What I’m reading (May 2024)

Okay, I know I was skeptical about James Joyce the last time I did a reading update, but I kind of get why he’s so famous now. The Norton Anthology of English Literature I’m reading right now includes an excerpt from Ulysses but also a very accessible earlier story of his called “Araby”. Its images glimmer and its sentences carry me along a powerful current; the man clearly has a good command of language. The Norton Anthology explains part of his genius in Ulysses: “He may move, in the same paragraph and without any sign that he is making such a transition, from a description of a character’s action…to an evocation of the character’s mental response to that action. That response is always multiple: it derives partly from the character’s immediate situation and partly from the whole complex of attitudes created by a personal past history. To suggest this multiplicity, Joyce may vary his style, from the flippant to the serious or from a realistic description to a suggestive set of images that indicate what might be called the general tone of the character’s consciousness. Past and present mingle in the texture of the prose because they mingle in the texture of consciousness, and this mingling can be indicated by puns, by sudden breaks into a new kind of style or a new kind of subject matter, or by some other device for keeping the reader constantly in sight of the shifting, kaleidoscopic nature of human awareness.”

I also powered through the Virginia Woolf essay I was stuck on and MAN was it good. I was underlining and taking notes all over the place. Sometimes you just have to make yourself read the hard thing. It can reward you in the end!

I’m newly finished (aka I threw it down) with Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, so I can give you my immediate feelings: I hated it, and it wasn’t interesting. It deals with a group of friends who meet at an art camp for talented kids. I thought ideas like having to deal with the loss of a childhood dream or navigating the tension of friendship with people who are much more successful than you sounded intriguing, but the themes are buried beneath 1) way too much meaningless sex that doesn’t move the plot forward or help anyone grow, 2) endless, repetitive sections that rehash everything Wolitzer has already told us about the characters (and what makes them annoying in their own *special* ways), and 3) an unhelpful amount of telling us exactly what the characters think, feel, and are motivated by so that we can’t imagine a bit of it for ourselves. This is probably my last Meg Wolitzer book.

And then there’s Reading Genesis! Marilynne Robinson’s newest book is “a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God’s enduring covenant with humanity” with an iridescent cover. I think it’s going to be a more literary interpretation of the first book of the Bible, and while I’m sure this will pull out many facets of meaning that I haven’t considered before, I do want to read it cautiously. There have already been a few hints, 30 pages in, that Robinson may not consider the Bible to be a true story. But the writing is luminous, if laden and hyper-intelligent, so I’m excited to get further into it.

Trees in artificial light

Welcome to a post about an ongoing obsession of mine.

Perhaps it began with taking walks at night when I lived near the University of Delaware. I loved that the brick paths that were normally so crowded were empty. I loved seeing a familiar place in an unfamiliar light. It had the vibe of a dreamworld, somewhere familiar but strange. And I loved that the trees looked just as alive at night as during the day.

Maybe it’s the contrast — the natural lit up by the artificial. The foreground feels like a sunny day; the backdrop of night drapes around the edges of things. Sometimes lamp bulbs look like moons peering through the branches.

The seasons bring new joys in this light. Ice limns everything in an outline of silver, and I’ve noticed that bare branches tend to spiral around a light like a spider web. Spring blooms look like discarded party garlands; fall leaves blaze like paper lanterns.

My favorite tree, the Kwanzan flowering cherry, is particularly spectacular in full bloom with its flower-laden branches. I like experimenting with taking pictures with the light in different places — from behind darkens the flowers and turns them gold; from the side lends them a copper cast.

Trees at night in another country are a wonder, shapes I don’t recognize made even stranger by the lamp light. (The tree on the left is from Wiesbaden, Germany; the one on the right is a stone pine from Rome, Italy.)

Is it the constructed — the plastic, the poles, the telephone wires, the buildings, the parking lots — and the beautiful together that I find so fascinating? Is it the way light throws the detail of things into sharp relief? Is it the interaction of a suburban environment with the natural world? I think I love walking down the same sidewalks everyday for similar reasons, whatever they are.

I’ll close with a quote from Li-Young Lee: “Is there anything that is not saturated with meaning?…I don’t know why, but it feels that the world around me is saturated with another presence, mystery, and splendor, all the time. It’s a matter of cocking our heads the right way and seeing it.”

