A Grief Observed

There are times when I'm terrified to doubt. There are times when the lights go out and I shake, thinking about the word eternity and what that entails and all of the sudden, I'm dizzy.

I can't relate with loss -- not in any real, tangible way, not in a mom dad sister best friend boyfriend kind of way, but doubt, certainly, strikes a chord with me.

Sometimes, when I get scared, I do everything I can to not ask all of the terrible questions I'm dying to know the answers, the ones that fall like quiet bombs and leave my head spinning. Sometimes the doubts I have are the same as Lewis'; I rarely have moments where I doubt the existence of God, because I've seen him, felt him, tasted him too many times for that, but sometimes it's his character I wonder about -- his love.

It's scary and it feels like swallowing.

Seeing other people (and by that I mean, seeing people named C.S. Lewis, a man who is like a king of Christian thinking) ask the same questions and think the same thing is profoundly shaking, but very cool in a way. That he could wonder about the character and love of God blows my mind.

I think it’s important to savor that doubt. Prof. Corrigan kept saying this week not to “rush to pat answers” or “run to consolation” but instead to let these questions shake us from the inside. When we stop asking the questions that terrify us and make us examine faith, make us turn to apologetics to figure out and demand some answers to questions that are hard to ask, we start relying on blind faith and hocus-pocus.

From there, it’s only a short just to being the homeless person on the street corner rambling to himself, crazier and blinder than an outhouse rat.

The Catcher in the Rye

This is the favorite book of sociopaths everywhere; every disconnected, lonely, bullied kid: the Perks of Being a Wallflower of the fifties.

Mark Davis Chapman, who killed John Lennon (buzzkill) tried to legally change his name to Holden Caufield because of how strongly he identified with the narrator.

The first time I read this book, I was thirteen and starting my sophomore year, lonely in the way that the youngest person in high school typically is, and this book resonated with me.

I read it half a dozen times before I actually got it.

Serial killers and crazies love this book. It's a fact. During this story, nothing happens. The alternate title should be Holden Caufield Gets Lonelier and Lonelier.

He goes around, kicked out of school thinking about how "phony" everyone is and saying things make him "depressed as hell" every three words. At one point, he tries to pay a prostitute to talk to him. That's all he wants, and she goes back to tell her pimp that he's swindled her out of her time with no compensation. He proceeds to beat the crap out of him.

Many people call Holden unlikable; that he has earned his sorrow. I like that idea. There is a part of everyone that is "unlikable," and that part of us wants Holden to find a friend, even when he is prickly and abrasive and a jerk. Life is frequently "unlikable".

At the end, though, and this is what I figured out on reread thirty: At the end of this story, Holden has learned to communicate, connect with people. We know this, because we empathise with Holden. Because we feel for him, and he's told his story.

Serial killers and outsiders and people who can't connect, they empathise with him getting lonelier and lonelier, and his well intentioned love for his sister and getting beaten up by pimps, but they do not see the healing.

Happy Endings

There isn't much that's more selfish than the idea of a happy ending. This story, while jaded and bitter, had some really awesome points.

It really made me think about happy endings, and about how EVERYONE IS THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THEIR OWN LIFE.

This, in connection with the idea of a "happy ending", entails two things:

A. When the point of view character ends happily, there is no second thought given to secondary characters welfare in deciding if an ending is a happy one. In several parts of Happy Endings, people were cheated on, people died by tsunamis and bad hearts, people killed themselves, and people killed other people, or various combinations of several of them. This doesn't matter, because reader focus is on the main character.

B. In the life of, say, the victim of any one of the aforementioned, there were no happy endings. Their stories end with them dead, overdosed on drugs and cheap liquor; shot; cheated on; dying of bad hearts. Bummers. No one would read them.

We forget that other people are real people.

Walt Whitman, throughout his poetry, and especially in Song of Myself, stresses the importance "of imagining others with infinite complexity" because of this: every one of them are breathing, every one is the protagonist.

Other than that, Happy Endings said something else that I found interesting. "So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with."

This seems true both in life and in books. Endings, of life, of relationships, of any good thing, and even plenty of bad things you wouldn't expect to miss, are downers. The beginnings are filled with potential and promise. Everyone loves a new start.

Book with happy endings, especially love stories usually don't actually end at the end. "Happily ever after" is an ending that happens during the honeymoon, and cuts out, fades to black before the first argument over who does the laundry, or who put the kids to bed last, and not making bills. And they especially don't end with John and Mary dead.

I like "happy middles" best. Happy "endings" hardly ring true, and leave nothing to the imagination. Tom and Huck will always be little boys on adventures in my mind, because I never read of them being onld and grey and drinking ale looking out into the sunset on their porches together, retired and near-end, thinking about the good old days. Certainly you can't leave a dangling middle, where you don't know if the outcome is for good or for bad, but leaving on a happy moment between acts of life, after the first argument, when you know they can both do laundry, and sometimes someone has to sleep on the couch, but that maybe they'll be okay. That's my favorite ending.

