dual personalities

I try to keep up with the news, but as parsing it reveals more and more deliberate misdirection, the exercise seems futile. And it’s not good for my blood pressure. Recently, after giving up and returning to my book, I found solace in this passage:

“The future of the world no longer disturbs me; I do not try still to calculate, with anguish, how long or how short a time the Roman peace will endure; I leave that to the Gods… Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and pediments will rise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.”  Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Our fictional Hadrian was correct; not all our books will perish, and at least some of our achievements will survive, even if memory of us doesn’t survive with them.  Some monuments remain in tact,

Hadrian’s Pantheon in Rome

while others fall victim to political trends,

Vandalized Confederate monument in Durham, NC

and most things just crumble away in obscurity.

Everything has a story. Find out what you can and save what you can, but don’t worry about it. Everything will work out.

Don’t think I’m giving up on the present — far from it! It’s just that taking the long view helps me endure it with greater equanimity.

Have a grand weekend!

As you might expect, unpacking our boxes of books is reminding us of all the things we haven’t read yet or could read again. DN and I are both book hoarders, so there are entire syllabi of books from sophomore years of college (and so on) to be consumed. Should I see how Marcel Proust fares for me now compared to when I was 21? Should I select a volume from DN’s entire shelf of Evelyn Waugh? Should I ever read the seventh Henry James novel I ambitiously purchased while reading for comps?

With great bookshelves comes great responsibility (or something).

Well, starting small is always a good method. So the other day I did at least flip through my favorite Rilke collection, Sonnets from Orpheus.

Breathing, you invisible poem!
World-space in pure continuous interchange
with my own being. Equipoise
in which I rhythmically transpire.

Single wave
whose gradual sea I am;
of all possible seas the most frugal,–
windfall of space.

How many of these places in space have already
been in me. Many a breeze
is like my son.

Do you recognize me, air, full of places once mine?
You, once the smooth rind,
orb, and leaf of all my words.

A bit Whitman-esque if you ask me!

*The painting is “Reading” by Pierre Bonnard

How was your weekend? Mine was busy, busy, busy — my new normal, I guess. But it was pleasant. We had a number of social plans that involved holding babies…

And we made great headway setting up our apartment. There are finally books on bookshelves! Perhaps not yet perfectly styled, but I am happy to have emptied and collapsed at least a dozen boxes.

A much more helpful metric than “sparks joy.” (Illustration by 1Canoe2)

Here’s to a happy week in a more navigable apartment. It is the first week of classes on campus, so I am sure that more mayhem awaits me at work. But I’ll do my best to embody Del Griffith, quoted above, and go with the flow.

I had a quiet week, reading and preparing for the semester to start (all hell breaks loose next week). I started Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian.

I’ve been meaning to read it for years but never got around to it until a friend gave me a copy. Timing is all. Yourcenar’s Hadrian writes a dense, lyrical prose, whereby even the human body becomes “that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.” I’m hooked.

When too tired to read, which is to say most evenings, I’ve been watching an Australian detective show from 2007 called “City Homicide”. It’s decidedly average, but the effort to decode the Aussie accents holds my attention. Otherwise, it requires no brain power at all.

It’s amazing how much the world has changed since 2007 — 12 short years! While watching American TV shows from that era, I often find myself thinking “wow, you couldn’t say that now”. How surprising to discover the same phenomenon on Australian (and British) TV. I must say, however, that I prefer older shows. They may not be politically correct but they are not nearly as cynical, brutal, and gory as today’s.

One last observation. Yesterday I helped pack school supply bags for needy area children. We worked from the supply lists that each teacher submitted to us.

I was amazed at the amount of stuff required for elementary school-aged children. Aside from the usual crayons, pencils, erasers, and pocket folders, lists called for headphones (!), pens of a certain color, fancy mechanical crayon/pencils, markers, highlighters, glue sticks, specific types of pencil cases, wet wipes, scissors (blunt or pointed), post-it notes, index cards, Kleenex, white-board markers, different sized three-ring binders, spiral bound notebooks, composition notebooks, reams of loose-leaf paper, and various other sundries. No wonder so many families need help purchasing this stuff! Is it really necessary? I couldn’t help remembering that much of the stuff we bought our own children either never got used or got lost. What a waste.

Well, if this post does anything, it certainly reveals what a cranky old lady I am! Have a great weekend!

There is nothing like moving to take you back in time one or two decades. Daughter #1 has a tradition of watching old DVDs of The O.C. before the internet connects; DN and I end putting the iPod on “Shuffle All” while we unpack boxes. Such non-streaming media inevitably originates in an older era — cue nostalgia!

At one point this weekend after a song by The Shins came on shuffle, I decided to listen to the full albums that I know, from 2003 and 2007. Now for me, those years are squarely in the ripest age range for reminiscing — 13 to 17! This was a time in our family when the boy would make mix CDs, we all did a lot of driving to and from school, taking road trips to visit colleges, and what have you. It was also high school, so you know — feelings. The Shins were a favorite.

I enjoyed listening to Chutes Too Narrow (2003) and Phantom Limb (2007) a lot and figured I’d blog about them. But when I went to look up some lyrics to find a good title for the post, I was shocked to realize they were all terribly dark!

You can fake it for a while
Bite your tongue and smile
Like every mother does her ugly child
But the stars are leaking out,
Like spittle from a cloud,
Amassed resentment pelting ounce and pound.

Since I don’t have the time nor mind to figure out
The nursery rhymes that helped us out in making sense of our lives
The cruel uneventful state of apathy releases me
I value them but I won’t cry every time one’s wiped out

Close your eyes to corral a virtue
Is this fooling anyone else?
Never worked so long and hard
To cement a failure

…

Still to come
The worst part and you know it
There is a numbness
In your heart and it’s growing

Only the last song sounds sad, right? What I remembered was the sound of The Shins and not the content, I suppose. As a person who can’t hear well, lyrics are not something I naturally notice and absorb — unlike DN, who seems to pick up words immediately and cares deeply about them in songs. I always have to look up song lyrics if I want to know them. (Or if it’s a radio hit and the words are “booty” and “dance floor” over and over again.) Well, lesson learned! The Shins are dark.

I did remember one verse of “Phantom Limb,” since one of my best friends used them as her “Senior Last Words.”

And we’ll no longer memorize or rhyme
Too far along in our crime
Stepping over what now towers to the sky

I laughed out loud when I looked up the full song this morning. It’s literally about high school. The line prior to her chosen excerpt is “This town seems hardly worth our time.” Pretty on the nose, eh? I can’t remember exactly which Bob Dylan lyrics I chose for mine, but they were probably pretty on the nose, too.

Since Saturday’s post, I have spent most of my time playing online solitaire, which is extremely addictive, and watching foreign programs on Netflix and Amazon, having run out of interesting English-language ones. I won’t discuss my viewing in detail since I don’t have strong feelings about anything I’ve seen. Let’s attribute my lack of enthusiasm to this morning’s dark and thundery weather and move on.

Recently I bought a valance to go in the kitchen until I can find the perfect (more colorful) curtains. Here’s a close-up,

and here is the wider view.

It’ll do nicely for the time being, but I do need to put something up on the wall to the right of the sink. Suggestions?

Finally, I want to share this great Johnny Cash song that I recently discovered. Give it a listen.

We’d all do well to pay attention to the message!

Enjoy the rest of your week, and remember, it’s almost Friday!