Helpful Words

Because I occasionally still fall prey to the “parents are parents and not actually real people” fallacy, I was surprised when my dad mentioned how sometimes, because of the particulars of your life at a given moment, a book or film can suddenly and profoundly touch you.  I guess I thought this was something that happened only to me, or only to people who frequently read fiction (my dad’s a nonfiction man, primarily).  On further reflection, though, I suspect that this may be a fundamental and universal human experience.

A lot of novels have grabbed me over the years, and for various reasons.  When I read the The Chronicles of Narnia in second grade, for instance, I was just old enough that (having experienced the relentless routine of the school day for a few years) I was incredibly aware of and disgusted with the usual.  Formal education was boring for me pretty much all the way on up through high school, and I think fantasy series–Narnia, Harry Potter, Tamora Pierce’s work, etc.–rushed in to sooth the sting of constrained dulness that was a major feature of my teens and pre-teens. 

 College wasn’t boring anymore, but actually caring (about more than my GPA) made life stressful in new ways.  An accidental reading of Byatt’s Possession while applying to grad school felt, at the time, like the only thing between me and nervous breakdown.  At any other time the book would have been merely interesting and well-written, but at that time it was precisely the passionate case for the pleasure and worthiness of an academic career that I so urgently needed to remind myself that all this worry would be worth it in the end. 

In recent weeks, it hasn’t been books or movies so much as graffiti.  Someone wrote “Try Harder” in black sharpie on the rise of a stair approaching the third floor of Denney Hall.  Every time I see it I feel like it’s speaking directly to me, and I do try harder, at least for awhile.  Another anonymous friend scribbled “you are smart and beautiful” in a toilet stall somewhere on campus; I didn’t feel either of those things the day I found it.  And, one day when the sidewalk along Neil Avenue was freshly poured, someone grabbed a stick and wrote “forget regret” in the wet concrete. 

That person didn’t know that I would run past their defacement of public property on a November morning when I needed to hear what they had to say.  A.S. Byatt didn’t know that my emotional stamina in the fall and winter of 2009-2010 depended on her publishing a literary love story.  That’s what makes the phenomenon so powerful, I think–it reminds us that we’re all human, and more the same than we are different.  People put their words out there without knowing for whom, and because we’re all so similar at the bottom of it all, their words are the perfect shape for the holes in someone’s heart that so desperately need filling.          

ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties

Last night, as I was having trouble falling asleep, I thought about how I have always, for as long as I can remember, had trouble falling asleep.  As a child, however, the unquietness of my mind stemmed from far more fanciful, yet strikingly more fearful subjects.  I was, in general, a bold kid.  I’d touch any bug, perform any daring stunt, tackle any social situation (shyness came along with bad skin and unfortunate fashion decisions in junior high), but I was cripplingly frightened of the shadow-world of possible evil I imagined when alone in the dark.

Ritual kept me safe.  Every night, after my parents read to me and tucked me in, I would say, “I love you I love you, goodnight goodnight” and they would answer with the same redundant phrase, as I had instructed them to do.  You had to say it twice, you see, to make absolutely certain it was heard and understood.  Then they would leave the door open a crack with the hall light on, so a narrow beam of gold fell comfortingly across my bed.  Sometimes, when Daddy was in a silly mood, he would leave the door open a “butt crack,” measuring the width of the opening with his posterior.  I would laugh, but when he had gone I would get up and close it to its normal two inches…he didn’t know (how could he!) that skeletons could creep in through a larger opening.  With the skeletons safely shut out, I only had to worry about the witches in the closet, the mummy in the niche over my closet, and whatever-it-was lurking under my bed.  “Everybody and everything, I love you I love you, goodnight goodnight,” I would whisper out loud, to ensure that the ghoulies, ghosties, and beasties of every sort didn’t feel offended or left-out and creep in to take their revenge.  I pulled the covers up to my chin–to protect my neck from vampires–and lay on my side–to protect my heart from the stabbing blades of “murderers.”  I lay in the dark, frightened, and thought about things that troubled me.  About the witches, skeletons, vampires, mummies, and murderers, yes, but also about nothingness and nonexistence.  Someone must have explained to me what death was around the age of five or six, and the concept of non-being gave me a chilling sense of vertigo.  Actually, it still does.

I no longer lie in bed hearing the creaks of the sleeping house as monstrous footsteps of innumerable nightmares.  Contemplations of what it must feel like not to exist are rarely allowed to trouble my mind.  My worries now, however irrational, are far more likely to come to pass than any of my childhood fears.  And yet, while I still have trouble falling asleep, these “realistic” fears are warm and welcoming compared to the perilous nightmare-world I invented as a child, in which safety was secured by a delicate web of precautions and rituals that, if disturbed even a little, might bring disaster.