Art and the ordinary

…although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously…When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was non-being. The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being.”

from “A Sketch of the Past”, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s capability to articulate my inner thoughts astonishes me. “A great part of every day is not lived consciously.” How I would like to change that! But I have a feeling that it’s the “cotton wool” that makes those moments of glory or change or elation really visible. There is grace in the monotony of life, in that way.

But I also think we could stand to notice more things. I read some great advice in a poetry book about paying attention to just six things each day. If I did it regularly, it would be so valuable; I think it would aid my poetry, hone my observation skills, train my mind to find words for what I’m seeing… Plus there’s the joys of just seeing things more closely. Ordinary things have meaning and joy in them. Seeing them helps us savor them for the gifts that they are.

A related thought: I heard Leslie Jamison talking on the First Draft podcast today about “The ordinary life” and how “the material of any given life could be the material of art if you ask the right questions of it or engage the right processes of excavation and elimination” — if you look for it.

PS: I love that Virginia Woolf calls a day of being sick “non-being”. I hate colds, too — I’m going to write off the next one as a “non-being” day.

“Lullaby of the Onion” by Miguel Hernández

I’d like to attempt analysis of a poem I really like but don’t understand. I think it will yield more than I expect. I also think it’s important to practice writing about what I don’t get, and to find the value in what is difficult by looking closely at it.

Here’s “Lullaby of the Onion”:

(Dedicated to his son, after receiving a letter from his wife in which she said she had nothing to eat but bread and onions)

The onion is frost
shut in and poor.
Frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion,
black ice and frost
large and round.

My little boy
was in hunger’s cradle.
He was nursed
on onion blood.
But your blood
is frosted with sugar,
onion and hunger.

A dark woman
dissolved in moonlight
pours herself thread by thread
into the cradle.
Laugh, son,
you can swallow the moon
when you want to.

Lark of my house,
keep laughing.
The laughter in your eyes
is the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that my soul, hearing you,
will beat in space.

Your laughter frees me,
gives me wings.
It sweeps away my loneliness,
knocks down my cell.
Mouth that flies,
heart that turns
to lightning on your lips.

Your laughter is
the sharpest sword,
conqueror of flowers
and larks.
Rival of the sun.
Future of my bones
and of my love.

The flesh flutters,
sudden as an eyelid,
and the baby is rosier
than ever.
How many linnets
take off, wings fluttering,
from your body!

I woke up from childhood:
don’t you wake up.
I have to frown:
always laugh.
Keep to your cradle,
defending laughter
feather by feather.

Yours is a flight so high,
so wide,
that your body is a sky
newly born.
If only I could climb
to the origin
of your flight!

Eight months old you laugh
with five orange blossoms.
With five little
ferocities.
With five teeth
like five young
jasmine blossoms.

They will be the frontier
of tomorrow’s kisses
when you feel your teeth
as weapons,
when you feel a flame
running under your gums
driving toward the center.

Fly away, son, on the double
moon of the breast:
it is saddened by onion,
you are satisfied.
Don’t let go.
Don’t find out what’s happening,
or what goes on.

—Translated from the Spanish by Don Share
From The Paris Review issue no. 107 (Summer 1988)

This reminds me a lot of Cathy Song’s Picture Bride poems, which I first read in college and fell in love with for their tender images and short lines that bloomed like flowers. In particular, I remember one poem about the speaker’s baby brother:

You were born
in the year of the fish,
during the rainy month
when the pond brims over
and the trees in the gulch
grow leaves like spinach
and mold thickens
under the skin.

I was two 
when from the broken water,
you came swimming,
slippery and smooth,
barely bigger than a tadpole.
You jumped
into father's surprised hands.
Mother wrestled to keep
your jellied body
cradled in her arm.

What a thirsty baby, 
wanting seawater instead of milk,
you slipped happily in the crib
after your mushroom mouth
went slack, satisfied.

--excerpt from "My Brother" by Cathy Song

Comparing the two helps me to see their shared characteristics. Of course, what reminded me of “My Brother” was the subject matter (a baby) but visually, the stanzas also have similar shapes and the lines are brief. I’m noticing that the line breaks seem to happen in similar places — after phrases, generally, not in the middle of one. The effect is one of smoothness, fluidity: “Hunger and onion,/ black ice and frost/ large and round.”

There’s some repetition going on in “Lullaby of the Onion” that contributes to this flow, I think. “Onion” is repeated five times; “frost”, four times; “hunger” and “moon”, three times each. There is a lilting feel to the first couple of stanzas — frost and hunger and onions and moons — helped along by the low vowel sounds (oh, you, uh) created by the o’s and u’s.

