a library card [at the local library] because they have no address,” Moulton says.

Home is two weeks from today. Ready or not.

Around the blogosphere

2011-08-15T10:15:00.000-07:00

My late nights have led to the discovery of new blogs. Today I want to share some of them with you.

Max Andrew Dubinsky at Make It Mad writes with verve and conviction. And he's asking questions about flashy, mega-church Protestantism that are hard to ask (but need to be). In "Jesus is for Quitters" he says,

This is why I hit the road. Because I couldn’t develop a relationship with God in the church. So I went looking for Him in the streets. Because I didn’t fear him. And because I didn’t fear him, I didn’t know him. And if I don’t know him, how can I confidently invite him into my heart? Into my worship?

He talks about Portland in this post, too. And I'm not biased or anything. But Portland is a good city and I loved reading about it in print.

Lauren Nicole Love (Max's fiancee) is writing about her Los-Angeles-induced identity crisis over here:

96 hours in LA, and my heart ACHED. The city you live in and the television you watch are selling you sex, money & a lifestyle you won't ever get. I'm used to that. But here in LA, it's on steroids. Even billboards for bail bonds are dripping in sex and half dressed women with bodies I'll never have. I didn't realize what I'd become numb to until I saw it in its extreme.

Every billboard seemed to scream at me, "You will never be sexy enough, you will never be attractive enough, you will never have enough money - I will sell you this lifestyle if it's the last thing I do." It's convincing, but what Hollywood doesn't know is that I'm driving home to my inbox full of women who have been destroyed by the lifestyle that those billboards and reality TV shows have been selling.

And I cannot bear its weight.

Lauren also runs The Good Women Project, a website committed to publishing frank stories written by women (and sometimes men) about beauty, sex, abuse and addiction, and marriage. Lauren is also committed to connecting women and helping foster mentor-mentee relationships, so if you're interested in mentoring or looking for a mentor, you should check out this page.

From the mission statement:

Good women are a dying breed, and the Good Women Project is doing something about it.

We’re here to tell you what a good woman is, why you should be one, and how on earth you can.

***

We believe that young women are in desperate need of these invaluable gems of wisdom, passed along from smart, sexy, successful older women. And that married women need to be encouraged to keep up the good fight.

We are seeking to provide a place of trust, honesty, truth and encouragement for both single and married women as we wrestle through life together. As women, we are inundated with romance novels and chick flicks, and the Good Women Project desires to deliver reality – the GOOD reality – to your kitchen table, your office space, and your bedroom.

Emily Wierenga (of Imperfect Prose) "hates institutionalized religion" but "wants to know Jesus more than life itself." I'm leaning more and more toward the side of the institution these days, but Emily has a lovely writing voice and the music on her sidebar is great. I leave the page up just to listen to the indie ballads.

in the morning, aiden is the first to hear his brother, and before i can make it to the nursery he's standing there in his pajamas, soother in hand, waiting at kasher's door, waiting to give kasher kisses. "uh-oh" he says, seeing me, meaning "uh-oh, baby's crying and i'm here to help" because his heart is big that way.

he doesn't know about africa, about the thousands of babies wailing and no one there to feed them soothers or milk or kisses, and if he did know, he'd be there, as any child would, standing at africa's door with supplies in his hand and tears in his eyes.

That's it for today, folks.

(My philosopher is on the plane home from Madrid! Right now! And I am beyond excited!)

City suburbs

2011-08-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

I am in the suburbs after over a month in the city. It is calmer here. I feel like I can breathe again. Even the thunderstorm that rolled overhead as we drank a late afternoon tea felt peaceful.

There's a reason people move to the suburbs, much as we malign them. The closest thing to an altercation I saw all afternoon was on the bus when the bus driver missed our stop and refused to turn around. He drove to the next stoplight and let ten of us off. We had to hoof it back to the bus station with our backpacks and bags.

In the downtown core people are often angry. They honk horns and yell out windows at the slightest provocation. They swear when the lines are long and the sidewalks crowded. Once a panhandler screamed at me when I said I wouldn't give her money (on the grounds that she had told me the exact same story twice before during the past three months).

People are frequently unkind when they think they will never see you again; it's difficult to remember that those we encounter are real human beings with stories and not just obstacles or inconveniences, things to be gotten around.

The suburbs have their own danger, of course. But they're not so abrasive. It's not so difficult to take a walk.

From the chapbook: Two-Part Invention

2011-08-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

My last presentation did not go particularly well. I was tired and felt incoherent. And the questions, though tactfully put, were devastating to my line of argument.

