There are days we lived as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
Li-Young Lee, “From Blossoms”.
Until death, it is all life.
Miguel De Cevantes.
Small pleasures: the first cigarette of the day; a glass of sherry before Sunday lunch; a bar of chocolate parceled out to last a week; a newly published library book, still pristine and untouched by other hands; the first hyacinths of spring; a neatly folded pile of ironing, smelling of summer; the garden under snow; an impulsive purchase of stationery for her drawer — had been encouragement enough.
She wondered how many years—if ever—it would be before the monster of awakened longing was subdued and she could return to placid acceptance of a limited life. The journey into love was so effortless and graceful; the journey out such a long and labored climb.
Clare Chambers, ‘Small Pleasures’.
This was the last book I had just managed to finish about a week ago, and it was quite an unexpected joy – both the book, and the act of actually finishing a book.
Felt good.
And it feels good to be back here again, after the long absence.
I’ve missed this space much and yet it was near impossible to muster enough energy and enthusiasm to do anything about it…. until now.
I still do not have much to say, but thought I’d just share some of the small pleasures that have helped to counter off the small griefs of the past few months.
Small book buying spree.
Am I the only one who is still mourning the loss of Book Depository?? (sniff.. sniff) These were mainly from my final orders with them.
Carving out space for me time.
A little of these, really goes a long way.
Visiting my favourite bookshop (again & again).
And lastly, but probably also the fastest and most effective way to putting a wide smile on my face at any given time…….
Looking at my cats enjoying peaceful slumber.
🙂
We think we’ll remember it all and we remember hardly anything. Even when the car is only doing forty, it’s still going too fast. The trees are a green and gray blur, the restaurant where we thought we’d die laughing over the misspelled menu has come and gone. Neon-green streaks and bolts of flamingo pink blow up the sky on a winter night in Maine and we think – oh, we will never forget these northern lights, but we do.
What we remember is only the curling picture in the left-hand drawer, or a gorgeous half page photo in an old travel magazine, but what we saw when we held hands, lifting our chins to the sky as if we could leap into the jagged, jeweled brilliance above us, was seen for ten seconds only, and never again.
Amy Bloom, ‘White Houses’.
How true.
And so, believe it or not, I managed to arrive at December with only 6 books bought for the year. Have not seen the likes of this in the past decade or so.
Somehow, I’ve actually been rather contented with just enjoying the offering I had on my own shelves this past eleven months (well, that as well as those on my Scribd account – I so love Scribd, by the way!)
Of course one particularly bad Wolf saw it as rather ‘unbefitting’ of a self professed book hoarder to end the year with anything less than a bang (or thud!) and so, a Fire Sale was started and thus bad begins. :p
Not a bad way to ring out the year, I suppose. Yes, there is much to be thankful for.
Personally, I was hit unexpectedly by some bleak and discouraging news during a recent medical follow up just the week before Christmas, and it had put a damper on my spirits. But God has been faithful and good, and while not everything is completely out of the woods yet, I can thankfully at this moment say, it is well with my soul.
Wishing all of you a blessed new year, and may you find much hope and light in the days to come! God bless….
Masks conceal, but they can also slip, and each slip brings a new surprise. Clearly, there has always been something unknown behind the facade, but when we do catch a glimpse of that other, hidden face, it is often very different from what we assumed or hoped for, or feared. […] having been granted a chance glimpse of what was once hidden, we are surprised, and altered, by finding that what we see is a far cry from what we had imagined. At such times, it’s not just that a secret has been laid open to view, it’s that our way of seeing changes, opening onto a wholly other world, familiar in some ways, vitally different in others.
It was during our holiday in Ostend that I first saw past the mask my mother kept for me. Of course, I knew her life was full of disappointments, but until then I hadn’t quite recognised that I was one of them.
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A fortnight before she died, I went into her room and found her lying very still, her eyes closed, the July sunlight spilling from the window onto her dressing table. She seemed impossibly remote, wonderfully other, the way those we love sometimes seem when dreaming – and I entertained the brief fantasy that, if I could talk to her as she lay in that suspended state, I could make her see that I’d never have been happy with what she thought of as happiness.
That fantasy melted away, however, as I gazed at her face: serene, for the moment, unburdened, but just one more in a series of masks. Until then, I had assumed that all our masks were intended to conceal, and that what they concealed was the real self, a fixed entity who suffered pain and shame, a self that needed to be kept hidden, if only for its own protection or, in the case of my mother’s dismay, to protect others. If I had paid more attention back then, however, I might have understood that, of all our many life masks, none of them, not even the most fleeting or beatific, is any more true or false than any of the others.
John Burnside, ‘Sons and Mothers’.
Well, this had hit unexpectedly, a little too close to home.
My first encounter with Burnside, and I must say, something definitely did catch fire.
This poignant piece is one of the collection of essays found in Treasure Palaces: Great Writers Visit Great Museums, in case you were interested.
February.
My favourite month of the year, for the simple reason that it has my birthday in it.
Not that anything particularly exciting ever happens though. :p
I have been wanting to put something up in this space ever since the last post, but never seem to have enough substance or content, nor the inspiration to make up for a post-worthy piece.
So I thought I will just go ahead and share some of the random bits (bookish and otherwise) that might (or might not) be of interest to anyone visiting these pages.
This post was supposed to be up last Friday, as I didn’t want the month to go by without leaving some footprint here. But then one of my cats went missing and I was derailed for a bit.