But the next stanzas seem to rise, weightless. “Laugh(ter)” is repeated seven times and larks, flying, and wings are mentioned multiple times, as well. The vowels change, heighten in pitch: Muted o’s and u’s become colorful a’s (in “dark” and “laughter”) and i’s (in “light” and “rival”) and e’s (in “sweeps” and “beat”).

The sounds are telling a story, just as the meaning of the words are. The speaker starts somewhere low, hopeless (“shut in and poor”) as he thinks about his family without any food besides bread and onions. He himself seems to be stuck somewhere; he speaks of “loneliness” and being locked in “my cell”. But there is a turn. The little boy is nourished by the the things that should impoverish him: The white juice of the onion his mother eats is “frosted with sugar” when the child nurses, and as she “pours herself thread by thread/ into the cradle”, diminishing, he is able to laugh, able to “swallow the moon”.

The poem goes on, gaining energy and hope:

Lark of my house,
keep laughing.
The laughter in your eyes
is the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that my soul, hearing you,
will beat in space.

Your laughter frees me,
gives me wings.
It sweeps away my loneliness,
knocks down my cell.

The boy’s laughter has become a weapon (“the sharpest sword”), an airiness. I love the image in stanza 7 of “many linnets” as they “take off, wings fluttering,/ from your body!” It seems that the laughter has staved off starvation: “The flesh flutters,/ sudden as an eyelid,/ and the baby is rosier/ than ever.” The emptiness of hunger has become the lightness of freedom.

Then the poem transitions into a wish from the father that his baby will not wake from childhood, as the speaker himself has. The sadness from the early stanzas is back — not because of hunger, but because the father wishes he could escape his own fate (“I woke up”; “I have to frown”; “If only I could climb/ to the origin/ of your flight!”). He desires that the child will keep using his weapon of lightness, “defending laughter/ feather by feather”. In one of the most beautiful metaphors in the poem, he describes his son’s teeth as flowers:

Eight months old you laugh
with five orange blossoms.
With five little
ferocities.
With five teeth
like five young
jasmine blossoms.

He does not want his son to grow up to face the realities of the world; he urges him to find escape, to “Fly away, son, on the double/ moon of the breast” of his mother. “Don’t find out what’s happening, /or what goes on” is his last piece of advice, a somber ending to a beautiful piece of poetry.

But I’ve skipped over the most puzzling stanza of the whole thing, for me. It comes right before the end:

They will be the frontier
of tomorrow’s kisses
when you feel your teeth
as weapons,
when you feel a flame
running under your gums
driving toward the center.

I wonder if the father is anticipating his son’s coming of age here, a time when the weapon will no longer be laughter, but teeth. (The word “frontier” certainly seems to indicate a future of some kind.) Maybe the speaker was imprisoned for feeding the “flame” he mentions here, and that is why he tells his son not to “find out what’s happening”. Perhaps what “[runs] under your gums” and “driv[es] toward the center” is a fiery speech, a passionate protest against the unseen enemy in the poem. If the father fights with language instead of laughter, maybe he’s comparing his own experience to his son’s, contrasting their roles.

It brings me back to the Cathy Song poem. She does the same thing in the last lines of “For My Brother”:

We each have become our own animals.
I am like the sheep,
woolly and silent.
I plant my belly on the hillside,
count myself to sleep.
I sit in the sun,
patient as a boulder,
like any proper sister.
And I know that I move differently,
using the alphabet
to spring from me an ocean,
to propel me through night waters.
This is my way
of swimming with you.

Earlier, she compared her brother to a creature of the water, a tadpole or a fish. Her experience is different; as the older sister, she is solidly a land animal. But she finds a way to communicate her love to her baby brother “using the alphabet/…to propel me through night waters” so they can be together.

I think the father in “Lullaby of the Onion” is doing the same thing. He, too, sees the world through different eyes. He plays a different role. But like the speaker in “For My Brother,” he draws closer to the little boy he is separated from by using language. And the result is a rhythmic dedication to the son he loves, meant to lull him to sleep with dreams of moons and onions. I am spellbound.

Sentences

One of my weaknesses — and obsessions — as a writer is the sentence. Sentences are a source of great pleasure and inspiration to me, but I’m aware that I have a lot of work to do to make my own writing as effective, beautiful, or deliberate as the writers I admire.

