Home

Home.

It's Andrew and Ellen, Lauren and Evan, Daniel and Mom. It's nothing too special, but I miss it all the more for that... Because here, where everyone and everything is supposed to be so remarkable, where the sunlight of the outer world limns everything in a light I never wanted to know, where I forget myself everyday in the cool, gray smudges of time that I have felt so clearly, so eagerly but never to the fullest.

Home.

It's within sight. Just a few more days until I see Tennessee's winter, the one I grew up with, the one that rocked me gently through each January night, the rime of frost always waiting patiently each morning for my footstep. Why should it feel so foreign now? I hope not. I hope it feels like I'm me again, like I can read and be at peace and when I'm upset, just get in the car and drive, drive down Kingston pike at 70 miles an hour, past Old Stage where Andrew lives, past Fox Den Country club and the new Kroger, past the school atop the hill, the track where I lay on my belly and listened to Nathan chortle, the China Pearl restaurant where I went for prom that one year, with Lauren and my white wayfarers. I'll drive until i'm out of Farragut, but still in my town, I'll drive through Bearden and Cedar Bluff, all these names of places I wish I had never outgrown. I'll drive to downtown, UTK, where Ellen goes to school, where I raised Arabidopsis in a lab and held signs every November for Buddy's Race for the Cure. I'll climb to the apex of the Sun Sphere and look down at my world, my home....

Home.

It's too small for me now.

Home.

I am going there, soon, but it won't be for long. I'll eat at Wild Wings and Ellen's house and see all the kids I knew so well just a few months ago. But I won't be real, anymore I don't think. I've become one of the haughty graduated Chinese school kids, the kids like Sarah and Beth and Charles that I idolized growing up. I'll go to the Chinese parties with mom and dad, wearing the clothes I pick out of thrift stores and pocket discreetly at Urban. The younger kids will look at me and wonder how Harvard is. They'll wonder what it would be like to do that, to fulfill that particular dream. It sounds conceited, but I know they respect me. I embody what their parents have crafted their lives to be about. And I'll never tell them this but it's false, all of this, this amorphous thing that somehow became my life. I'll never tell them that a dream is only beautiful when it's untenable, that Harvard sounds so much better when it's just in your head rather than actually in your life.

Home.

It will come and save me from here, this place that I sorta, kinda want to love.

Home.

I'll breathe you in. You never really did play fair.

Reading Period Blues

I'm kinda freaking out. The pressure is on. Two finals, one week, and I've hardly even started thinking about them... 

But then again I'm not unused to this feeling, this hanging, grimly turning panic. I've faced it down before, and always, unfailingly, there's that voice in the back of my head reassuring me that it's going to be okay, that all my procrastination will have no lasting harm, that the tests will come and go and I will emerge with solid grades and an intact pride. 

Yet that was then, before Harvard, before all the liquor and all the late nights (I went to sleep at five in Grant's room last night), and stored-value T tickets (to Arlington and Park Street and Boylston). That was before I let myself get swept away by Boston and Cambridge and the life that I knew I wanted but now am not sure I am meant for. Today I shopped. Yesterday I wrote expos and cooked. Tomorrow I'll do whatever it takes to forget tonight I'm sure. And in the end, I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that it'll be okay.

God Reading period is stressful. The unstructured time for "study" kinda just kills me. 

Bring it on finals. I'm bleary eyed but awake, swathed in chunky knit scarves and over-sized suiting, eating pull-and-peel twizzlers, and always thinking of home.

Spacing Out

It's been awhile since I've posted.I've been busy I guess, distracted with classes and midterms and myriad little ventures.

As this last month in Boston stretches on into eternity, I find myself intensely, powerfully homesick. I see my friends talking to each other about Thanksgiving reunions... I read their facebook statuses and peruse the homecoming pictures they post. In Tennessee it's balmy and autumnal. The leaves are freshly turned and the air still has that latent summery high. I'm told by my Bostonian roommate that this is warm for Cambridge in November, an idea that has terrified me into buying long underwear and cold-weather boots and all sorts of large, voluminous layers.

As ideas for the two final papers I'm working on (Expos and Memoirs) stew fitfully in my head, I feel the constant need to write down what I'm feeling and sensing. I have so many ideas that I feel the need to articulate. The process of getting to that point, where my words and my thoughts meld effortlessly and with finality is what's got me down. I just need a moment to breathe, to forget these deadlines and put my life into perspective.

I'm counting down the days till I return home to my friends and my bed. I'm counting by tests (three to go), papers (three half written) and weekends (four I believe?).

How hath time flung itself by with such haste?

Journal Prompt #6

When I think of Italy, I always think of Under A Tuscan Sun--not the book, the movie. I remember watching it on HBO when my family first got cable. It was a lazy summer Sunday; my parents were out of the house, and I didn't feel up to doing anything really besides schlepping around watching trashy reality T.V. shows and sickly-sweet romantic comedies.

In that particular depiction of Italy, the nation, and Tuscany especially, is almost a supporting member of the cast, reintroducing the main character to romance, elegance, and independence, concepts she had lost touch with in her middle-age.  The book the movie is based on is a memoir of its author, Frances Mayes, and I remember feeling that the movie too had a remarkably memoir-like quality with its reflective inner monologues and idealized little moments.

In a way, Tea with Mussolini is similar to Under a Tuscan Sun in that both are based on memoirs and both draw heavily upon the landscape and atmosphere of northern Italy. Continuing along these lines, one could also postulate that both Diane Lane's character in Under a Tuscan Sun and Zefferelli's Luca in Tea with Mussolini are strangers within Italy--the former because she is a foreign tourist who decides on a whim to make Tuscany her new home and the latter because he is born on the outskirts of Italian society and raised amidst an enclave of aged British dowagers in Florence. This sense of otherness forms a dynamic tension that underlies that central themes of redemption and self-discovery that propel both films.

Since both these works are also loosely based on the actual life events of two individuals, it is also interesting to think about how they were realized both in the context of the time frame in which they were conceived and in the subjective story-telling of Zefferelli and Mayes respectively. In other words, how do these two films actually re-imagine rather than simply regurgitate the lives they are based on. In the case of Tea with Mussolini, the life of Luca (aka Zefferelli) is given a certain theatricality and grandeur that is not wholly couched in truth. Yes, Zefferelli certainly did have a childhood of unique circumstances, but several of the events and characters within the movie can be seen as loose interpretations of real-life individuals or even fabrications on the part of Zefferelli intended to help the movie convey larger themes about life, war and disillusionment. Characters such as Georgie and Ester and Lady Hester are added to add a dramatic flavor to the film that would have been lacking if the movie had focused more closely on Zefferelli's actual life. This manufacturing of life history obviously reflects Zefferelli's own ideas on the memoir-process. As a director, Zeffereli's talents lie in showcasing the flashy and indelible, and this is a philosophy that he applies liberally to his own life.... some might say with even more ardor than in more impersonal works.

Besides drawing heavily upon Zeffereli's successes as a showman and raconteur, the film also reflects the time in which it was conceived. Filmed in the late 90's between the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the September 11th terrorist attack, Tea with Mussolini resonates with the general optimism and new-found openness of the time. The movie's liberalized content and bevy of brash, worldly characters also correlates with the sentiments of the time period. Zefferelli may be telling his life story in Tea with Mussolini, but he can't help but color the story with his own directorial background and the overarching feelings of the time.

Journal Prompt #5

Besides a brief and terrible dalliance with the piano when I was younger, I've only ever been a listener of music --and not a particularly good one at that. I've been told on numerous occasions that I am "the most tone deaf person I know." It's nothing I'm embarrassed of; I came to the conclusion long ago that music was not my forte and never would be just like art or physical activity doesn't gel with some people.

That is not to say that I don't like music. Like most people, I enjoy music. When I run, I listen to poppy 90's hits and angry chick rock; Most Friday nights you can find me dancing somewhere or another to the current club mixes and Top 40 hits: Katy Perry and Akon and Cascada. If you want to make me feel  wistful for my all but lost childhood just hum to me any song from Aladdin or Mulan and I guarantee I'll join you enthusiastically in song, albeit in an off key manner.

Music is inescapable in our daily lives. Only when I sleep can I arguably say that music is truly silenced. And who knows, perhaps records spin on repeat in my slumbering mind unbeknownst to me. This is a ubiquity that I am sadly reminded of every time I am in my room attempting to study, only to have my focus broken by the Hebrew hymns my Jewish roommate loves to play. So I guess my relationship with music is that I find it unapproachable in the sense that its curlicue notes and esoteric motifs are utterly beyond my ken, and yet by virtue of its omnipresence in my life, it's an alien entity I've learned to coexist with.

