Of Idealists.

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

And I think the most beautiful people are those who continue to hold on to a dream while refusing to believe that there is no place in reality for such things.

Returning to my roots.

"I think that one of these days, you're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute. And I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school. You'll have to. You're a student—whether the idea appeals to you or not. You're in love with knowledge. And I think you'll find, once you get past all the Mr. Vinsons, you're going to start getting closer and closer—that is, if you want to, and if you look for it and wait for it—to the kind of information that will be very, very dear to your heart. Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."

—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Re-reading The Catcher in the Rye has brought a new perspective to me. Perhaps it's because I have grown a little more, and instead of looking through the angsty eyes of teenage Holden Caulfield, I now begin to understand what Mr Antolini was trying to tell him after all. William Stekel said: "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." It is not too late for growth; for the idealist to become the pragmatist. Even so, the transformation leaves something of an ideal for the reborn pragmatist to strive towards, in a practical fashion. And I want to believe that in the end, even Holden Caulfield was capable of it.

One Week.

"Love must face reality if it is to survive."
—Loretta Livingstone

"What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid."
—Sylvia Plath (via A Sea of Quotes)

Then one must always remind himself not to see 'too deep and too much'. But when all this is over, if I have not become something... Dust in the wind, the empty song of a billion men.

While Woolf was in the early stages of To The Lighthouse, in the autumn of 1925, she was preparing a lecture called 'How Should One Read a Book?'. In it she compares the thirty-two chapters of a novel to 'an attempt to make something as formal and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks'. Try, she suggests, to write on 'some event that has left a distinct impression on you', when 'a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment'. As soon as you attempt to 'reconstruct' it in words, you will find that it 'breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions'.

—Hermione Lee, Introduction to To The Lighthouse

From A Sea of Quotes:

"After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do."

—John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven

"I'll hold on to that fragile slice of hope and keep it close, remembering that in each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We're each of us our own chiaroscuro¹, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We've got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there's an awful lot of gray to work with. No one can live in the light all the time."

—Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

¹   In art, an Italian term which means 'light-dark'.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in your morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see your exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of character in the bleak inhuman loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. Writer-Director of Earthly movies sponsored & angeled in Heaven
30. You're a genius all the time.

—Jack Kerouac, Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

"When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell in his energy, recognize the scent of his skin. You see only the essence of the person, not the shell. That's why you can't fall in love with beauty. You can lust after it, be infatuated by it, want to own it. You can love it with your eyes and your body but not your heart. And that's why, when you really connect with a person's inner self, any physical imperfections disappear, become irrelevant."

—Lisa Unger, Beautiful Lies (via A Sea of Quotes)

"Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up."

—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

I have one too, of course, but I cannot say with certainty what it is. These days I spend my hours researching on and sketching dragons with the seriousness of an artist—doesn't matter if no one pays me to do it. I read up on brand identity and pore through hundreds of logos—doesn't matter if it isn't real work. I scribble in secret notebooks for my own joy—doesn't matter if they will never be read. I take bus rides to town to buy books and have coffee—doesn't matter if I've only four dollars left in my bank account. But I still wonder why I turned out like this. Perhaps there is meaning to an epic mediocrity after all.

So the book cannot be anything less than epic; its characters anything more than ordinary.

"Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person."

—David Foster Wallace (via Booklover)

And I've been thinking, perhaps it's time to apply myself back in school.

There once was a soul who knew itself to be the light. This was a new soul, and so, anxious for experience. "I am the light," it said. "I am the light." Yet all the knowing of it and all the saying of it could not substitute for the experience of it. And in the realm from which this soul emerged, there was nothing but the light. Every soul was grand, every soul was magnificent, and every soul shone with the brilliance of My awesome light. And so the little soul in question was as a candle in the sun. In the midst of the grandest light—of which it was a part—it could not see itself, nor experience itself as Who and What it Really Is.

Now it came to pass that this soul yearned and yearned to know itself. And so great was its yearning that I one day said, "Do you know, Little One, what you must do to satisfy this yearning of yours?"

"Oh, what, God? What? I'll do anything!" The little soul said.

"You must separate yourself from the rest of us," I answered, "and then you must call upon yourself the darkness."

"What is the darkness, o Holy One?" the little soul asked.

"That which you are not," I replied, and the soul understood.

And so this the soul did, removing itself from the All, yea, going even unto another realm. And in this realm the soul had the power to call into its experience all sorts of darkness. And this it did.

Yet in the midst of all the darkness did it cry out, "Father, Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Even as have you in your blackest times. Yet I have never forsaken you, but stand by you always, ready to remind you of Who You Really Are; ready, always ready, to call you home.

Therefore, be a light unto the darkness, and curse it not.

And forget not Who You Are in the moment of your encirclement by that which you are not. But do you praise to the creation, even as you seek to change it.

And know that what you do in the time of your greatest trial can be your greatest triumph. For the experience you create is a statement of Who You Are—and Who You Want to Be.

—Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God Book One

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth." —Fyodor Dostoevsky

Yes, I think I haven't been seeing things in the right perspective after all, from an inflated view of how we are connected in some way in this world. Step back, step back; and the illusion disperses. I was young Werther, unworthy of Lotte. I wish I had never read this book that mimics my present situation in life; but if I hadn't I might have ended up like poor Werther, dead and unloved and unpitied.

"Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing."

— Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (via Literary Verve)

The man comes to understand the poet's love within himself: enduring, bittersweet, illuminating. Still, as in all types of love, there is too much desire to quickly give it away, all of it. Patience, young poet! It is but a budding seed, barely breaking out from its shell, out from the earth. No doubt love's light is too bright for one to bear, but in order to grow a tree, one must not be too quick to harvest in the hope of finding fruit.

So he learns.

"Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way."

— Janet Fitch (via A Poet Reflects)

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,

          By the love of comrades,

             By the manly love of comrades.

—Walt Whitman, For You O Democracy (Leaves of Grass)

Before the year ended, the energies took a turn all in the other direction and boy, was the light so bright. I shouldn't be talking like that—so out of this world—but that's just what it is. At times I feel as if I really can save the entire world, bursting into a thousand shards like thousand-armed Avalokitesvara and helping a thousand beings at once. And then, thinking like that while walking, I'd trample onto a snail in my mindlessness and realise the mortality of my existence: I am still human. Poor, poor snail; but life has its cycles, and even now I am killing some microscopic germ somewhere in my body. I looked at my hands again, and asked myself if I am capable of changing lives. I think I can, maybe not a thousand, but one at a time. But some days I despise myself, for it comes at the expense of some other life I cannot help while helping another at the same time...

I pray that each may find a light to guide him somewhere along the way.

"Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my participation in what is real, my engagement with voices and images. This is why a poem speaks not of ideal life but of actual life: the angle of a window; the reverberation of streets, cities, rooms; shadows along a wall."

—Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (via A Writer's Ruminations)

The ideal life against the actual life.

Victor Hugo: "A poet is a world enclosed in a man."

Then, looking into his eyes, he sees an entire universe in the young man. In that moment, he feels like he understands a moon. Curiosity, it makes him young again; and he discovers he hasn't lost that youthful laughter he once possessed.

Reading List of 2011.

Books I have completed:

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
2. J. D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye
3. Homer — The Odyssey
4. Albert Camus — The First Man
5. Albert Camus — The Rebel
6. Albert Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus
7. Albert Camus — The Stranger
8. Albert Camus — The Fall
9. Albert Camus — Notebooks
10. Michael Cunningham — A Home at the End of the World
11. John Steinbeck — Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
12. John Steinbeck — Working Days
13. James Joyce — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
14. Hermann Hesse — Steppenwolf
15. Hermann Hesse — Siddhartha
16. Colin Wilson — The Outsider
17. Alexander Pushkin — Eugene Onegin
18. Orhan Pamuk — The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
19. Jack Kerouac — On The Road
20. Jack Kerouac — The Dharma Bums
21. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg — The Letters
22. J. W. v Goethe — Faust, Part I
23. J. W. v Goethe — The Sorrows of Young Werther
24. Jean-Paul Sartre — Nausea
25. Nikolai Gogol — The Diary of a Madman
26. Jon Krakauer — Into the Wild
27. Philip Jeyaretnam — Abraham's Promise
28. A. A. Milne — Winnie-the-Pooh

Books I have not completed:

1. Irving Stone — Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh
2. Homer — The Iliad
3. Louis-Ferdinand Céline — Journey to the End of the Night
4. Hermann Hesse — Peter Camenzind
5. Milan Kundera — The Unbearable Lightness of Being
6. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — The Idiot
7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Crime and Punishment
8. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Notes from Underground
9. Leo Tolstoy — War and Peace
10. Ayn Rand — We the Living
11. Italo Calvino — The Complete Cosmicomics
12. John Steinbeck — The Grapes of Wrath
13. Susan Sontag — Against Interpretation and Other Essays
14. Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse
15. James Joyce — Ulysses
16. James Joyce — Finnegans Wake
17. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Wind, Sand and Stars
18. Ernest Hemingway — The Old Man and the Sea
19. Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
20. T. E. Lawrence — The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
21. E. M. Forster — A Room with a View
22. André Malraux — Man's Fate
23. Marcel Proust — In Search of Lost Time vol. 1: Swann's Way
24. George Orwell — Essays
25. Albert Camus — Exile and the Kingdom: Stories
26. Albert Camus — The Plague
27. Albert Camus — Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
28. Franz Kafka — Metamorphosis and Other Stories
29. Kobo Abe — The Woman in the Dunes
30. Ernesto Che Guevara — The Motorcycle Diaries
31. Henry David Thoreau — Walden

[Fox] reasoned like this: What is wrong with the 'unredeemed' man? Well, he is lazy, he lacks high ideals, he cannot see beyond tomorrow. What, therefore, is his salvation? Not to be afraid of aiming high, not to be afraid of feeling that the mantle of all poets and prophets who ever lived has descended on his shoulders, his alone; that upon him depends the future state of all the race. When Fox accepted this for himself, he ceased to be a miserable Outsider and became a great leader. He advised everyone to try the same remedy. But surely, one could object, all men are not Outsiders? Nonsense, Fox would say, let any man open his eyes to the world he lives in, and he'll become an Outsider immediately. He will begin by thinking he sees 'too deep and too much'; he will end by realizing that you cannot see too deep and too much.

—Colin Wilson, The Outsider