But you are not defined by your deficits any more than I am.

Sometimes I reread his old Mr. Blue advice columns, and I have nothing but love for him. He says, “But you are not defined by your deficits any more than I am,” and “you know that loneliness is an accident and no reflection on you, and you simply have to see yourself through it,” and “get off this bus and wait for the next one,” and also this: “Life is a mess, we agonize over it, and then we get in the car and go someplace to do something we need to do, and we are showered with mercy and forgiveness.”

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly...

My three favorite poems are "The Lanyard" by Billy Collins, "Love Poem" by John Frederick Nims, and "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden. There are a handful of other poems and poets I appreciate (let's see... Yeats, um, Yeats... Atwood! Margaret Atwood writes some poetry... Yeats, Atwood... and David Slavitt wrote this one poem about the sinking of the Titanic that I wrote an essay about once...), but these three take the cake.

"The Lanyard" - you must read it, really. Or you must log on to the NPR website and hear Billy Collins read it, in his dry monotone.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Classic.

/ / / / /


Next, Nims' "Love Poem," which addresses its subject as "my clumbsiest dear."
My clumbsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burrs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill at ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before red apoplectic streetcars-
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease.
In traffic of wit expertly manoeuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgeting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gayly in love's unbreakable heaven
Our soals on glory of split bourbon float.

Be with me darling early and late. Smash glasses-
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should yor hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break. I love this poem for its unorthodox warmth and honesty. No shooting stars, no pounding hearts, no sweating palms. Only with words and people and love you move at ease. The last lines (For should your hands drop white and empty / All the toys of the world would break) crushes me a little.

/ / / / /

And, lastly, Auden's "September 1, 1939." I love every line from I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire straight through to the closing words, but especially the closing words, which I will post here and not spoil by saying anything more about them:

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us.

Life, like holiness, can be known only by being experienced. To experience it is not to 'figure it out' or even to understand it, but to suffer it and rejoice in it as it is. In suffering it and rejoicing in it as it is, we know that we do not and cannot understand it completely. We know, moreover, that we do not wish to have it appropriated by somebody's claim to have understood it. Though we have life, it is beyond us. We do not know how we have it, or why. We do not know what is going to happen to it, or to us. It is not predictable; though we can destroy it, we cannot make it. It cannot, except by reduction and the grave risk of damage, be controlled. It is holy. To think otherwise is to enslave life, and to make, no humanity, but a few humans its predictably inept masters.

WENDELL BERRY.

Old-fashioned young thing.

Dust.

My brother Adam and I attended an Ash Wednesday service tonight. I love Lenten music—all the sharps—and the ashes. You are dust and to dust you shall return. Some people find our impermanence unsettling, but I find it reassuring. For everything that happens to us in this life, however wonderful or terrible, our entire lives are just the briefest flicker. We return to dust.

Sitting in Church, I was also thinking about one of my main hopes/fears about organized religion. If God turns out to be just an invention of the human mind, I hope that we can say that everything we did in the name of religion was also in the service of humanity and our planet. It saddens and sickens me to see people fall back on religion to wage war, defend intolerance and inhumanity, excuse hateful attitudes and behaviors, and justify the exploitation of our natural resources. So often religion seems to turn people cruel and rigid. I wish that we could say—God or no god—that our religious beliefs make us kinder to one another and more mindful stewards of our planet.

This is why I went into journalism, initially:

Many years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the press in large and populous nations such as America for its ability to unite people who share certain beliefs about an issue but, because they feel 'insignificant and lost amid the crowd,' cannot act alone. According to Tocqueville the press fulfills its highest purpose when it serves as a beacon to bring together people who otherwise might ineffectively seek each other 'in darkness.' Newspapers can bring them 'together and... keep them united.' If there were no newspapers or if newspapers failed to do their task, he observed, 'there would be no common activity.'

Now I don't know. We treat so much drivel as news, preferring to ignore the real issues. We insist on seeing events as isolated and out of context, beyond our ability to help or even just understand. We embrace the easy answer. (Why do they hate us? Because we are free. Free to do what, exactly? Free to change the channel?) A few newspapers still serve as 'beacons,' but how many people are earnestly looking for that light? We all seem to be looking inward, we're bowling alone, and I think we're worse off for it.

Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf.

Here I come to the memoir writer’s difficulties—one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened”; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then?

* * * * *

When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated...

* * * * *

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device—a means of summing up and making innumerable details visible in one concrete picture. ... Whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past. Always a scene has arranged itself: representative, enduring. This confirms me in my instinctive notion (it will not bear arguing about; it is irrational): the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and at some moments, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is, these scenes—for why do they survive undamaged year after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent? Is this liability to scenes the origin of my writing impulse? Are other people also scene makers? These are questions to which I have no answer. Perhaps sometimes I will consider it more carefully. Obviously I have developed the faculty, because, in all the writing I have done, I have almost always had to make a scene, . . . when I am writing about a person; I must find a representative scene in their lives. . .