If I were asked to articulate just how exactly music permeates my life, I think I would refer mostly to its strange properties of memory. Songs can be repositories or at least aids to a person's memory. Many of my memories concerning family road trips I took when I was younger have snippets of songs playing in the backdrop. When I listen to Copeland's cover of "Every Breath You Take" by the police, the visceral tremor of each lyric, how the phrase "oh can't you see, that you belong to me..." draws out in haunting fermata in my mind, plays back to me a memory slide show of the Grand Tetons all snow capped and jagged rising up out of the Wyoming flatness. My impression of that moment, the desolation I perceived from the car window as the world slid by so smoothly outside blends into my feelings about the song. They exist intertwined in my consciousness and I don't think I could nor want to dissociate the two. The music enriches my memory and vice versa, and now whenever I think about great swaths of gray plain or the crenelated spine of the Rockies, I think also about Copeland and the Police and how it felt to be in a car, listening to my brother's Ipod nano as he snored in the seat beside me.

Experiences like this pepper any life. There's one snippet of "Kids" by MGMT that I will always associate with the laundry room raves my friends and I would have the summer I spent at Governor's School in the sun baked ghost town of Martin, West Tennessee. Play "Daylight" by Matt and Kim for me and not only will I smile, but my eyes will get that detached, glassy look and you know that I will be thinking of Andrew, and how we would drive around town aimlessly to that song on nights we didn't feel like doing homework, just talking about school and life. Then there's "Recessional" by Vienna Teng, which I hear sidling through my mind every time I see snow because it was the song I was listening to that time I was walking Airik in the woods near my house and before I knew it, the first and only snow of that year was falling in soft white waves onto my face.

The thing is, most of these memories I feel like are more about the images and the tactile sensations then the music. "Every Breath You Take" is an important addendum to my memory of that car drive from Colorado to Yellowstone, but what I remember even more vividly is the visual impact of the Mountains materializing in the distance and the cool compress of glass against my forehead as I stared at their approach, utterly transfixed. So in a way, music seems to be only tangentially related to my memories; the soundtrack of my life has no inherent value of its own beyond the fact that it allows me to conjure up my memory of a moment more readily.

If there's one memory, or perhaps almost-memory, of mine in which music is an integral part of the recollection rather than just a framing device, it would be my memory of an event that occurred in my life on Friday the 13th my freshman year of high school. Sometimes a song has such eerie symbolism within a memory that it's hard to dismiss as a instance of chance. The song in question here is "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol and the instance I'm remembering is a car crash that nearly took my life. My memory of the crash itself is spotty at best, my mind has blocked out much of what happened. I remember no crunching metal or the flash of car lights. I can't envision in my head the moment of impact, the instance where my face slammed into the head rest in front of me, the bloody intrusion of my teeth into my lower nasal cavity. These things all happened, and yet I don't remember how or when. What I do remember with almost vicious clarity is the sound of the radio playing right before Jesse's mom slammed on the brakes. I was singing along, my mouth luxuriantly open, eyes half-closed.

"If I lay here... If I just lay here. Would you lie with me and just forget the world."

And then nothing. 

Left Behind

I wish now that I had brought my journals with me to college. There's seven plus years of my life stored away in those cheaply bound, messily smudged pages, seven years that I was willing to leave behind back in August when I began to pack for Harvard. I packed in in spurts essentially: loading and unloading my two suitcases with clothes and pictures and random trinkets, letting myself get more and more flustered as I tried to decide what parts of my Tennessee life were necessary to bring with me to the far-off northern mecca that was Boston.

I ended up making a lot of poor packing choices, bringing hot sauce and plates but no utensils, stuffing the sides of my suitcases with colorful socks but neglecting to bring any long underwear... my thought processes were jumbled, I wasn't quite there in the packing process I guess, lost as I was in the last sweet days of summer. When it came time to decide whether I wanted to bring all my journals with me I decided against it. I reasoned that I was making this grand leap forward in my life and education, and to bring my journals was to dwell foolishly in the past. I would be strong and unsentimental and just leave them behind. It was a moment of closure in a way, physical proof of the benchmark I wanted to cleave into my life at this time.

But now.... ten weeks into my Harvard experience, I feel slightly foolish. I've come to realize that there's a difference between moving on and giving up your past. The two actions aren't mutually exclusive. Indeed, as we've been discussing in class, manifestations of our past color our present and future whether we wish them too or not; memory and self are inextricably tied. I can leave my journals behind, but memory still shadows my thoughts and actions, patiently, assiduously.

What I left behind at home then is a physical evocation of my nostalgia. My journals serve as tool to organize years and years of built up sensation; in a sense, they bring a tenuous order to my unruly thoughts as they progress through time, imposing words and enumerations and dates upon the fractal images that haunt my mind. There's a dynamic tension there as well, a sense of time (the dates, the seasonal shifts in tone, the disconnected plot of mundane moments) that is beautiful to me, reminding me that this is where I come from, that my perception lies at the crux of all these movable pieces of time and that my memory is what drives this narrative forward.

I miss the sensation of leafing through an old journal, the sense of wonder you get when you read something you penned so long ago you feel detached from the voice behind those words, and then you know that the intervening time has changed you, that each moment in between has knocked you slightly off course, led you down a thousand side paths and brought you here, where the present feels so real and the past like a sepia-toned dream.

I miss that tactility I guess, how I could use old entries as a jumping-off point for my nostalgic reflections, how when I read my thoughts from say March 25th 2007 I could almost still remember the feeling of writing those words, what emotions were thronging the spaces of my mind, my physical condition, the state of my spirit--all these things that I otherwise probably would've lost.

Without my journals, I feel like I'm just groping in the dark.

Dear myself, 54 years older

By the time my fiftieth Harvard Reunion rolls around I'll be 72. I'll be grumpy, arthritic and most likely senile. I'll be old, actually really really old. Isn't that a revelation?

What will half a century of life have meant to me? I can't really imagine myself as old. I can't imagine myself without youthful acne and a head full of hair. It's outside of my ken, beyond the expansive scope of my imagination.

So instead of speculating on what old me would want to know about young me (because by then the two will be distant cousins, hazy in each others minds) I will focus my energies on the now, on the daily passage of life and all the things I want to salvage, to store away indefinitely in some vault up in the sky so that they will never fade.

If I were given a time capsule and told to fill it with my freshman year first semester I'd fill it up with pictures and trinkets and spent charlie cards to Wonderland and Davis Square. There would be meal receipts from the Kong (crumpled and smeared with duck sauce), retail receipts from Urban Outfitters and H&M (guiltily stowed in my wallet), a Harvard ID lost in Rhode Island, Chinese language dialogues and empty solo cups. There would be a hand full of dessicated leaves, their color long faded away, reminders of an autumn long passed. There would be squash from Annenberg and bowlfuls of cereal, lived in gray sweats and a pair of dirt caked hiking boots. There would be pictures of me jumping off the foot bridge into the Charles and others of me on my precarious balcony overlooking the yard. There would be books stacked on top of books and a sheaf of paper scrawled in two different languages.

My time capsule would most likely be unintelligible to you or Lynelle or Michael or anyone else I've come to know over these past few months. We may share this campus, this view of autumn in Boston; our experiences may even intersect tentatively at times, crossing paths like polite strangers on the T, a nod of acknowledgment, a conspiratory grin telegraphed among friends, but the narration of our experiences is categorically different. And the memories that protrude most in our minds are certainly all not one in the same. But there is a continuity there. I know that there are people here who have shared my life just as I have shared theirs. Though our exact memories of this fall may diverge, we share a basis of sorts, a collective memory that enlivens our conversations and makes us feel safe, included, known.

How this will all translate into my motley compilation of keepsakes is unknown.

In this treasure trove of memories I could perhaps discern some trace of the feckless youth I maybe once was. In retrospect I might smile with chagrin, or humor, or with a bitter note of sadness. Or I may furrow my brow wonderingly and marvel at how very much the mind lets slip as the years progress.

Night Jaunts

It's blurring. In my head, all these walking dreams, these moments of vulnerability in which the outside world seeps in and I hesitate on the threshold of something new.

There's so much I should be working on, so many memories to archive, faces to connect with names and half-remembered scenes, facebook wall posts I've left un-liked, erstwhile songs spewing forth from my mouth in the deep cold of night.

