Brene Brown, game changer.

I first heard of Brene Brown last winter when my friend Lindsay told me I had to watch her TED talk called "The Power of Vulnerability." It was a game changer for my emotional health, y'all.  Then Lindsay and I decided we would both read her book The Gifts of Imperfection and it was the perfect follow up for helping me process through what it means to live with meaning and purpose and without anxiety.  Reading the book and reflecting on Brown's research and how it related to my life has been an incredibly powerful experience.  I've slowly and reflectively read this book over the past five months or so. This post is a little vulnerable, but I think Brene Brown would be in favor of me sharing and owning these pieces of my story.

My core spiritual beliefs (grace, love, forgiveness, stillness) have remained much the same over the years, but there came a time when I had to face the fact that from every angle I was hearing: strong people of faith ________.  As a high achieving people pleaser, for many years I ran without stopping in my volunteer work, my actual work, and in the commitments I made in my free time.  Sometimes despite hearing an overarching message of grace and love, I felt as though I was constantly not measuring up to what I was "supposed" to be doing, which was difficult for a perfectionist (though now I consider myself a recovering one) and felt as though I had to be apologetic for my introverted nature.  I've taken the past few years to redefine what a spiritual life looks like for me and to (finally) learn to be ok with the fact that it does need to look like anyone else's.

A lot of authors have mentored me through this journey: Mother Theresa with Come Be My Light, Anne Lamott with Traveling Mercies and Bird by Bird, Joan Didion with The Year of Magical Thinking, Susan Cain with Quiet, Colum McCann with Let the Great World Spin, Eric Metaxes with Bonhoeffer, and of course the poetry and music of Over the Rhine.  What I appreciate about Brene Brown is that her book seemed to pull together all of these literary influences and helped me to redefine and find freedom in what spirituality looks like for me.

In the journey of trying to define what my spiritual life looks like now, it honestly can be easy to simply not think about it, thus avoiding existential dilemmas.  But, the anxiety that so easily creeps in reminded me that being grounded and intentional is life giving and I noticed that not having an intentional grounding in faith, I became less hopeful in general, a bit cranky, and I forgot to look for beauty.  Brown's definition of spirituality piqued my interest because I was (still am) so tired of the minutia of Christian theology:  "By spirituality, I'm not talking about religion or theology, but I am talking about a shared and deeply held belief.  Here's how I define spirituality: Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in compassion.  Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives" (64).  

When she wrote "It's not about denominations or dogma. Practicing spirituality is what brings healing and creates resilience. For me, spirituality is about connecting with God, and I do that most often through nature, community, and music.  We all have to define spirituality in a way that inspires us,"(74)  I was reminded of the life nature gives me and how washing dishes or walking with music centers me, and how dinner with my husband and great friends grounds and connects me.

One of the messages I have struggled with as a Christian is that "everything happens for a reason," which I simply cannot buy into no matter how many scripture based conversations I have.  This felt really isolating, especially in the early days of this journey.  I have landed in a place of confidence and rest with this issue and others, and reading Brown's book helped give greater clarity to me: "At first I thought faith meant 'there's a reason for everything.'  I personally struggled with that because I'm not comfortable with using God or faith or spirituality to explain tragedy...Here's how I define faith based on research interviews: Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of certainty" (90).  Faith as a beautiful mystery has been one of the most healing perspectives I've run across.  

To close, one of my favorite parts of the book was when Brown discussed the fact that we can change our neurological pathways, something one of my old pastors used to talk about, too.  It is possible to physiologically change our patterns of thinking (google neuroplasticity).  I'm now living in a way where I am trying to incorporate rhythms into my life that help me feel grounded, connected, grateful, and covered in grace.  This is happening for me through reading, taking time to be creative (watercolor and calligraphy lately), cooking, looking for beauty, and  practicing stillness.  It looks different, but feels beautiful.  

