On Sunday, I took in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia with a friend. It's a play that celebrates, most of all, the intellectual hunt, the visceral search for truth, and the joys and sorrows of our insights into understanding ourselves and the world we live in.
I was so inspired, I went home buzzing with ideas and caught within the mealy mouth of the writing bug, ready to conquer the world. Yet the sight of my parents--whose health is declining--put a catch in my throat. I could see my father's angular shoulder blades jutting out from under his thin grey sweater. I could see my mother's glazed expression she gets when her meds kick in, or conversely, her loony antics and outbursts of agitation. Sometimes it feels like I'm living in a hospital. Three years ago, I moved in with my parents to help take care of them.
When I started Proust's fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, I expected a racy volume full of "decadent" scenes of sexual bravado. What I got was a heartbreaker. Marcel's belated grieving over his grandmother's death is the heart and soul of the volume. I rushed over these passages before they could register in my heart. Later on, in rereading them, I was emptied of all light, all hope, all beauty.
In my front row seat to my parents' decline, it's not comedy or mindless escapism I crave, but Proust's words. The prospect of losing my parents is like thinking of being shipwrecked and homesick for the rest of my life. I've always had an unusually close relationship with my parents. We're a pack of four, including our dog Phoebe. The only thing more cruel than having to watch my parents' decline would be to leave the earth before they did.
My father has a friend for whom Moby Dick is her solace, her bible, her I-Ching. Everyday, she takes it out and opens to any random passage, and this comforts her and gives her direction.
I have a feeling that this is what In Search of Lost Time will be like for me--my book of inspiration and introspection. My guidebook to the wilderness of life, of the human mind, of relationships.
As my father always says, as long as we are alive "there are no bad days." I would amend this to say, as long as I have Proust by my side there are no bad days...no days in which some beauty or mystery or blessing can't be salvaged, however fleeting.
And in the meantime, onwards!
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
The Progress of Civilization
The progress of civilization enables each one of us to manifest unsuspected virtues or new vices, which make us either dearer or more unbearable to our friends. (from Sodom and Gomorrah)
Here Proust is referring to the telephone, though he might have been speaking of Facebook or Twitter. On the one hand, we are increasingly distracted by technology and the 24/7 nature of the information age. We text while crossing the street, missing the small things that make up our world: eye contact with the alluring stranger who passes us for the first and the last time of our lives, the sight of a gaggle of school girls in uniform, an elderly woman inching her way to the other side. We practice the release of TMI ("too much information") on a regular basis so that everyone on Facebook knows that we committed such and such transgression. It's hard not to blurt it all out on our blogs and Facebook pages. (I'm sure I've sunk many a ship with my own loose lips.) Where is the mystery? Where is communication as an art form, slowly dealt out card by card, instead of tipping our hand from the start? Where is the seduction that takes place at the beginning of both friendships and romantic entanglements?
On the other hand, I recently heard that a young father in Egypt has named his newborn "Facebook" in honor of the truly unsuspected virtue of the social network in the Egyptian revolution.
So with all of these new vices--the very things that isolate us in a non-stop stream of information that makes our immediate surroundings so much less vivid and robs us of pockets of silence--we are also better able to please our "friends" and unite in a wave of protest, crying, "Together, united, we'll never be defeated!"
Here Proust is referring to the telephone, though he might have been speaking of Facebook or Twitter. On the one hand, we are increasingly distracted by technology and the 24/7 nature of the information age. We text while crossing the street, missing the small things that make up our world: eye contact with the alluring stranger who passes us for the first and the last time of our lives, the sight of a gaggle of school girls in uniform, an elderly woman inching her way to the other side. We practice the release of TMI ("too much information") on a regular basis so that everyone on Facebook knows that we committed such and such transgression. It's hard not to blurt it all out on our blogs and Facebook pages. (I'm sure I've sunk many a ship with my own loose lips.) Where is the mystery? Where is communication as an art form, slowly dealt out card by card, instead of tipping our hand from the start? Where is the seduction that takes place at the beginning of both friendships and romantic entanglements?
On the other hand, I recently heard that a young father in Egypt has named his newborn "Facebook" in honor of the truly unsuspected virtue of the social network in the Egyptian revolution.
So with all of these new vices--the very things that isolate us in a non-stop stream of information that makes our immediate surroundings so much less vivid and robs us of pockets of silence--we are also better able to please our "friends" and unite in a wave of protest, crying, "Together, united, we'll never be defeated!"
