End-of-Year and End-of-Book Quotes

I am taking these quotes from this NPR article.  They are going here since I want to remember them and don't have any other place at this moment to preserve them.

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."  (James Joyce, The Dead)

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters." (Norman McLean, A River Runs Through It)

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." (George Eliot, Middlemarch)

To Whole Foods to Study

Hello, friends.  Next week, is my first college exam in a while.  Two summers ago, I took a Plant Biology course, so it hasn't been too terribly long.  Plus--did you know this dear blog readers--that I study for fun?  In 2012, I've been studying for the GRE and brushing up on Precalculus and Physics.  Yes, this is fun for me and I embrace every fabulous learning moment.  And, since I'm always honest with you, I'll admit that I like the challenge of a college test.  So, I can't say I'm complaining.

Tomorrow, the forecast is cloudy and a little cool, so I'm going to head to Whole Foods to make my flash cards and drink some coffee.  The real-life outfit is still TBD, but I like to imagine it will be something like this:

Fat Face navy hoody, $67 / Acne boot cut jeans / Converse shoes, $68 / Crafted Messenger Bag, $40

First Day of School

Every semester, I'm allowed to take one university course for free.  I've only taken advantage of this once (hooray for Biology!)  Work is too stressful and my schedule too packed to fit in a course.

However, this semester I decided to go for it and take Art History:  Introduction to Visual Art.  Just because. I love learning and love art and design.  There have been several times when I have debated dropping it (usually when I received another work project or realized I have about 100 pages of reading and numerous flashcards to make weekly.)  But, I really want to try to make it through this one!

My class is held in the Art Building and, mixed in with the usual college t's and jeans, you can usually see some pretty awesome outfits.  Here is a little back-to-school outfit I put together...now back to the books!

Oasis dress, $76 / Orange trench coat / Matiko wingtip oxford / Proenza Schouler metallic handbag, $2,170 / Ela Stone butterfly earrings, $72 / Goorin Bros. goorin bros hat / Spiral Notebook - You & Me

A Rainy Day with Lucy

I love Lucy.  Lucille Ball was quite the pioneer.  She helped set the stage for women in comedy, had a baby at almost 40,  and was married to her second husband-13 years her junior-for 27 years.  Lucy also had a fashion style that we imitate today.  I think if she went out for coffee on a rainy day in 2012, it would like a little something like this:

Vintage long dress / Prada long sleeve top, $460 / Hunter wellies rubber boots / Radley vintage satchel, $315 / John Lewis umbrella, $16

I Don't Have the Answers

"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like—"
"It's 'If a body meet a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."
"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."
She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though.
"I thought it was 'If a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around— nobody big, I mean— except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff— I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy." 

(from The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger)

I suppose life is the inspiration for literature and literature is the inspiration for life.

Suffering. I don't have the answers for why it exists or what to do with it.  But I have thoughts on it and I see some of these thoughts in the passage above.  Holden Caulfield.  Old Holden, old sport.  

The cliff in this passage reminds me of suffering.  The cliff and the darkness, the shadow that we find when we peer over the edge at all the we never want to experience.  When we dangle from the edge, white-knuckled, pleading that we don't fall.  When we balance precariously on the brink.  

But life often doesn't end at suffering.  Or, I guess it is more accurate to say it doesn't have to end at suffering.  Time has a way of making us rise.  Of realizing that our hearts are going to beat again, even if we think it's impossible that they will.  We are a revenant, I suppose.

I think that suffering can be an impetus.  A drive that makes us want to be the catcher in the rye.  There can be a desire to save those who come after us from falling into the depths that we did.  To keep them innocent, safe, perhaps even joyful.  That we can catch them, pull them securely close, and then release them.  

But the hard (hard, hard) part is that we won't want to do this, or even know how to do this, until we know the cliff.  And perhaps that is why suffering comes.  Or, at the least, what we need to reap like rye from the suffering--the hope, the desire, the passion to catch those around us.  To either help them escape the fall entirely and, when that is impossible, to love them through it (to love them through it, to love them through it.)  