Literature/Katie = OTP

In elementary school, I remember, it was wildly popular to make fun of Hooked on Phonics. When I was three years old, my baby sister was born, and mom bought me Hooked on Phonics. (The two are probably coincidental, as no one would ever do something just to "get me out of their hair." That wouldn't make any sense.) Reading was just what people did in my house, which looks sort of like an overstuffed library, books spilling off the shelves like sugar and pooling on the ground and against the walls, so I taught myself to read: excited and tiny and probably listening to my Winnie-the-Pooh tape player under the dining room table while mom tended to a fussy baby. (That baby just turned fifteen, and she's only gotten fussier.)

Anyways, I remember hearing my first HoP joke, or maybe the first time I'd heard one and connected it to the way I'd learned to read -- by that time being three years old was a little hazy, and I hadn't thought about it. It had seemed normal. I was mortified. Hooked on Phonics was for retards and dummies? I laugh about it now, because, seriously? I let little kids that probably read below grade-level make me feel stupid for learning to read at three years old?

I don't have many memories of being read to because of that; the fact that there isn't much time in my memory that I couldn't read to myself, but I did a lot of reading then, to myself, and to the new squirmy bundle, Exhibit A, or Bethany:

(Even now, I occasionally read to the squirmy bundle who is practically an adult. "No one does voices like your big sister." I am grateful for this connection and time even when my throat is raw and splintered.)

Now, I read anything I can get my hands on; Whitman and Tennyson and Gregory Maguire and C. S. Lewis and John Green and Yann Martel, the way I did in elementary school when I read books under my desks (they were very worth it) but my understanding of literature is different.

My understanding of words is different. Where in childhood, I was wrapped up in words only of the written variety, dismissing music and paintings and dancing because they had nothing to do with articulation, and I knew from elementary school that I'd be an english major. Have always known.

Except, I'm not. I'm majoring in communications because now, with my practically-adult-eyes, I am finding that everything is about connecting, everything is about telling stories, everything is about herding someone towards seeing things through another's eyes, if only for a few hours. Bob Dylan meanders his way through the story of the love of his youth in Tangled Up In Blue, and I think who wouldn't call this literature? Anis Majgoni, spoken word artist, says "all I did was shake my ribcage like a library in an earthquake; I spilled book like holy water... I was one thousand tattered spines, splinters on my tongue from licking the cathedrals. I had worked hard for my sorrow." and my heart stutters the same way it does when I hear The Hollow Men read, or Song of Myself, every atom of me belonging to the story, the way it belongs to you.

I don't know what purpose literature has except to be the roots connecting us, letting us see what life is like for someone who has their own thoughts, to remind us that other people are real, and not props on our stage, to build in us empathy and sympathy and larger vocabularies, and something to talk about on Monday morning.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Words

Words, I think, are like wild animals. You can't keep them in cages. For one, language is always changing, and two, reality doesn't care for language.

We use words, invented language to define our world: we feel a twisting in our stomachs and call it "hunger" or call it "guilt" and in knowing the name of our butterfly-insides, we can move on, or we can dwell on the feeling, but the naming changes it, somehow. It's like the old comparison of English vs the Eskimos: we have a few words for snow where they have dozens. How does this change our experience of it?

In What We Talk About, they all recount their stories and ideas about love. Mel and Terri both give their soapbox speeches right out, in drunken rants and old arguments, and Nick and Laura briefly mention a pro-love ideology, but their love is shown more through their actions. Laura seems to be, at least in this brief window into their day-to-day life, seems to be Nick's center of gravity, and he's content just to look at her, or feel her hand in his. Of course, they're also newlyweds, but I digress.

The point is that they've all defined love differently. Terri stayed with a man who "dragged her around by her ankles" and "tried to kill her", threatening both her and her new husband repeatedly after she left him, claiming even now that his behavior was a manifestation of "love." Mel "loved" his first wife, but now he "hates her guts." Nick and Laura, as far as we can see, neither beat each other, nor constantly inform the other that if they died, they could move on pretty quickly, but when we see them, they're newly married.

The heart of the story seems to be the definition of love. To Terri, Ed's love was terrifyingly real, and nothing will dissuade her from the point. To Mel, love is something that you travel into and can get out of like driving through the bad part of town. Nick and Laura have yet to survive the period of "love" where you treat each other like glass. If the author had a less cynical view of love, I think we would have seen Nick and Laura as tried-and-true, as opposed to the couple whose opinions can be discounted because of their stage in life.

What they're all talking about, to my definition, to the way these words define my life, is codependence (Ed and Terri), infatuation (Nick and Laura), and a state of kind, but shallow, affection that can be killed with time (Mel).

But that's the crazy thing: you can't keep language in a box, because it isn't something stagnant. Language grows and words lose their meanings, and ideas represent different things to different people. The way I define life is the only way I'm capable of it. I cannot see through someone else's eyes; I cannot stand firm in their convictions, I cannot understand what I do not understand without study and convincing. If I try to describe to a blind man what I see, he may not see it.

Someone can say "and then he put a sharp metal blade against his skin and dislodged little pieces of himself," and think they're being perfectly clear, but I probably wouldn't (as you probably didn't) get a picture in my head of someone shaving.

To me, Love is patient; love is kind. Love does not envy; it is not proud.

Or, Love is:

1.	a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

2.	a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.

3.	sexual passion or desire.

4.	a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart.

5.	(used in direct address as a term of endearment, affection, or the like): Would you like to see a movie, love?

6.	a love affair; an intensely amorous incident; amour.

7.	sexual intercourse; copulation.