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Driving Lessons
Like a lot of people who grew up in New York, I found myself turning 40 without a driver's license. So for the last six weeks I've been taking Saturday morning classes with ten other sleepy students at a hole-in-the-wall driving school where we get to sit in simulators. Each simulator has a full dashboard complete with steering wheel, gear-switcher, accelerator and brake. As we watch the film at the front of the room, we signal and change lanes, stop at intersections, and remember IPDE (Identify, Predict, Decide, and Execute) in every situation we encounter on the road. We've driven through the driving snow and sheets of rain, we've driven down peaceful yet danger-ridden suburban California streets where kids on skateboards lurk in the shadows, ready to dart out at any time. We even had a session with distracting backseat drivers (fellow carpoolers) who chatted nonsense and then gave faulty, conflicting directions.
These films are from 1980. I can imagine them at the Museum of Modern Art as part of a performance piece. The cars are as long and flat and silver as sharks. The instructors are upbeat but authoritative, dead serious about safe driving. They wear suits in neutral tones with wide lapels. The voiceover praises us for breaking quickly and avoiding an accident. "Remember IPDE!" we are told, those four letters forming the skeleton key to becoming a good driver.
Every twenty minutes or so, our teacher pauses the film and walks up to the front of the classroom holding a venti cup of tea and gives us the straight dope. Don't sleep and drive. Stay two seconds behind the car in front of you. Did you see that woman dashing across the street? Another thing, always assume the other driver doesn't know what the hell he's doing.
I've had twelve hours of this, and now I've graduated to outside lessons. We'll see how it goes on Saturday morning in a real car in NYC traffic.
We had an amusing time during the mandatory five-hour talk given by a man who appeared completely loony. In his introduction, he told us he also taught firearms. Next came several crazy hours of a car wreck of a monologue. He was the tough-love sergeant you see in war movies. First on his agenda was a diatribe against "aggressive women drivers," with the assertion that if Hilary Clinton had been elected, the number of traffic accidents would have gone up. "I'm a fish in water," he commented at one point. "I keep on swimming."
The class concluded with a couple of old, snowy video tapes. The first one diagrammed how Princess Diana would have lived if she had worn a seatbelt. The next one addressed falling asleep at the wheel. Weeping parents help up photos of their dead children as they recounted the day Billy was mowed down by a sleep-deprived driver. Already apprehensive about driving, this video scared me silly. I only hope I can learn my lesson and someday steer an automobile with plenty of caution and Red Bull.
These films are from 1980. I can imagine them at the Museum of Modern Art as part of a performance piece. The cars are as long and flat and silver as sharks. The instructors are upbeat but authoritative, dead serious about safe driving. They wear suits in neutral tones with wide lapels. The voiceover praises us for breaking quickly and avoiding an accident. "Remember IPDE!" we are told, those four letters forming the skeleton key to becoming a good driver.
Every twenty minutes or so, our teacher pauses the film and walks up to the front of the classroom holding a venti cup of tea and gives us the straight dope. Don't sleep and drive. Stay two seconds behind the car in front of you. Did you see that woman dashing across the street? Another thing, always assume the other driver doesn't know what the hell he's doing.
I've had twelve hours of this, and now I've graduated to outside lessons. We'll see how it goes on Saturday morning in a real car in NYC traffic.
We had an amusing time during the mandatory five-hour talk given by a man who appeared completely loony. In his introduction, he told us he also taught firearms. Next came several crazy hours of a car wreck of a monologue. He was the tough-love sergeant you see in war movies. First on his agenda was a diatribe against "aggressive women drivers," with the assertion that if Hilary Clinton had been elected, the number of traffic accidents would have gone up. "I'm a fish in water," he commented at one point. "I keep on swimming."
