We've been hibernating all morning in a house transformed by snow and blanket-covered windows into a charming cave (I was tempted to say cosy cave, but the chill and draftiness won't be forgotten so easily). Reading, listening to Christmas music, cooking, cleaning, catching up on letter writing and bills, listening to Lex grumble at his online chess opponents... well, it's been lovely.
Days like this simply don't come often enough- days of concentrated quiet, peace, and cheer. Certainly, tomorrow isn't likely to be another of the same if we drive to Kansas City as planned. So it's a good lesson in contentment- accepting to be luxuriously satisfied by the present moment, with no grumbling about its brevity. It strikes me that pleasure- especially the transient pleasure of a day which magically falls somehow into perfect harmony with itself- is exquisite precisely because of its fragility, because of the knowledge lurking behind it that it may be shattered from moment to moment.
It's impossible to extend the volume of a fine, rich broth merely by adding gallons of water to it. You've more liquid, certainly, but it isn't at all the same thing you began with- the savor is lost. Rest and comfort must be made of the same stuff- the more you have of them, the weaker their flavor.
Days like this should be held to the light like diamonds to be admired. Such glittering white perfection without- such homeliness and security within...
How wonderful to have a few hours of intense peace, boiled down to an almost impossible deliciousness, undiluted by any threat of longevity!
Friday, December 21, 2012
Monday, December 3, 2012
Moments in Munich: Part 2
"The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn."
― Sophie Scholl
February 22, 1943- Three ringleaders of the resistance group 'The White Rose', based at Ludwig-Maximilian unversity in Munich were executed by guillotine at Stadelheim prison just a few hours after being given a summary trial for treason.
The crime of which Hans Scholl, 23, Sophie Scholl, 21, and Christoph Probst, 22 were accused?
Undermining the National Socialist regime through the distribution of inflammatory leaflets condemning the passivity of the German people in the face of Hitler's crimes, and advocating passive resistance and active sabotage of the war effort and National Socialist agenda.*
― Sophie Scholl
February 22, 1943- Three ringleaders of the resistance group 'The White Rose', based at Ludwig-Maximilian unversity in Munich were executed by guillotine at Stadelheim prison just a few hours after being given a summary trial for treason.
The crime of which Hans Scholl, 23, Sophie Scholl, 21, and Christoph Probst, 22 were accused?
Undermining the National Socialist regime through the distribution of inflammatory leaflets condemning the passivity of the German people in the face of Hitler's crimes, and advocating passive resistance and active sabotage of the war effort and National Socialist agenda.*
For many, many years, this group- Sophie in particular- have absorbed my admiration, interest, and affection with a great deal of intensity. They represent, for me, all that is admirable and heroic, all that is honest and loveable, as well as the genuine passion and cameraderie one often feels the lack of, here. From their example and writings- from their very seeking and confusions, I've learned more about the purpose, depth and signicance of life on earth than from nearly any other source. When I found myself living in Europe for several months last Spring, my greatest desire, naturally, was to make pilgrimage to Munich, and attempt to see this city as these courageous fellow-students had seen it.
The fierceness of the emotions roused during the days I wandered with Rita through Munich and Ulm, attempting to retrace the steps of the Scholls, was unsettling. I was haunted by a sense of physical and spiritual closeness to the student movement, awed to walk among streets and buildings which I'd scrutinised in photographs, dreamed of, and reconstructed in imagination for years. I was moved to tears as though the events of sixty years ago had taken place only yesterday. Those days in Munich were fraught with joy and anguish. I understand now why Catholics kneel before their saints. In homage, regret, and gratitude, my heart too weighed me to my knees. There was at times a strange, primitive desire to kiss the very cobbles of the streets. I seemed to encounter the students of the 1940's at every corner- every new sight, and my heart gave a great leap: 'They too saw this- walked by this arch, paused by this church, strode through this courtyard to their classrooms!'
It was with a sort of dread that I at last left this world of the living students and took the train across town to the prison and cemetery where they, and so many others of that generation, lost their lives. I was unprepared for the overwhelming physical proximity of these 'imaginary friends' of my childhood, and with their harsh end. When at last I found myself before the three crosses bordered in shrubbery, I was dumb with the ache and solemnity of the moment, kneeling beside this so dearly beloved little group, and encountering them irrevocably as physical entities as much as symbol.
And it came upon me with strangeness as I knelt there, trembling in tenderness and grief before the grave of my long cherished ideal, that here indeed lay the end of the story, the culmination of my years-long quest. Tears slid and stung- sixty years ago youth, integrity, and beauty were flung here faceless and bleeding, flung here carelessly as seeds, each in their own narrow furrow torn from the suffering German soil. In this twilit forest, Sophie was no longer the laughing, eager girl, the tree-climber, nature lover, the artist, brow wrinkled in concentration, who had led me like an older sister and patron saint through my young womanhood.
Hans, here, was a pitiful remnant of bone- gone was the tall and keen-eyed young man, fierce and piercing in his hawk-like intensity, his life and passion and thought.
Hans, here, was a pitiful remnant of bone- gone was the tall and keen-eyed young man, fierce and piercing in his hawk-like intensity, his life and passion and thought.
Christoph, gentle Chris, marveling at the mountains, carrying his baby son on his shoulders, cherishing his soft young wife, her belly round with his second child, was stripped here of motion, even of flesh.
Feckless Alex with his Russian songs and stories and his sketch pad- hair falling over his forehead, rakish smile clamped around his pipe, charm twinkling ephemerally even from photos- Alex here was nothing.
Earnest, conscientious Willi here was nothing.
Limping, brilliant Dr. Huber here was nothing.
The upheaved German soil had covered all here indiscriminately- the blood of these eager hearts, and, more terrible than blood, the merciless, anguished tears torn from the hearts which lingered after them.
And this was the end of the story.
I will be 22 in October, but Sophie, my darling Sophie, lies halted here forever at 21. And yet, 'The sun still shines.' The April sun trembles softly across the Perlacher-Friedholm, the pitiful mounds of soil lined up in neat rows along the silent earth.
This is the end of the story, and yet, it is a story without end.
This story cannot end, because what these students and their friends represented is not a thing which can be killed, which can wither away into nothingness in the darkness of a cemetery. Those who live ideas intensely- who make ideas the master of their bodies rather than servants of them- such as these, who never stooped to live merely as bodies cannot be reduced to mere bodies in death. To live one's life in the burning core of an idea is to live on as an idea eternally. To live the truth is to live without end within the truth.
Within the truth then, the White Rose lives timelessly. Sophie did not speak lightly when she declared in prison, 'God is my refuge into eternity'. I have come to this cemetery in my quest for these dear friends, and I have not found them, though at last, after so many years of yearning, I stand physically beside them. I have sought the living among the dead. They are not here. They are not here.
My heart is as light in this moment as it is broken. These young lives were discarded here like unwanted seed tossed into the war-torn earth, and look- the seeds have sprung up into life- look, my heart, the dry husks have burst out verdantly as flowers and fragrance- Oh, look, look! Because a little cluster of children laid down their lives in defiant love, un-terrified and self-forgetting love during years of terror and hatred, and now the world is in a tumult of blossoms- the world, the anguished old world is a-bloom with white roses.
My heart is as light in this moment as it is broken. These young lives were discarded here like unwanted seed tossed into the war-torn earth, and look- the seeds have sprung up into life- look, my heart, the dry husks have burst out verdantly as flowers and fragrance- Oh, look, look! Because a little cluster of children laid down their lives in defiant love, un-terrified and self-forgetting love during years of terror and hatred, and now the world is in a tumult of blossoms- the world, the anguished old world is a-bloom with white roses.
Whatever is fine in Germany, whatever is fine, and lovely, and noble in humanity- whatever is honorable, and whatever is strong and vital, I have found it here, and can carry it away with me, conscious of new life and endurance. And Sophie, Hans, Christoph, Alex, all you others who have shown me with such passion how to live and die in integrity, I have not forgotten- and I am grateful.
"Isn't it a riddle . . . and awe-inspiring, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the horror. Lately I've noticed something grand and mysterious peering through my sheer joy in all that is beautiful, a sense of its creator . . . Only man can be truly ugly, because he has the free will to estrange himself from this song of praise.
It often seems that he'll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won't be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor."
It often seems that he'll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won't be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor."
-Sophie Scholl
(*If you want to know more of the (magnificent) story of these young people, what they accomplished, and the deep faith and convictions which motivated, them, I recomment Hermann Vinke's biograpy 'The Short Life of Sophie Scholl', 'The White Rose' by Sophie's younger sister, Inge Scholl, and, certainly 'At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl' by Inge Jens.)
Monday, September 10, 2012
From France to 'La Maison Francaise'
Some houses wear eccentricity as graciously as Her Majesty wears a mantle. La Maison Francaise is not one of these houses. Rather, she swaddles herself in eccentricity with the clumsy charm of a gawky colt. Or at least, this is what I would like very much to believe, for since the end of August, this strikingly peculiar little house has been my home, and that of the delightful Stacey Weidemann.
We take a certain pride in our character laden abode.
Permit me to offer you a tour?
Painted a buttercup yellow, and shoved into the side of an embankent, with precarious and spindling decks tacked swayingly onto either side, our house exudes an indefinable aura of 'ramshackle' and 'thrown together'. Enter, and the first thing which will catch your eye is a door.
This door was not always present. It is a recent, and more than welcome addition.
Before the door, there was a gaping doorway, a cobweb hung stairwell, a crooked, neck-breaking descent of wooden stairs, and the shadowy, fearful depths of The Basement.