More Than This

 I read (and wept through) A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness this summer, about a boy processing that his mother isn't going to survive her cancer.  When I saw he had a new title out, I was quick to pick it up and I can confidently say I've never read a book like More Than This: it straddles science fiction and mystery while having 3 beautifully written, realistic characters.  Interestingly, it also deals with death: the first chapter starts with the narrator, Seth, drowning in the ocean near his home.  From there, he wakes up in some kind of afterlife, which he spends the length of the book trying to figure out while simultaneously facing some of the hardest, most difficult, as well as the most poignant moments of his prior life, covering namely loss, parent/child relationships, teenage friendship, identity, and first love.

To write too much about the plot and this afterlife of Ness's creation would be to ruin the experience of reading the book (which I highly recommend), so I'm going to focus on a few of the life philosophies of some of the characters.  Ness weaves these philosophies not so much for the reader to choose one, but for the reader to become aware of some of the many complex ways people use to make their way through life, as Seth faces both his current life and what he finds as both of his former lives and attempts to cull meaning from each of them.

The hopeful. Seth's friend and first love Gudman says multiple times throughout the book in Seth's memory: "There's always beauty if you know where to look."  This phrase haunts Seth in his deepest moments of pain.

The seeker of meaning and the cynic.  Seth spends much of his time in the afterlife trying to figure out a greater narrative for what is happening to him.  Regine, one of the two people he meets there says: "People see stories everywhere...That's what my father used to say.  We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn't true.  We have to lie to ourselves to live.  Otherwise we'd go crazy."

The escapists. When his parents are considering a scientific, virtual escape from their lives after a tragedy Seth father shares: "You mean Lethe. The river of forgetfulness in Hades.  So the dead don't remember their former lives and spend eternity mourning them."  

This brings us back to the title--there must be More Than This.  There are parts of life that seem to make no sense and we must seek to find answers.  We must know the present reality isn't always the only truth. Ness seems to be saying the answer doesn't lie within a singular philosophy, but in a complex matrix.  The older I've gotten, the more I appreciate openness to mystery and the more I've started accepting living in uncertainty.  That doesn't mean I don't have some anchors set down in a few key places, just that this life is so much bigger than I ever imagined.  

looking for beauty and remembering how to live.

Springtime is when I come alive again--especially this year when winter seemed to stretch way too far into April.  The blossoms in the park and on the streets and behind my apartment make my heart swoon--and I'm always trying to capture them with my camera as their fleeting nature always gives me a sense of urgency and the beauty reminds me of what is real and true.

I'm currently on page 445 of 605 in A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.  My thought when I picked this one was that I was moving through books so quickly that it would be wonderful to have a long read that I could linger in for a while--I'm definitely lingering.  My nightly exhaustion from unpacking and setting up our apartment left me making about 5 pages of progress a night.  Luckily we are finally feeling more settled and I've resumed my mostly normal reading habits before bed. Then, of course in the past week and a half I've also had to read The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer and Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson for my graduate class.  Talk about a disrupted reading life. Ha.

Through the class I've been learning a lot about myself as a reader alongside how to best teach my students.  We moved in about a month ago now and I can say with absolute certainty that not taking time to write about my reading each weekend--which is basically taking time to reflect on the world around me and where I find myself in it--has left me feeling unsettled and not like myself.  So even though I'm not quite done with the book yet, I feel compelled to write about where my brain has been lingering over the past month or so while reading it.

A Fine Balance is a book about how 4 people's lives come together in India in the 1970s: a woman who was widowed in her 20s after three years of marriage and has struggled and strived to remain independent, an uncle and nephew pair who were bold enough to learn a trade above their caste and left their village to seek work in the city, and a young student who was sent by his parents from their comfortable home and general store in the mountains to the city to study.  What I've been able to get to know the most through this book beyond these characters is an India that I confess I was utterly uneducated about: when in 1975 the Prime Minister declared a state of emergency that allowed the President to rule by decree and suspend elections and civil liberties.

When the student comes from the mountains to study, he is stunned by the way people live.  His new friend tells him: "The problem with you is, you see too much and smell too much.  This is big-city life--no more beautiful snow covered mountains.  You have to learn to curb your sissy eyes and nose," (238).  As a wide-open-spaces lover turned long-time city dweller, over the years my own eyes have shifted into what I find beautiful.  Growing up, I spent so much time in t
he woods or in my midwestern suburban town where everything seemed picture perfect.  Beauty in New York is defined differently than my creekside wildflowers, backyard tomato garden, or street medians with planters.  New York's beauty is mostly man-made, be it in the architecture or the energy, but it is also side by side with rats and urine-baked sidewalks in the summertime and of course, millions of people, most of whom do not live in luxury apartments or take cabs to work.  