Last night was a good night, a wondrous, spinning affair.

But now it's Saturday and reality is bustling all about me.

Lamont. Writing. Homework.

I'll take nocturnal memories over sunlit ones anytime.

Pictures in a Gallery

There's an image crowding out the blackness on my computer's desktop. It was taken this summer in Tennessee, on a floating dock at sunset. In it, the arcing silhouette of a boy is caught in mid-flight as he dives off the dock into the lake water below. His body is all long lines and sun-burnished skin, arms stretching outwards in imprecation to meet the reflection of the sun where it lies, a molten procession of ripples in the silken lake water. The moment sits poised beautifully between land and water, day and night; it's laced with the potent expectation of impact, the clarifying moment when the boy's body hits the water and life goes on the way it always has, its picturesqueness dissipated as quickly as it formed.

Life in its sobering reality never really lives up to photographs like this. The lake water is probably heavy with silt, and the boy's dive was probably a fluke, a spasm of athletic prowess produced by merit of a hundred graceless swan dives. But it doesn't matter, the picture stands as proof, and every time I look at it a vivid recollection of summer blazes to life in my head. Because the boy in the picture is me. That is me diving off a friend's dock into a lake thirty minutes from my house. That is my summer's penultimate sunset, gliding serenely to its mooring in the west. And that is my memory, floating just below the present in my mind, caught in mid-motion, poised just so for the camera.

I've been discussing ideas about how memory becomes fixed in the mind, how it drifts in and out of one's life at the oddest intervals. I'm drawn to this idea about how the mind connects visually and spatially to memory, how our memories can be stored, ghostly but intense, like pictures hanging in a gallery (however cliched that metaphor may seem). Reflecting on my life is like sifting through a deconstructed photo album, filled with pictures that talk and smell and cavort wonderfully through dappled sunlight and along dusty, Southern paths. It's bracing to look back on, and I spend a lot of time perfecting my vision, improving the way I meet and know my past selves.

The rub herein is that it's never quite full, this gallery of mine. There's blankness interspersed throughout, hazy areas where gray matter writhes with discontent. And then there are new canvases being hung up each day, new exhibitions that change the layout, the lighting, the panorama of my gallery. My gallery is conceived in a pastiche of regional and cultural influences, the architecture of Chinese tenements and Gothic Cathedrals, bluesy, folksy tunes and the colors of New England in fall. All of this is merely context though, the staging for each vision of my past.

Today was quite possibly the most idyllic day yet that I've encountered here at Harvard. It was sunny and warm again after a few weeks of steadily falling temperatures but windy, so you still know it's fall. Walking across the old yard, I was caught in a yellow storm of leaves. Everything was in motion. Multi-hued rain fell from the sky and whirling dervishes danced like impetuous children along the sidewalks. The moment felt surreal, a picture for a postcard maybe--"Come visit Harvard in Fall!" I paused for a second as I walked, not wanting to look like a awe struck tourist but not wishing to relinquish the wonder of the moment either. Later, after lunch, I laid out by the fountain near the Center for European Studies, let my hand fall indolently into the clear, cold water, and thought about how I would remember this moment, how and why I would paint this picture.

It'll hang one day I think, off in a corner of the gallery with a skein of dust motes obscuring its incandescent, vermilion glow.

The Memories I hold

As I've been thinking quite belatedly about my final paper (is it really almost November?????), my musings keep on coming back to a few key ideas. What's mostly been on my mind is the mechanism of memory, i.e. why do we remember in a certain way? How are our memories organized and themed in our heads? This notion I have in mind of the otherworldly properties of memory, how it exists both within and apart from our lives... how memories can see to follow a pattern, a narrative arc, as if we are creating moving pictures of our past in the present.

Obviously there's a lot of stuff, idiosyncratic stuff, stuff that may or may not have any valid point, all jumbled up in my head, but I'm trying to sift through the madness, distill something concise and cogent out of all these incandescent ideas. So I think I will focus on the various ways in which memory is grounded in our lives, how we relate to those memories and the implications therein. Using the text of Never Let Me Go, I want to analyze how the memories of Kathy H., Ruth, and Tommy are fixed to their lives, what common threads seem to tie them together and how this relates to memory in general.

I will divide the paper into sections. The first will expound on the variety of ways that we engage in dialogue with our memories. For instance, MFK Fisher connects to her memories through tastes and the memory of shared meals in exotic locales. Then there is Kingston, who seems instead to connect her memories with stories and myths, the folklore that her life has been steeped in. There's Hemingway who uses the physical location of Paris as a stimulus for his recollections and Gorochova who seems to emphasize certain powerful characters (her mother, her teachers, young lovers) with periods in her memory.

Next, I will give orienting information about Never Let Me Go just for background.

Where Never Let Me Go is concerned, I think that Kathy relates her memories to physical places (Hailsham, the Cottages, Norfolk, etc.), possessions (the titular tape, art in the gallery, items at the sales and exchanges) and of course the complex relationships amongst friends--Tommy, Ruth, and her. I want to explore these three facets of her memory and relate it to my own life, perhaps also speculating about why she remembers along these lines. I will also incorporate the bulk of any textual evidence I want to employ in these sections.... such as excerpts from Kathy's contemplations of Hailsham, how she would drive aimless about the countryside, always unconsciously searching for Hailsham (her memories? the people she's lost? her youth?).

In the last section(s) I want to make some broad, analytical statements about memory and how we relate to our pasts. I'll also make the subclaim here that memory is inherently tied to humanity and that without memory we lose much of what makes us sentient. Obvious support for this claim is how the memories of Kathy and Tommy and Ruth--their intense bond and sense of a collective past--shows that they are human within the book.

Journal Prompt #4

As I read Gastronomical Me this weekend, with its visions of France and ocean-faring life and the grossly indulgent world of true gourmets, I felt oddly deprived, like so much of my life has been wasted eating the simple, coarse fare I had always favored and loved.

Where I'm from, there are no restaurants where one can sit and daintily sup on foie gras and escargot while draining, with unabashed ease, glass after glass of fine, aged wine imported from some fragrant vale in Burgundy or Tuscany, and even if there were, I doubt I would have either the resources or palate to frequent such an establishment. No, I may be many things... but a food snob I am not!

Rich, brown sauces, oysters so fresh "the flanges retract at your breath" and ripe, old cheeses--these things have no place in my culinary memory. My fondest memories of food are often of the simplest sort, cheaply bought and devoured without perfumed airs or persnickety waiters. The restaurants I love are not elegant or quaint in any sense. Oftentimes they are mass-market, chain-restaurant affairs that serve unremarkable foods whose ingredients could be found at any local supermarket in America's suburban wasteland. This is not to say that I don't love good food. I eat ravenously, passionately, with uncouth bouts of laughter and vulgar, sloppy noises. I eat food for the tastes I love and the company I keep: the nutty spice of Pud Thai from the stir fry joint near my school, the guilty joy of McDonalds fries shared at 2:00 AM amongst close friends, the disconcerting delight of fried oreos at the state fair.

Food is about sharing stories and companionable silences. It should not be pretentious. There's no delicacy about the digestive process in my mind. It may be a painstakingly prepared, fabulously seasoned filet mignon or a Burger King whopper and regardless of price or relative enjoyment it all ends up as acidic chime gushing through ones intestinal canals. Of course there are times when a classy dinner is nice. I can remember fondly 12 course meals I've had in Chinese cities with college friends of my parents where the waiters dressed smartly in snappy black vests and the silverware gleamed impressively against the immaculate white tablecloth. Yet what I remember of these meals has nothing to do with the expensiveness of my surroundings or the precious quality of the foods I ate. Instead my mind is caught up int he gaiety of the moment, of my mom's thinly lined face flushed with happiness, the rustling coos of her friends, the way my tongue was always wagging, never silent, Chinese and English flowing as one from the aperture of my lips. I remember Hot Pots we dined at in Chengdu with just as much clarity: how the air smelled of cigarette smoke and herbal tea, how my grandfather had sniffed dismissively as he counted out change to pay for my meal, refusing the money my mother had given me with express orders that I use it. I remember the fiery cauldron before us, the red swirling oils at its heart, the pale, shivering worms and scallops and bok choy we slid into the bubbling pot--how I left with my stomach contentedly full and a flaming numbness blossoming in my mouth.