Afterwards I went to the library for novels. The plan was to read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, but I ended up with L'Engle's Two-Part Invention. It was a small miracle. I sat in the coffee shop with the big city corner view and read until gloaming sifted down through the tower buildings.

***
On work:

Idleness was not a problem. I might still be amazingly ignorant in most aspects of life, but I knew how to work. That was probably the most important lesson I learned in college. (25)

On failure and success, quoting Chekhov:

You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failure. Don't let that concern you. It's your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, for failures. . . (40)

On prayer:

I think we can pray. I think the heart overrides the intellect and insists on praying. (94)

On love:

And what I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it take, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give. To love wholly, generously, and yet retain the core that makes you you." (103)

***

How does she do that? Plath would have sent me spiraling down; L'Engle, with her sensible, soul-tapping words, always lifts me up.

Lifting of the August heat

2011-08-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

Cool wind on the corner today. Gusts of it tumbling through my hair, cascading across asphalt, whipping through red lights. No humid strands, sweaty foreheads, clammy breaths. No slicing through invisible, sticky walls as we walk. No, just this cool wind, born on an air so clean we forgot it was summer and still humid and still city, so bright and crisp that it could have been fall.

But it's not fall. Not yet.

2011-08-10T19:50:00.000-07:00

"It is in vain that you rise up early

and go late to rest,

eating the bread of anxious toil;

for he gives to his beloved sleep."

Ps. 127.2

I have been battling insomnia off and on all summer, but it has been especially bad for the last week. We're talking wakeful nights that drag on til 3 or 4 am; we're talking the world's longest night on Sunday, when I went to bed at midnight and was still awake at 8am. Usually the worst nights are the products of days and evenings when my mind is especially active (i.e. when I'm trying to come up with paper ideas). That partly explains all the activity here, doesn't it?

But to put it in perspective, I am not a late night person. When I first came here last September, I would stay up until 2am, but only if I was out with friends or colleagues and had no way of going to bed when midnight hit. Even during the winter, I rarely stayed up past 11pm. And I don't regret this. Not one little bit. I love sleeping. I look forward to it. I think there is nothing quite like waking up after a full, refreshing, mind-clearing night's sleep.

And it annoys me to lie awake into the wee hours of the morning. Watching the sky lighten from midnight blue to morning grey is one of the most depressing visual experiences I've ever had (yes, I'm being dramatic; but seriously, it's not fun).

That said, I am taking measures. I went to the story today and bought a tea infusion that contains not only chamomile but several other sleep-inducing herbs. The tea is brewed (covered) for 10-15 minutes and consumed in relatively large quantities throughout the evening. We'll see.

In other news, J. sent me beautiful postcards with beautiful words from Edinburgh and London, which arrived yesterday. He comes home next week, and I can hardly wait!

One more seminar, one more presentation, one more paper. Three letters of recommendation promised.

Almost, almost, almost

there.

Sensible philosophizing

2011-08-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

I've been taking a metaethics class this summer--my last hurrah at the university before heading home. On the first day of course, our professor told us that metaethics was "the dilettante's discipline." True to his word, we've romped through metaphysics and epistemology as well as ethics, dabbling in supervenience, causal theories of knowledge, moral explanation, concept formation, and perception. It's been a good course, and we've done good battle with a lot of skeptical arguments against morality. We also read this article by Dworkin ("Objective Truth: You'd Better Believe It"), which I thought did a marvelous job of putting skepticism in its place.

Morality is a distinct, independent dimension of our experience, and it exercises its own sovereignty. We cannot argue ourselves free of it except by its own leave, except, as it were, by making our peace with it. We may well discover that what we now think about virtue or vice or duty or right is inconsistent with other things we also think, about cosmology or psychology or history. If so, we must try to reestablish harmony, but that is a process whose results must make moral sense as well as every other kind of sense. . . (p. 128)

My professor says that if we go this route, we are quietists, that we have given up on metaethics as a distinct subdiscipline of philosophy. To which I am inclined to say: All right then, let's get on with things!

It's not that I don't think there are important, interesting questions to be explored here, it's just that the skeptical arguments, in the end, can't do justice to my convictions. (Are you seriously trying to get me to commit to a worldview on which genocide isn't REALLY wrong? What do those caps even mean?) And if there's one thing I've learned this year, it's that philosophers of all stripes build their arguments on conviction and intuition just as much as anyone else. So if the skeptic is going to go all the way down with his challenge, I am perfectly free to reciprocate. The ball's in your court, friend.