The question I've been left thinking about is "what is beauty and how do we construct our lives around it?" The two tailors in the book live in one of the city's slums until the government forcefully removes the residents and levels the slum in the name of "beautification."  Of course in reading the story, I got to know not only the tailors, but the way of life in the slum and see pictures of the people there: and once you know the people, you begin to see the beauty--even if it's amid a mass "toilet" that lies on the other side of the train tracks. Because there is a line that forms at sunrise to fill a few buckets with water from a single pump and the people in it are capturing water for their families to sustain their lives and having conversations and living life together.

So, sitting here in my apartment I've worked hard to make visually appealing and to feel like a home, I want to challenge myself to seek out true beauty this week: to look for it most of all in the spirits of people--be it my students, the deli guys who know my coffee order by heart, the people I sit next to on the train, or the ones I pass by on the street.  I want the spirit and beauty of humanity to be as much of a comfort to me as springtime blossoms or coming home to clutter-free counters and a tea kettle waiting for me.

How reading short stories is reminding me to live more reflectively and intentionally.

I recently read a novel that could be described as a collection of somewhat interwoven short stories called Blueprints for Building Better Girls by Elissa Schappell. I was drawn to this book because it seeks to explore the moment's that shape women's identity as women.  In hindsight, I wish I had read it slowly, as there wasn't an overall character arc for each character, but a few snapshots of their lives. 

This summer I read Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy and fell in love with his rich, poetic style of prose.  While on a walk through the West Village I found a collection of his short stories called The Secret Lives of People in Love and began making my way through them.  What I've learned, though, is that for me, short stories for me are best read slowly and sporadically.  If I read them as a novel, I don't take the time to stop and think about what the author is trying to say in each one or mull over the small details that speak into human existence.

One thing I've been thinking about recently is that I am more grounded as a person when I'm letting my reading wash over my mind and impact the way I'm looking at the world.  I read through the first 13 of Van Booy's 19 stories so quickly that my brain didn't have time to consider the weight of lines like: "Without memory, he thought, man would be invincible." One of the reason's I bought Schappell's book was because I wanted to think about how the female identity is formed--especially as I am teaching girls at such a critical developmental stage and stocking my library with books that they will be reading and thinking about.


This is not to say that all of my reading is deep and reflective.  The other book I'm in the middle of is The Snowman, a thriller by Jo Nesbo, which has been a distractive force and an escape from life this week.  Sometimes I need reading for that just as much as the kind that makes me stop and look at life differently.  But, for now it is time to slow down.  It is time to breathe deeply and reflect, especially in the midst of the devastation of my city and surrounding ones post-hurricane.  The roots that my reading deepens can then be taken out into the world, to be on the look out for small moments of poetry and to develop an eye that is sensitive to the human story happening all around me.

The Great Gatsby and how the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge changed everything

Every year I have students join a book club with me (I've written about World War Two and Harry Potter) and this year I added The Great Gatsby to the list of choices for students who are ready to jump into some more classic, adult literature.  I studied The Great Gatsby in high school, college and graduate school, but those lenses into the story don't seem to quite fit for 8th grade.  Luckily I still have time to think about that, but I also got stuck figuring out how to write about it here: this is not a book review or a literary essay blog, so I went back to my roots and thought about how the story speaks into life at this moment, and at this moment I am thinking about the city.  My city.  New York.

Most New Yorkers with a literary slant in their lives know all the classic lines about where we live, and Fitzgerald's description is one of the best: "The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and all the beauty in the world," (73).

This is the New York I like to think about the most: the one that still feels magical 9 years later, the one that offers up perfect autumn dinners eaten at the counter and walks into bookstores on the corner and cafe tables on the sidewalk and life swirling around.  The one that has perfect theaters for rainy Sunday matinees that follow a long brunch at a South African restaurant.

And yet. There is also "...a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air," (27).