The class concluded with a couple of old, snowy video tapes. The first one diagrammed how Princess Diana would have lived if she had worn a seatbelt. The next one addressed falling asleep at the wheel. Weeping parents help up photos of their dead children as they recounted the day Billy was mowed down by a sleep-deprived driver. Already apprehensive about driving, this video scared me silly. I only hope I can learn my lesson and someday steer an automobile with plenty of caution and Red Bull.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Lapses
We can see nothing; then, all of a sudden, the exact name appears, and quite different from what we thought we could divine. It is not it that has come to us. No, I believe, rather, that, as we go on through life, we spend our time distancing ourselves from the zone where a name is distinct, and that it was by the exercise of my will and my attention, which enhanced the acuity of my inward gaze, that I had suddenly penetrated the semi-darkness and seen clearly. At all events, if there are transitions between forgetfulness and memory, these transitions are unconscious. For the intermediate names through which we pass, before finding the right name, are themselves false, and bring us no closer to it. (from Sodom and Gomorrah)
I've been forgetting a lot of names lately. Mostly those of actors. I couldn't think of Rip Torn's name for several days or, later on, Isabelle Adjani. Why not consult the IMDB, you might say. Of course, while attempting to retreive these names perfectly unsuitable syllables came to mind. It was like hitting a brick wall. Then, suddenly, the name appeared and, though it was as if the truth had finally shown itself, the name was totally foreign to the concept I had of it when I was stumbling in the dark.
My first fear is that, like my mother, I have early onset Alzheimer's. There is now a test that determines whether one has the disease or not. I don't think I'll take it. How would that information help me now?
Maybe it's my age. I remember talking with a Classics professor years ago who told me the story of a successful businessman who had retired and enrolled in Ancient Greek lessons. He was determined to blaze through his studies in a firestorm of glory just as he had built himself from the bottom up on Wall Street. However, he just could not commit the required declensions to memory and, instead of A's, he barely earned C's. There is a certain age past which it is close to impossible to become proficient in Ancient Greek or Latin, the professor concluded.
I hope that's not the case. Though I played hopscotch with different graduate programs through my twenties and early thirties, I still have a yen to really master Latin the way I never have. I even bought the first volume of Harry Potter in Latin but haven't sat down to decipher it yet.
There is a part of me that is elated not to be in graduate school anymore and to be able to enjoy books for the plot and the suspense and the characters instead of tearing them apart with scissors or, as that dreadful phrase goes, "unpacking their meaning."
I haven't written much this past month. It's been full of ups and downs with my parents and their health. Yet I'm committing to five blogs a month from now on instead of the usual three. Sodom and Gomorrah is already moving in more interesting directions than the overly starched Guermantes Way, and I hope there will be much to discuss--even if my mind is a sieve. But memory is a complex affair that Proust keeps returning to, telling us there as much to learn in forgetfulness as in remembering (and searching for) the past.
I've been forgetting a lot of names lately. Mostly those of actors. I couldn't think of Rip Torn's name for several days or, later on, Isabelle Adjani. Why not consult the IMDB, you might say. Of course, while attempting to retreive these names perfectly unsuitable syllables came to mind. It was like hitting a brick wall. Then, suddenly, the name appeared and, though it was as if the truth had finally shown itself, the name was totally foreign to the concept I had of it when I was stumbling in the dark.
My first fear is that, like my mother, I have early onset Alzheimer's. There is now a test that determines whether one has the disease or not. I don't think I'll take it. How would that information help me now?
Maybe it's my age. I remember talking with a Classics professor years ago who told me the story of a successful businessman who had retired and enrolled in Ancient Greek lessons. He was determined to blaze through his studies in a firestorm of glory just as he had built himself from the bottom up on Wall Street. However, he just could not commit the required declensions to memory and, instead of A's, he barely earned C's. There is a certain age past which it is close to impossible to become proficient in Ancient Greek or Latin, the professor concluded.
I hope that's not the case. Though I played hopscotch with different graduate programs through my twenties and early thirties, I still have a yen to really master Latin the way I never have. I even bought the first volume of Harry Potter in Latin but haven't sat down to decipher it yet.
There is a part of me that is elated not to be in graduate school anymore and to be able to enjoy books for the plot and the suspense and the characters instead of tearing them apart with scissors or, as that dreadful phrase goes, "unpacking their meaning."
I haven't written much this past month. It's been full of ups and downs with my parents and their health. Yet I'm committing to five blogs a month from now on instead of the usual three. Sodom and Gomorrah is already moving in more interesting directions than the overly starched Guermantes Way, and I hope there will be much to discuss--even if my mind is a sieve. But memory is a complex affair that Proust keeps returning to, telling us there as much to learn in forgetfulness as in remembering (and searching for) the past.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Black Swann
Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins with Marcel spying on the Baron de Charlus and the shopkeeper Jupien as the two men share a quick afternoon tryst.