Dworkin says it best:

The only kind of skepticism that counts, anyway, is the really disturbing kind, the chilling internal skepticism that grips us in a dark night, when we suddenly cannot help thinking that human lives signify nothing, that nothing we do can matter when we and our whole world will in any case perish in a cosmic instance or two. That kind of skepticism cannot be owned or disowned by semantic reclassifications or meta-ethical refinement. It takes hold as a terrifying, overwhelming, substantive fact, and until its grip is loosened by competing conviction we cannot be sophisticated or ironic, or anything else but hollow or paralyzed or sad. (p. 129)

****

We want to live decent, worthwhile lives, lives we can look back on with pride not shame. We want our communities to be fair and good and our laws to be wise and just. These are enormously difficult goals, in part because the issues at stake are complex and puzzling. When we are told that whatever convictions we do struggle to reach cannot in any case be true or false, or objective, or part of what we know, or that they are just moves in a game of language, or just steam from the turbines of our emotions, or just experimental projects we should try for size, to see how we get on, or just invitations to thoughts that we might find diverting or amusing or less boring than the ways we used to think, we must reply that these denigrating suggestions are all false, just bad philosophy. But these are pointless, unprofitable, wearying interruptions, and we must hope that the leaden spirits of our age, which nurture them, soon lift. (p. 139)

I think this is one of the most sensible things I have read all year.

From the chapbook: The Longest Journey

2011-08-09T10:13:00.000-07:00

"You think it is so splendid to hate no one. I tell you it is a crime. You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong. When you denounce sets, you're really trying to destroy friendship."

"I maintain," said Rickie--it was a verb he clung to, in the hope that it would lend stability to what followed-- "I maintain that one can like many more people than one supposes."

"And I maintain that you hate many more people than you pretend."

"I hate no one," he exclaimed with extraordinary vehemence, and the dell re-echoed that it hated no one.

The Longest Journey, E.M. Forster (p. 22)

***

The Longest Journey turned out to be a strange book (I first wrote about it here). As in A Passage to India, Howard's End, and A Room with a View, Forster spends most of his time exploring the differences between nature and convention, reality and human invention. But he does so less expertly in Journey than in the latter three novels, in the sense that in Journey he relies much more on explicit philosophizing to tell his story and much less on character development and scene-setting and plot. I suppose that's why the latter three novels are famous and this one is practically unheard of.

What makes the book strange, and the reason I'm glad I read it, is the ending. From some vantage points, the ending is exactly the opposite of the ending of Crime and Punishment (which I just finished): instead of coming to terms with the intrinsic value of human beings, Forster's characters must come to terms with their intrinsic inequalities. On the other hand, the ending also suggests (to me at least) that the intrinsically superior are not quite beyond the pale of morality after all, that they not only benefit from the actions of those who do their duty but that those actions compel them to acknowledge a reality that is more meaningful and bigger than convention (bigger, perhaps, than nature).

So I don't really know what to make of it in the end. I'm not sure whether I think Forster has it right or wrong; perhaps he has a little of both. But still, Journey resonates and its puzzles linger, and that's my main requirement for a good novel.

Recommended.

2011-08-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Toronto Skyline (from Robarts Library, 2011)

Big City Corner (Toronto 2011)

I know the second picture is messy, but that view, taken in from a coffee shop armchair, is one of my Toronto favorites. I come here and buy cappuchinos just for the luxury of watching the city pass me by on foot, by car, and by bicycle.

Listening

2011-08-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

My computer crashed a few months back and since then I haven't had access to my iTunes library, which means that I've been playing the same music (over and over) on the iPod. I'm really looking forward to being back home and having my library back. I'm also looking forward to having some money for new albums:

I have Elbow's 2008 album Seldom Seen Kid. And I love it. I heard a song from their latest album on the CBC a couple days ago. And I loved it. I was not a "lippy kid" on the street corner, but it's a great song!

The Innocence Mission is another favorite. I've been listening to them for a few years now, but her voice is, I think, an acquired taste.

The album I own has a distinctively jazz/blues flavor. I've only listened to the preview of this one, but it sounds more ballad-y. Either way, she's good.

And Madeleine. We've been acquainted the longest out of this bunch. I have been listening to Half the Perfect World for over five years. I'm still coming back, and I think it's time to add to my collection.

Amazima Ministries

2011-08-05T23:00:00.000-07:00

This is a remarkable story.

Find out about Amazima Ministries here.

Katie's blog is here.

