Critical Mass

I have just noticed that my bookshelf which I bought at the beginning of the semester is beginning to show wear and tear. It's not very noticeable, but I can see the gentle bend of the top shelf as it ruggedly supports most of my Norton Anthologies  and the stack of books that I like to call my Fairly Hefty Books That I Would Love To Have Time To Read stack. In the stack is Walden, a biography of Shakespeare, and travel stories from France, all travels to worlds far away from my dorm room. Though I've graduated from the cinder block, it sometimes still resembles a prison: there is always too much regulated furniture for the cramped space in the room and real life looks so good from behind the iron bars of Homework, Reading, and Papers. It's my own fault. I enthusiastically overbooked my semester with challenging classes, and even now would be pressed to give up even one. But about a month and a half ago, only a third of the way through the semester, I had to give up "fun" reading, a promise which I have mostly kept.

Still, the required reading is fun. I'm one of those nerds to the soul who covet learning and relish the thought connection from idea to idea. Happenstance has taught me many things, forcing my learning to bridge from class to class, uniting the evolution of technology with Emerson and quantum theory to creative writing. This semester I've read C.S. Lewis and Michael Crichton side by side with Edgar Allan Poe and Anne Lamott. Let no one ever say that the life of an English major is dull; we dwell in the realm of ideas and take dips in the lake of practical application. Really, this semester I've started realizing how crazy we are. We come to the field because we are in love with the beauty of words and the feel of a good books, and then we learn to do all sorts of things to it, to analyze, to inspect, to root out the beauty. We teach ourselves (willfully) to masculanize the feminine and try our hardest (as John Crowe Ransom did) to make ourselves a science out of words. But words are slippery, evasive things, and they make our science softer than down. Not that there is an evil in the scientific impulse. The best is a healthy combination.

I don't do too much with scrapbook paper. I am not the sort to take pictures and think of cute sayings to label them with. In fact, I admire those who do. But every time I walk into the paper aisle at a craft store, I want to go crazy and buy all of the colors and patters that line the shelves. They are potential, and that is the beauty in words. The fact is that I would suck at making great art of the manipulation of paper. I could do a few things, but they would be simple things strung together prosaically. And it would be good, a beautiful sentiment indeed. But someone else could come along and smash together two patterns that I would have never dreamed of together and call it better than good. The same sentiment I would try to express, portrayed majestically. This is the art and science of words.

Deathly Hallow

I have in my life a secret goal. As I pass through life, accumulating experience wrapped up in words, I am entering certain things into a library, which will be ultimately used in a competition. I am searching for the poem, quote, paragraph, or magic spell to memorize and moan weakly on my deathbed. Everyone crowding around my bed (ideally in my bedroom of old, but most likely the white hospital kind) will experience an insurgence of feeling: sorrow at my passing, fulfillment from the beauty of the words, and love at my perfect selection. I aim to make them cry. A few minutes after I faintly chuckle at them all crying and pass beyond, they will remember this post, and laugh. Knowing that my last few minutes will come of a product of memorizing a poem or a paragraph in order to orchestrate the most perfect final moments in an attempt to be dramatic and create a perfect story for my descendants, they will start laughing. My final moments will have been a wonderful and caring joke. In order for these last moments to happen correctly, though, I have to find the perfect passage and memorize it now. It's kind of a wonderful journey, to keep death in mind. What will symbolize me in 5 or 85 years? What means the most? So far, I have a few candidates.

One I just rediscovered:

"I am going, you see, to the Mountain. You remember how we used to look and long? And all the stories of my gold and amber house, up there against the sky, where we thought we should never really go? The greatest King of all was going to build it for me. If only you could believe it, Sister! No, listen. Do not let grief shut up your ears and harden your heart...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing - to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from...my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels lnot like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover. Do you not see now - ?"
-Istra/Psyche before the sacrifice, from C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold.

I also considered the quote about going up to the mountain from The Great Divorce, but I figured that this one was much more passionate and said close to the same thing. There's also a great poem I am considering...

As virtuous men pass mildly away, 

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, no sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, 

Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined, 

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls, therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so 

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other do.

And thought it in the center sit, 

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as it comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

Like th' other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

-A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, John Donne

It would be so cruel. and it would be so delicious. But really, Donne knows what he's doing. Always. Good man, that. To be shorter and close to my roots, my last section, for the moment:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale 

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, Shakespeare.

Ach, Shakespeare. The true love of my life. I suppose this grand scheme all depends on what I'm feeling at the moment. I suppose I might ruin it all and spout out all three at once. That would be like me. But I rest in the comfort that no matter what I say, bitter or refined, the ones standing near me will know me and understand, soaking in the words as a gesture and not as a direct message. Because really, who wouldn't want to quote Shakespeare or C.S.Lewis on their deathbed, simply to attempt a grand final gesture? It would make my...death...other things will make my life.