For, to judge by what I heard in the early stages from Jupien's, which was simply inarticulate sounds, I assume few words were uttered. It was true that these sounds were so violent that, had they not constantly been taken up an octave higher by a parallel moaning, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's throat close beside me, and that the murderer and his resuscitated victim were then taking a bath in order to erase the traces of the crime.
On the one hand, despite the narrator's judgmental curiosity, the scene is as open and natural as society life is fundamentally false and repressed. On the other hand, there are definitely some sinister undertones to this "love scene."
In the next section of the book, what lurks underneath the pageant of nobles at the Princesse de Guermantes' well-appointed party and isn't allowed the light of day becomes warped and threatening.
As she walked beside me, the Duchesse de Guermantes allowed the azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but undirected, so as to avoid the people with whom she was not keen to come into contact, but whom she could sometimes make out in the distance like a menacing reef.
Proust calls homosexuals "inverts," as if to emphasize that whatever is not expressed turns on itself.
I couldn't help but think of this as I watched the film Black Swan yesterday. Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers, a prim ballerina who is adept at technique yet lacks the dark sexuality that the role of the Black Swan requires. Nina has no self-knowledge and she is imprisoned by an adolescent desire to be perfect. What she leaves unexpressed festers in real and imagined wounds that reach what a friend of mine called Grand Guignol for the film's over-the-top violence. (The Grand-Guignol was an actual theater in Paris that opened in 1897 and featured gory horror plays.)
Nina has a claustrophobic home life, surrounded by girlish stuffed animals and an overbearing mother. What's more, the ballet world is self-punitive. We see her strenuous exercises at the barre, and we hear the popping crunches of her toes, and yet these are scenes of self-starvation and a turning-against herself.
Watching Black Swan was a cathartic journey. When Nina morphs from an overprotected, innocent young woman to a mature force of darkness, there is a final release to all of that pent-up emotion. It reminds me of the emptiness of striving for perfection...just as the people at the Princesse de Guermantes' party fight tooth and nail to make their way into the inner sanctum, the creme de la creme of society, only to pose as total strangers to themselves.
For, to judge by what I heard in the early stages from Jupien's, which was simply inarticulate sounds, I assume few words were uttered. It was true that these sounds were so violent that, had they not constantly been taken up an octave higher by a parallel moaning, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's throat close beside me, and that the murderer and his resuscitated victim were then taking a bath in order to erase the traces of the crime.
On the one hand, despite the narrator's judgmental curiosity, the scene is as open and natural as society life is fundamentally false and repressed. On the other hand, there are definitely some sinister undertones to this "love scene."
In the next section of the book, what lurks underneath the pageant of nobles at the Princesse de Guermantes' well-appointed party and isn't allowed the light of day becomes warped and threatening.
As she walked beside me, the Duchesse de Guermantes allowed the azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but undirected, so as to avoid the people with whom she was not keen to come into contact, but whom she could sometimes make out in the distance like a menacing reef.
Proust calls homosexuals "inverts," as if to emphasize that whatever is not expressed turns on itself.
I couldn't help but think of this as I watched the film Black Swan yesterday. Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers, a prim ballerina who is adept at technique yet lacks the dark sexuality that the role of the Black Swan requires. Nina has no self-knowledge and she is imprisoned by an adolescent desire to be perfect. What she leaves unexpressed festers in real and imagined wounds that reach what a friend of mine called Grand Guignol for the film's over-the-top violence. (The Grand-Guignol was an actual theater in Paris that opened in 1897 and featured gory horror plays.)
Nina has a claustrophobic home life, surrounded by girlish stuffed animals and an overbearing mother. What's more, the ballet world is self-punitive. We see her strenuous exercises at the barre, and we hear the popping crunches of her toes, and yet these are scenes of self-starvation and a turning-against herself.
Watching Black Swan was a cathartic journey. When Nina morphs from an overprotected, innocent young woman to a mature force of darkness, there is a final release to all of that pent-up emotion. It reminds me of the emptiness of striving for perfection...just as the people at the Princesse de Guermantes' party fight tooth and nail to make their way into the inner sanctum, the creme de la creme of society, only to pose as total strangers to themselves.
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Memoir or Novel?
Just as essayist and memoirist Andre Aciman wrote of his experience of reading Proust: "The seductive power of a novel such as the Search lies in its personal invitation to each one of us to read Marcel's life as if we, and not Marcel, were its true subject."