***

This house I call home, it is where people flock for help. For a glass of water, for a welcoming smile, for a story of redemption, for a place to belong. “Come and listen,” we say. “Come and listen to what He’s done for us. For you.” These 8 will leave, but more will come. They always come. I don’t know why us and I don’t know why here. Our house is a wreck and dinner is late. We make a ruckus in the grocery store and we don’t get invited out much because surely we will bring a screaming baby or worse, crazy people. We are late to church and sometimes we get there and one doesn’t have shoes and one forgot to comb her hair. We are the messy ones. And we pray and we pray that we could spill out the grace God has so lavished on us.

13 pairs of eyes look at me as if I hold the world. I pray they learn from me half of what I learn from them. They are growing. Trauma from their pasts surfaces and we fight to cling to truth and joy. The days feel long but the years are so short. Time slips away and these little people transform into big people and I pray only that they are becoming people who know Him more.

Kisses from Katie (5/8/11)

"When I don't live love, others live homeless"

2011-08-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

I've been reading A Holy Experience off and on since high school now. It keeps getting better. Wednesday's post was especially beautiful. Ann writes about wheat, Paris, and communion.

***

Love can only be what communion is — a pouring out, a breaking open and a passing around, a sacrifice.

And if love is what makes itself into a roof around a heart to absorbs all the storms, love is the only real dwelling place, and communion with another is all we have to offer and it’s all we have to crawl up under. When I don’t live love, others live homeless. When I don’t love like Christ, I evict souls.

Christ is love embodied and no matter where we are, He and His body are Home.

What else would God have?

***

Have you seen her book?

Paying compliments

2011-08-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

Back in June, Lisa Bloom wrote a nice article on "How to Talk to Little Girls." It's been making the facebook and blog rounds ever since. Have you read it?

Bloom suggests that instead of paying young girls compliments, we talk to them about books; instead of talking about their appearance, we should ask them what they like and dislike:

Try this the next time you meet a little girl. She may be surprised and unsure at first, because few ask her about her mind, but be patient and stick with it. . .There are no wrong answers. You're just generating an intelligent conversation that respects her brain. For older girls, ask her about current events issues: pollution, wars, school budgets slashed. What bothers her out there in the world? . . . Tell her about your ideas and accomplishments and your favorite books. Model for her what a thinking woman says and does.

I think this is the best idea. I have nothing against fashion or appearances or compliments. I like shopping and shoes and make-up; I like compliments too. But I don't want to spend all my time talking about those things either, and I definitely don't want to be reduced to what I'm wearing.

I worry sometimes that I'm in the minority. I know women who spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking and talking about fashion, and I know men who can't seem to see past a pretty face. Any person who belongs to either camp is doing themselves (and other women) a disservice.

The best thing about Bloom's advice is that, when implemented, it opens doors for real conversations with young people that a facile complement never could. Witness Joanna Goddard:

So, instead of telling the girl on the bus how much I liked her hair, I went ahead and asked her what books she liked. She told me that her mom was reading The Little House in the Prairie to her at night, and that they read one chapter per night, unless it was a long chapter, in which case they read half. We talked about books for five bus stops (that's a long time in midtown traffic!) and then I asked her what she had for breakfast. "Pancakes," she said. I told her that I loved pancakes with lemon and sugar, and her mom looked up and said, "That's how I ate them growing up in Germany." And then the little girl told me how she had gone on an airplane (!) to Germany earlier that summer and how she had seen a fox during her trip and how her grandparents took to her swimming and to the movies, where you could eat pizza in your seats.

I'll take pancakes and Little House over barrettes and shoes any day.

Counterbalance

2011-08-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

Despite the paper-writing, I must have more time on my hands this summer than I did during the previous two semesters--at least if blog posts are any indication. Thanks for listening. (And now onward!)

I'm now in my last month in Toronto, and I've been sorting through the last year. There's a lot of it to sort through. Some of it has been painful (like learning to be a small fish in a big pond and realizing that a career in philosophy requires more than good papers). But I've said a lot about that already. What I've been thinking about today is the other side of the spectrum, the brighter side. Because, you see, mixed in with all the growing pains there has been a lot of growth.

A few weeks ago I started my last course, and I wasn't nervous. I remember how nervous I was when I went to my first seminar last September; I hadn't been able to eat that morning, I was so nervous. And last month, walking into that room and finding a seat and starting in on the lecture--it all felt par for the course and natural and so un-nerve-wracking.

I am getting better at developing ideas out loud too. I still feel really stupid sometimes after I open my mouth, and there are still a lot of seminars where I don't talk. But I think I'm keeping up with most of the conversations now, and I am having a much easier time articulating my ideas and coming up with something to say during the lecture rather than afterwards. In my worst moods, it's really easy to think about how far I have to go, but on the other hand, I've come pretty far, and that counts for something.