This gray opening leading to the vast netherworlds of our maison excercised a peculiar magnetic quality, dragging my unwilling gaze each time I passed it, clutching me with vertigo as I stared across the twilit expanse, peopled with shrouded objects which grew in terror and mystery as the light waned.
To be home alone at night was to face all the horrors of that gaping doorway to the basement, through which anything might, at any moment be expected to come. We joked about the basement- about the crazed murderers and mysterious creatures which lurked hidden in its dark recesses, but the joking was tinged with panic. This was a basement, huge and harrowing, which made such loathesome lurking seem to dangerously near the realm of the probable.
The door has brought blessed relief. I could almost caress it with pleasure when I pass through the once perilous hallway to the kitchen and meet no menacing shadows, but rather this sturdy, cheerful panel of polished walnut, securely deadbolted in place.
The basement has many interesting characteristics, but one of the most astounding is The Graffiti room, a half finished room covered with bright yellow posterboard on the outside, with a vast assortment of graffiti applied in sharpie to the cement blocks of the interior. The graffiti appears to have been planned and encouraged, but is difficult to make sense of. On one block someone named Dave scrawls "Whoa! Great bar!", and on another, a childish scribble reads "Thank you grammy and grampa for a great thanksgiving it was a good thanksgiving and I liked the turkey love Tanisha"
On the other wall, is lettered "Mark is in love with Katie!", and beside it, in a different hand, "Katie is in love with Mark, too!"
Perhaps the mystery of this room will never be solved, certainly not by a team of amateur archaeologists such as us.
And now we find ourselves in the kitchen. The upper walls are a creamy golden yellow like blatantly artificial coloring in margarine. The lower, a unique, ephemeral shade of dull pinkish orange which was advertised as 'rhubarb', and which I confess to being intensely fond of.
Artificial brick paneling adorns the more businesslike area of the room, which is growing more pleasant and useful by the week. First, we had a refrigerator, and this was good. Next we had a stove, of which only the gas burners could be used, and this was also good. Then came a strip of countertop propped on two of the sturdier of the old cabinets which once occupied this cuisine. Then came enormous piles of sawdust (which have since gone of to the nearest landfill, and an old porcelain sink hanging awkwardly halfway in and halfway out of a new rectangular hole in the center of the counter, like a portly woman wedged into an innertube. Someday this sink will perform the full duties of a sink, but for now it is merely a sort of promise, or IOU, or status symbol, reminding us that we will not always wash our dishes in the little sink in the bathroom, and that better things are on their way.
Gradually, the screwdrivers, and wires, and boxes of nails which filled our kitchen cabinets are giving way to Stacey's quaint dishes and the various food staples which make life palatable.
The floor is of an experimental vinyl known as 'floating flooring', which is not attached to the plywood beneath. As a result, it's inclined to bubble, and tremendous care must be taken in moving heavy objects. My father advises us not even to scuff our feet.
The laundry room and N'importe Quoi room are a sharp step lower than the kitchen, which they both connect to. I haven't the faintest idea why. The laundry room, sponge painted in baby blue, with a ragged wallpaper border representing clothes on a clothesline, is the new resting place of all tools and construction materials, recycling, filled trash bags, and any other unsightliness which can be crammed in. The reason? It has doors, which close, and latch. Rather closetlike, they are.
The N'importe Quoi room is a textured and dusty ivory around its top half, with dark wood paneling around the bottom. Bookshelves are built into one side of the room, and at the other is a door leading to the outdoors, the purpose of which we have never understood. At present, it is a mausolem of dusty and unwanted furniture and abandoned cardboard boxes- little more. If something is neither tool nor trash, yet you're not sure where to set it, by all means, pile it here.
Let us proceed to the living room.
The half nearest to the kitchen is a square alcove outlined in white chair rail, with elegant white panel designs of a classical appearance ornamenting the lower section of the wall. The other, is merely the home of our aged couch, and Stacey's two chairs. The carpet is a dull industrial gray, continuously pilling and shedding, which embitters my existence, and clashes defiantly with every colour in the house. The whole thing is painted in a very soft delicate turquoise shade, which I find charming, but which was less alluring to the man from Suddenlink who installed our wifi.
"This color looks like something my wife would have picked out", he remarked conversationally. "I've never understood her tastes in colors. Me, I couldn't stand to have a room this awful greenish-blue shade. It would make me sick. But my wife just loves that sort of thing- even turquoise jewelry, which I won't buy for her. You know her, she'd wear it, and I just can't bear this color. Not that I'm criticizing of course. My wife's a good woman, and she would have painted a room this awful color too if she had the chance. But it's sure not what I would have chosen."
In the alcove with the wainscoting, which is currently bare of furniture, there also hangs a fanciful crystal chandelier, a relic of the mysterious former occupants, about whom we grow increasingly curious.
Another chandelier, the crystals arranged in a different style, adorns the hallway, which is also painted in 'rhubarb', and one wall of which is covered in majestically textured wallpaper with delusions of Versailles.
The bathroom is dominated by the shower, which is tall and imposing- so tall, that our shower curtain, though the normal height, seems painfully short and inadequate. The shower head can be seen, arching triumphantly high above the sad little curtain. The faucet is jammed in directly under the sky-scraping shower head, and so to turn on the water it is necessary to stretch one's arms to their farthest hight.
We like it here. I like it here.
But to be honest, it's not France. And now that our time in France has ended, I find myself missing it more even than I believed possible.
Missouri is... midwestern. Dingy, commercial, and nearly devoid of sidewalks (Alright, so I'm a bit bitter and shrill on the topic of sidewalks at present)
When I think of France now, I have a dizzying impression of beauty and fragrance, cloudy skies and swaying masses of lilac and white wisteria, lovely, gracious old buildings, and cobbled streets, the shimmering waters of the lake, the warm, crusty, golden charm of the little corner bakeries, the breathless wonder of learning to take refuge in beloved and reassuring arms, the bus moving through the rain in a rainbow blur, the women draped in their enormous scarves, pink roses clambering over warm stone walls, the cold, lofty majesty, the compelling silence, or ravishing music, of the stone churches and cathedrals, with their enormous windows sparkling like a kaleidescope of gems- the nerve wracking noise of the train stations... Oh, France has burned itself on my senses like a brand, and I'm shocked now by the harrowing ache, the tender grief I can't help lavishing on each crumpled receit and faded bus ticket which remind me.
While unpacking clothes last week, I happened upon a shirt which had lain unnoticed in a pocket of my duffel bag since I crammed it there during my last week in Angers. I buried my face in it, and Angers struck me like a wave- it breathed the aroma of the lavender assouplissant I'd washed my clothes in, a bit of the precious rosewater I was forced to discard in London airport, the peculiar odor of the dorm room and its drawers, the sunshiny breeze the shirt had dried in, while hanging from my window, Greg and his mother's sweet laundry detergent... I found myself weeping into the garment, overwhelmed by an unexpected sensation of being physically transported back.
And so, transitioning into everyday life in the U.S. is challenging, because emotionally, there's still a... dizzying gulf between I, and the life I left behind nearly a year ago now. Normal eluded me when I tried to return to it, perhaps because my reluctance to return was so evident. I still feel lost here- curiously disoriented and out of place.
But since life is a continuous pattern of change and uprooting, and loveliness such as the loveliness I so painfully remember, and am dazed in remembering is always fleeting, and frequently illusionary, perhaps none of this is so strange.
And so, I am thankful for the transition, however rocky in spots, back to the world of cows, and corn, and ditches where sidewalks should be, and into our funny and intensely individual yellow mansion, wobbling smugly on its stilts, and demanding to be noticed.
Hopefully now, even you friends who are not lucky enough to have met it, will notice it, with all the humorous and head-shaking attention it deserves. The French house is off and running! Et donc, bienvenue!
We take a certain pride in our character laden abode.
Permit me to offer you a tour?
Painted a buttercup yellow, and shoved into the side of an embankent, with precarious and spindling decks tacked swayingly onto either side, our house exudes an indefinable aura of 'ramshackle' and 'thrown together'. Enter, and the first thing which will catch your eye is a door.
This door was not always present. It is a recent, and more than welcome addition.
Before the door, there was a gaping doorway, a cobweb hung stairwell, a crooked, neck-breaking descent of wooden stairs, and the shadowy, fearful depths of The Basement.
This gray opening leading to the vast netherworlds of our maison excercised a peculiar magnetic quality, dragging my unwilling gaze each time I passed it, clutching me with vertigo as I stared across the twilit expanse, peopled with shrouded objects which grew in terror and mystery as the light waned.
To be home alone at night was to face all the horrors of that gaping doorway to the basement, through which anything might, at any moment be expected to come. We joked about the basement- about the crazed murderers and mysterious creatures which lurked hidden in its dark recesses, but the joking was tinged with panic. This was a basement, huge and harrowing, which made such loathesome lurking seem to dangerously near the realm of the probable.
The door has brought blessed relief. I could almost caress it with pleasure when I pass through the once perilous hallway to the kitchen and meet no menacing shadows, but rather this sturdy, cheerful panel of polished walnut, securely deadbolted in place.
The basement has many interesting characteristics, but one of the most astounding is The Graffiti room, a half finished room covered with bright yellow posterboard on the outside, with a vast assortment of graffiti applied in sharpie to the cement blocks of the interior. The graffiti appears to have been planned and encouraged, but is difficult to make sense of. On one block someone named Dave scrawls "Whoa! Great bar!", and on another, a childish scribble reads "Thank you grammy and grampa for a great thanksgiving it was a good thanksgiving and I liked the turkey love Tanisha"
On the other wall, is lettered "Mark is in love with Katie!", and beside it, in a different hand, "Katie is in love with Mark, too!"