When I think of all the meals I've had, alone and with company, in 18 years of life the thoughts and tastes all seem to blur together. There's a continuity to it all. Breakfast, lunch, dinner--the procession of these daily benchmarks helps mark the passage of my life. Tastes blaze heady and unforgettable on my memory, and I struggle to describe it in words, my love of food, the sweetness I feel when I think of the Panera Bread near my house where Lauren and I met every Wednesday for slightly singed bagels and warm coffee. I think of all these ordinary moments, these perfectly normal meals I've had, the random snacks I unerringly will buy when I walk into a gas station or the velvety smooth chocolates my mom will randomly buy on a whim from the school-boy vendors with their glossy corporate catalogs and winning smiles.

And never really do I feel the need to question the unhealthy, oily goop I will at times shovel into my mouth. I have no patience for delicacies and ornate foods. I have no knowledge of culinary mystique or favorable wines, and frankly, I don't particularly feel the worse for it.

Food is food.

Woodland folk

I'm always forgetting things, trifling things, things that are hardly worth remembering anyways--like phone numbers and names and homework assignments. I forget my keys a lot, my wallet and ID even more. It's kind of a problem, but trying to coach my memory would be a waste of time I feel. Absentmindedness becomes me in a way. It leads me to strange adventures and stranger acquaintances. Forgetfulness is useful in that sense. It takes you out of the realm of calm and cool reason, making sure my days are never straightforward, never truly boring.

Ironically enough, I have fond memories of forgetting things. There was the time I forgot to turn in my permission slip for a field trip to some hokey corn maze in the fifth grade. My teacher had handed it out with the succinct instructions that we bring it back in exactly a week, anointed with the signature of a parent and/or guardian. A week flew by as they tend to do in the microscopic world of prepubescent boys, and the permission slip crumpled into a progressively smaller lump at the bottom of my backpack, dismissed from my mind the moment Mrs. Radar stopped talking about it and moved on to critiquing our cursive writing or reprimanding poor Brenton for being a brat (which he most thoroughly was). And when the time came to turn it in, I was left to shuffle awkwardly from foot to foot before Mrs. Radar's desk, mumbling false excuses about how my mother was away on business and dad hardly knew English (This was when I came to the conclusion that when in doubt, always forge).

Needless to say, my excuses fell on deaf ears, and the following week, as the rest of my class filed merrily off to the Corn Maze, I was left alone with Mrs. Jardet, the corpulent intern, who I had always hated because she never smelled of anything besides flowers and licorice. We were studying American Geography at the time and Mrs. Radar had left me with a pile of maps to color with marker, labeling the major cities, rivers, and regions. After I was done Mrs. Jardet, who wasn't very much use to anyone, simply told me to sit and read or nap if I felt like it. I told her I had already finished my book (Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers). I said I wasn't tired and needed to use the bathroom.

Out I went, into the cavernous hallways of the elementary school, which seemed so small to me years later when I returned, now a high school senior, to pick up my sister. I skipped straight by the bathroom and out the glassy double doors to the bus circle where kindergartners in pastel puffer coats lined up in the autumnal chill, awaiting simpering mom's who wore velour track suits and drove souped up minivans. Alone, and intense with the thrill of my illicit outing, I cavorted to the play ground, dashing by the rusting swing set and the tubular, colorful slides that spiraled downwards with their metal studs that shocked your hand as you slid by, the static electricity flaring blue in the semidarkness. Bored with the playground, I ventured farther away from the school building, which sat dourly watching me--a parent observing its prodigal son. I ran past the tether ball court and the four square plot, past the dried up gulch where dirty water burbled after it rained, past the mobile flat-top classrooms where the special education kids had class in the morning and where my after school art program met every Tuesday and Thursday, until finally I came to the edge of the woods behind my school. Today I know that those woods aren't really woods. It's really just a lone stand of trees dividing the school from Grisby Chapel Road.

But on that day in late October the woods seemed very large to my ten year old self, large but not ominous. I was at the age where childish imaginings were still possible... the real world hadn't quite seeped into my consciousness yet; I could still dream that fey, elven folk with flaxen hair and piercing eyes lived around each hillside. I could still gaze into the swift waters of the creek by the library and see ripple creatures who changed in the light: little navy fish trying to get upstream.

I ran by the edge of the woods, stopping at times to observe a bird flying overhead or an unusual patch of chitinous fuzz on a fallen log. The wind tugged insistently at my hair and when I looked up at last I saw a slowly falling bounty of leaves, dessicated and brown, drifting just out of sight, cloaked in pure white light.

As I run

Sometimes being here on this campus can be suffocating. I find myself treading the same paths every day, going from Matthews, to Annenberg, to the Science Center, to Lamont, back to the Science Center, to Widener... Harvard's beautiful. It's true (though it took me awhile to see it), and there are days I'll be gazing out at the Yard from my fourth floor window and everything just feels so right. But then there are other days when the wind penetrates all the layers of wool and synthetic fiber I swath myself in, days when I walk with my eyes trained on the ground before me, navigating around puddles and packs of Asian tourists. Back home I could jump in my car when I felt the urge and just go somewhere new, somewhere undiscovered that I could harbor in my mind as my own. Here, there's less freedom to do that. I'm tethered to my daily schedule and the constraints of this campus. I went out into the great wide world, intending to escape Tennessee and smallness and the insignificance of suburban life, and here I am, marooned on a grandly appointed island in a world I wish were smaller.

So I go on runs just like I would do back home. I run at night when the air is chilly and every darkened thoroughfare feels like an invitation, a mystery to be resolved. As I run, I feel my world broadening, its edges peeling back like tin foil sloughing off good, dark chocolate. I run by places I've never been, letting my feet remember the texture of the pavement, the give of the grass, and as I run these new places establish themselves in my geographic memory. They become a part of my tiny little world, brought finally into the light. When next I run, I may return along that way again, letting the places gain familiarity in my mind. Eventually, I've made myself a route, and my body knows without direction where to go.

When I run the motion itself is uninhibited, effortless. I've been a runner for as long as I can remember. I like how running turns the world into a blur, how it heightens the senses... slows down time. My mind always drifts off when I run. I think about my day, what I ate, who I talked with. I think about all sorts of random things that I can't remember later. It's like a dream in that sense, airy and nebulous and infuriatingly brief. When I run, I loosen the underpinnings of memory, and what spills forth, I leave well enough alone. Eight years of running have taught me by now to never stop. Don't run (or remember) in circles. Don't turn back  unless you have too.

Journal Prompt #3

For as long as I can remember, my family has had no stories--at least not the kind with a definite beginning, climax, or conclusion. We operate instead on a concept of less is more, telling just enough to pique interest, to establish a context, but allowing the listener to fill in the details. This way no one can be disappointed, disillusioned. We invent out own stories for each others lives.

My parents' lives are mysteries even to themselves it seems. Sometimes I'll catch mom looking at old photos of China. She'll spread them out on the kitchen table in a fan-like configuration, a spray of faces in variegated grays and blacks. Black hair. Black Eyes. My mom and her two brothers posed in cascading order of height in a Chengdu garden, unsmiling, but happiness beaming from their eyes. There are photos of her and her college classmates. In them my mother is young, fresh-faced, dressed in demure knee-length skirts and filmy blouses, the kind of girl I'd probably be friends with today. In all the old pictures her hair is either braided in a long plait down her back or in girlish pig tails brushing her shoulders. She showed me a picture of an old boyfriend of hers once. He was swarthy and handsome with hard, attenuated features--nothing like the softness of my dad. It was hard to imagine my mom as the kind of girl who would date that kind of guy. Had she walked hand in hand with him in between class? Did they go on dates? Had her parents approved? These questions had flitted briefly across my mind but I let them lie fallow their, burgeoning on the thickness of my tongue, unsaid and irksome.

I wish sometimes that we had learned to talk, mother and I. Like Maxine Hong Kingston, I have things I'd like to say to her, accusations, confessions... the kinds of things I imagine other boys may say to their moms like I love you, I miss you, I'm sorry. I have questions I want to ask, about China, dad, her family (my family). But instead we communicate in meaningful silences. We call each other with requests and petty problems, dancing around the questions we'd never ask each other. How are you? Are you scared? Alone? Are you in love? Have you met anyone? Our stories are the trivial, the harmless, the desultory.

I've spent so long making up stories in my head. Stories about my life and that of my family. I watch television shows and read books to piece together from them what is happening next door where parents are nosy and the kids trust themselves to speak. And then I look at my house, my family, and imagine a castle of mute minstrels, stories raging unkempt and vicious behind locked doors.