It happens that I just started Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. She has a whole chapter on sentences, and I thought I’d share a section about Virginia Woolf that I particularly enjoyed, starting with an excerpt from Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”:

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

And then Prose’s analysis of this sentence (which she calls “complex and virtuosic”):

     Once again it's worth mentioning that the composition of a sentence such as this one -- or any sentence, really -- is the end result of many minute decisions, and that a different sort of writer might have decided to make the same point in a dozen or so words that could have gotten the idea across as understandably but not nearly so enchantingly, nor so intelligently. Nor would such a sentence have been nearly so much fun to read. Another author could have said, simply: Considering how frequently people get sick, it's strange that writers don't write about illness more often.
     But that sentence would be a far less revealing and reliable introduction to the essay. Because it's not just the content -- the meaning -- of the sentence that prepares us for what is to come. What's in store for us is not a straightforward examination, a glorified statistical analysis of the inexplicable infrequency of illness as a literary subject, but rather an opportunity to watch Woolf's mind skipping from subject to subject in a simultaneously imaginative and logical way, crossing gossamer bridges that never seen like non sequiturs but rather like stepping stones from one clear stream of thought to another, from one engaging observation to the next.
     By the end of the twenty-five page essay, at which point Woolf will have gotten to her real subject, which is the bravery that it requires to continue living in the presence and the face of loss and death, she will have touched on several dozen topics that include reading, language, faith, solitude, science, Shakespeare, the animal kingdom, insanity, suicide, and a brief biography of the third Marchioness of Waterford. In just a few words, the essay skips from a discussion about how hard it is for us to envision heaven to a very different kind of difficulty, reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when we are feeling less than up to par. And so by the time you have come to the end of the essay, you will have realized that a sentence that may have seemed to involve a sort of showing-off was rather an admirably accurate promise about, or introduction to, the sparkling wit and the deep seriousness of everything that has followed.

Some writers are just geniuses — naturally talented, creative, visionary. But the beauty of writing is that I can take my own level of talent and practice and study and learn from others and get better. Other writers have much encouragement to offer about this:

Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, admits his own weakness at the sentence level — “I don’t think of myself as a naturally gifted writer when it comes to using language. I distrust myself. Consequently, I try every which way with a sentence, then a paragraph, and finally a page, choosing words, selecting pace (I’m obsessed with that, even the pace of a sentence).”

Ray Bradbury offers ideas for how to study the writing of others — “My favorite writers have been those who’ve said things well. I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in twenty words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together? I was an intense student. Sometimes I’d get an old copy of Wolfe and cut out paragraphs and paste them in my story, because I couldn’t do it, you see. I was so frustrated! And then I’d retype whole sections of other people’s novels just to see how it felt coming out. Learn their rhythm.”

And Annie Dillard both acknowledges the struggle of writing and sets the bar high — “Writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”

I can’t argue with that logic.

The *one-month* poetry challenge

I’m excited to be starting a whole month of writing a poem every day. Last time, Onj and I wrote a poem every day for two weeks and it was incredibly successful — not because I wrote amazing poems, but because it taught me how to write no matter what mood I was in. The blank page is no longer as scary when I sit down to write a poem. I know something will come if I just keep sitting there; it’s hard work, but it’s also like magic.

Plus, I checked off a lot of my original goals:

• Get into a habit of writing something creative more consistently and often. I’m doing this! I have a newish creative project I’m dedicated to and I write in it most days. Plus, blog posts now come out every 3-5 days instead of every 4-6.
• Learn to let go of the idea that every poem I write has to be a GREAT one. Somehow this sank in really quickly, like maybe after day four. It turns out that lowering my expectations for myself helped me to start producing pretty good poems every once in a while!
• Practice writing the thing I want to write — don’t save a good idea for later. It’s pretty easy to do this with poetry, but I’m hoping this lesson sticks enough to influence my fiction.
• Try new things and experiment. During the two weeks, I wrote a poem with four syllables per line, a poem about biking, a haiku, a poem with a rhyme scheme, a song…
• Rewrite drafts. I didn’t get into this a whole lot at the time, but I’ve revised several of the poems now, and wow…revision is very fun. I think I like it more than drafting. It gives me hope for writing fiction — maybe writing a first draft will always be slow and hard, but the revision stage will be faster and easier!