Perhaps the mystery of this room will never be solved, certainly not by a team of amateur archaeologists such as us.
And now we find ourselves in the kitchen. The upper walls are a creamy golden yellow like blatantly artificial coloring in margarine. The lower, a unique, ephemeral shade of dull pinkish orange which was advertised as 'rhubarb', and which I confess to being intensely fond of.
Artificial brick paneling adorns the more businesslike area of the room, which is growing more pleasant and useful by the week. First, we had a refrigerator, and this was good. Next we had a stove, of which only the gas burners could be used, and this was also good. Then came a strip of countertop propped on two of the sturdier of the old cabinets which once occupied this cuisine. Then came enormous piles of sawdust (which have since gone of to the nearest landfill, and an old porcelain sink hanging awkwardly halfway in and halfway out of a new rectangular hole in the center of the counter, like a portly woman wedged into an innertube. Someday this sink will perform the full duties of a sink, but for now it is merely a sort of promise, or IOU, or status symbol, reminding us that we will not always wash our dishes in the little sink in the bathroom, and that better things are on their way.
Gradually, the screwdrivers, and wires, and boxes of nails which filled our kitchen cabinets are giving way to Stacey's quaint dishes and the various food staples which make life palatable.
The floor is of an experimental vinyl known as 'floating flooring', which is not attached to the plywood beneath. As a result, it's inclined to bubble, and tremendous care must be taken in moving heavy objects. My father advises us not even to scuff our feet.
The laundry room and N'importe Quoi room are a sharp step lower than the kitchen, which they both connect to. I haven't the faintest idea why. The laundry room, sponge painted in baby blue, with a ragged wallpaper border representing clothes on a clothesline, is the new resting place of all tools and construction materials, recycling, filled trash bags, and any other unsightliness which can be crammed in. The reason? It has doors, which close, and latch. Rather closetlike, they are.
The N'importe Quoi room is a textured and dusty ivory around its top half, with dark wood paneling around the bottom. Bookshelves are built into one side of the room, and at the other is a door leading to the outdoors, the purpose of which we have never understood. At present, it is a mausolem of dusty and unwanted furniture and abandoned cardboard boxes- little more. If something is neither tool nor trash, yet you're not sure where to set it, by all means, pile it here.
Let us proceed to the living room.
The half nearest to the kitchen is a square alcove outlined in white chair rail, with elegant white panel designs of a classical appearance ornamenting the lower section of the wall. The other, is merely the home of our aged couch, and Stacey's two chairs. The carpet is a dull industrial gray, continuously pilling and shedding, which embitters my existence, and clashes defiantly with every colour in the house. The whole thing is painted in a very soft delicate turquoise shade, which I find charming, but which was less alluring to the man from Suddenlink who installed our wifi.
"This color looks like something my wife would have picked out", he remarked conversationally. "I've never understood her tastes in colors. Me, I couldn't stand to have a room this awful greenish-blue shade. It would make me sick. But my wife just loves that sort of thing- even turquoise jewelry, which I won't buy for her. You know her, she'd wear it, and I just can't bear this color. Not that I'm criticizing of course. My wife's a good woman, and she would have painted a room this awful color too if she had the chance. But it's sure not what I would have chosen."
In the alcove with the wainscoting, which is currently bare of furniture, there also hangs a fanciful crystal chandelier, a relic of the mysterious former occupants, about whom we grow increasingly curious.
Another chandelier, the crystals arranged in a different style, adorns the hallway, which is also painted in 'rhubarb', and one wall of which is covered in majestically textured wallpaper with delusions of Versailles.
The bathroom is dominated by the shower, which is tall and imposing- so tall, that our shower curtain, though the normal height, seems painfully short and inadequate. The shower head can be seen, arching triumphantly high above the sad little curtain. The faucet is jammed in directly under the sky-scraping shower head, and so to turn on the water it is necessary to stretch one's arms to their farthest hight.
We like it here. I like it here.
But to be honest, it's not France. And now that our time in France has ended, I find myself missing it more even than I believed possible.
Missouri is... midwestern. Dingy, commercial, and nearly devoid of sidewalks (Alright, so I'm a bit bitter and shrill on the topic of sidewalks at present)
When I think of France now, I have a dizzying impression of beauty and fragrance, cloudy skies and swaying masses of lilac and white wisteria, lovely, gracious old buildings, and cobbled streets, the shimmering waters of the lake, the warm, crusty, golden charm of the little corner bakeries, the breathless wonder of learning to take refuge in beloved and reassuring arms, the bus moving through the rain in a rainbow blur, the women draped in their enormous scarves, pink roses clambering over warm stone walls, the cold, lofty majesty, the compelling silence, or ravishing music, of the stone churches and cathedrals, with their enormous windows sparkling like a kaleidescope of gems- the nerve wracking noise of the train stations... Oh, France has burned itself on my senses like a brand, and I'm shocked now by the harrowing ache, the tender grief I can't help lavishing on each crumpled receit and faded bus ticket which remind me.
While unpacking clothes last week, I happened upon a shirt which had lain unnoticed in a pocket of my duffel bag since I crammed it there during my last week in Angers. I buried my face in it, and Angers struck me like a wave- it breathed the aroma of the lavender assouplissant I'd washed my clothes in, a bit of the precious rosewater I was forced to discard in London airport, the peculiar odor of the dorm room and its drawers, the sunshiny breeze the shirt had dried in, while hanging from my window, Greg and his mother's sweet laundry detergent... I found myself weeping into the garment, overwhelmed by an unexpected sensation of being physically transported back.
And so, transitioning into everyday life in the U.S. is challenging, because emotionally, there's still a... dizzying gulf between I, and the life I left behind nearly a year ago now. Normal eluded me when I tried to return to it, perhaps because my reluctance to return was so evident. I still feel lost here- curiously disoriented and out of place.
But since life is a continuous pattern of change and uprooting, and loveliness such as the loveliness I so painfully remember, and am dazed in remembering is always fleeting, and frequently illusionary, perhaps none of this is so strange.
And so, I am thankful for the transition, however rocky in spots, back to the world of cows, and corn, and ditches where sidewalks should be, and into our funny and intensely individual yellow mansion, wobbling smugly on its stilts, and demanding to be noticed.
Hopefully now, even you friends who are not lucky enough to have met it, will notice it, with all the humorous and head-shaking attention it deserves. The French house is off and running! Et donc, bienvenue!
Thursday, August 30, 2012
A language manifesto, and a few curious questions...
A gift which is truly a gift is never a gift merely.
It is a force, a fierceness, a drive. It does not bestow itself, it rather demands pursuit- tantalizes, taunts, eludes, rouses its servant to a frenzy of determination, a glow of enthusiasm, an intensity of ecstatic purpose. It is struggle, and it is joy. It is agony and sweat, but only as childbirth is- a glorious agony, bringing life, new meaning, into the world.
To have a 'gift for languages' is in essence this:
To be the thrall of language, enslaved by language learning. To cherish these bonds.
No chains could be more enlivening than those which place all the beauty and mystery of human communication and culture into the trembling manacled hands of a student who strains for them, dizzied with wonder.
In other words, language learning, though work-intensive, is fun. Exquisite fun. 'Deliciously fun', as one of my professors likes to say.
During the four years I've spent studying French, two years of learning Chinese, and three days of tackling German, I've continuously encountered a question which I find utterly incomprehensible. People phrase it in different ways:
"Why are you studying _____?"
"What's the point of learning ________? What are you going to do with it?"
"Why on earth would you want to know ______?"
Confession: People who ask this make no sense to me at all. When I meet someone, and they mention that they're studying a language, I feel an immediate kinship if it's one I'm studying as well, impressed if they're more advanced, envious and gluttonously eager to glean their knowledge if it's one I'm not learning. It never occurs to me to wonder why they're learning it. If they're the 'right sort of people', I already know.
This love of languages is characterized by a certain element of greed. I want them all, can't bear to encounter one without acquiring at least the rudiments of it. Possession for its own sake is a thing I strive for compulsively. So, the honest answer to the questions I continuously encounter is this: I study any given language in order to know it. I'm driven by the desire to master it, revel in it, and bask in it merely for its own sake. I learn languages for the sole purpose of knowing languages, and for the infinite pleasure and challenge involved in acquiring them. What I intend to do with these languages is to know them, and glory in the knowledge- to communicate with the vast new expanse of human beings each new language gives me access to, to read their literature, listen to their radio stations, befriend and adopt them. I never begin the study of a language with any more practical thought in mind than this starry-eyed fascination with people and cultures and words. Foreign languages, and the attendant cross-cultural friendships, are the thud of my heart, the pulse of my blood, the flame, the voice, the motion of whatever elusive quality is 'I'.
I've come up with many practical uses for my habit, primarily as an excuse to continue along this path of linguistic addiction. Language, words, are my catnip, an irresistible lure. To stumble over new words like an infant, gradually growing in confidence, to watch a tiny kingdom of vocabulary gradually explode into a vast militant empire of sentences, and then paragraphs, of which one is master, to begin practicing with native speakers, and shudder under the thrill of the complacent comprehension and casual response with which they increasingly meet one's stammered utterances, to sense the delicious invasion of one's thoughts, and then one's dreams with the seamless transition to a new tongue... This is living, as living should be.
Last year I discovered the magic of teaching languages, of opening up a whole new universe of sound and expression to students.