Mothers

Mom is coming tomorrow. It's parents weekend on campus so she (and legions of other Asian mothers from across the country) is flying up to Boston to see her son who she hasn't seen for two months and will not see again until Christmas time when the first snow has fallen over the Smokies and I come back home, spent from my first semester as a college freshman.

She'll bring food with her I'm sure. Food and money that she will slip nonchalantly into my hand. "It's okay, just take it. Don't spend it on clothes you already own!" She'll appraise my room in that motherly fashion, tidying a little in each corner, sniffing pointedly at the damp, mildewy air, flicking the light switch on and off and pulling the sheets straight on my bed.

It'll be strange for me to see her here. She is incompatible with my experience here, anachronistic, emblematic of another place, another time, another me. When I think of mom I think of dumplings floating in a boiling froth, thick rimmed glasses shielding a face that is young but old at the same time, her raven hair swept back behind her ears, oddly mismatched ensembles in monochromatic color schemes and piles of dogeared biographies cluttering the coffee table in the parlor. As a college student, I've made strides towards  independence. Without mom, I wash my own clothes, budget my own time, meet with whoever I wish at odd hours of the night. There are no rules here, no arbiters watching over my shoulder. But then again my mother (especially in the last years of high school) never was the type to dictate with any real force. Where dad would rage and pontificate from his middling perch, mom resigned herself long ago to my choleric temper, my maddening stubbornness. So she watches instead, working behind the scenes. Even with her miles away in Tennessee, I feel her presence, guiding me with a phone call here and there, a gently rebuking email in my inbox.

"now is that what your really want to do?"

Mom is hard to describe actually. She's not like most mothers. I mean she does the normal motherly things. She worries about me when I could care less. She stays up late nights watching Chinese soap operas, waiting for the sound of the garage door opening so she knows that I'm home and she can at last close her eyes and sleep. But she's distant, aloof. I know nothing about her past life, who she was in that first blush of girlhood. And she likes it that way.

I bet she's finishing packing right now. I bet she's looking down at all the neatly squared off jackets and candy bars in her suitcase, ticking off the things she knows I forgot to ask for in our last phone conversation.

A fistful of air

I'm at the edge of a place. In the indefinite greyness I call out my name, letting it echo, reverberating along the boundaries of this world. I'm at the brink of understanding, of knowing my place in this fraying memory, this protracted segue into the future. Transience does not suit me. I seek strong, solid earth beneath my feet. The realization of home anchors me to a place. But no home presents itself here. A dorm is a shell, a rest stop along the way. It is not a home. A college is an organic institution, a sentient, evolving body of life, but is it a home?

Questions rattle against my mind, shaking loose bits and pieces I thought I had lost.

My progress feels slow, but rapidly accelerating. Soon I'll have reached that terminal velocity, soon the interface of my life and this place will disengage; I'll soar or fall flat.

This is just my roundabout way of saying that I'm feeling the pressure. This is just my way of saying that I miss home. I miss my friends. I wonder if they miss me.

This is my way of relating a memory.... leading the reader through so much extraneous information, hoping to ground them in my thought process, the why of this recollection, the context in which I have framed this image just so--as propaganda for my you and I to digest in tandem. Because as I tell a memory in my head, I'm reassuring myself again and again that I am alive, that I've done this and that and can remember doing so.

Sometimes I remember so vividly the memory feels touchable, like a dream come to life, all sinew and bone and gossamer strands of hair. Reading Nabokov has compelled me to think of themes in my memories, to trace the slow, gradual branching of my life. What are the overarching tropes of my existence? What series of circumstances brought me to this point? I started out so simple. Just a boy with a bulb cut on his way to school. And now I'm something all together different, something I can't really describe with much eloquence right now.

So I race back in time to gather clues, to speculate and wonder. What if I had never taken that class? What if mom had stayed in Pennsylvania and never gone back to Knoxville. What if dad hadn't been so cold? So busy with his work and his own mind. I try to condense down into a sentence, a phrase, just who I am. And I come back empty handed.

Somehow, I'll work through this. I'll piece together all these colorful pennants of life I have shored up in my mind and make a picture for myself. I'll find the threads that hold it all together. I'll snip them off, and watch the picture unravel about me, so beautiful in its dissolution.

The first thread then is this: Water both still and moving

The second: strong female figures

The third: Summers layered like rock strata

The fourth: Clothes hanging in my closet

The fifth: the continuity of place and time

The sixth: long drives and airport terminals

Final Paper Beginnings Part 2

I haven't had much time to write lately. It's both my fault and not. Time seems to be conspiring against me, blowing me away as the seasons change, due dates loom and classes accelerate their pace. And frankly, I've been lazy as well, letting things fall as they will, never taking the initiative to push just that one inch further. I've had this feeling before, this creeping panic, this galling inadequacy. I've been able to overcome it before, to squeeze by just as the semester shudders to a close. It's just the stakes have never been this high.. and I have never before been this easily distracted.

So in an effort to be efficient while procrastinating important work for other classes, I want to lay out an outline for this illusory paper I'm framing in my mind. I have great hopes for this project. I want it to be nuanced, artful... but original as well, not just another one of my perfectly fine but demure papers. I want to put myself out on a limb, explore a little bit what it is to write with abandon but through an academic lens. Perhaps find a synergy between my reflective, personal style and the structured rigor of an academic paper?

Outline

Intro: opening marks about memory and its connection to humanness, establish idea of humans being the product of their memories. segue into Never Let Me Go.

1: Introduce the book, outline its major themes, conflicts, characters, and plot lines.

Thesis: by showing the character's collective memory of a place and each other, their humanness is established.

2: Launch into the analysis of place, Hailsham, how it connects to Kathy's memory, how our memories embellish and tint how we remember specific locations.

3: incorporate personal experiences that correlate to Hailsham into paper: Farragut, the pool, the field.

4: Second point about how their interwoven memories of each other bridge the gap between clone and human.

5: Similar parallel in my own life: Our group... our summer... our times together our memories.

6: so what does it mean? To be human? To remember? To NEVER LET ME GO?

Final Paper Beginnings

So I watched Never Let Me Go in theaters as a prelude to the paper-writing-frenzy that will soon engulf my life. To be honest, I wasn't greatly impressed. Carrie Mulligan was sufficiently wonderful and Kiera delivered in the fierce, deadpan looks department per usual but the movie just lacked a certain... I don't know spark?

Either way, I'll be rereading the book over the next week or so, just to reorient myself to the major themes and events. I definitely have a lot of ideas I wanna play with in this paper. Firstly, I want to do a retrospective element that ties in with the symbolism of Hailsham, what it represents, the parallels I see in my life etc. I want to examine the title as well, along with the interactions of the characters and the part they each play in weaving their collective memoryscape. I want to delve into their questionable humanness as well, to make the point that memory encompasses human identity and perhaps imbues life in that sense.

I don't know... obviously I have some work to do... In the meantime, I'm gonna try and get some sleep before my midterm tomorrow in Chinese!

A Pattern of Leaves

I was assaulted yesterday with a most peculiar memory. The time frame of this particular recollection was nebulous at best, dated to a period of my life that I generally label as quasi-memory, those years from five to seven, even eight, from which I still preserve lingering sensations but very few discrete, lucid memories from. What's more is that all these vague apparitions of this sort are supremely hard to sharpen without great leaps of imagination making prodigious use of Gilbert's "filling-in" technique.

But from time to time I feel like ambling farther back in time than I'm accustomed. I seek in these long, solitary walks through my mostly cloistered life to perhaps limn my existence in something bordering on novelistic beauty. And as I go I sweep together little shards of what was once extant (or at least what I hold to be such) and conjure from such paltry evidence a grand narrative arc of whimsy and internal metamorphosis.

I digress. My point in starting this now much too attenuated post was simply the remembrance of a certain pattern of leaves, and the exotic taste of salty upholstery in my juvenile mouth. Somehow these two sensations come entwined in my mind... so much so that I must infer at one time that I chewed on the leafy upholstery of an old couch, one that I can almost remember my family owning but am cautiously skeptical of declaring as absolute existing in my life. Yet how can it not be? I remember its taste--acrid and moist--its color--ochre with dull brown leaves--its standard  span and the bedraggled nature of its cushions. I remember all these things; I swear, I hope, I declare.

Speak, Memory... and tell me something new: Prompt #3

Nabokov can write the hell out of a memoir. His prose is intensive, meticulous, the kind of writing that manages to be both expressive and controlled. Reading his memoir, I felt as if he were not only elucidating me as to the relevant figures and dates of his life, but also indoctrinating me into the Nabokov way of thinking.