These are ongoing goals, particularly the one about trying new things. I want to continue to experiment by writing a poem in one form and then trying it in another one to see which one suits it better. I think I’m intimidated at the thought of changing a poem that already has a structure, and I would love to see what surprises come out of doing something like that.

This time around, I’m mostly following (belatedly) a form calendar that someone made for National Poetry Month. It’s only day three and I’ve already been introduced to two poetic forms I’ve never used (or really heard of) — the tanka and the Golden Shovel. Poets.org/poems has an amazing search that lets you filter by form, so I’ve been able to see examples of each one.

The Golden Shovel is especially interesting. Poets.org defines it as “a poetic form wherein each word of one line from another poem serves as the end word of each line for a newly constructed poem.” It’s a tribute to another artist; you use an excerpt from another poem. The first example of this style was written by Terrance Hayes (his poem is called “The Golden Shovel”), who ended each line of his poem with a word from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”.

I like the possibilities of this form. You don’t have to choose another person’s poem — you could select a line from a speech, a play, a letter, or a work of fiction. You can use your poem to respond to the original work or you could say something entirely different using the same words.

I decided to use part of a quote from Annie Dillard: “…dangle from it limp wherever it takes you” (from the essay “Living Like Weasels”). It’s only a first draft, but here’s how it turned out (with end words in bold to make it easier to see):

It doesn’t hurt to dangle
Your own prowess away from
Your face to examine it once in a while. It
Won’t kill you to limp
When running isn’t available. Wherever
You go, the struggle tracks with you. But it
Isn’t your own strength that takes
You through. It isn’t you.

I love how this stretched me, mentally. I’m keeping my eyes open for other lines that might make a good Golden Shovel because I’d like to play around with it some more. What does this form say about its original source — both when your poem is on the same topic and when it’s about something else entirely? And what if I could make a self-referencing Golden Shovel that took the first words in a stanza and made them the last words in the next stanza??

Poetry is exciting. Tomorrow’s form is erasure and I can’t wait!

What I’m reading (April 2024)

I’ve jumped on the Tobias Wolff bandwagon, if there is one. After reading Old School last month I immediately moved on to a collection of his short stories published in 1995, The Night in Question. It was excellent. (Since finishing it on April 2nd I’ve been to the used bookstore to get two more of his books.) I think something Wolff does particularly well is describe people’s inner thoughts and decision making processes. He doesn’t barrage you with a list of facts about his characters; instead, it feels like you’re somehow observing someone’s mind. You recognize the people in his stories as real people. You understand why they do things because they’re like extensions of your own mind. Take this sentence: “In fact everyone was alone all the time, but when you got sick you knew it, and that was a lot of what suffering was — knowing.” A line like this touches on a knowledge you’ve always had but have never articulated — that part of suffering is knowing you’re suffering alone.

Other than that, I’m not hugely enjoying what I’m reading at the moment, and I guess that will happen from time to time. (Is it because Tobias Wolff is so good?) It’s probably good practice to write about even the things that I’m reading half-heartedly.

Celine by Peter Heller is one of the half-hearted reads at the moment. The premise is exciting — a female private eye in her 70s tracks down someone’s father; he went missing in Yellowstone National Park 20 years ago. But I’m on page 50 and not loving it yet. I feel a little bit like I’m being told what kind of a person Celine is instead of drawing my own conclusions and I also don’t think she’s quite as interesting as I thought she would be. Also — this could be nitpicky, but I don’t like how much space is between each paragraph in this edition of the book! It feels like I’m coming to a new section every time there’s a line break. Anyway, it’s still early and I’m looking forward to experiencing what the back cover calls “crystalline prose and sweeping natural panoramas”.

I’m making slow progress in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. I’ve moved from the WWI poets and Yeats to Virginia Woolf — and I’m stuck on Virginia Woolf. Her prose is gorgeous, but I’m not in the mood for essays right now. And after Virginia Woolf I have James Joyce to look forward to…

Lastly, I am listening to my second audiobook ever — An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 by Rick Atkinson. Out of all the genres, I’m probably the least interested in history, and out of all of history, I’m the least interested in war, but this book is defying my expectations so far. It does a good job of humanizing something with the scope of World War II. The level of detail surprises me — how does Atkinson know what people were saying to each other? How does he know that one man jumped out of a particular ship and had to be pulled back onboard before a battle? — and makes this event I’m far removed from feel like a real thing. It turns out that really good writing — and a good narrator for an audiobook! — can make just about any subject interesting. (And this is one of the benefits of being in a book club — I read things I would never pick up on my own!)