While in France I fell in love with translation- testing my competency in an adopted tongue by bringing it to life in my native one- striving to retain the subtleties of style and meaning of the original French while producing an accurate, culturally approachable, contextualized text in English. The magic of it catches me like a spell, nerving me to a delicate, painstaking attention to detail. I understand now why translators are compelled to spend hours searching and scribbling until the exact word or idiom, the precise turn of phrase is discovered, and another piece of the puzzle falls neatly into place. I want to do this.
Bref, the thought of spending a lifetime mastering the tools of translation and honing the skills it demands, eventually adding multiple languages to my translating repertoire is enthralling, both in terms of satisfaction derived, and practical benefits such as working from home, a flexible schedule, having a fully portable career which is independent of location, and making contacts with 'language people' all over the world.
Certain elements, of course are intimidating- the massive tech savviness increasingly demanded of translators and interpreters, the aggressive self-marketing and meticulous organization/dedication to deadlines necessary for building up a respectable clientele. Mais peu importe. Je ferai mon mieux, et un tel travail vaut bien le travail qu'il faut pour s'établir.
So, to answer another, more reasonable question which I've received a lot since returning from France, my plans, admittedly loose, are thus:
To graduate at some point in 2013.
To return to the Loire region of France (probably to Nantes or Rennes) for a paid internship, teaching English as a second language, and hopefully taking a couple of French classes on the side. I can't express how eager I am to go back to Europe. Partly because it's Europe. Partly because... translation's not the only thing I fell in love with while in France.
Possibly, to go to graduate school to obtain a masters in French literature or something of the sort.
To go to China (Xi'an?) for a year to teach English and gain immersion in Chinese.
To continue studying Chinese independently, and as aggressively as possible. To self-study or take classes in German whenever possible.
During this time, to research, and study, and make contacts, and eventually establish myself as a French-English translator online and/or in my community. (Eventually, perhaps German-English as well)
At some point in the next six years, to return to China to work and build cross-cultural relationships for an indefinite period of time.
Eventually, to return to the U.S. to raise a family, and homeschool a herd of children.
To have an intentionally hospitable home near a university, which can function as a hub for the surrounding community of internationals, particularly becoming a second home and resource for international students. Perhaps to offer free English classes and conversation groups for ESL speakers. Perhaps to teach French informally as I previously have with our homeschool group.
To keep striving to better understand this terrible, wonderful, frightening, and topsy-turvy world of human beings and solemn mysteries which we inhabit.
Stuff like that. :-)
Those of you who were wondering, AND who read my blog, should be a bit more satisfied, now. Those of you who wonder, but didn't... I guess I'll have to keep answering these questions over and over again for you. And in English, too, which is boring... ^^ Quelle dommage!
It is a force, a fierceness, a drive. It does not bestow itself, it rather demands pursuit- tantalizes, taunts, eludes, rouses its servant to a frenzy of determination, a glow of enthusiasm, an intensity of ecstatic purpose. It is struggle, and it is joy. It is agony and sweat, but only as childbirth is- a glorious agony, bringing life, new meaning, into the world.
To have a 'gift for languages' is in essence this:
To be the thrall of language, enslaved by language learning. To cherish these bonds.
No chains could be more enlivening than those which place all the beauty and mystery of human communication and culture into the trembling manacled hands of a student who strains for them, dizzied with wonder.
In other words, language learning, though work-intensive, is fun. Exquisite fun. 'Deliciously fun', as one of my professors likes to say.
During the four years I've spent studying French, two years of learning Chinese, and three days of tackling German, I've continuously encountered a question which I find utterly incomprehensible. People phrase it in different ways:
"Why are you studying _____?"
"What's the point of learning ________? What are you going to do with it?"
"Why on earth would you want to know ______?"
Confession: People who ask this make no sense to me at all. When I meet someone, and they mention that they're studying a language, I feel an immediate kinship if it's one I'm studying as well, impressed if they're more advanced, envious and gluttonously eager to glean their knowledge if it's one I'm not learning. It never occurs to me to wonder why they're learning it. If they're the 'right sort of people', I already know.
This love of languages is characterized by a certain element of greed. I want them all, can't bear to encounter one without acquiring at least the rudiments of it. Possession for its own sake is a thing I strive for compulsively. So, the honest answer to the questions I continuously encounter is this: I study any given language in order to know it. I'm driven by the desire to master it, revel in it, and bask in it merely for its own sake. I learn languages for the sole purpose of knowing languages, and for the infinite pleasure and challenge involved in acquiring them. What I intend to do with these languages is to know them, and glory in the knowledge- to communicate with the vast new expanse of human beings each new language gives me access to, to read their literature, listen to their radio stations, befriend and adopt them. I never begin the study of a language with any more practical thought in mind than this starry-eyed fascination with people and cultures and words. Foreign languages, and the attendant cross-cultural friendships, are the thud of my heart, the pulse of my blood, the flame, the voice, the motion of whatever elusive quality is 'I'.
I've come up with many practical uses for my habit, primarily as an excuse to continue along this path of linguistic addiction. Language, words, are my catnip, an irresistible lure. To stumble over new words like an infant, gradually growing in confidence, to watch a tiny kingdom of vocabulary gradually explode into a vast militant empire of sentences, and then paragraphs, of which one is master, to begin practicing with native speakers, and shudder under the thrill of the complacent comprehension and casual response with which they increasingly meet one's stammered utterances, to sense the delicious invasion of one's thoughts, and then one's dreams with the seamless transition to a new tongue... This is living, as living should be.
Last year I discovered the magic of teaching languages, of opening up a whole new universe of sound and expression to students.
While in France I fell in love with translation- testing my competency in an adopted tongue by bringing it to life in my native one- striving to retain the subtleties of style and meaning of the original French while producing an accurate, culturally approachable, contextualized text in English. The magic of it catches me like a spell, nerving me to a delicate, painstaking attention to detail. I understand now why translators are compelled to spend hours searching and scribbling until the exact word or idiom, the precise turn of phrase is discovered, and another piece of the puzzle falls neatly into place. I want to do this.
Bref, the thought of spending a lifetime mastering the tools of translation and honing the skills it demands, eventually adding multiple languages to my translating repertoire is enthralling, both in terms of satisfaction derived, and practical benefits such as working from home, a flexible schedule, having a fully portable career which is independent of location, and making contacts with 'language people' all over the world.
Certain elements, of course are intimidating- the massive tech savviness increasingly demanded of translators and interpreters, the aggressive self-marketing and meticulous organization/dedication to deadlines necessary for building up a respectable clientele. Mais peu importe. Je ferai mon mieux, et un tel travail vaut bien le travail qu'il faut pour s'établir.
So, to answer another, more reasonable question which I've received a lot since returning from France, my plans, admittedly loose, are thus:
To graduate at some point in 2013.
To return to the Loire region of France (probably to Nantes or Rennes) for a paid internship, teaching English as a second language, and hopefully taking a couple of French classes on the side. I can't express how eager I am to go back to Europe. Partly because it's Europe. Partly because... translation's not the only thing I fell in love with while in France.
Possibly, to go to graduate school to obtain a masters in French literature or something of the sort.
To go to China (Xi'an?) for a year to teach English and gain immersion in Chinese.
To continue studying Chinese independently, and as aggressively as possible. To self-study or take classes in German whenever possible.
During this time, to research, and study, and make contacts, and eventually establish myself as a French-English translator online and/or in my community. (Eventually, perhaps German-English as well)
At some point in the next six years, to return to China to work and build cross-cultural relationships for an indefinite period of time.
Eventually, to return to the U.S. to raise a family, and homeschool a herd of children.
To have an intentionally hospitable home near a university, which can function as a hub for the surrounding community of internationals, particularly becoming a second home and resource for international students. Perhaps to offer free English classes and conversation groups for ESL speakers. Perhaps to teach French informally as I previously have with our homeschool group.
To keep striving to better understand this terrible, wonderful, frightening, and topsy-turvy world of human beings and solemn mysteries which we inhabit.
Stuff like that. :-)
Those of you who were wondering, AND who read my blog, should be a bit more satisfied, now. Those of you who wonder, but didn't... I guess I'll have to keep answering these questions over and over again for you. And in English, too, which is boring... ^^ Quelle dommage!
Monday, May 28, 2012
In France, we call them Les gens du voyage. It's the politically correct term for all itinerant people. But among themselves they are known as the Tsiganes or Manouches. You may know them by other names. The Romani. The gypsies.
They arrived in Angers a week ago.
When I first saw the horde of white RV's which had descended upon the rugby field turning it, in one night, from a peaceful oasis of green to a clamouring trailor park, I was at a loss. Was it a festival? An unauthorized family reunion? "No," my French friend assured me. "It's les gens du voyage (the travelling folk). I think you in English call them gypsies."
I was consumed by curiosity. Nay, even that is an understatement. I was frantic, squirming, on fire with curiosity. I craned my neck about in passable imitation of a giraffe every time I could think of an excuse to stroll by the encampment. I watched the children frisking about at the edge of the field, their dark eyes flashing, the long black hair of the girls swinging in braids or flowing loose, the women gliding through the caravan with their brightly colored head scarves, the men in grimy t-shirts, their teeth gleaming white from brown, stubbly faces, boys standing around a tent, challenging and magnetic in sleek dark leather jackets.
I wanted to know more.
At night, I lay awake imagining pretexts for beginning conversations in my broken French, the questions, the hundreds of questions, which I would ask. The answers which I might or might not be able to understand.
But no such pretext arose. So I bombarded my French friend with questions instead, though he had no way of knowing the answers.
How many are there?
Where do they come from?
Where are they going?
How do they earn money?
What do they eat?
Where do the live in winter?
How are the children schooled?
Are the caravans made up of family groups? How big are most caravans? Do they intermarry with Tsiganes from other caravans? Do they ever marry outsiders and bring them into the people?
