Tag: Literature

How much of human life disappears into oblivion like this?

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D.G. Myers

“Vladimir Nabokov was wont to fall into a reverie over nail clippings, bitten-off cuticles, tufts of lint plucked off a sleeve, bits of food picked from between the teeth and spat out. After disposing of these tiny scraps of human life, no one thinks of them any more. Since matter is neither created nor destroyed, what becomes of them? They go on existing, but in a realm beyond human concern. Nabokov called them the darlings of oblivion.

After nursing two of my children through week-long stomach viruses and then watching them bounce off to school this morning as if nothing had happened, I’ve been thinking about how much of human life consists of events that are also darlings of oblivion—the stomach cramps, the headaches, the sleepless nights, the full glasses of milk that are knocked over and spilled across the clean kitchen floors, the flat tires, the dead batteries, the traffic jams, the appointments that are late. Entire days can be lost to these events; they can be, at the time, as absorbing as tragedy; then, once they have passed, they are forgotten. How much of human life disappears into oblivion like this?  These darlings almost never find their way into literature. And why is that?…”

~ D.G. Myers (Excerpt from May 9, 2013 post: Darlings of Oblivion)

From D. G. Myers blog: I am a faculty member in the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at the Ohio State University, I am the author of The Elephants Teach (Chicago, 2006) and coeditor (with Paul M. Hedeen) of Unrelenting Readers (Story Line, 2004). Educated in the public schools of Riverside, I earned my degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I founded the literary magazine Quarry (later Quarry West) with Raymond Carver; Washington University in St. Louis, where I wrote a masters thesis on Stanley Elkin under Stanley Elkin; and Northwestern University, where I held the TriQuarterlyFellowship and studied under Gerald Graff and Joseph Epstein. For twenty years I taught at Texas A&M University. Now I live in Columbus with my wife Naomi and our four children: Dov, Saul, Isaac, and Miriam (“Mimi”).

Sit. Feast on your life.

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Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you have ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

~ Derek Walcott, Love After Love

Derek Alton Walcott, 83, was born in Saint Lucia in the West Indies.  He is a poet and playwright who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.  He is currently Professor of poetry at the University of Essex in the U.K. In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career including an Obie Award in 1971, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry.  (Source: Wiki)

Photograph of Derek Walcott (in 2003) by Richard Avedon. Poem Source: journalofanobody

The days melt in my hands like ice in the sun

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balzac

“Balzac drove himself relentlessly as a writer, motivated by enormous literary ambition as well as a never-ending string of creditors and endless cups of coffee; as Herbert J. Hunt has written, he engaged in “orgies of work punctuated by orgies of relaxation and pleasure.” When Balzac was working, his writing schedule was brutal: He ate a light dinner at 6:00 p.m., then went to bed. At 1:00 a.m. he rose and sat down at his writing table for a seven-hour stretch of work. At 8:00 a.m. he allowed himself a ninety-minute nap; then, from 9:30 to 4:00, he resumed work, drinking cup after cup of black coffee. (According to one estimate, he drank as many as fifty cups a day.) At 4:00 p.m. Balzac took a walk, had a bath, and received visitors until 6:00, when the cycle started all over again. “The days melt in my hands like ice in the sun,” he wrote in 1830. “I’m not living, I’m wearing myself out in a horrible fashion—but whether I die of work or something else, it’s all the same.”

— Balzac’s daily routine by Mason Currey from Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

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Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss. Let’s Read.

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Dr. Seuss

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

~ Dr. Seuss

Theodore Seuss Geisel was born today in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He attended Dartmouth College and Oxford.  He was a perfectionist in his work and he would sometimes spend up to a year on a book. It was not uncommon for him to throw out 95% of his material until he settled on a theme for his book.  Geisel’s first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was rejected 27 times before it was finally published by Vanguard Press in 1937. The Cat in the Hat was published in 1957.  Green Eggs and Ham in 1960.  (Could it have been that long ago?)  Geisel’s birthday, March 2, has been adopted as the annual date for National Read Across America Day.

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Small miseries

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Rudyard Kipling, Illustration

A post by Amanda Patterson on Rudyard Kipling triggered a stream of thoughts this morning.  Kipling was born yesterday in 1865.  I couldn’t recall ever reading anything by Kipling but I’ve certainly heard of him.  (DK. Mr. Contemporary. Always looking forward.  Never much for history.  Not much for looking back. What possibly could I learn from a life 100+ years ago? PAST IS PAST.)

Kipling, “born in India, was sent to England to live with a foster family and receive a formal British education at the age of 6.  These were hard years for Kipling.  His Foster mother was a brutal woman, who quickly grew to despise her young foster son. She beat and bullied Kipling, who also struggled to fit in at school. Kipling’s solace came in books and stories. With few friends, he devoted himself to reading. By the age of 11, Kipling was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A visitor to his home saw his condition and immediately contacted his mother, who rushed back to England and rescued her son from the Holloways.”

Yet, here’s a man who survived this childhood and flourished.  He said:

Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.

And said:

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.

And said:

This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.

And a man, who produced this poem in 1895:

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