This is the New York that I also think about.  I can be literal and think about the insane amount of trash that we proffer to the sidewalks or the hours lost waiting on a train that has been rerouted for the weekend.  I can calculate the money I have spent in rent over the years or figure out how many pounds of groceries I have carried over x amount of miles.  I weigh these things often these days. Or, more heavily, I can think about the students who walk into city schools coming from families who don't value education and don't see their own worth and a system that doesn't know how to help.  I can think about the men and women who sleep on the streets and the paralyzing feeling of not being able to help as I walk by with my smart phone in hand.

I dream a lot about a little house with a fire place on a little piece of land, where life could be quiet and where I could see the sunset every day.  And that may happen still.  But.  Living in a place filled with both beauty and ashes has changed the way I read the world around me--and I don't think I could ever be the same, or shake the feeling that no matter how cozy my life is, whether that is reading my book while homemade tomato sauce is simmering on my stove in my studio apartment or some future multi-room home in my future, there are ashes scattered around me--and that I should never stop looking for ways to help beauty and life to grow among and out of them.

Weights and Glasses: Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

I have read some of Flannery O'Connor's short stories before and was anxious to read her first novel, Wise Blood, originally published in 1949.  It is a story of spiritual searching without lyricism.  Her style feels sparse, dark, sometimes comedic and deeply symbolic.  It follows Hazel Motes, who felt he was destined to be a preacher his entire life.   He returns from World War Two disillusioned and haunted by his faith, ultimately preaching on the street and founding The Church of God Without Christ.  Each of the characters he encounters are wrestling with their own demons, either pressing in to find answers like Enoch Emery who claims claims to have innate wise blood to lead him toward his destiny or a father/daughter pair of religious con artists, where the father pretends to be blind.  


O'Connor' s story left me reading an incredible amount of commentary and  I was amazed that every possible religious world view could have a different interpretation on the religious imagery and symbolism and the characters' fates.  This made it difficult to process through in a coherent manner, which I think is part of the point.   In her author's note, published with the second edition, she writes,  "Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen."  I tried to read this story through this lens, as freedom can be an incredibly nuanced word, especially when applied to one's personal journey.  


What has stuck with me the most in this vein of thought is the fact that ever since Hazel Motes left for the war, and even upon his return, he carried around an old bible and his deceased mother's old glasses.   Part of the beauty of these two objects is the wealth of things they can symbolize, and in turn how those symbols can cause a reader to think about his or her own life.  Does the bible represent a burden that he is carrying or where he can find freedom? Can it be both? How is that played out in one's life? Are the glasses representative of him looking at life through his family's past? Or just the fact that he is seeking something? Or is he blind to certain parts of life?   He returned from the war a different person--and it is interesting to think about how facing that particular reality colored his worldview and his ultimate fate.


Through the lens of seeking freedom, these objects magnify the complexity of it and whether it is possible to completely be free from one's past and the questions haunting one's mind and whether it is possible to rest and simply be when there are so many things  to process through around us.  What I'm appreciating more and more about this book is life's complexity that O'Connor, who was a practicing Catholic, didn't shy away from.  The pat answers I've encountered along the way feel weightless and empty--and perhaps it is the carrying of the weight while intentionally looking and seeking that brings answers and eventual peace. 

to run or not to run.

The Marriage Plot is Jeffrey Eugenides' third novel (after The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex) which was released last fall. It follows the college and post graduation life and experiences of three characters: Leonard, with a brilliant mind for both science and philosophy, symptoms of manic depression and a heartbreaker reputation; Mitchell, who has been studying religion and mysticism and is the story's moral center of sorts; and Madeleine, an English major who has situated her life between these two men, most often romantically allying herself with Leonard.  The title refers not just to their own stories, but to the literary sub genre of the marriage plot, which Hanna studies in earnest.  The ending of the book reveals Eugenides' take on it, which I enjoyed, but I wasn't super engaged with the overall plot of the story.