Do they always make the same circuit? Do the same groups come through the same cities every year?
Do they like this life? Are they happy? Do they ever settle down, and could they, if they wanted?
One afternoon, from my open window, I heard music coming from the encampment. A guitarist, and singing- sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. The voices were rich and beautiful, the melodies alternately haunting and lively. My curiosity was at boiling point, unbearable. With half an hour before I had to meet a friend, I threw on my coat, grabbed my keys, and marched off towards the gypsy camp.
I didn't know what to expect. I had vague visions of dancing, fortune telling, and colorfully garbed women, drawn from various literary and film stereotypes of the Romani people.
That is not what I found.
At the center of the encampment rose a large, blue striped tent. A few men of boys loitered at its open door, the collars of their jackets pulled up against the misting rain. And now that I could hear clearly the words of the song they were singing, I realized that it was a hymn. The colorful tent was the home of services held by Light and Life, a French gypsy ministry and the gypsy church which traveled with the caravan.
My friend and I attended two of their evening services, and for days, all afternoon, music and speeches were carried from the field to my window, a lively background to everyday life.
As the gypsies began to leave, and green spaces opened up once more in what had formerly been our rugby field, I was haunted by an unformed sadness and regret. They carried their whole world with them to Angers, and remained carefully detached from us- civil, but serenely indifferent to cultivating long term connections. What good is it to begin a life anywhere, when you belong both everywhere and nowhere? They planted no flowers, built no houses, introduced themselves to no neighbors. One day, inexplicably, a few chairs, a table, some laundry on the line, and some chattering children and their puppy would be whisked back into one of the trailers, and it would vanish around a bend of the street, leaving only a muddy rectangle and trampled grass in it's wake. Often a new trailer, new children, and dogs, and laundry would appear to take it's place. They were among us, but not of us- they left Angers the way the wind leaves branches as it passes through. The way ocean currents leave coral on their way to the deeper waters. The way international students return home at the end of a semester.
I was grieved, because watching les Gens du Voyage- the travelling people- I realized that I was one of them. As spring gives way to summer here in France, my heart aches with an appalling ache. The springtime, the wonder of May and April belonged to me, enchanted me, beguiled me. The summer, I have no part in. June first will find me in Missouri once more.. And I want to see Missouri, want to be with family and friends again, to conduct life in a familiar language on familiar terms. But I don't want to leave Angers. The inexorable necessity of leaving Angers, and all I love in Angers, is (forgive the cliche, friends) breaking my heart.
When I think of France during the coming years, what will I remember? Green fields and little villages seen from the train. A sunset watched joyously from a bluff above the lake. A heron picking his solitary way along the edge of the water at twilight. Roses, roses, everywhere a wealth of roses pouring over walls and fences in the May sunshine. Wisteria dripping from every arbor. Warm light on worn plastered walls, the sun slanting along narrow cobbled streets and alleys. Pain au chocolat with friends in the afternoon. The wonder of two hands meeting and clinging together in unreserved understanding- a caress within a caress. The glorious, unapologetic greasiness of kebab and chips. The moonlit silence of the city at night as we walked home, or the riotous clamor and fairy tale lighting of the city center each evening. The blue, blue waters of la Maine flanked by banks of richest green, or at dusk, a magical mirror of reflections when the rainbow bridge is illuminated. Little dogs mincing obediently after their owners in every street, seen in smug repose at every corner cafe.
The rich inflections of the French language murmuring all around us- at the supermarket, in the classroom, in the bus.
My photos, my short, clumsy sentences, all the words in every language I study are inadequate to tell you this story, the story of this semester in all of its light and color and fragrance, in all of its sound and sensation, in its loneliness and camaraderie, its music and its silence.
The world doesn't give us the freedom to stay where we wish to stay, or go where we wish to go. To occupy two spaces at once is only another of the impossible dreams which men have dreamed since man's beginning. I know there's no profit in dreaming so foolishly thus, but my head is lost in it, fogged with it anyway. Angers is a garden with high walls too steep for climbing, and reality exists outside of these walls, is only heard in a muted clamour of traffic which finds its way in to linger bleakly among the lushness of the flower beds.
Like the gypsies, I came to Angers only to leave it. My caravan moves out toward the open road in less than three days. Yet unlike the gypsies I am bound here by cords which frighten me with their intensity. The French historically failed in their grapples with the Anglais, and in all their imperial ambitions, but in a dazzling blitzkrieg campaign, France has conquered me. I return to the Land of the Free in a shackled, colonial condition, utterly bouleversed by la douceur angevin. But when will I see again the blue slate roofs of Anjou, hear again the strident French sirens, breathe in once more the heady fragrance of their honeysuckle and roses? Gypsy-like, I can only tell you, 'Je ne sais pas'.
They arrived in Angers a week ago.
When I first saw the horde of white RV's which had descended upon the rugby field turning it, in one night, from a peaceful oasis of green to a clamouring trailor park, I was at a loss. Was it a festival? An unauthorized family reunion? "No," my French friend assured me. "It's les gens du voyage (the travelling folk). I think you in English call them gypsies."
I was consumed by curiosity. Nay, even that is an understatement. I was frantic, squirming, on fire with curiosity. I craned my neck about in passable imitation of a giraffe every time I could think of an excuse to stroll by the encampment. I watched the children frisking about at the edge of the field, their dark eyes flashing, the long black hair of the girls swinging in braids or flowing loose, the women gliding through the caravan with their brightly colored head scarves, the men in grimy t-shirts, their teeth gleaming white from brown, stubbly faces, boys standing around a tent, challenging and magnetic in sleek dark leather jackets.
I wanted to know more.
At night, I lay awake imagining pretexts for beginning conversations in my broken French, the questions, the hundreds of questions, which I would ask. The answers which I might or might not be able to understand.
But no such pretext arose. So I bombarded my French friend with questions instead, though he had no way of knowing the answers.
How many are there?
Where do they come from?
Where are they going?
How do they earn money?
What do they eat?
Where do the live in winter?
How are the children schooled?
Are the caravans made up of family groups? How big are most caravans? Do they intermarry with Tsiganes from other caravans? Do they ever marry outsiders and bring them into the people?
Do they always make the same circuit? Do the same groups come through the same cities every year?
Do they like this life? Are they happy? Do they ever settle down, and could they, if they wanted?
One afternoon, from my open window, I heard music coming from the encampment. A guitarist, and singing- sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. The voices were rich and beautiful, the melodies alternately haunting and lively. My curiosity was at boiling point, unbearable. With half an hour before I had to meet a friend, I threw on my coat, grabbed my keys, and marched off towards the gypsy camp.
I didn't know what to expect. I had vague visions of dancing, fortune telling, and colorfully garbed women, drawn from various literary and film stereotypes of the Romani people.
That is not what I found.
At the center of the encampment rose a large, blue striped tent. A few men of boys loitered at its open door, the collars of their jackets pulled up against the misting rain. And now that I could hear clearly the words of the song they were singing, I realized that it was a hymn. The colorful tent was the home of services held by Light and Life, a French gypsy ministry and the gypsy church which traveled with the caravan.
My friend and I attended two of their evening services, and for days, all afternoon, music and speeches were carried from the field to my window, a lively background to everyday life.
As the gypsies began to leave, and green spaces opened up once more in what had formerly been our rugby field, I was haunted by an unformed sadness and regret. They carried their whole world with them to Angers, and remained carefully detached from us- civil, but serenely indifferent to cultivating long term connections. What good is it to begin a life anywhere, when you belong both everywhere and nowhere? They planted no flowers, built no houses, introduced themselves to no neighbors. One day, inexplicably, a few chairs, a table, some laundry on the line, and some chattering children and their puppy would be whisked back into one of the trailers, and it would vanish around a bend of the street, leaving only a muddy rectangle and trampled grass in it's wake. Often a new trailer, new children, and dogs, and laundry would appear to take it's place. They were among us, but not of us- they left Angers the way the wind leaves branches as it passes through. The way ocean currents leave coral on their way to the deeper waters. The way international students return home at the end of a semester.
I was grieved, because watching les Gens du Voyage- the travelling people- I realized that I was one of them. As spring gives way to summer here in France, my heart aches with an appalling ache. The springtime, the wonder of May and April belonged to me, enchanted me, beguiled me. The summer, I have no part in. June first will find me in Missouri once more.. And I want to see Missouri, want to be with family and friends again, to conduct life in a familiar language on familiar terms. But I don't want to leave Angers. The inexorable necessity of leaving Angers, and all I love in Angers, is (forgive the cliche, friends) breaking my heart.
When I think of France during the coming years, what will I remember? Green fields and little villages seen from the train. A sunset watched joyously from a bluff above the lake. A heron picking his solitary way along the edge of the water at twilight. Roses, roses, everywhere a wealth of roses pouring over walls and fences in the May sunshine. Wisteria dripping from every arbor. Warm light on worn plastered walls, the sun slanting along narrow cobbled streets and alleys. Pain au chocolat with friends in the afternoon. The wonder of two hands meeting and clinging together in unreserved understanding- a caress within a caress. The glorious, unapologetic greasiness of kebab and chips. The moonlit silence of the city at night as we walked home, or the riotous clamor and fairy tale lighting of the city center each evening. The blue, blue waters of la Maine flanked by banks of richest green, or at dusk, a magical mirror of reflections when the rainbow bridge is illuminated. Little dogs mincing obediently after their owners in every street, seen in smug repose at every corner cafe.
The rich inflections of the French language murmuring all around us- at the supermarket, in the classroom, in the bus.