The other area where I've noticed real improvement is in my ability to tackle first-order philosophical problems. I am not naturally good at this. My strengths lie in exegesis and close reading. In some ways, I am more of a classicist than a philosopher. I love reading arguments and then figuring out how exactly they're supposed to go and what can be said in their defense. But while being able to put together novel interpretations based on close readings of a text is a useful skill, it's not, strictly speaking, a philosophical one. This year I've been learning how to step away from a text and confront its arguments more directly; to let go of some of the close-reading and focus instead on the bigger picture; to come up with my own claims and my own accounts and do my own philosophizing. And you know what? I like it. It makes me feel bold and creative in a way that all the best exegesis in the world can't, and it gets me to think about and develop my own philosophical commitments, which is something I've avoided in the past.

I am more of a philosopher than I was almost twelve months ago. And even though there's a lot about what lies ahead that terrifies me, I haven't been discouraged. In fact, my courage now makes its appearance on a regular basis, as I summon it forth to help me send one more email, sit through one more intimidating meeting, make another presentation, ask another question, and in general to keep on keeping on. Such good courage, such burgeoning strength.

2011-08-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

Bonsai (Harbord Street, Toronto 2011)

Mixed metaphors

2011-08-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

I started making grad school plans again tonight. You know the drill: which schools, where, who, when, why. I could feel butterflies in my stomach--and the ill-tempered birds of discontent coming in to roost.

The butterflies are easy to explain. I love philosophy, and there is a part of it that comes naturally to me: the part where I sit in the library and read and think and write. I know I complain about it a lot, but I love it. I also like sitting in classrooms or philosophy talks and letting words and ideas and arguments wash over me; it makes me feel like a surfer, standing in wait to catch the wave of truth, ready to be carried out into the wide blueness with my hair whipping in the salty spray. (Yeah. Ok. I've never been surfing. But I imagine that's what it would feel like--a lot like sitting in a philosophy classroom, plus water, sun, and sand.) So the butterflies are there because I am in love with ideas, and I am in love with the way philosophy, in particular, works out and on and through ideas. It just makes me weak at the knees.

Ah, but the birds of discontent, you ask? They're a little more difficult.

Way back during the last round of applications I wrote a post on self-respect. In it, I said that if I was rejected by grad schools, I wasn't going to count that as a failure, that it would only be a failure if I thought that my self-worth was measured in acceptances. I also said that I was confident I had something to offer philosophy, even if it took a while to catch anyone's attention.

I was very confident. Breathtakingly so. I had plans to pack up and move to a university town even if they rejected me. I was going to be like the woman in that Bible story about the judge--pounding on doors until I was let in and my case was heard.

I am less confident now, both about my intellectual capabilities and about what I have to offer philosophy. Partly because I've spent most of my time for the last year with people who are significantly smarter than I am. But mainly because I had been accustomed to a steady diet of praise: I was used to people telling me that I was doing well and that I would do well. And then I came here and it was like the phone company cut my line. My successes felt inadequate and the words of praise stopped coming. I had no idea how much stock I put in hearing someone else say: This is good; you can do this; you're going somewhere. Now I have to wait until the end of the semester for the momentary boost of a good mark or a kind comment at the end of a paper.

So that's one reason for the birds of discontent, I guess. I am word-needy, more so than I realized. And I have been learning what it means to live without satisfying that craving. I'm not saying it isn't healthy. But it sure is hard.

The other reason for the birds is that I am realizing that, in the end, the marks and the papers--even the ones with nice comments--are not what matter (or, at the very least, they aren't the main thing). It's also important to know the right people and have the right people backing you, and it's important to be able to say the right (smart, canny, intelligent) things at the right time. And that absolutely terrifies me. It terrifies me, and it makes me feel very alone. How can I even hope to compete when there are so many people who are smarter and more eloquent and better than I am?

And that leads me to the third reason. Someone once told me she thought the thing I was most afraid of was failure. I laughed and said, "Who? Me?" (Yes, you.) I think now that she was right. I am very afraid of failing, and I think fear is what makes the lack of words this year and the thought of having to fight for a place in academia (or anywhere else) so poignant and so unsettling. I am coming to terms with the fact that I will never be the best at what I do, but what if I'm not even good enough?

So that explains the birds of discontent. That explains the sudden aviary I'm housing in my stomach after clicking through department websites.

But, you know, they're only crows. And the butterflies are so lovely, and that sea tang? So beguiling.

Some things are worth the risk.