1.1.11

Happy New Year!

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

The Waking: Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
G_d bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

MIRRORS

Overshadowed by the more celebrated writers of “El Boom Latino-Americano”, Eduardo Galeano has always been an acquired taste for readers in the English-speaking world. At once lyrical and highly political, the Uruguayan has always been difficult to pigeonhole. In the preface to Memory of Fire (1982-86), his mesmerizing three-volume narrative history of the Americas in vignette form – and the one on which his reputation is likely to rest – Galeano sets out his stall: “I don’t know to what literary form this voice of voices belongs... I don’t know if it is a novel or essay or epic poem or testament or chronicle… I do not believe in the frontiers that, according to literature’s customs officers, separate the forms.”

Alexander Woollcott

Alexander Woollcott, who led the Algonquin Round Table of media celebrities in the 1920's and 30's, prized winning above all, and set out his croquet ground on a far-from-level playing field at Neshobe Island, NY. In his biography, Alexander Woollcott: His Life and his World, Samuel Hopkins Adams writes of his lawn, 'hewn out of virgin forest, with the contours of a roller coaster and frequent extrusions of primordial rock or giant tree root'.

"Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water."-Alexander Woollcott

"His father died in 1903 and his mother in 1905. After the deaths of his parents he increasingly withdrew from social life and he became a virtual recluse, spending most of his time in bed writing, in a room lined with cork to exclude noise, with all the windows shut and the air thick with inhalents. His friends were usually summoned to visit him at night. After 1907 he lived mainly in a cork-lined room in his apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann, writing mostly at night. His last public appearance was at the New Year's Eve ball given by the discreetly homosexual Comte de Beaumont in 1921."


Proust's multifaceted vision is enthralling. He was a satirist and a nanoscopic analyst of introspective consciousness, a chronicler and theorist of Eros, exploring nuances of human sexuality, a wise and ethical writer. He was the creator of more than forty unforgettable characters who continue to resonate in the world's literary consciousness. Above all, Proust's central message is the affirmation of life. Contrary to the opinion voiced by some of his contemporaries and critics, Proust's great work teaches that life's "purpose" is not to be sought in artistic artefacts: life is not fulfilled when a painting or a novel is completed, but when it is transmuted, in the very course of quotidian living, into something "artistic" or spiritually mature and wise.


 "Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water."-Alexander Woollcott


When I was around 6 I was sent to a boarding school in East Sussex and I was one of three small girls. The rest were boys. Bath time happened once a week on a Saturday.
We were all lined up naked from the bathroom, on the landing and down the first and second flight of stairs. There must have been 50 of us, maybe less. In any case we were lined up alphabetically, each week the same order. Because of my surname starting with a P I was way down the queue. 
The bathtub was filled half-way with water and every child was bathed in the same water in the same tub three at a time! Three at a time! Scrub scrub scrub. The matron would use the same flannel and wipe our faces and ears, ask us to soap ourselves and then rinse us with a beaker of water which by this time pretty cold water!
By the time I climbed in with two boys on either side the water was quite dirty and cool! Memorable colour and memorable water!
I was next to a kid who used to gross me out, poor thing! He would spit when he talked and had a gravelly voice. He wanted to trade all the time. Sweets for treats! He would get a great tuck box every term filled with Mars bars and such.


Is this my Madeleine experience? What is the trigger? Dishwater?

Frozen Image

Ever since I was a young girl and heard about Proust and his magnum opus I imagined, the image which has stuck in my mind, is of a naked Proust sitting in his copper bathtub surrounded by cork walls and gazing into his navel which has liquid bath water in it.
This image still haunts me whenever I even say his name.

(perhaps the title should be Wet Image for this post)

The End of Boys

Peter Hoffmeister was a nervous child who ran away repeatedly and bit his fingernails until they bled. Home-schooled until the age of fourteen, he had only to deal with his parents and siblings on a daily basis, yet even that sometimes proved too much for him. Over the years, he watched his mother disintegrate into her own form of mania, while his father—a scholar and doctor who had once played semi-pro baseball—was strict and pushed Peter particularly hard. He wanted only the best from his son but in the process taught Peter to expect only the worst from himself. In the midst of his chaotic home life, Peter began to hear a voice—an insistent, monotone that would periodically dictate his actions. When Peter finally entered public school he started to break free from his father’s control—only to fall sway to the voice more and more. His obsessive-compulsive behavior morphed into ruthless competition in sports and, ultimately, into lies, violence, and drugs. Deceit and brutality became his sole currency as he was tossed from institution to institution, with his younger brother Cooper as his only ally—a boy as lost as Peter.

The End of Boys is one man's journey to the very brink of sanity and back, a harrowing and heartbreaking account of the trauma of adolescence and the redemption available to us all, if only we choose to find it.


This sounds like a worthwhile book to read, it is available for pre-order right now.