My photos, my short, clumsy sentences, all the words in every language I study are inadequate to tell you this story, the story of this semester in all of its light and color and fragrance, in all of its sound and sensation, in its loneliness and camaraderie, its music and its silence.
The world doesn't give us the freedom to stay where we wish to stay, or go where we wish to go. To occupy two spaces at once is only another of the impossible dreams which men have dreamed since man's beginning. I know there's no profit in dreaming so foolishly thus, but my head is lost in it, fogged with it anyway. Angers is a garden with high walls too steep for climbing, and reality exists outside of these walls, is only heard in a muted clamour of traffic which finds its way in to linger bleakly among the lushness of the flower beds.
Like the gypsies, I came to Angers only to leave it. My caravan moves out toward the open road in less than three days. Yet unlike the gypsies I am bound here by cords which frighten me with their intensity. The French historically failed in their grapples with the Anglais, and in all their imperial ambitions, but in a dazzling blitzkrieg campaign, France has conquered me. I return to the Land of the Free in a shackled, colonial condition, utterly bouleversed by la douceur angevin. But when will I see again the blue slate roofs of Anjou, hear again the strident French sirens, breathe in once more the heady fragrance of their honeysuckle and roses? Gypsy-like, I can only tell you, 'Je ne sais pas'.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Moments in Munich- Part 1, Easter
Munich's Olympiaberg, a grassy hill, curving and undulating like the coils of a sea monster up to a domed top, is one of the highest elevations in the city. Beneath the deceptively gentle slopes lie the jagged rubble and refuse of the city in wartime. At the end of the Second World War, the remains of bombed buildings and roads were heaped up here and covered mercifully with earth. A serene and lovely park now blossoms above the broken stones and twisted metal of a world in chaos. At the top, an aluminum cross stands as a memorial to the civilians killed in Munich during the war.
Before dawn on Easter Sunday, my first morning in Germany, I found myself climbing the sinuous track up the Olympiaberg, snow falling like sprays of white flowers, starring the ground and lighting in our hair. Moving all about me through the dim gray light were dark clad, bundled members of my friend's German congregation, huddled beneath black umbrellas. Fog flirted through the trees and along the curves of the hill. The air was damp, and mistily cold.
When we reached the dome, we formed a shivering circle. Johannes, one of the young men from the church, brought out a tiny keyboard, which he managed to play with cold-stiffened fingers, keeping it partially sheltered from the still falling snow in its case.
Before dawn on Easter Sunday, my first morning in Germany, I found myself climbing the sinuous track up the Olympiaberg, snow falling like sprays of white flowers, starring the ground and lighting in our hair. Moving all about me through the dim gray light were dark clad, bundled members of my friend's German congregation, huddled beneath black umbrellas. Fog flirted through the trees and along the curves of the hill. The air was damp, and mistily cold.
When we reached the dome, we formed a shivering circle. Johannes, one of the young men from the church, brought out a tiny keyboard, which he managed to play with cold-stiffened fingers, keeping it partially sheltered from the still falling snow in its case.
And we sang.
The voices were frail- muffled by the snow and fog, quavered through chattering teeth. Below us, all around, the hill fell away until it melted into the sleeping city, shrouded in white. With the cross a stark silhouette in the mist beneath us, and the death and madness of a terribly recent nightmare rolling beneath us, we sang of life.
'Welch Gnad! Er stand auf vom Tod... Welch Gnad! Err kommt zurück...'
'Welch Gnad! Er stand auf vom Tod... Welch Gnad! Err kommt zurück...'
'What grace! He rose from the grave... What grace! He's coming again...'
'Er hat den Tod besiegt für alle Zeit. Der König lebt, preist ihn, der uns befreite! Er regiert in alle Ewig keit...'
'He has conquered Death for all time. The King lives, praise Him who freed us! He reigns over all eternity...'
Friday, March 30, 2012
Restlessness
There are people we love, because they are like windows. We do not so much look at them, as through them, into a world we have never imagined before.
Even the most dense and opaque acquaintance transforms, at moments, into a window of shocking clarity and rainbow radiance.
There are friends who remain with us for hours, unclouded, as panes of gleaming, translucent glass, fragile in their clarity. It is these people, whether we are bound up with them in passing for a few weeks, or able to cling to their society for months and years who make us feel that friendship is desirable, that solitude is unbearable. When we look away, back to the cold expanse of empty spaces and closed faces, where a man is a solid mass and not a kingdom of transparent adventure, we are lost, and disappointed, and afraid. Poverty stalks us in streets where richness blossomed. The reaction to the sensation of clear, easy freedom, is a sense of hopeless constraint, and this constraint is a weight tied to a drowning man, forcing our heads beneath the water. An infant cannot live without air after that first, sputtering breath- the surprise of expanding lungs.
I am dying for a world without walls or ceilings- standing in my room I stretch my arms to their farthest height and long to feel miles of empty space whirling above them. In solitude, I curse gravity. Something in me is buoyant, and crying out to leave the floor, to laugh at treetops from overhead, and streak past the clouds into the terrifying lostness of stars and circling planets.
To be free seems the most difficult thing in the world. Free, I hardly know from what, yet I feel suffocated, claustrophobic, pressed into the dark, heavy earth with an unyielding weight.
Music, beauty, poetry, the sky at every moment seem to be straining toward something. They make us feel like weeping, because they are all escape attempts, surging upward, and we can sense the barrier they strain against, like pitiful balloons striking a ceiling- my heart lifts, and swells, and almost bursts in me, yet I can go no further. I am matter, and weight, and feebly limited, and even lack the words, the voice, the power to express this intensity.
Something shouts to us 'Exult! Exult! Exult!', and our fragile exultation trails out into nothingness, is lost in empty space, swallowed up by a universe we cannot understand. And even as I fade into silence, feel the notes of each song and the letters of each word slipping away into a mysterious, far away rhythm of eternity, I cannot be silent.
Is this illusion then, what wind, and wide spaces, and the vulnerable, frighteningly beautiful glimpses a glass-like moment gives us into another human heart? Is it merely the highest pinnacle of reality, which leaves us longing, starving for more? Is it an echo, a reflection, of a reality we haven't found yet, can't reach, still dream of and strive toward relentlessly?
"The beauty or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things- the beauty, the memory of our own past- are a good image of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are NOT the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited." -C.S. Lewis
We all know as though by instinct, what it is to throw oneself in despair at an unyielding door. Every haunting glimpse of a window reminds me that I live behind walls, with walls before and behind, a maze of walls within walls, in which I am both victim and Minotaur, hunter and hunted, justice and courage, guilt and terror.
I feel as reckless and wild as April, eager to throw off every unwanted hamper. I want to dance with bare legs, and feel the wind sweeping over arms and face, tearing at my hair. I want to sing so that fine clear notes echo back to me from the rocky cliffs of slate to the blue, blue heavens. I want to lie in impossible stillness, unbreathing, on a low rock wall and look at explosive white pannacles of pear blossom against an infinite black night sky, lit to warm golden wonder by an ordinary street light while the crescent moon, a curl of liquid silver, swims in the corner of my vision.
I want to place my hands on the shoulders of a stranger in the street, and look into his eyes and past his face, until I understand the strangeness of it- that this warm, living unit of motion beside me is animated by a mystery invisible even to the most brilliant scientists, the most searching innovations of technology. We can trace, and graph, and measure the footsteps of an energy, a force we cannot comprehend. In history, they used to imagine that the soul could be found and weighed, and they were wrong. And after that, they began to believe that a thing which cannot be measured and weighed is nothing at all, and they were more wrong still. For it is only by this invisible, untraceable element that we exist as ourselves, that we are aware of the thing we cannot see. Enormous, and luminous it is, filling our vision and obscuring it, demanding to be seen and acknowledged, yet flitting just out of sight with diaphanous elfin speed. I look in my mirror, and I do not see myself, only an indication that my self is looking for my self, and it cannot find it- can't see past a plain face, masses of hair, and anxious blue eyes to discover the truth it is looking for- the iron ephemeral spirit which gives meaning to the face, to every face.
We are lost in one small place- tightly boxed in, yet wandering without cease.
I can only think that somehow, in a paradox I am blind to, this frantic thirst for freedom, and the infinite weight which stands between us are saying in two different languages, each only half understood, that to be free does not mean what I feel that it must, that in constraint is found a liberty of a different sort, that when my arms cease pulsing in their desire to be wings, perhaps only then will I discover the full magic of arms. That restlessness is only a poor, flimsy substitute for rest.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Mad wonder and madcap wondering
The most astounding thing imaginable is to be alive. And being alive, we must surely be astonished from moment to moment, and then astonished again, no dazed, at our previous lack of astonishment.
Surprise is building on surprise here. Hair is awe-inspiring. Why should anyone have it? Or why should it be hair on people, and grass on lawns, and not the other way around? There's more mystery in a single blade of grass than in all the unsolved mysteries of history. Or rather not more mystery, because mystery, wonder, simply grows, expands on itself, defies our poor tongues and imaginations.
If we are not struck blind and dumb with wonder at every turn, then we were surely blind to begin with. Try to describe water, liquid in general, describe it for a people whose planet is devoid of liquid. It's so dazzlingly incomprehensible, untouchable, indefinable, the minute you step out of the rigid lines of your dull scientific vocabulary, you'll be utterly lost in stammering bewilderment. And that, only for water. You've not even begun to describe the world. Could you have imagined motion, or light, or music, had it never existed? A child- simple and intensely curious- knows more of the world than we do, and even at his most childlike, a child hasn't begun to know, because a lifetime is insufficient even for the exploration of one backyard.