I am happy to report that all is (almost) well now (hence the appearance of this post), and my cat is safely back, recovering from its wounds after being found on Saturday night, bloodied and traumatized – aftermath from a vicious catfight.
Speaking of cats, here’s a useful tip I came across on Instagram recently, which might be of interest to some:
Random bits on reading.
And here are some of the ones that have been most recently added to the never-ending list of want-to-reads. I will not attempt to share the list that I have also managed to amass in Scribd.
Random bits on listening.
Book Arrivals.
Birthday Cake.
Last random bit.
I now weigh exactly the same as my age.
What a year this has been!
While nothing went quite the way we thought it would have panned out at the onset of the year, there was (and still is) much to be thankful for.
Things could have been worse, and is indeed worse, for so many, and I can only thank God for having kept me and mine, well.
And that I could still take delight and comfort, refuge and shelter, in these little joys…..
And that, was how my year had been for me.
How has it been for you?
I felt the overwhelming nature of the words on the page and the pages in all the volumes […] I could drown in so many words. This thought filled me not with the panic of my childhood, more a sense that one day I would sink below the surface of all that literature and disappear into it. The stuff that had nurtured me, the stuff that had kept me alive, would one day be a place in which I would submerge entirely.
Andrew Relph, ‘Not Drowning, Reading’.
Just a little sort-of post to show some signs of life over here.
I know this space has been deathly quiet for far too long….
But yeah, definitely not drowning (nor drowned!) but rather, reading. 😉
(& listening to loads of audiobooks!!)
p/s: Did I forget to mention that I’m in love with Scribd? 😀
We live on the flat, on the level, and yet – and so – we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracturing force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.
Julian Barnes, ‘Levels of Life’.
For Barnes, this was his grief story. A raw and honest piece of writing that details the loss of his wife and soulmate of thirty years. An account of a grief, unflinchingly observed.
How you feel and how you look may or may not be the same. So how do you feel? As if you have dropped from a height of several hundred feet, conscious all the time, have landed feet first in a rose bed with an impact that has driven you in up to the knees, and whose shock has caused your internal organs to rupture and burst forth from your body. This is what it feels like, and why should it look any different?
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I do not believe I shall ever see her again. Never see, hear, touch, embrace, listen to, laugh with; never again wait for her footstep, smile at the sound of an opening door, fit her body into mine, mine into hers. Nor do I believe we shall meet in some dematerialised form. I believe dead is dead.
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You put two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
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It was thirty seven days from diagnosis to death. I tried never to look away, always to face it: and a kind of crazy lucidity resulted. Most evenings, as I left the hospital, I would find myself staring resentfully at people on buses merely going home at the end of their day. How could they sit there so idly and unknowingly, their indifferent profiles on display, when the world was about to be changed?
Interestingly, Barnes realized that he had already predicted his own probable feelings in such an event, thirty years ago, in one of his novels. He read this particular passage at her funeral.
When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all. Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. It’s just misery as regular as a job…. [People say] you’ll come out of it…. And you do come out of it, that’s true.
But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.
A friend wrote to him: ‘The things is – nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.’
And that, is precisely what Barnes has managed to present the reader in this slim volume.
We get to see exactly just how much it mattered.
I had always been more violent in my negative than in my positive demands. Thus, in personal relations, I could forgive much neglect more easily than the least degree of what I regarded as interference. […] In the course of life, I could put up with any amount of monotony far more patiently than even the smallest disturbance, bother or bustle. Never at any age did I clamour to be amused; always and at all ages (where I dared) I hotly demanded not to be interrupted. The pessimism, or cowardice, which would prefer non-existence itself to even the mildest unhappiness was thus merely the generalization of all these pusillanimous preferences.
C. S. Lewis, “Surprised by Joy”.
While I have long been an admirer of C.S Lewis’s writing, and the way his brilliant mind is able to articulate thoughts and sentiments that have resonated deeply with me in the past, I was nevertheless taken by surprise upon learning that he and I, both happen to share a very similar temperament in our core personality.
It is the part of me that I have never been able to put into words as clearly, but yet have been keenly aware of its influence and the crucial role that it plays in most of my decision making, resulting in paths taken (or not taken) thus far, in my life. Like Lewis, I have lived life as one who ‘…. was far more eager to escape pain than to achieve happiness’, and have always found it much easier to navigate my way around the things I could bear to live with, rather than in pursuing after things that I could not bear to live without.
This probably also helps to explain why it is that I seem to be clearer about the things that I don’t want, as opposed to the things I do want, in life.
Reading Lewis’s personal account of his early life and the journey that his spiritual quest had taken him, from that of being an atheist to one who was eventually convinced of the truth and reality of the Christian faith, was both a pleasure and privilege. His honest and transparent articulation with regards to matters of the mind, heart and will, leaves one with much to chew upon and digest. I will probably be returning to its pages, in time to come.
Because he really gets me.
No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word Interference. But Christianity placed at the centre what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer. If its picture were true then no sort of ‘treaty with reality’ could ever be possible. There was no region even in the innermost depth of one’s soul (nay, there least of all) which one could surround with a barbed wire fence and guard with a notice ‘No Admittance’. And that was what I wanted; some area, however small, of which I could say to all other beings, ‘This is my business and mine only.’
I am aware that I still have not taken down that barbed wire fence and notice, even though I have long started on the journey.
Not yet, anyway.