A walk in the rain

I went on a walk this morning by myself. It was overcast and wet, and it was glorious. I feel so happy I could cry.

I wish I could have taken a picture of the smells. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine I was at the beach — humidity, wet driftwood, damp gravel — missing only the high, sharp tang of salt. The evergreens along the path reminded me of past hikes, the coziness of camping; the fragrant grass made me picture Longwood — the conservatory’s glass panes and pebbled columns, the manicured lawns, the bushes dripping with dew.

Spring colors were more vivid in the rain. I spotted grape hyacinths in the mulch and pink cherry blossoms were set off beautifully against the dull sky.

It’s been a while since I’ve done something like this on my own. I used to take solo walks all the time — in the rain, at night, in the early morning. I enjoyed the solitude. I had a lot of feelings and walking helped me feel them all — nostalgia, loneliness, sadness, sweetness — and accept them, process them. But I’ve felt conscious of how my ability to be alone is changing recently; it’s a good thing, but it does sometimes feel like I’m missing part of myself.

But today I felt like my old self and my new self simultaneously. The familiar longings were there, but I also felt fulfilled. So many of my longings have been satisfied, by God’s grace. It’s all a gift!

Rain started to fall, so gentle and cold that I couldn’t help but laugh. It’s all a gift.

Beautiful sentences (April 2024)

On the recommendation of Priscilla Long (author of The Writer’s Portable Mentor), I keep a notebook full of sentences I find beautiful. Some are about beautiful subjects; some are phrased beautifully; all of them take my breath away for one reason or another. I’ve come across this suggestion other places, too — it is beneficial for a beginning writer to write out sentences by good authors. Ray Bradbury said that he’d “retype whole sections of other people’s novels just to see how it felt coming out. Learn their rhythm.”

Here are some beautiful sentences I have come across in my reading lately. (Which one is your favorite? Leave a comment with a beautiful sentence you have found recently!)

To strip yourself of pretense is to overthrow a hard master, the fear of giving yourself away, and in that one sentence I gave myself away beyond all recall.

from Old School by Tobias Wolff

We are blest for everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.

from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” by William Butler Yeats

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part…

from “Living Like Weasels” by Annie Dillard

You could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs…

from “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf

There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that.

from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

The possibilities of one’s own nature

“…Your problem is, you think everything has to mean something.”

That was one of my problems, I couldn’t deny it.

“Mortals”, Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff’s characters feel real. I have only recently started reading him and I find his writing so articulate, especially about people’s motivations and emotions.

I’ve just started reading his collection of short stories called The Night in Question and I was struck by this character named B.D. in “Casualty”. To be honest, stories about war bore me a bit, (or maybe it’s just that the trenches of World War I are not my ideal reading escape). I don’t really know how to identify with characters who are soldiers, how to get into their world — full of so much fear and violence but also so much routine and boredom. But I was captivated by B.D. He felt like a real person.

     B.D. wasn't brave. He knew that, as he knew other things about himself that he would not have believed a year ago. He would not have believed that he could walk past begging children and feel nothing. He would not have believed that he could become a frequenter of prostitutes. He would not have believed that he could become a whiner or a shirker. He had been forced to surrender certain pictures of himself that had once given him pride and a serene sense of entitlement to his existence, but the one picture he had not given up, and which had become essential to him, was the picture of himself as a man who would do anything for a friend.
     Anything meant anything. It could mean getting himself hurt or even killed. B.D. had some ideas as to how this might happen, acts of impulse like going after a wounded man, jumping on a grenade, other things he'd heard and read about, and in which he thought he recognized the possibilities of his own nature. But this was different.
     In fact, B.D. could see a big difference. It was one thing to do something in the heat of the moment, another to think about it, accept it in advance. 

Wolff breaks a well-known writing rule (show, don’t tell) by telling us that his character isn’t brave. But it works because he’s not just trying to show us that B.D. isn’t brave; he’s going beyond that to show how this soldier has had to accept some hard facts about himself. B.D. has not lived up to the version of the man he always thought he was. The things he has done are shameful. But he stubbornly refuses to cross a certain line, refuses to see himself as a man who lets down his friends. (Yet even in this, he sees his cowardice. He’s willing to die for a friend in one way, but not in another; it feels arbitrary.)