Again, I don't have the answers to explain the whys of suffering.  Or to justify it. Or to casually explain it away.  I just know that we are not exempt from suffering but somehow we can choose not to exempt ourselves from loving others who are in it and desperately need us to.

A Delicious Salad Recipe for You.

Beets with Walnuts, Goat cheese, and Baby Greens

(Trust Andrea on the beets and goat cheese.)

From Cooking Light, April 2011, page 130

6 medium beets (red & golden), about 1 1/2 pounds
1 cup water
8 cups mixed baby salad greens
1 cup loosely packed fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves
1 tbsp white balsamic vinegar (regular balsamic works fine, too)
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup (2 ounces) crumbled goat cheese (not feta)
1/4 cup coarsely chopped walnuts, toasted

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

2.  Leave root and 1-inch stem on beets; scrub with a brush.  Place beets and 1 cup water in a 13 x 9-inch glass or ceramic baking dish; cover tightly with foil. Bake at 375 degrees for 1 hour and 30 minutes or until tender.  Cool beets slightly. Trim off roots; rub off skins.  Cut beets into wedges; cool completely.

3.  Place greens and parsley in a large bowl; toss. Combine vinegar, salt, and pepper, stirring with a whisk.  Gradually drizzle in oil, stirring constantly with a whisk.  Drizzle dressing over greens mixture; toss gently.  Arrange 1 cup salad on each of 8 plates; top evenly with beets.  Top each serving with 1 tbsp cheese and 1 1/2 tsp nuts.

Warning:  This salad is addictive.  It's also an excellent substitute for the usual garden salad at your next dinner party!

Creative Sundays (Written on a Saturday)

It has been an emotionally dark month.  And, like Forrest Gump, that's all I want to say about that. For now.

Here is something I did last Sunday while listening to Perfume Genius and hanging out with Maris:

It's an unedited photo of a painting I'm working on.  A work in progress.  Can you tell yet that it's the ocean at night?  I hope so.  Really, it is so much more, though.  It is an illustration of how desperately I need to be creative. Not necessarily an artistic master.  Just creative.  And I have to make time for this.

Creative Sundays.

Everything else gets done during the week. And, if it doesn't...that's ok.  Sundays are the times to be creative:  painting, photography, writing, reading, crafts, knitting, and so on as I could progress infinitely through these necessary things.

We need those times, friends.  We were made to be creative.  Let's do this.

Goest

Ash Ode
by Dean Young
When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t you but some alarmed pretender, I went on running, shouting now into the sky, continuing your fame and luster. Since I've been incinerated, I've oft returned to this thought, that all things loved are pursued and never caught, even as you slept beside me you were flying off. At least what's never had can’t be lost, the sieve of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone, wedding ring, a single repeated dream, a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions of the sea written in the desert, your broken umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.

Twin Primes

Last year, around this time, I was contacted to submit an entry for a Valentine's Day newspaper article in which several people shared their favorite quotes about love.  I narrowed mine to part of the selection below--more text is included to give you its context and because it's so beautiful in it's entirety.

I forgot all about this until, last week at the library, I saw the book it's an excerpt from:  The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano. I didn't know at the time, of course, that my selection was a little prophetic.

Prime numbers are divisible only by one and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they’d been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other ties he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn’t do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.

In his first year at university, Mattia had learned that, among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually became rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silence, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no on can say where exactly, until they are discovered.

Mattia thought he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not really close enough to touch each other. He had never told her that.

Behold the New Year: 2012

Came across this in the comments section of an article and thought, "This is not a bad way to approach the new year.":

Learn to love someone without expecting something in return from them.

This reminds me of something I journaled several months ago:

Isn't this how we are supposed to love in these post-9/11 days?  To live so we have no regrets? So we don't later ask ourselves "What would have happened if I....?" To throw our love--and all its related emotions--out into the world and hope that it finds someone who at the least wants it and at the best reciprocates it? I want to stop demanding more than I have in the expectation that I should have it.  And to just find the good things that have fallen out of the past few months.  (This is a ridiculously cheesy analogy) but that maybe it could be like looking at the beautiful rain instead of the stormy clouds it falls from...


This is giving me great pause right now and I think I'll have to go reflect on this.  I'll report back to you in 2013.