A rich imagination is a child’s greatest asset by day, and her darkest curse by night.

Why I Study Old English

In my seventeen years of formal education (counting kindergarten, in which one could argue I learned more valuable information than I did senior year of high school), I have often found occasion to wonder: “why on earth am I bothering to learn this?”  “When will I ever need to know the ins and outs of a semi-permeable cell membrane?”  “Why do they call this the honors program?” and questions of a similar ilk.  But it never occurred to me (until my professor raised the question yesterday) to wonder why I should study Old English.  It seemed obvious; “Ure ealdfaederas spaecon Westseaxna theode thusend geara aer thissum” (our ancestors spoke the West Saxon language a thousand years ago.)  That is, I consider Anglo-Saxon culture and the Old English manuscripts that it produced to be my roots, and everyone should study their roots, right?

Right, only I’m not really English.  Ok, I have a few droplets of English blood on my maternal grandmother’s father’s side, but officially I’m 50% Czech and the remaining percent (minus the drop of English) German.  So I’m northern European, I told myself.  Germanic.  Like the Anglo-Saxons.  Plus, there’s that drop ‘o English…

But that’s not it either.  The extent of my cultural connection to my Czech forefathers is a smattering of Czech words (mostly scatological) that I picked up from my dad and his cousins, and the opportunity to eat kolache at family gatherings.  The German connection is even fainter; we make pfeffernus at Christmas, but that’s about it.  The ties to and traditions of my pre-American ancestors have been essentially absent from my life, leaving a historical-cultural void that I filled with…literature.  I grew up with British history and culture pouring in through my eyes and ears off the pages of my favorite books.  British children’s fiction was the bread-and-butter of my youth–Roald Dahl, Brian Jaques, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and countless others with forgotten names but remembered stories.  I read truckoads of historical fiction, mostly about the middle ages or Queen Elizabeth.  I read about King Arthur and Harry Potter, and when I got a little older I read Bronte and Austen.  Thus, the strongest cultural influence I had as a child (which has continued into adulthood) was British.  Through the literature that I read, I learned and loved the history, mythology, language patterns, and historical culture of Britain far more than I ever did those lands to which I am connected by blood.

And so it seems only natural that I should study the language that is the ancestor of the tongue that connects me to the books I read, and the culture that is the ancestor of each successive period of British culture that I have grown up seeing as my own heritage.  It seems unnatural to say that the Anglo-Saxons aren’t “my people” when I feel more connected to that drop of English blood than to the pints and pints of Czech and German.

Why being an English major makes me behave inappropriately in church

I love my family for many reasons, one of which is that they get my sense of humor.  I had more hearty belly-laughs with them in five days out-of-town for Christmas than I have for probably the entire fall semester (no offense, dear friends…you do make me laugh!).  However, it doesn’t take much at all for my family to set me off.  There’s really no point in sharing most of the anecdotes, though; you had to be there.  However, there was one instance that fellow English nerds might possibly sort-of appreciate.

After declaring myself willing to go to church as long as they “sang lots of songs and didn’t talk too much about Jesus,” I went to mass twice in one weekend.  Now, I’m pretty good at maintaining an appropriately contemplative demeanor at church, but as midnight mass commenced with the “Proclamation of the Birth of Christ” I lost it.  I’m not proud of it–it was completely disrespectful how hard I was laughing–but picture this:

An elderly woman in a maroon choir robe stood at the lectern.  She was built like a brick, a big, square brick with a marble perched on top, connected with four or five wobbling chins in lieu of any apparent neck.  It was Christmas and after all the poor woman couldn’t help her appearance; I would have cut her some slack.  Her voice was an extreme iteration of the old-lady quaver…she could have out-warbled Glinda the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz.  Christmas or not, I probably would have rolled my eyes at my dad and made some sort of snide comment on the walk home.  But it was what she was quavering out of the large mouth in her gray-curled marble of a head that did it:

Proclamation of the Birth of Christ

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December,
unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth
and then formed man and woman in his own image,
several thousand years after the flood,
when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant,
twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah,
thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt,
eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges,
one thousand years from the anointing of David as king;
in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel,
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad,
the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome,
the forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus,
the whole world being at peace,
Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,
desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming,
being conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and nine months having passed since his conception,
was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary.
Today is the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

I was shaking silently by “Ruth and the Judges” and at the word “Olympiad” I turned my audible snort into a cough and buried my fingernails in my wrist as an attempt to master my ill-timed hilarity.  Unfortunately, the proclamation was only half done.  At “nine months having passed since his conception,” with deep red welts in my wrist, I gave up, hid my face behind my hymnal, and laughed long, hard, and (thank goodness) silently.