Mention of Proust brings us back around to the question of genre. What special reach or access does memoir have that the novel does not? Given the enormous suppleness and variability of fiction, the answer can only have to do with the reality status of the subject matter. What gives memoir its special title--and, I think, its growing rather than diminishing place in our literary culture--is the constraint of the actual.
--From The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts
As I have been reading Proust, I've also been preparing a memoir. It's a coming-of-age story about a difficult period in my life. (Hell, who doesn't have a difficult coming-of-age story?) Along with a few examples of involuntary memory (mostly olfactory), I've ransacked the journals I kept for years, mining for the "truth."
Why not write a novel? And why didn't Proust just make the Search a memoir? After all, the narrator refers to himself as "Marcel" at times. Some of the details--such as the famous madeleine episode in which the taste of the big toe-sized buttery pastry dipped in tea evokes an entire lost world--are so immediate that they have to have been experienced by the author. It's like listening to a song and wondering if the sorrow of the country crooner has really been lived or if it's just another conventional ditty about drinking and parting and feeling like your heart might bust open.
I think that to the novelist, it's easier to tell the truth with the broader brush of fiction than it would be if he or she wrote a memoir. Kafka wasn't a bug; Flaubert wasn't an adulterous woman. But what these authors could say about the human condition surpasses what they could probably convey with the stuff of their daily lives.
To the memoirist, fiction is for those who choose to wear a mask. It's from the rubble and confusion of life that the memoirist shapes a narrative. The "truth" of date, time, place--and the people we were and the people we have become--allows for a stark investigation into the beautiful strivings we have as human creatures into the realms of death, sex, and love. The memoir earns its immediacy like a needle pricking the surface of a finger and drawing blood. Yet the memoirist also uses the novelist's tools of detail, description, structure, etc.
I'm glad that the Search is a novel because its that much more universal--and yet the point of view is distinctly that of the memoir. We are nodding off when the adult Proust is struggling with sleep, and we wait for his mother to come kiss him goodnight just as the young Proust cannot find solace in his empty bedroom. Throughout the Search there is a double take that works well in memoir. We see the author as the protagonist and also the current narrator who leads us by hand through the things a child can't understand. In the end, this is the great appeal of the Search--it is both literal in time and place and weaved from dream life, random impressions, and a sense of eternity.
Mention of Proust brings us back around to the question of genre. What special reach or access does memoir have that the novel does not? Given the enormous suppleness and variability of fiction, the answer can only have to do with the reality status of the subject matter. What gives memoir its special title--and, I think, its growing rather than diminishing place in our literary culture--is the constraint of the actual.
--From The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts
As I have been reading Proust, I've also been preparing a memoir. It's a coming-of-age story about a difficult period in my life. (Hell, who doesn't have a difficult coming-of-age story?) Along with a few examples of involuntary memory (mostly olfactory), I've ransacked the journals I kept for years, mining for the "truth."
Why not write a novel? And why didn't Proust just make the Search a memoir? After all, the narrator refers to himself as "Marcel" at times. Some of the details--such as the famous madeleine episode in which the taste of the big toe-sized buttery pastry dipped in tea evokes an entire lost world--are so immediate that they have to have been experienced by the author. It's like listening to a song and wondering if the sorrow of the country crooner has really been lived or if it's just another conventional ditty about drinking and parting and feeling like your heart might bust open.
I think that to the novelist, it's easier to tell the truth with the broader brush of fiction than it would be if he or she wrote a memoir. Kafka wasn't a bug; Flaubert wasn't an adulterous woman. But what these authors could say about the human condition surpasses what they could probably convey with the stuff of their daily lives.
To the memoirist, fiction is for those who choose to wear a mask. It's from the rubble and confusion of life that the memoirist shapes a narrative. The "truth" of date, time, place--and the people we were and the people we have become--allows for a stark investigation into the beautiful strivings we have as human creatures into the realms of death, sex, and love. The memoir earns its immediacy like a needle pricking the surface of a finger and drawing blood. Yet the memoirist also uses the novelist's tools of detail, description, structure, etc.
