Joan: How could you?! How could you just leave me?!

Adam: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Joan: No! How could you just leave me there?

Adam: I tried! Okay? I couldn't do it. Not after my mother, I . . . I couldn't. I . . . I just couldn't see someone throw her life away like that.

Joan: She didn't . . . she didn't kill herself.

Adam: Some people do it all at once. And some people do it a little bit every day.

Joan: [pause] I loved her.

Adam: I know. And I don't know why that doesn't matter.

I copied this down a few weeks ago after watching this episode with Kay and crying, like I do every time I watch that episode, but I never wrote anything else down about it. I don't really know what I had been thinking about or what I had thought about writing. I just know that every once in a while, those last two lines of Adam's, they pop into my head. When it feels like everyone around me - including myself - is acting self-destructive. When life doesn't seem fair. When I try to help someone and can't. When I can't help someone understand how loved they are. Just in general, when someone I want to be close to, seems so far away, and I can't reach them, or have no right to. When life hurts, sometimes those words will pop into my head. Sometimes they make me feel better. Sometimes they don't.

'The Bridge of San Luis Rey,' Thornton Wilder

Like all beautiful women who have been brought up amid continual tributes to her beauty she assumed without cynicism that it must necessarily be the basis of anyone's attachment to herself... This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gave birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday...
(102)

Madre Maria stood with her back against a post; the sick lay in rows gazing at the ceiling and trying to hold their breaths. She talked that night of all those out in the dark (she was thinking of Esteban alone, she was thinking of Pepita alone) who had no one to turn to, for whom the world perhaps was more than difficult, without meaning. And those who lay in their beds there felt that they were within a wall that the Abbess had built for them; within all the light and warmth, and without was the darkness they would not exchange even for a relief from pain and from dying. But even while she was talking, other thoughts were passing in the back of her mind. "Even now," she thought, "almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
(123)

I'll get around to writing about this and about the Interview stuff one of these days. Swear.

'The Quiet American' by Graham Greene.

“Death takes away vanity—even the vanity of the cuckold who mustn’t show his pain.”

“...From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had always longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness... Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would no longer be the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.”

"It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings."

All of those are Thomas Fowler, the narrator of the book. I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would, given that it's for 20th Century American Foreign Policy, my hell course this semester. I'm particularly enjoying the contrast between the characters - Fowler's older, experienced, worldly, and hard. Emotionally he's restrained to a crippling point, and he knows it. And then you have his view of the eponymous Alden Pyle, a young innocent man whose idealistic visions and impossible standards haven't yet crumbled. Set in Vietnam in 1955, I think it is, it's very interesting. They're vying for the heart of the same girl, Phuong (whose name means "phoenix"), in very detached ways - the love that all three involved feel is really interesting.

On a completely separate note, I just remembered something I wanted to mention. I've been listening (almost obsessively, really) to a bunch of songs by Chris Ayer and Ingrid Michaelson lately. I love the Ingrid Michaelson ones for their lyrics, but also for how different they are, musically, from a lot of stuff I usually hear. I love Chris Ayer's stuff for his lyrics and his simple, folksy music - really, though, his lyrics are amazing. The guy can write a song. And sing it in a manner where you can understand everything he's saying. AND he can write a good tune that's not about love, which is wonderfully refreshing. To me, at least. But yeah. That's what I wanted to note: a great relatively unknown singer/songwriter who writes touching songs that aren't all about love.

That's all.

"To die so young is more than merely dying; it is to lose so large a part of life..."

"Don't it always seem to go,
That you don't know what you got till it's gone?"
- Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi"

So my Facebook homepage feed told me today that a guy I had a class with last year joined a group called "Stay Strong Nick." Description: "To a brother who could always make us smile, you're forever in our thoughts and prayer, we love you brother." Recent News: "Nov. 3- Nick was in a severe car accident last night. *Nov. 4, Nick passed away late this afternoon...our deepest condolences go out to his family." Related group: "STAY STRONG GARY..YOU ARE IN OUR PRAYERS". Description: "PLease leave and stories or memories you have of Gary. RIP GARY DEVERCELLY..you will always be in our hearts..we will never forget you "CALI" We love you G-Baby 9.4.88- 3.30.07"

This is the part that Blogger keeps deleting on me that I've written twice already and am now trying to remember:

I hate these groups. Mostly because there are too many of them. Far too many. It's lovely that people gather together to share memories and love for a lost loved one, but none of them should be lost. No matter what the reason - an uncontrollable terminal illness, a freak accident - it's a tragedy every time. Too often, I feel like it's probably the result of some reckless act of youth. When we're young, we have this subconscious belief that we are impervious, that we are immortal. I hate that. Nothing can touch us or hurt us. I feel like this is almost a natural, inherent attitude, that occurs in everyone in various degrees. Bad things don't happen to us, or to the people we love - only to other people. Other people get into horrible car accidents, other people get alcohol poisoning and die, other people get assaulted - it's always other people. And this attitude is reflected in what we do. We get careless and thoughtless, we take so-called "calculated" risks that only calculate what we risk in terms of ourselves, not in terms of others. We do stupid things because "it's only one time" or "just this once." We flirt with fate, because nothing can get to us - nothing can reach us, in our youth. We've got it all: we're young, we're healthy, we're carefree, and we've got our whole lives ahead of us.

Except that's not always the case. Bad things happen. Often to people who don't deserve to have bad things happen to them. But they happen. And when tragedy strikes, we feel it deeply, but often only fleetingly. We mourn in that dramatic melancholy that belongs only to the young - the kind that lasts only a while before our world moves on, and in a sense, we forget that it ever happened or could ever happen again. Not everyone does this, but many do. And then we go back to our reckless lifestyles until one day, we stop, for whatever reason - there are many.


"Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerers and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment."
- Harlan Ellison


We never really value our lives or the moments we're given. There's so much in every mundane, little moment that we take for granted. Cracking a joke with a stranger. Sitting around in silence with a friend. Meeting someone new. Going on a trip. Getting a new job. Listening to a speaker. Eating your favorite food. Dancing. Taking a solitary walk. Splashing through puddles. Alone, these things are simple experiences that everyone can understand. Woven together, they're your life.


"There is so much in the world for us all if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it to ourselves--so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful."
- L. M. Montgomery


We waste a lot of time being angry. I guess that's okay, on one level - without the anger and pain and bitterness and negative emotions and bad moods, the good stuff wouldn't seem so great. But letting that control us - it'll drive you nuts. Shakespeare said, "Sweet are the uses of adversity," and they are. Everything that we experience, it becomes a part of us, and being positive about everything we experience makes our overall life that much sweeter. Of course, that's easier said than done.


"I don't know, you know, I always think that if I could just accept the fact that my life was supposed to be difficult, you know, that's what to be expected, then I might not get so pissed-off about it and I'd just be glad when something nice happens."
- Jesse, Before Sunrise


I guess we just do the best we can and that's all there really is...

I dunno. I'm not really succeeding in the whole transposing thought/feeling to words deal tonight.

Haha. On that note, one last quote:

"I quote others only in order to better express myself."
- Michel de Montaigne