It was over.  I took some deep breaths, composed my face, and bowed my head meekly.  And then I started to think, like I do, about diagramming sentences, specifically, the 180 word sentence of the proclamation (which, as you no doubt noticed, contains only two sentences).  The core of the sentence, which took approximately three minutes for the venerable chorister to warble, is “Jesus Christ was born” (which is essentially covered in the title…).  Having so recently exercised my laughing muscles, the thought of this sentence diagram was enough to send my face back into my hymnal during the entirely un-comical first reading.  Oops.

Had the wrathful arm of God chosen to smite me for my sacrilegious amusement, I might have re-considered my non-thesim (although, come to think of it, it would probably have been too late).  As it was, I hope the brick-and-marble nightingale didn’t notice anything amiss and that I didn’t seriously compromise the spiritual experience of those around me.  As for me, I had more fun at church than I have since…ever, probably.

Plans

Santa’s not the only one making a list this December.  I’m the sort of person who likes planning things, even if I don’t actually end up doing them.  I make New Year’s resolutions every January, even though some of them are invariably discarded within a few weeks.  I write out schedules under the assumption that it’s better to have a plan and then deviate from it when necessary than to not have a plan at all.  That said, here’s the scheme to get the most out of Winter Break:

8-8:30 Ease self out of warm bed with cozy slippers, hot tea, and the Variety section of the newspaper.

8:30-9:00 Force self to pedal vigorously on the exercise bike, despite the damp nastiness of its basement surroundings, for the purpose of preventing muscle atrophy and creating body heat to combat the inevitable chill of the frugally-heated parental dwelling.

9:00-10:00 Practice basic hygiene rituals, eat breakfast, etc.

10:00-11:00 Review Latin.

11:00-1:00  Research and read for honors project on 21st c. Jane Austen adaptations.

1:00-10:00 Eat lunch.  Have social life.  Help cook and eat dinner and spend time with family.  Read for fun.  Do whatever the heck sounds appealing.

10:00-Sleep  Quiet time (a.k.a more reading time) so as not to incur the wrath of sleeping parents.

Now that it’s written down I actually have to follow it, right?  (and if anyone’s thinking I’m a little compulsive in my desire to schedule my time…you aren’t wrong)  And now, for the most exciting part of the Winter Break Plan: Books I Intend to Read for Fun!

1)Vanity Fair (Thackeray)

2) The Secret Life of Bees (Kidd)

3) A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

4) Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)

5) The Bluest Eye (Morrison)

And if I finish all those in addition to the books I’m reading for my Jane Austen project, I’ll be a superhero.  My copy of Vanity Fair, incidentally, is one of the loveliest soft-covers I own.  It is off-white, simply designed, and filled with thin, smooth paper of incredible density.  Holding it feels like holding a big, heavy chunk of knowledge in your hands.

Home and Family

I have two homes now, one in Woodbury with my parents and one in my Morris apartment with Anne.  It gets a little semantically confusing as I instinctively refer to both of them as “home,” but I figure it’s a small price to pay for reaching a state of being that, four years ago, I considered impossible.  The reason Morris is home to me now is not because I have spent almost four years here–time is immaterial.  Home is where you live with family, and I do that both in Woodbury and in Morris.

Most people have biological family, you know, the people who are obligated to love you.  My biological family is (in my opinion) pretty much the best ever, and I’ve always known I was lucky in that department.  But acquired family is luck on an entirely separate level.  These people are beyond friends–they truly are family–yet they aren’t obligated to love you; they love you by choice.  I think some people go through life largely without these people, and if I were the sort of person who used the word blessed, I would say I am truly blessed to have several in my life.  Just like family, I know they won’t leave me when times get tough, and just like family, where they are is home.

When I was a miserable freshman four Decembers ago, I decorated my half of the dorm room with tinsel and snowflakes and red bows and had never felt so far away from Christmas and from home.  Today I baked cookies and sang  songs and took pictures in front of the Christmas tree with Anne in one of my two fabulous homes.  I’m a rags to riches story, I guess…the lonliest girl in the world to the luckiest in four quick twists of a big, blue-green ball.