'There is no freedom' years to me have whispered
We living, dying, choose from slavery
And slavery- our masked and silent masters
Stalk silent; still some soul-thirst drives us, goads us
To shriek out 'Freedom, freedom!' This eludes us,
To leave us begging, 'Freedom, or I die'
Yet no man wholly man is wholly free.
Chain merchants cry to me 'Throw off your chains!
Bind yourself now with cords of liberty!
Exchange a cell for dungeon and go free
My heart cruelly tied and struggling, frantic strains
Against a massive weight of Universe
Harsh voices in the mist and darkness shout
'This way lies soaring flight- beneath these stones!
Within these wings of lead- my mind is fire
And searing pain, in keenness of desire-
Somewhere shine stars- uninterrupted sky
There is a word, a world, where spring winds tear
In unfettered gladness through a swaying field
Into horizons constantly receding
Where orchards burst in furious shouts of white
Defiant blossoms shuddering into pink
Great whorls of life and sound and fragile freshness.
This gladly singing world still unexplored
And dazzling in its details- who can say
Why beauty heaps on beauty in this way?
And tiny veins race laughing through the leaves
To catch the glorious sun- the glow is swelling
Across reflecting waters- color, breath-
Full-charged with music- every bud is triumph
Each branch is clarion- ripples, wonder-
Feathers, grave miracles, and on a duck,
A million miraculous plumes
Make glossy neatness. Rumpled bark of trees.
My head is struck, and eyes half-blind with magic.
Small birds are flitting- who can say what holds them?
Nets of fine-spun silver strung from cloudbanks
They swing suspended, breath to breathless moment
Floating unfalling, graceful; every second
Atoms swirl in seeming-solid objects
Millions dancing in the page I write on
And vault in pert abandon through my ink.
The hidden laws of gravity continue-
Or seem to do so- when we speak of laws-
('The universe is ruled by this and that'
Scientists say with all the satisfaction
Rule-memorizers feel when spouting rules)-
I want to cry in fear- in joy and awe-
There is no law- this force which holds us living
Which shaped us from the shapeless, oscillating
And holds us shaped- poised on disintegration.
This turgor pressure of the universe
Grand, wild, creator God- this King of Romance
Lord of astonishment, I breathe and feel
Each breath as a surprise.
In all my desperate, night-weeping soul-pain
Doubt, existential days, wanderings in blackness
And suffocating fear- the empty hours
Stone blind and brain-sick, exhausting stubbornness
In radiant melody Your strange world calls me.
Where beauty is as great as mystery.
The sunset lights the lake in reddish gold.
I touch this tree.
Song-struck and struggling in surmise, delight...
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Blame it on Angers...
I don't actually have a blog post, and I'm not likely to for weeks. ( :-O ) What I have are perhaps seven partial blog posts, pages of notes, fragments of poetry, etc... dawdling in my drafts folder, and wandering in between history notes.
So, you'll have to make do with what there is, and there isn't much. You can blame it on Angers, if you like. There's so much to see, and hear, and learn, and think about, and question here, that I can't seem to finish one idea before beginning on twenty new ones. My brain's bursting... If you're still reading after this disclaimer, courage! I hope you'll be able to make sense of the jumble. Each unit will be separated by spaces and quotation marks, which may or may not be entirely ineffective.
'I came this morning to the field where we would play together at cowboys.
Hero and gun-slinger, a rustler stalked by a knight in bandanna and spurs.
But nothing was left of our games there.
Only our two hats beside each other.
My white sombrero, dark with the grime of earth and years.
Your black hat bleaching mercifully grey in the winter sun.'
'Always the sense- that haunting sense which lingers
The world's a spinning toy,
And time-
And time like water, slipping through your fingers...'
"This kind of artificial emotional cushioning can't make you feel better; it only can make you forget that you don't. The world's in a haze of pain, and it's searching not for doctors, but painkillers.
Because sometimes, the only way to straighten and heal a broken limb is to wrench, and break it again. A deep infection must be lanced and drained. Our fear of pain drives us forever to pain, leaves us in pain.
The world would hate us, then, because the hard, real core of the Gospel cuts through the fog of drugged forgetting and lays bare the hurt- demands that it hurt, and hurt again to the very extremity of the agonized death of it's own self-love.
Like a child thrashing against the surgeon with his probing fingers and fearful knife, like the terrified dog which sinks its teeth into the too-knowing hand of the veterinarian, the world is cowering away from the excruciating pain of the truth. We fear the cure more than the disease.
There's space to hide in the universe- miles and miles for running. But the disease, the disease is fatal. We cannot evade death by masking its hideousness, by singing to drown out the noise of its approaching...
The cavity of rebellion will rot relentlessly until every tooth is destroyed. But the corruption of the heart is not dragged to healing as simply as a shrill, resisting child is carried to the dreaded dentist and his drill. Heaven help us if we dull the aching with distractions...'
"Ignorance itself is not a crime, but smug, indifferent, arrogant ignorance; the cheerful, cow-like resistance to questioning and seeking, the self-satisfied conviction of 'correctness', when never for a moment did they listen to a word from the opposition, or try to understand the other perspectives- or even base the forming of their formless views on more than hearsay, and pleasantries, and the opinions of others equally misinformed- this invincible, comfortable, saccharine, unbearable ignorance, how easy it is to despise it! It's so hard to be patient with those who are wrong stubbornly, but without intelligence or conviction.
And yet- I've certainly been guilty of such lazy, shoddy thinking myself...
Why do only some people in the world feel this restless, ceaseless knowledge-hunger and curiosity- this fire to know... nearly everything? At risk of falling into clichés, I feel like I've lived always like a bird in a cage, fierce and frantic to escape, silent, because all of the other birds seem so very happy to be fluttering lamely behind bars. The few people who are different, who can't be satisfied so easily, what makes the change? Is it simply a matter of creation and design? In that case, a sick disgust for the thoughtless who ignore beauty and play with learning as a sulky child plays with his spinach- it must be prideful and unfair. Can one hate the blind for their poor taste in art? Or the deaf for a lack of musical appreciation? Is the world crammed with shallow and dull minds by nature, or by choice? It seems that the history of the human race is the history of man's tremendous creativity in idiocy and atrocity. As much as I'd love to like humanity, there's no way around the conviction that our existence is generally a black stain on the universe.
Faced with this world, with such questions, the cramped little pond of thehomeschoolers- the very haven which gave me time and freedom to think and read for myself- is a nightmare kingdom of triviality. We argue heatedly about the minor, subjective questions- skirt and short length in inches, the proper tightness of jeans, the exact regulations for physical contact, the most correct method of courtship, dancing, studying, the 'acceptable' styles of music, the 'best' church (in the most minor, minor detalia) - and outside the high walls of our garden, while we dispute makeup and hairstyles, movie standards and social rules, Homer is singing, and Shakespeare is being performed, and Hemingway is writing, and Socrates is crying questions like a madman in the streets. And the world is dying, and being reborn, and the seasons are passing, and new and old music is crashing all around in astonishing melodies (but they can't know it, poor fools, they've covered their ears). I've seen such strange things blandly taken for granted; the pro-life coldly indifferent to their government's destruction of innocent life abroad, the members of an unearthly, eternal kingdom shouting brutal, simplistic anthems in lusty patriotism, cluttering their lives (as I do my own!) with ludicrous, superfluous luxury. I've seen some who claim to follow a Way of gentleness, humility, and love, carelessly, callously cruel to animals, blind to injustices committed against those who 'aren't like us'. Some, also, who claim to love a rational, intelligent God, who despise thought and knowledge. So much of the kindness, curiosity, humbleness, patience, humor, and wit I've met in my life has come from the unbelievers, the doubting, the faithless...
Strange world of upside-downs and colors blending in the mist...
And when I die, I beg that it should be with feet worn to the bone with walking beside the stumbling and helpless, and with relentless running after the tangled thread that leads through the labyrinth of my questioning. A heart fully satisfied that, however little was accomplished, it was done with passion and conviction; that seeking neither to lead or to follow, I went where I must go. And finally, because this conviction was founded on eternity and not myself, because though I am utterly unable to fulfill the rigorous demands of my conscience, I belong to a God who, in perfect holiness and fidelity, fulfilled it for me- fully in his own mysterious blood and infinite agony- my own life and death, the existence of mankind- the beauty and suffering, fury and joy of the universe, are not without final meaning.
What a horror existence is if this meaning is not present.
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
-Vaclav Havel
Thursday, February 16, 2012
The lullaby game
When I was three years old my parents moved from the little A-frame house my father built in Columbia, Missouri to a remodeled garage on my grandparents' Pleasant Hill farm.
That move was hard on our family, though I remember little about it. Aside from two or three vague memories, all I know about the transition comes from the stories my mother told me later.
Living in that tiny remodeled garage with an infant, a toddler, and a pre-schooler was hard on my mother, as well. I don't remember that, either.
But I remember a corner of the bedroom my brothers and I shared. I remember a crib piled with quilts and too many stuffed animals. I remember a worn beige carpet, stained and overdue to be vacuumed, Alexander's dark blue eyes wide and serious above his snub baby nose and pacifier. I remember a nightlight casting a soft little glow in our room each night, and I remember what it was like to curl in my father's arms while he sang to us.
Not even my parents could tell you exactly when the singing began. I suppose it didn't begin at all. My father is a man who sings. From the moment they knew I existed, as a tiny, squirming creature cradled in my mother's womb, it was only natural that some of his songs should have been for me.
Some of them were songs that are sung to children. 'Over in the Meadow', 'The Gunnywolf song'. But mostly, my father left the children's songs to my mother. The things my father sang were strange, and haunting, and mysterious. Songs that no one would ever dream of as lullabies. Before I knew what they meant, I was in love with these songs.