His words wound circuitously about my mind as I read, and I feel almost sad that I haven't had the time to fully appreciate his writing. A bout of strep throat laid me low this past week and reading Nabokov unfortunately was usurped by my need to both get well and ace my OEB midterm on Friday (both tasks I failed at!).

However, from what I have read, I can begin to discern certain nascent themes in his memoir. From the very first chapter, Nabokov establishes his own presence within the memoir. His voice acts as both the narrator of the work and as its main protagonist, and his rich memory is the setting in which Speack Memory's narrative arc arises. The theme that struck me in what I have read thus far is Nabokov's seeming fascination with death. There is first and foremost the beginning sequence in which Nabokov describes life as "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." And as the book progresses, Nabokov heralds with equal parts reverence and introspection the lives and eventual deaths of many of his family members. Yet death in Nabokov's world lacks morbidity. He refers to the deaths of dear family members with elegaic beauty but with no hint of grief. If there's an emotion present it would be a serene calm if anything. Nabokov seems to be more interested with perpetuating the legacies of his ancestors (and by default his own) than he is with the tragedy of their passing. Death is thus made immutable and expressive. There was life--wondrous, explosive, explosive and raw--and then there was death, by execution or heart attack or all manner of assorted causations.

And tying it all together is Nabokov's crisp, clean voice and you the reader can feel yourself falling into the pages like leaves of his life and feeling loamy, black earth between your toes.

Rushing to and fro

So I haven't had much time to actually sit down and read Nabokov's memoir this past week. It's been on my to-do list of course.... along with a million other things that need attending to! I feel as if this week has leveled me completely. I'm sick (with strep), fatigued, and incredibly sour at the dismal weather (will winter come already and dispel all this horrid humidity)?

I shouldn't be using this journal entry as a font for all my myriad complaints. I should be writing insightful, impressive words about memory and Nabokov and human consciousness. But that would require actual thinking. And now, with my first college midterm looming precipitously over my head and an ungodly amount of Chinese homework lying fallow in my backpack I can't bring myself to remember or speculate on anything besides my next meal and the overall crapiness of this week.

I will say though, from the little pieces of his work I've actually had time to read, Nabokov seems to be right up my alley. He writes in a very exacting, eloquent fashion. I like to mull over his words, rubbing them together like sticks and stones in my mind, feeling the sparks singing my synapses as I make believe that I too could be a Russian aristocrat with an incredible talent for description and an elegant estate called Vrya to call home.

Why do writers have such cool lives?

On a slightly related not, the very first chapter of this memoir were familiar to me. As in I have read (and analyzed) those exact same words before on a SAT practice test I took once.

Prompt #2

King Philip Came Over From Germany Sunday.

Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

My seventh grade life sciences teacher employed this mnemonic device to help us remember the hierarchy of taxonomic organization. Or at least I think it was her. Maybe it was Mrs. Brodman, my eighth grade science teacher, or even Mrs. Krouse my freshman Honors Biology teacher who taught me these words. To be honest, I can't remember exactly when this little phrase was insinuated into my mind and I certainly have no recollection of what compelled it to lodge so stubbornly in my mind.

Later on in high school I would learn that there was even a higher level of classification beyond Kingdom. Apparently there were three "Domains" that encompassed all life. I promptly amended the mnemonic in my head to Dead King Philip Came Over.... and so on. Now that I'm a freshman in college, I'm learning in my OEB class that these classifications are ostensibly useless. They were just good ol' Linnaeus's arbitrary way of arbitrarily ascribing order to life. Real Biological classification is all relative. It's messy, convoluted, impossible to section off into he efficient lines of a mnemonic device.

Yet I'm sure that the mnemonic (now useless) will persist in my memory, another shard of another time that I'm averse to lose. And in a way it'll still help me. It carries with it the spun memories of an era of biology coursework in my life--the textbooks with their leafy green covers and waxy pages, the pill bugs cowering at the bottom of the jar, gel electrophoresis trays and color coded heart diagrams. Ironically enough, the mnemonic has no relevance to these memories, but it's lumped in with the rest of my biology memories. It's true that I can't pin down any discrete moment that it's been of use to me on a test or in lab but it endures, and I warrant there must be a reason for this, a explanation for why I've come to be acquainted with Dumb King Philip. 

Maybe the mnemonic endures by virtue of its construction. The words may have some pattern or veiled connotation, some variable that makes them unpalatable to forgetfulness. I think that a more plausible guess would be the context in which I was exposed to the words. I was young, impressionable, in love with biology. All the creepy crawly things that repulsed my sister so much enthralled me. So what I learned, I retained, weaving the framework for a latent interest, adding color and meaning to my biological know-how. And that framework still remains, frozen in time... resurrected with the recitation of those words. My natural interest and curiosity made my mind susceptible to memory, opening it up to grab on to all that it could encompass. There's a reason why I can't seem to remember what mnemonic I was taught for the planets of the solar system. Frankly, I have no interest in stars or planetary nebula. Just like I have no interest in the Spanish Language or Electrical Engineering. So when I learn such things, I never ever seem to remember them.

The Reeling

I went out last night, like I do every Friday night (and most Saturday's and the occasional Thursday). I went out to a club named Machine, washed the black marks of my hands, danced up on stage, swayed and pulsed and careened to the music.

And as I moved there was an image coming to focus in my mind. It throbbed with the music and suddenly I knew where I was: The Carousel, another Friday night, dancing with men I didn't know and searching the crowd for a hungry, empty face. My friends hemmed me in then; they kept me safe and chaste. But I knew no one here. I had come with a group of kids but I trusted none of them. We had no background, no history, no collective memory to draw upon. I've known some of them a month at most.

Why was I here? Was I simply trying to relive the past? I should be beyond this I thought. This is not who I am anymore, not who I want to be. But it was Friday night and I had gone out and there was nothing more to it.

I got home alright--taxi fair was five bucks a piece--to my dorm where my roommates were just hanging out, talking about girls and philosophy and socialism. I got home alright to my bed with the comforter already mussed and the faint whiff of sticky floorboards. I got home alright when my eyes slid shut and Tennessee rose up to cradle me.

My old friends from home are all together this weekend. But I went to far afield to return. Sometimes I wonder....

Was it really worth it?

Final Paper Musings

Before all these deadlines start to blur together in my head, I just wanna take sometime to brain storm ideas for my final paper.

Idea #1: I want to do something related to the memoir writing process, how it relates to other styles of writing. In order to accomplish this, I was thinking I could take a shot at writing an abridged memoir commemorating a certain period of my life (most likely this past summer) and complementing it with analytical pieces that dissect each memory and sorta explain my writing process as I wrote down these memories.

Idea #2: I've kept a bunch of journals throughout my middle school and high school career. I'd love to write a piece analyzing what significance these often poorly written recollections of my life really have. The paper will combine snippets from my journals paired with analysis and reflection on how my journals present memory. Also I'd think it'd be cool to track the steady progression in how i approach my experiences, to show how writing a diary somehow maps a person's growth as a human being. The logistics of this idea may be problematic since it would involve my parents shipping me my stacks of journals from back home somehow.

Idea #3: I was really inspired by "The Madeleine Episode" in Swann's Way, this notion that inanimate objects can sometimes retain ghostly lives and memories of their own.... I can relate to this in a certain way as well. Several objects in my life have powerful memories attached to them. I keep most of this stuff underneath my bed and like to sift through it all at times. So I think it would be cool to write a sort of disjointed memoir composed of short vignettes each inspired by a different keepsake of mine.

Prompt #1

Before reading A Moveable Feast, I had read only one book by Hemingway. That book was A Farewell to Arms which I read almost exactly one year ago for my AP Literature Course in high school. So going into this most recent foray into Hemingway, I knew a few basic facts about his life and work.

I knew Hemingway was a member of the so-called "Lost Generation" which lived and wrote in Paris in the aftermath of World War One. I knew that he committed suicide by putting the barrel of a gun in his mouth, that he had worked as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during the Great War and that he had multiple marriages to different women. Furthermore, I knew him as a lauded writer who wrote terse, somewhat blunt prose that matched his forcibly male persona.

