Melancholy Saturday
I’ve finally finished my second re-read of Ondaatje’s The English Patient. This reading took so much longer than usual, due to my keeping track of events on my trusty yellow legal pad. Half a pad later, I can honestly say that I have some direction to my paper (finally). This is a good thing, especially considering the paper is due in about 3 weeks, give or take. Now to sort through the research and start typing.
I’m convinced that there’s nothing more intimidating than a blank word processor screen, taunting you to begin with its blinking cursor!
I wanted to put up some of my favorite passages, since I consider this weblog my personal “commonplace book” of sorts.
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world. She sat at the night table, hunched over, reading of the young boy in India who learned to memorize diverse jewels and objects on a tray, tossed from teacher to teacher — those who taught him dialect those who taught him memory those who taught him to escape the hypnotic.
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To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement. A bath in the sea, a fuck with a soldier who never knew your name. Tenderness towards the unknown and anonymous, which was a tenderness to the self.
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I see him [Herodotus] more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legend as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piercing together a mirage. ‘This history of mine,’ Herodotus says, ‘has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history — how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love.
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I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.
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We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography — to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Oh, to be a writer. I love finding myself lost in words.