I remember my father as he was those nights- boyishly dark haired and handsome, laughing and warm as the three of us crowded against his knees like eager puppies. We would sit on the floor, on the awful beige carpet, in the soft golden shadows of the nightlight, and each of us would choose a song. There were stories as well, on especially good evenings.
But those songs, those songs, where did they come from? I never began to ask myself until recently.
Because he loved the old musicals, he would sing to us from those. I remember his fine, rich tenor voice crooning 'Wouldn't it be Loverly?', and 'Sunrise, Sunset' .
'Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Quickly fly the years;
One season following another,
Laden with happiness and tears.'
"Someday, Shalucie bug, I'll sing it at your wedding. My little girl is growing so fast."
Folk music, rebellious music came to us as well, laden with hidden messages. 'Waltzin' Matilda', 'Charlie on the MTA', 'You Can Close Your Eyes'.
'Listen children to a story, that was written long ago
'Bout a people on a mountain, and the valley folk below
On the mountain was a treasure, buried deep beneath a stone
And the valley people swore they'd have it for their very own...'
'When I was a young man I carried my pack
And lived the free life of a rover
From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback
I waltzed my matildas all over.
But in 1914 my country said 'Son,
Tis time to stop ramblin' there's work to be done'
They gave me a tin hat and gave me a gun
And sent me away to the war...'
I always felt like crying when we came to the end of the song, and the legless old man watched his elderly comrades hobbling along in the parade:
'And the young people asked 'What are they marchin' for?
And I asked meself the same question.'
It was not for so many years that I came to understand the significance of the singer's question. But the question, and the answer, and the bloody beaches of Suvla bay were a part of who I was long before that.
One that I remember most clearly (yet there were so many that are woven into me as tightly as threads in a well-made Persian carpet) is an old, wistful anti-war tune.
'Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
Picked by young girls, every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?...'
I begged for this song again and again. As a three year old, and four year old, and even twelve year old, I couldn't put into words what spoke to me in the lyrics. I hadn't the faintest idea what it was that the girls, and the boys, and the soldiers were never learning. I couldn't explain the comfort I pulled from the song's full circle- from flowers, to soldiers, to graveyard, and flowers again. I only knew that it was true, even before I knew what it was I was knowing.
Looking back, I realize that everything I became as an individual, everything I value and respect, all the strange and unorthodox opinions I formed :-P began with the songs my father sang to me. I find the core of our relationship in those memories as well. My love and admiration for him, longing to please him, were born in the warm circle of his arm around me, the flickering halo of the night light, the incomprehensible magic of his voice:
'And if you smile and you say 'Well things were different back then'
Well you have to remember, they were only just men.
There's a lesson for the learning for the likes of you and me.
Just have a little faith and you'll see.'
'Well the sun is slowly sinkin' down
And the moon is rising
And this old world will still keep turnin' round
And I still love you, I still love you.'
When my mother wonders how her daughter became a firebrand, a rebel, a pacifist, a dreamer, and a fierce independent, she can remember the crooning melodies that floated from our room each night, and my humming as I played with my toys- remember how I memorized every word of each song as the years passed, until, when my father faltered or stumbled over the lyrics, I was able to carry us along.
In our own ways, though perhaps to different degrees, my two brothers and I are both shaped deeply by my father's singing. His strange, surprising lullabies made windows for us into worlds and ideas our childhood friends never encountered. Being on the other side of an ocean makes these memories come back vividly, as I miss him more than I ever have in my life.
I've been thinking about this all day, because I just learned a song which reminds me of my father. A song which one day, should I have children of my own, I will sing to them in the cozy shadow of a crib. Because even if it takes them half their lives to learn what it means, I want words like this to be burning like golden seeds in their hearts from the beginning, waiting to blossom in that far away time known as 'when I grow up'.
If you'd rather hear it for yourself, here's the link:
(I have a feeling that my father used to listen to Pete Seeger. Something about their singing feels alike, though I can't pinpoint the similarity.)
Die gedanken sind frei
My thoughts freely flower
Die gedanken sind frei
My thoughts give me power
No scholar can map them
No hunter can trap them
No man can deny:
Die gedanken sind frei
I think as I please
And this gives me pleasure
My conscience decrees
This right I must treasure
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator
No man can deny:
Die gedanken sind frei
My thoughts freely flower
Die gedanken sind frei
My thoughts give me power
No scholar can map them
No hunter can trap them
No man can deny:
Die gedanken sind frei
I think as I please
And this gives me pleasure
My conscience decrees
This right I must treasure
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator
No man can deny:
Die gedanken sind frei
Tyrants can take me
And throw me in prison
My thoughts will burst forth
Like blossoms in season
Foundations may crumble
And structures may tumble
But free men shall cry:
'Die gedanken sind frei!'
And throw me in prison
My thoughts will burst forth
Like blossoms in season
Foundations may crumble
And structures may tumble
But free men shall cry:
'Die gedanken sind frei!'
Sunday, February 12, 2012
The Foreign Illusion
I think, perhaps, it is safe to say that there is one quality all true travelers have in common. We are searching for something. Even when we least know what this something is that calls to us, this siren song of nebulous longing, we are driven by hunger for it, by questioning, by irrepressible curiosity. Is it around the next bend? In the next city? The next state? In China? In England? In France? Against all reason we feel that in blind ignorance we can find it, that we will stumble upon it unknowing if we only go far enough. There is a lost piece of ourselves, a gaping emptiness that is unsatisfied. So we search the eyes of foreign visitors and the pages of foreign books, and the soul-hunger, the isolation gnaws and remains unsatisfied. Somewhere in the world It is, and when we find this unknown we will have fullness. Fullness, sereneness, and life. I think I've seen the essence of this seeking sense expressed most beautifully, most sensitively, throughout the works of C.S. Lewis.
"
"We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness...""It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."
"All joy...emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."
He doesn't simply make me want to go to a place I have searched for and never found, he makes me believe that such a place exists. This is, for all of us who love Narnia, the crux of the matter. We are hungry for a world where we can be completely, as ourselves, knowing fully who we are, and being fully known. Lewis, in his own longing for this, had a magical gift for expressing it and evoking it in all his writings. One feels that there are worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds which travelers may find, and that the thing one seeks is waiting in them.But the doors leading from our world into the other worlds are rare and hard to find. And so, we wander into crowded cities in Asia, and fertile plains in Africa, and conical huts, and tree houses on stilts, and jungles and floodplains and coastal cliffs, and we look for the thing we do not know.If we are dedicated, we study the languages, and if we study and progress with enough talent and passion, we are at last able to express our wanting and our lacking in new and lilting tongues. But there is only disappointment to be found along this way. Because they answer us, and we find that there, on the other side of the ocean, they are failing in the same, wistful quest. We may learn from one another, but we cannot find the country we searched for, the country where everything is whole, where the scattered pieces of what we are come together, where beauty is a comprehended reality and not a glimpse that haunts and beckons. It does not exist in this world. Yet we are thirsty for membership in it.If we cannot find it, we will imagine it and pine for it. If it does not exist, we will die wanting it. It if has never been thought of, we will instinctively invent it. We will cling to the image, the idea of our true country against all probability and disappointment."I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."A conversation with a new friend in France drove this idea home to me last night. We were discussing, each, our dissatisfaction with our home countries, our desire to travel, to speak with people from around the world, to learn new languages and bury ourselves in new cultures. Home seemed hopelessly constrained, pedestrian, narrow-minded, and dull. But being foreign to each other, we were each fiercely curious about the other's country and culture. France is a riddle to me, a mystery fascinating and strange. For him, the U.S. is equally unfamiliar and fascinating. We're both 'enthousiastes' about China. He said:"I think it's an illusion, but ...I mean
our own country seeming boring must be an illusion
but I can't help feeling that ...
I'm a stranger to no one ... I meet somebody, he listens to me a few minuts and then is convinced he knows who I am ...
I've never felt this way with foreign people ...
i'm sure it's not the only thing I have in mind
- but although I'm trying
I can't express the rest
France is boring to me ...
And living here forever would eventually result in a total sadness ...
As I am dying, I would think that I haven't lived 1/1098070789796676 of what I could have lived ..."
I'll let you make your own interpretation of this. I think it can stand alone. But for we travelers, the journey becomes our identity. We are seeking a homeland that is not an illusion. We are seeking the new, and the strange, and beyond that, the familiar- the known, but not-known that our hearts cry out towards. We are seeking, driven to continue and continue seeking, to be understood. We want to be heard, and seen, and known, and so pant after this achievement across the world, never coming nearer to the understanding we desire. No two human beings can meet and comprehend each other in this way. No such completeness is waiting in exotic buildings, customs, and foods. It is a quixotic, sterile quest, true and lovely only in the sense that we are questing, as we were created to do."For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13)Lewis chimes in again:"If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally."In the end, then, the choice is our own. This hunger I feel will not be abated by France, nor will it be satisfied by China. My appetite must be developed to meet this truth, or for me, as for so many travelers, beauty will never be more than grief, and new beauties but the repetition of disappointment. The emptiness of my own homeland, and the rich opportunity of foreign life are equally illusions. But the illusion is not about these. The illusion is about myself. Until I am complete in the city that is to come, 'hidden with Christ in God', I am complete nowhere. And staying in this incompleteness forever, never loosing my stubborn pride and accepting the kingdom which has been found for me, is what will result in total sadness. Not life in the midwest, or in France, or in China. Everywhere, the world is infected with the same disease. A visa cannot carry you to the cure.
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