What was interesting to me, though, was when Mitchell was traveling in India for part of the year following graduation.  While volunteering with Mother Theresa's Missions of Charity in Calcutta, he comes across a man there who was a beekeeper from Arizona, with his wife he was still passionately in love with and their children.  "And out of this perfect life had come the need to break out of it, to bring it into real difficulty, even hardship, in order to relieve the suffering of others."  Mitchell was fascinated by this intentional choice and watched as the beekeeper and the other volunteers served the people of the home as a bit of an outsider.  He had an opportunity to step out of the relatively clean space he had carved out for himself in the home to help a man who needed a bed pan and attempted, but when the mess came and he wasn't sure how to handle it, he literally ran out of the home and left Calcutta.

Of course, Mitchell is 22 years old and yet to glean the kind of wisdom that the beekeeper had, so I can't despise him for his act of cowardice.  But it makes me think about how easy it is to talk a good game on the importance of alleviating suffering and walking with people through their pain, but following through is another story.  When it encroaches on one's freedom--time, thought life, expenses both literal and metaphorical--bolting feels like a valid option, especially if you can at least feel good about having tried.  I guess this is all to say that I'm trying to reconfigure my definition of what a good life actually entails--and not merely in word and thought, but in action--not leading a life that is guided solely by comfort and ease, but a willingness to have deeper roots, which will bring both deeper sorrows but also joys.

On belief.

I feel like everything I'm reading lately is asking me to seek out wonder or spend some time in the depths pondering the darker corners of life.  A former student has been begging me to read Life of Pi by Yann Martel for months and I finally did.  Pi is the boy narrator, who is from India and the son of a zookeeper, but most importantly very spiritual.  The beginning of the story chronicles his journey of belief in not only his native Hinduism (though his family wasn't especially religious), Christianity, and Islam.  In response to political is family leaves for Canada on a Japanese ship, which sinks on its journey.  Pi alone ends up in a life boat with a Bengal tiger, zebra and orangutan floating on the ocean for 227 days and is left with his knowledge of zoology and his spirituality.

At the end of the story, Pi recounts his story to two men from Japan seeking answers as to why the ship sank, who don't want anything to do with the story of survival Pi is sharing with them.  Pi then says that he  will tell them an alternate story, in which he substitutes people in for the other animals, like a cook and his mother.  The reader is left to ponder which story is the real story--and in turn if Pi's survival story becomes less meaningful when and if metaphors and substituted for the truth.  This then leads the reader to ponder the nature of truth and faith and story, which is one of the most interesting things I've been asked to think about in a long time and left me wishing, as always, that I had a diverse literature class to discuss it all.

No matter what I think about the ending of the story, though, or Pi's personal theology, I did find that there were a number of moments that spoke into spirituality in a significant way.  When he is speaking with the Japanese men who don't believe him, he says: "If you struggle at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?  Love is hard to believe, ask any lover.  Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist.  God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?" (page 297).  My mind has been consumed lately with the concept of belief--and I have found myself missing the wonder that often accompanies belief in things beyond sight and frustrated at how difficult belief can be.  Pi, earlier in the book, spoke into this concept.

"Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably. 

I pause. What of God's silence? I think it over.  I add: 

An intellect confounded yet trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose," (page 63).

This is the condensed version of what I took away from it.  First, I had to look up the word ineluctable.  I'm not ashamed.  Ha. According to the Oxford English dictionary, it means "unable to be resisted or avoided; inescapable."  This makes so much sense to me, because as much as I try to hide from the confusing, unexplainable parts of having faith in something I can't see, it continues to haunt me.  The divine, to me, is indeed ineluctable.  In the book Pi is troubled by God's silence, but he lives in the confounded, rather than hiding from it because of its nature.  This kind of trust is really beautiful to me and reminds me that I don't have to have all of the answers I want right now.  I can live confounded alongside of my belief, too, that "the founding principle of existence is what we call love." 

You should read this now.

I randomly revisited David Foster Wallace's commencement speech for Kenyon College that he gave in 2005.  It is the best text I have read in a long time and at the same time heartbreaking, knowing that he died three years later.   You might click on the link and think that it's too long, or think that it requires too much mental gymnastics for a Friday afternoon, but I don't think you'll be disappointed.

For those who have been wrecked that they weren't called to Hogwarts or let into Narnia. Or, for existential nerds.

