i finished The Heart is a Lonely Hunter yesterday.
i can be funny about finishing a book.
i know the end is coming, so i will often script the enviornment - the perfect setting - by which to experience the ending.
endings are of paramount importance to me - the treatment thereof being often my guage or attachment to the author/work.
i had five pages to finish and didn't want to experience them at 1:30am barely awake. i saved it for my bus ride. if you read the book, you would know that the bus ride is a perfect place to experience then end of such a work.
since it's so starkly isolated and simultaneously communal.
hold on, i need another cup of coffee.
okay, i am back.
so i was saying, the bus was the perfect farewell to such a great little novel. and it was...great. you should read it.
i can be funny about finishing a book.
i know the end is coming, so i will often script the enviornment - the perfect setting - by which to experience the ending.
endings are of paramount importance to me - the treatment thereof being often my guage or attachment to the author/work.
i had five pages to finish and didn't want to experience them at 1:30am barely awake. i saved it for my bus ride. if you read the book, you would know that the bus ride is a perfect place to experience then end of such a work.
since it's so starkly isolated and simultaneously communal.
hold on, i need another cup of coffee.
okay, i am back.
so i was saying, the bus was the perfect farewell to such a great little novel. and it was...great. you should read it.
so last night, for my fiction, i started Cannery Row. So far, it's been interesting to read something he wrote BEFORE East of Eden (the novel around which my world resolves).
so i had forgotten, for a couple of weeks about my SP Journals. I picked them up again last night and devoured a couple of entries, circled a bunch of words of which i wanted clarification, and re-emerged into her life as an escape from the complexities of mine.
here are the most recent tidbits of sheer beauty per Syl,
"Oh, I bite, I bite on life like a sharp apple. Playing it like a fish, I am happy. And what is happy? It is going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more - to learning. Always" (141).
She is 21 years of age writing this - sensing her destiny, of the school of transcendence, no doubt - but this constant analyzation and portent of her potential is forever haunting her. Forever haunting me.
She is often journaling of her options in life, the various roads she could take. It's so interesting to know how it turns out - and be reading all the questions life posed before her. It's so terribly dramatically ironic.
"And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments...if I only knew! If I only knew how high I should set my goals, my requirements for my life! I am in the position of a blind girl playing with a slide-ruler of values. I am now at the nadir* of my calculating powers" (151).
In later entries, she speaks often of her frustrations with dating and trying to pick a marriage partner. She is trying to teach herself to be patient and let life come to her instead of grabbing it. But if she doesn't grab it, will it become all it is destined to become?
"There is a time for everything; and you must beware your predilection for green apples. They may be sweet and tart and new and early, it's about time you learned to wait for the season of harvest. Take it slow, please. He is to be no engine for your ecstasy" (163).
"I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be" (169).
"Getting to know anybody is hideous complex job" (169).
The hideous complexities of trying to know someone is rather fascinating to me. Relationships, though of immense value in my life, have been the cause for so much internal angst. I seem to process things intensely, grabbing up everything on my porcupine quills and ingest it maschocistiacally into my soul. What was never intended for poison ends up as such because of the way my emotional digestion infuses everything with arsenic. But I either run away to avoid the bile or they run away to avoid the trauma of my aloofness.
so i had forgotten, for a couple of weeks about my SP Journals. I picked them up again last night and devoured a couple of entries, circled a bunch of words of which i wanted clarification, and re-emerged into her life as an escape from the complexities of mine.
here are the most recent tidbits of sheer beauty per Syl,
"Oh, I bite, I bite on life like a sharp apple. Playing it like a fish, I am happy. And what is happy? It is going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more - to learning. Always" (141).
She is 21 years of age writing this - sensing her destiny, of the school of transcendence, no doubt - but this constant analyzation and portent of her potential is forever haunting her. Forever haunting me.
She is often journaling of her options in life, the various roads she could take. It's so interesting to know how it turns out - and be reading all the questions life posed before her. It's so terribly dramatically ironic.
"And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments...if I only knew! If I only knew how high I should set my goals, my requirements for my life! I am in the position of a blind girl playing with a slide-ruler of values. I am now at the nadir* of my calculating powers" (151).
In later entries, she speaks often of her frustrations with dating and trying to pick a marriage partner. She is trying to teach herself to be patient and let life come to her instead of grabbing it. But if she doesn't grab it, will it become all it is destined to become?
"There is a time for everything; and you must beware your predilection for green apples. They may be sweet and tart and new and early, it's about time you learned to wait for the season of harvest. Take it slow, please. He is to be no engine for your ecstasy" (163).
"I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be" (169).
"Getting to know anybody is hideous complex job" (169).
The hideous complexities of trying to know someone is rather fascinating to me. Relationships, though of immense value in my life, have been the cause for so much internal angst. I seem to process things intensely, grabbing up everything on my porcupine quills and ingest it maschocistiacally into my soul. What was never intended for poison ends up as such because of the way my emotional digestion infuses everything with arsenic. But I either run away to avoid the bile or they run away to avoid the trauma of my aloofness.
Either way, I am out of grasp.
Though I am used to it,
I love that Plath reminds me that I am not the first,
Nor the last,
to feel poisoned so by this existence.
Though I am used to it,
I love that Plath reminds me that I am not the first,
Nor the last,
to feel poisoned so by this existence.
Poisoned by myself.
And in her world, I find a voice...a peace of my own.
_________________
- rapacious: inordinately greedy
- fetid: having an offensive odor
- *nadir: the point on the celestial sphere directly beneath a given position or observer and diametrically opposite the zenith; the lowest point of despair
- inane: lacking significance; silly
- scintillant: sparkling
- dastardly: cowardly; meanly base; sneaking
- incipient: beginning to exist or appear; in an initial stage
- inured: to accustom to hardship, difficulty, pain
- enuch: here misspelled, i think she meant eunuch: a castrated man.
in ElleDecor, i found the perfectly decorated writing space for me.
i dream of that space now.
writing widly, with great and ferocious abandon,
caring little for anything but the words.
if only i could be so free.
2 comments:
Do I not share your desire to write with wild abandon... and increase my vocab.
Are you actually, yes my favorite word, memorizing these words? Please don't! That is all I need right now in my life is a Candace Morris with a double-edged tongue! (hehe) I just started doing this in my current read. Your on your way...
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