The syntax — the rhythm and flow of the sentences — in these paragraphs is gorgeous. Look at the variation; there are no dead spots, no awkward pauses. It all flows. Take paragraph one, for example:

1. Short sentence (B.D. wasn't brave.)
2. Short sentence followed by a long phrase -- we're building to something. (He knew that, as he knew other things about himself that he would not have believed a year ago.)
3-5. A series of three sentences all starting with the same eight words -- "He would not have believed that he could...". These are examples from sentence #2.
6. A very long sentence. A summary (He had been forced to surrender certain pictures of himself that had once given him pride and a serene sense of entitlement to his existence) that moves on to a new revelation about the character (but the one picture he had not given up, and which had become essential to him, was the picture of himself as a man who would do anything for a friend). 

Wolff is doing one of my favorite things that good writing can do. The length and construction of his sentences is reflecting the meaning of the sentences themselves. “B.D. wasn’t brave” is a concise fact, so the sentence is concise. The last sentence is more complex, reflecting the complexity of B.D.’s character — he is both a disappointing man and one who aspires to be good.

As a side note, I find this sentence from the second paragraph so insightful: “B.D. had some ideas as to how this might happen, acts of impulse like going after a wounded man, jumping on a grenade, other things he’d heard and read about, and in which he thought he recognized the possibilities of his own nature.” How often do we do this same thing, evaluating ourselves by the possibilities for good that we see within? I struggle with this a lot. The default way that I see myself is solidly, morally good. I would not hesitate to say that I’m a good person. But eventually I will come across something in my own character — something buried just below the surface of my personality — that shocks me with its desperation, pride, or shame, and I realize that “good person” doesn’t even scratch the surface of who I am. How did Wolff capture all this in one sentence — in one phrase?

Here’s another masterfully written passage:

     Years later he told all this to the woman he lived with and would later marry, offering it to her as something important to know about him -- how this great friend of his, Ryan, had gotten hit, and how he'd run to be with him and found him gone....
     This story did not come easily to B.D. He hardly ever talked about the war except in generalities, and then in a grudging, edgy way. He didn't want to sound like other men when they got on the subject, pulling a long face or laughing it off, striking a pose. He did not want to imply that he'd done more than he had done, or to say, as he believed, that he hadn't done enough; that all he had done was stay alive. When he thought about those days, the life he'd led since -- working his way through school, starting a business, being a good friend to his friends, nursing his mother for three months while she died of cancer -- all this dropped away as if it were nothing, and he felt as he had felt then, weak, corrupt, and afraid. 
     So B.D. avoided the subject.
     Still, he knew that his silence had become its own kind of pose, and that was why he told his girlfriend about Ryan. He wanted to be truthful with her. What a surprise, then, to have it all come out sounding like a lie. He couldn't get it right, couldn't put across what he had felt. He used the wrong words, words that somehow rang false, in sentimental cadences. The details sounded artful. His voice was halting and grave, self-aware, phony.

I’m fascinated by the choices Wolff makes here. Why include that B.D. tells his story to “the woman he lived with and would later marry”? Why not say “his wife”? My guess is that Wolff is creating a sense of distance between B.D. and the other people in his life, people who cannot understand the things he encountered in the war. Saying that he “offer[ed] it to her as something important to know about him” (rather than “he told her”) and describing B.D.’s rendition of his past as a “pose” emphasizes the isolation of his experiences. B.D. is alone. He can’t describe it adequately to anyone.

I also love how Wolff explains why B.D. avoids talking about the war. My own grandpa, who fought in the Korean War, was hesitant to tell war stories; it seems to be a common response for some veterans (and maybe for that generation as a whole. In my mom’s words, “You acted like it didn’t happen. Nobody talked about anything.”). B.D.’s failure to describe what it was like is an interpretation of that silence. Perhaps this failure to describe was Wolff’s experience, as well; he served in the US Army from 1964 to 1968, during the Vietnam War.

The two passages I selected are only a couple of pages apart. In such a short space, Wolff has revealed the soul of his character; B.D. practically breathes. He’s afraid, conflicted, self-aware, ashamed, striving for nobility, laboring to be unique among men, to be better and more real. But despite living a full life after he comes home, B.D. defines himself by who he was in the war. You, the reader, feel the tragedy and the truth of that; you see echoes of yourself in him. You recognize the possibilities of your own nature.