Now, after reading his memoir, I find that many of my preconceptions of Hemingway have been affirmed. He certainly was a self-described man's man, the kind of guy who tries to teach his friend's boxing, drinks and gambles with equal gusto and indulges in fine food and pretty young women.  The way he interacted with other writers of "The Generation Perdue" was fascinating--from his homophobic disgust for Gertrude Stein to his sudden friendship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Similarly intriguing was the insight A Moveable Feast provided into Hemingway's internal relationship with his own writing. The book certainly made me respect Hemingway for the methodical, thoughtful approach he took to his writing, how very seriously he took it. At one point he mentions spending entire mornings just writing one paragraph of a story! However, overall, it did not change my view of Hemingway as a person and historical figure. He was just as blunt and virile as I had assumed he would be... there was certainly a powerful, calculating mind behind his stern countenance, but that revelation came as no real surprise either.

Regardless, Hemingway still possesses the commendable ability to put me to sleep with his writing. (or maybe I should just get more sleep?)

One Percent

I remember you, so clearly. How you knew, without a doubt, what coursed and lived in my head.

In summer it was so simple. I could get in a car and forget I existed for the day. I could be just a drifting dot of shiny black hair, barely breaking the surface of the neighborhood pool and you would float blithely with me. It wasn't hard to imagine that our lives would remain this way, unbroken lines twining around in hopeless loops, as tangled and sedentary as the unused hose in the back yard, hidden as it was in a bed of overgrown weeds. Yet the facts of our lives cascaded down in increments and I knew (just as you did) that the lines were diverging, fracturing by the stop sign on your street I've blown by a hundred times-uncaring, undaunted, daft.

We both moved away. I'm here in Boston, working as best as I can and fingering all these memories shored up in my head of us, the slow, gradual way in which I came to be your friend and the fast, heady rush of our epic final year.

I wonder what's changed, in these months, in the months still to come. I wonder a lot about these things. I think ahead to coming home, to how ordinary and bucolic Tennessee will feel to me now that I've been here, in Boston's coruscating fringe. 

So what if my life isn't grand? If there's anything that reading all these memoirs has taught me it's this: No lives are. You can be Earnest freaking Hemingway and still have a boring life 99% of the time.

It's that 1% though that you live for, that you keep coming back too when the desultory, the mundane, engulfs you. It's that 1% that you look back on without aid from photo albums or Facebook threads, because that image you have in your head defies all physical remnants of that sort.

I'll keep looking I guess, waiting for my life be worthy of  remembering... holding out for that one percent chance.

Passing By

I was walking to Thayer dorms this morning, to meet a friend for lunch and get some laundry done, perhaps write a bit as well.

Little things started to strike me: the queer, rosy tint my sunglasses lent the world, the surprising lack of tourists as I passed by the John Harvard statue, the yellow caution tape spanning the distance between Thayer's South Side and University Hall, the police cars parked in the yard.

"Someone committed suicide on the top step of Memorial Church" Joseph would tell me later. I would nod, and root about inside for something to feel, and come up only with the empty consolation that today was and is still a beautiful day and that later I will exercise and sit in my room talking about the depravity of suicide with my roommates and we would all turn comfortably over in our young lives and feel normalcy hem us in on all sides once more.

There's someone dead on the steps of memorial church. One friend saw his body; another saw the head. And I'm wondering why no one (not me or you or the tourists) seems to care.

"SOMEONE SHOT THEMSELVES ON TOP OF MEMORIAL CHURCH STEPS!!" one friend texts me after I already know.

"I know, It's terrible. Michael saw the body" I type back.

My phone buzzes and I slide it open. Another text from the same friend: "Let's do our laundry at twelve thirty. Meet in Thayer Basement?"

"Sure. See you then."

I go back outside because I've forgotten my detergent in my dorm room. Ducking under the caution tape, I go on my way. 

Fast Forward One Year

I've been slowly getting into A Moveable Feast over the past few days. I'll read it in snatches--in my room after completing my Chinese homework, or sitting on the windswept steps of Widener Library in between class. This time last year I was reading Hemingway as well. A Farewell to Arms was one of our assigned readings for AP Literature, and I remember quite vividly sitting in a cubicle in the lab where I worked, furtively reading about World War One ambulance drivers and their beloved nurses when I was supposed to be analyzing the molecular structure of Chemical compounds using complicated computer software I had no interest in tangling with. It wasn't my favorite book. Hemingway's style, the detached, unadorned syntax and the methodical rhythm to his words isn't really my thing. His writing floats serenely in and out of my head, leaving no trace besides a few scattered facts and a general sense of huuuunh? The writing's not complicated, and maybe that's my hang up with Hemingway. Whenever I read his writing, I never feel compelled to understand, to delve deeper into his psyche and discover what drives him as a writer and a thinker.

It's weird, how reminiscent his memoir is to his fiction. The writing feels just as detached, and I can almost no believe that this is Hemingway actually writing about his own life. The book does pique my interest in how it describes the competitive, arcane world of the "Generation Perdue"... giving insight into not only Hemingway's life but also the lives of Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald, contemporaries of Hemingway who were incredibly influential in his work.

I don't know; I just don't like Hemingway.

Autumn, Now

It's beginning to feel like fall outside.

While sitting with a book in the yard, I saw an intrepid (and chubby) squirrel industriously burying acorns today. It looked at me challengingly with its beady little eyes, as if daring me to stand up and watch it scamper deftly away, onwards to the next acorn cache. Ever the pacifist, I just sat, letting my open book fall into my lap, enjoying the midday sun and the sibilant whisper of wind amidst the oak leaves.

Moments like this remind me poignantly of home, how I could track the procession from summer into autumn from my bedroom window, the trees in my back yard growing riotous with color and then all at once barren. My memories correlate with the season. Autumn is always school and friends, the onerous coursework, cross country meets every Saturday, the mismatched layers of nubby knits mom would pile on before work each day. These are the images flitting about my head in these pre-autumnal days. Looking forward, it's strange and not a little bit disconcerting to think that that life, that distilled essence of Tennessee in fall, is lost to me now (for the next four years at least). My autumns will now be exclusively spent here, in Cambridge, sitting by imperious squirrels in Harvard yard, running in the rain to Lamont, eating Americanized Chinese food and pushing through milling crowds of tourists who don't know my name but figure I'm a Harvard student.

As we discussed in class, in reference to A Mountain of Crumbs, it's hard--to leave home that is. I look out my new bedroom window and see the redbrick of Strauss dorm and Mass Ave beyond it instead of four stately elms and my mother's vegetable patch.

What happens now I wonder? When will my recollections of Harvard blend into that lovely quagmire in my memory I flavor with lethal doses of nostalgia? Or will the two realms: Tennessee and Cambridge, forever stand alone in my consciousness, two surprisingly distinct phases in my cluttered life.

 Regardless, I say hello and good day to you autumn , my friend. To quote my favorite Keats poem, you have always been a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." 

Memories like Crumbs

Today's seminar class was devoted to discussing A Mountain of Crumbs, the memoir of Elena Gorchova that we all just finished reading. I was glad to discover that opening up my experience of the work to the forum of our in-class discussion gave me an enhanced insight into the books events and themes.

I was particularly struck by our group analysis of the book's title. We postulated many possible reasons as to why A Mountain of Crumbs, one being that Mrs. Gorchova was trying to reflect one of the memoir's central themes: subterfuge both in the Soviet government and in personal matters (vranyo). Additionally, we wondered if perhaps the title was implying this notion of subsisting on a framework of self-deception, inducing happiness even when times are harsh. My favorite interpretation however was that the title was simply a metaphor for life, that Elena Gorchova essentially was saying that her life, that all lives, are merely mountains of remembered crumbs. I felt that this image, though somewhat disheartening, was beautiful in how it rendered not some idealized, romantic image of life, but rather life as it really is, brutal and bucolic and abrupt.

We flitted through many more disparate topics as our discussion evolved, touching on 9/11, Russian history, how it feels to leave home and so on. When four pm came and I found myself packing up my cream, drawstring back pack, there was this buzzing sensation in my head, of ideas stirring to the fore, eddying in riotous vortexes in my mind.

It was quite the feeling.

Copious and Clear

Out hereabouts, in the Vermont woods, I feel a tad ridiculous. Sweat (and rain) soaked layers of synthetic fabric cling to my hot, sticky skin, but it's cold this morning on the trail. Tendrils of floating vapor twine with the branch-scape above, soaring up into the wizened canopy of the forest. Our progress wends ever downwards. We slog through sucking pools of shiny black mud. We creep down slippery rock faces, our fingertips tracing the craggy disposition of the mountain. Three successive days of rain have fallen, and the Green Mountains are saturated. The excess water travels down with us, leaking from the porous soil, turning our path into a snaking, sloping waterfall.