I'm glad that the Search is a novel because its that much more universal--and yet the point of view is distinctly that of the memoir. We are nodding off when the adult Proust is struggling with sleep, and we wait for his mother to come kiss him goodnight just as the young Proust cannot find solace in his empty bedroom. Throughout the Search there is a double take that works well in memoir. We see the author as the protagonist and also the current narrator who leads us by hand through the things a child can't understand. In the end, this is the great appeal of the Search--it is both literal in time and place and weaved from dream life, random impressions, and a sense of eternity.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
The Sense of Relief
Well, at this point in the social calendar, when anyone invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dine--with great urgency, in case she was already engaged--she would turn down the invitation with the one excuse that no society person would ever have thought of: she was about to set off on a cruise--"Quite fascinating, my dear!"--of the Norwegian fjords. Society people were thunderstruck by this, and, without any notion of following the Duchesse's example, nevertheless derived from her project the sense of relief you get when you read Kant, and when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, it transpires that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom. (from The Guermantes Way)
I remember the sense of relief I felt several months ago when I realized that I wasn't bound to live the life I was supposed to live. I needn't worry about the ruler of life and being within the exact centimeter of where society dictates one should be (in a menacing way at times) when it comes to studies, career, marriage, children, etc. Even in these liberated times, even in Lower Manhattan, there is constant pressure to conform.
When I was in high school, I assumed I would have four children and home school them all while my carpenter/poet husband fed the fireplace each evening in our renovated farmhouse in Vermont. I'm not sure where this fantasy came from, yet my life veered off the tracks by the time I started college. I've spent years trying to catch up, yet I've also abandoned false expectations. At this point, I may never have children. And 40 isn't a death knell.
I remember sitting in the back of a church on a wooden pew several years ago. I was attending a 12-step meeting. (I won't say which one.) One distraught woman was sharing and she had a catch in her voice. At the end of a litany of complaints and miserable happenings in her life, she finished with a sob. "And I'm thirty-seven!" she said. That was code for: "And I'm not living the life I was supposed to live! Feel sorry for me!"
I love unconventional women such as Heloise (the learned Parisian woman from the Middle Ages who loved and lost her beloved Abelard and ended up a nun with embers of passion still burning in her loins and in her letters) and Frieda Kahlo (the Mexican painter who expressed herself and her narrative of physical suffering in graphic terms and lived life without worrying how people would peg her).
Who knows where I'll be in ten years? I may be in Paris; I may be in Rome. I may be meditating in a small town in India. I may be happily married; I may enjoy my solitude. I may have a second act that will make up for everything before it.
Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I will try to abandon the ruler. Because, according to the ruler, I'll never measure up.
I hope I have plenty of friends and lovers and dogs and cats. I'll shred my college newsletters that bring glorious tidings of what everyone has been up to and use them as mulch for my garden. Isn't it a relief to finally understand that you have and are everything you need to have and be?
I remember the sense of relief I felt several months ago when I realized that I wasn't bound to live the life I was supposed to live. I needn't worry about the ruler of life and being within the exact centimeter of where society dictates one should be (in a menacing way at times) when it comes to studies, career, marriage, children, etc. Even in these liberated times, even in Lower Manhattan, there is constant pressure to conform.
When I was in high school, I assumed I would have four children and home school them all while my carpenter/poet husband fed the fireplace each evening in our renovated farmhouse in Vermont. I'm not sure where this fantasy came from, yet my life veered off the tracks by the time I started college. I've spent years trying to catch up, yet I've also abandoned false expectations. At this point, I may never have children. And 40 isn't a death knell.
I remember sitting in the back of a church on a wooden pew several years ago. I was attending a 12-step meeting. (I won't say which one.) One distraught woman was sharing and she had a catch in her voice. At the end of a litany of complaints and miserable happenings in her life, she finished with a sob. "And I'm thirty-seven!" she said. That was code for: "And I'm not living the life I was supposed to live! Feel sorry for me!"
I love unconventional women such as Heloise (the learned Parisian woman from the Middle Ages who loved and lost her beloved Abelard and ended up a nun with embers of passion still burning in her loins and in her letters) and Frieda Kahlo (the Mexican painter who expressed herself and her narrative of physical suffering in graphic terms and lived life without worrying how people would peg her).
Who knows where I'll be in ten years? I may be in Paris; I may be in Rome. I may be meditating in a small town in India. I may be happily married; I may enjoy my solitude. I may have a second act that will make up for everything before it.
Wherever I am and whatever I am doing, I will try to abandon the ruler. Because, according to the ruler, I'll never measure up.
I hope I have plenty of friends and lovers and dogs and cats. I'll shred my college newsletters that bring glorious tidings of what everyone has been up to and use them as mulch for my garden. Isn't it a relief to finally understand that you have and are everything you need to have and be?
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