(Note: This post quotes heavily from the book.  It was the only way I could process through it. And it's rather long. I have some opinions about the narrative being so inner-thought heavy that the reader doesn't have to infer, but those are neither here nor there for the purposes of this post.)

Fillory had yet to give Quentin the surcease from unhappiness he was counting on, and he was damned if he was leaving before he got what he wanted.  Relief was out there, he knew it, he just needed to get deeper in...He had to jump the tracks, get out of his Earth-story, which wasn't going so well, and into the Fillory-story, where the upside was infinitely higher (304).

The Magicians by Lev Grossman is a coming of age story that begins when Quentin Coldwater, brilliant and bored, is a senior in high school in Brooklyn.  He has never left behind his Fillory books--a series Grossman made up, very similar to Narnia, and deeply believes without irony that if only he could find his way into a land like Fillory that life would make sense.  "He'd spent too long being disappointed by the world--he'd spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn't the only world, and coping with the evidence that it in fact was, " (37).  His existence is defined by his longing for Fillory and all that it represents: wholeness, beauty, peace, fulfillment, adventure.  One day, though, Quentin unexpectedly finds himself walking through a garden and onto the campus of Brakebills, a college in the Hudson River Valley for magical training, and not visible to the non magical eye.  

When Quentin arrives at this school that does indeed exist on Earth and not in Fillory, a professor tells him: "Most people are blind to magic.  They move through a blank and empty world.  They're bored with their lives, and there's nothing they can do about it.  They're eaten alive by longing, and they're dead before they're alive (88).  For Quentin, this makes sense, because they haven't been able to step through to the magic.  The twist of expectation here, though, is that Quentin's experiences with the magical realm are disappointing, and he finds himself struggling with the same kinds of things: "This was the kind of disaster Quentin thought he'd left behind the day he walked into that garden in Brooklyn.  Things like this didn't happen in Fillory: there was conflict, and even violence, but it was always heroic and ennobling, and anybody really good and important who bought it along way came back to life at the end of the book.  Now there was a rip in the corner of his perfect world, and fear and sadness were pouring in like freezing filthy water through a busted dam," (148).

As it would turn out, one of his magical friends finds that not only does Fillory actually exist (even among the magicians, they see Fillory as a children's story), but he's found a way to get in.  Quentin remained convinced that life would finally become ok: "He was in Fillory. There was no question about it now.  And now that he was here it would finally be all right," (288). And I suppose that this is how it goes for most adventures: the initial thrill and newness of a move, a new job, a new relationship can make one think that life will be different.  And, of course in the book there is a feeling of true adventure for a while, but ultimately Quentin has to face the same existentialism that has plagued him all along: "Why now, when it was actually happening, did the seductions of Fillory feel so crude and unwanted? He thought he left this feeling behind long ago in Brooklyn, or at least at Brakebills.  How far did he have to run? If Fillory failed him he would have nothing left! A wave of frustration and panic surged through him," (311).  

The Magicians could be described as a grown up's Narnia or Harry Potter--it turned the magical into the ordinary and made the concept of fighting evil much more postmodern, and in turn, depressing.  The characters at the end just settle for a different brand of discontent.  There is not one clear foe or one clean answer in which to rest and find peace.  

I don't want to be so jaded or realistic that there isn't room for magic--or at least hope.  Reading Quentin's story, I was surprised how much I related to parts of his mental journey.  At this point in the story, one would think that something would happen to re-instill Quentin's hope in magic, but it takes a turn for pretty stark realism: He should have stayed in Brooklyn, in the real world.  He should have nursed his depression and his grudge against the world from the relative safety of mundane reality...Sure you can live out your dreams, but it'll only turn you into a monster.  Better to stay home and do card tricks in your bedroom instead...The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power.  That was courage: the courage not to live anyone or hope for anything. The funny thing was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered (382-383). 

One of the professors at Brakebills seemed to be describe coming of age: "Magical thinking: that's what Freud called it.  Once we learn otherwise we cease to be children.  The separation of word and thing is the essential fact on which our adult lives are founded," (216).

And yet, C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series, pressed into the longing: "The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing--to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from...Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back." Readers and thinkers have to wonder if there is a space in the world for magic--and could the longing point to something real? Lewis, in his non-fiction writings on his Christian faith, explained that the longing was for Heaven and that life once again became magical for him when he realized that the longing was not in vain, but that it as was made him alive.  Grossman's book seems to be a critique of the Narnia-like longings.  I can't decide if Grossman himself would find Quentin a pathetic character in the hopes he had for magical lands. The bleakness of who Quentin becomes at the near-end of the story suggests that intellectual, passionless realism is the best way to cope with the disappointments of the world.  

And yet. There are some universal truths woven into the story: love, sacrifice, human fallenness and the pain of longing.  

So.

"Once you get lost in these woods, believe me, you stay lost."

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami was recommended to me in the fall by a friend and then subsequently fell onto my "books to read someday" list that grows every time I walk into a bookstore.  I'm currently trying to read my way through the stack of unread books in my apartment, though, so I forgot about it.  Then, another friend finished it, shoved it in my hands and declared that we must talk about it while it was still on her mind. So I read it.  And then I learned that yet another friend had fallen prey to Murakami.  She and I talked about it while driving upstate a few weeks ago and realized that there are so many lingering questions that cannot be answered with just one read.

Kafka on the Shore pulled me in, got me thinking and sort of left me there.  It was the kind of reading experience where you finish a book only to realize you need to turn back to page one and start rereading in order to make sense of it.  That is not to say that I didn't follow the story line, but that once I knew how it ended I realized there were details I had brushed past.  I started doing some research and found that Murakami said in an interview: "Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write".


Set in Japan, the basic plot of the book is of two main characters, a 15 year old boy who has re-named himself Kafka and a sixty-ish man Nakata, whose stories alternate chapters and begin to run closer and closer together.  Kafka has run away from home, fleeing a prophecy his father shared with him.  Nakata, who is somewhat mentally handicapped due to an incident as a child during World War Two, is fleeing a crime he committed, but felt he was led to commit.  Both characters know they are looking for something, but are unable to say exactly what it is and both begin traveling toward the ocean.  


The whole process of reading this story, and the knowledge that I'll need to reread it, has been on my mind lately.  Especially one sentence that I think encapsulates the entire story and this reading experience.  It is from when Kafka  spends time alone at a new friend's cabin deep in the woods.  His friend warns him to always keep the cabin in view while wandering because "Once you get lost in these woods, believe me, you stay lost, " (116).

At once this became a metaphor for my experience reading this story.  Murakami has put together a narrative that is tied together enough where one can discuss substance and meaning, and yet it is loose enough that nothing ever felt definitive.  When my friend and I were talking about it in the car, we kept coming up with more questions and the knowledge that we'd have to go back and reread and re-discuss, reread and re-discuss.  Obviously, we were left longing for our college literature classes and enough free time to nerd out and follow up with all this thinking.

I've also done a lot of thinking about how there can be mental places that feel like those woods where one can stay lost.  The sense of being lost isn't necessarily bad or good, but rather frustrating and interesting at the same time.  The existential questions that plague me seem to be telling me that no matter how much I try to read the world around me, there may not be a definitive answer to my questions.  And maybe what I need to remember is to keep a metaphorical cabin in my eyesight so that I can find my way home.  Interestingly, toward the end of the book Kafka finds himself once again in these woods and intentionally goes much deeper into them without the thought of making it back to the cabin.  This narrative development throws a wrench into my thinking pattern and loops me back to the idea that once you are lost in the woods, you stay lost.

And sometimes it is easier to to dwell lost than to find a way out.

I had another conversation with a friend about changing habits in the context of changing the patterns of poverty that exist.  In the midst of talking about how easy it is for us to point to someone else and say, well, if you changed your spending habits, you wouldn't be in this situation.  But then my friend mentioned that it was easy for us to think like that when we have healthy spending habits, budgeting knowledge and have had a completely different life story.  She compared it to us trying to rid our diets of all sugars, and how much discipline and will power it would take.  Habits of living--much like habits of thinking--are incredibly difficult to break.

And so.  I am left with wondering what it would take to find my way out of my metaphorical woods.