It's the last day of our five day hike, and we are searching for a dry, flat spot to set up camp so we can spend our last night away from the front country and its highways lined with lights, its showers and ivory toilet bowls and wonderfully ordinary technology.

Lost in my own thoughts, I keep my eyes trained downwards, searching out a path for my mud-caked hiking boots to tread. I'm ignoring the spectacle of our descent, how we all must appear--a bedraggled train of Harvard students, carrying teetering packs on our backs, a swath of human chatter in the primordial wilderness. The mountains make me feel tiny, but it's a welcome feeling, this anonymity. Out here, I'm invisible, and no one is here to poke and prod, to demand my action, to draw out of me some shrewd and erudite retort to the world's clamoring requests. I'm solitary, but not alone. My fellow FOPers inhabit this memory with me. They populate this recollection with laughter, shared pasta, the powerful camaraderie of hauling lumber together up a mountain slope. I speak with them in short bursts, divulging little chunks of my past and receiving similar slivers of their lives in return. This exchange is simple and honest and I put little effort into establishing anything enduring.

The truth is I came out here for myself. I signed up for this trip not to meet people or test myself physically. No, I just wanted to get away, to distance myself in the most drastic way possible from the suburban, cloistered clutches of Tennessee. Out here, in the verdant Vermont back country, I had grieved at each quiet trailhead, each starlit campsite. The natural beauty all around me was like a shot of morphine, numbing the shock of leaving home, helping me cope with all the floating faces of friends I left behind in the airport terminal thirty minutes from my house, whose limp waving hands could not say enough to quell my sense of disaster.

I emerged from the bread loaf wilderness with my FOP mates, covered in mysteriously earned scratches and a glossy patina of sebum. We stopped for lunch by the Clark Brook, and I watched the water as it flowed, so clear and copious.

Little Scars

Memories can be volatile, surfacing in effervescent bursts in my head, charging forth from brief encounters, telltale sounds, and that exotic potpourri of scents I can't describe nor forget.

They alight upon my mind at the oddest moments, causing me to pause before the obligatory mental shrug, the return to the ever-pressing present.

I was brushing my teeth the other day when my eye settled on the abused green and white tube of toothpaste I've been using all summer. Something about my toothpaste, perhaps its placement on the sink edge or the way the cap was only screwed on halfway, caused a memory to abruptly erupt in my consciousness. Flung back in time, I reappeared in the heady heat of Wenzhou in summer. The tube of toothpaste--Crest Spearmint Extreme Clean--sat on a crowded counter top, between the metal basin of the sink and a rack of chopsticks, caked with tonight's dinner. I was brushing my teeth as I did every night, clad only in my underwear, my ye ye (grandfather) and nai nai (grandmother) asleep in the living room of their two room apartment. Outside the kitchenette's sliver of a window, I could see the dark shades of drying clothes hanging limply on crisscrossing clotheslines. Murmured strings of conversation, spoken in the indecipherable "Wenzhou hua", cut through the stifling night and I felt quite sharply the dizzying vertigo of being far from home and alone in my head.

The memory is more a singular image than a story in movable color and sound. It's me, brushing my teeth, in blue-gray boxer briefs and nothing else, the slump of my shoulders articulating the desolation of my last childhood summer. It's not a particularly bad memory. I loved my trip to China this summer. It gave me solitude, a certain peace of mind. Yet it's not a joyous tableau either. It's simply a memory, a piece of my past that happens to appear when I look at that crumpled tube of toothpaste and allow myself to remember.

Speculating

I'm not exactly sure what it is I should be writing here. The premise of this project is the analysis of memoirs and the memories that compose them. Yet this in itself is not a particularly expansive topic. It's difficult to write about memories. They're complex, multifaceted, obscured by a haze of subjectivity. When you write about memories, you run a treacherous gamut of emotional and logical issues. It's only too easy to fall into the hackneyed recitation of past events. Indeed, anyone can relate a memory; we all do it everyday when we talk to our friends or banter with family. But it takes more effort to distill something meaningful from memories, along with a a lot of candor and instinct. So maybe that's what this journal/blog is about? Extracting from memories something powerful and original to be articulated in the forum of class discussion and personal writings.

I don't know. I'm just speculating.

Anyhow, I've been thinking about my own memories, about the moments that have lodged most stubbornly in my mind. As I string them together in my mind, I'm beginning to see the beginnings of my own memoir, my own body of life. There's stories I could tell, memories to be related. I'm not sure if they're any good. Many of them are not certainly, but it's interesting, at least to me, to think of how my life would appear in memoir form. I feel that memoirs can seem pretentious sometimes, as if the memoir writer is extolling some special quality to his own life, raising it to some higher plane perhaps. One could even go further and say writing a memoir is the ultimate form of self flattery. Yet the fact remains that we all have stories to be told, and the best memoirs in my opinion are not defined by extreme, nigh on unbelievable circumstances or tremendous feats of heroism; the best memoirs dredge the depths of mediocrity, lending lyrical beauty to the trappings of ordinary life.

Water Under the Bridge

You always hear the maxim "Remember the Present." It's an entreaty to all of us to enjoy life as it occurs, rather than being mired in past occurrences or the overzealous pursuit of the future. I guess the sentiment is nice, this notion that life should be enjoyed in an immediate, spontaneous manner, that we should dwell on this earth independent of the expansive time lines continuously unraveling in our minds. But there's something scary about giving oneself over to the present. For people such as myself, who are dominated by a profound sense of personal history, the present will forever exist receding into the past, like so much flotsam drifting out to sea.

I am the kind of person who finds succor in nostalgia. I even wrote my Common Application Essay for college as a reflective inventory of dusty, old keepsakes I stow away beneath my bed back home. As I go about my daily life, I assess the quality of my experiences in the context of my past. The frozen yogurt I enthusiastically ingested today at lunch is pitted against the memory of waffle cone Wednesdays my junior year of high school and the kitschy delight of splitting a parfait with an old crush after a track meet. I walk along Harvard's shady pathways and images from my past cluster at the edge of my consciousness. Crossing under Annenberg's triumphant flying buttresses, I see Princeton's venerable chapel with its vaulted ceiling and stained glass windows, and as I run along the Charles River I'm reminded of a similar run two years ago, along the swampy edges of Stanford's Lake Lagunita.

My past makes me question the present. I track in my mind the ghostly progression of lives that could have been mine, veins of experience that will now never be plumbed. The past makes me doubt, makes me wonder at my circumstances, makes me quibble over trivialities of place and time. Sometimes I feel like all I am is a moving memory. After all, how I perceive the present is largely based on how memorable I feel it to be. I'm always asking this question of myself: Will I remember this? Will this matter to me in a year, a decade, a lifetime?

This isn't to say that I don't enjoy my life. On the contrary, I tackle each new day with a fierce tenacity, and I try not to live in the past; even though sometimes I fail. In my mind, the present is enriched by the past. It's an indirect process, but it happens, and my life is certainly the better for it.

Just yesterday I was standing on a bridge over the Charles, looking impassively down at the water below. It was a moment of smiles and laughter and ballsy bravado. My world felt open and new. I stood there, perched just so, with some new Harvard friends at my back and Boston thrumming all about me. My present condition was very apparent to me. Yet all the colliding sights and sounds could not crowd out my past. Memory laced the air I breathed as I jumped. Memory fleshed out my particular sensation of weightlessness, the sense of impending impact with the water. And memory articulated the refreshing chill of the water--how the river eddied and undulated as I swam back towards shore.

I walked away from the bridge knowing I had made another memory, whose relative importance to my life story would reveal itself as time passed and the present evaporated into a mist of remembrance.

Beginnings

What is a memory?

The question seems so inane. Memories are simply what they are: discrete parcels of human experience that form the chronological framework of our lives. There's nothing more to it really.

Or is there?

The other day in my freshman seminar (Memoirs and Memories), I was forced to actually delve into the deceptively simple matter of what constitutes a memory and why should anyone care. My five classmates and I found ourselves arrayed about a table, engaging in a disjointed yet earnest discourse on the nature of memoirs, diaries and their like. Our somewhat abstracted objective was to understand the unique place of memoirs in both literature and history, and our dialogue on the matter spanned topics as disparate as the validity of artistic license in memoir writing and our own personal recollections of the 9/11 world trade center bombings. As we sat there talking, tense with the nervous energy of our first day of college courses, I began to discern certain unifying threads in our discussion, tell tale hints as to what directions our study of memoirs may veer.

What I sensed was as follows:

A) Memories, as intangible constructs of the mind, are incredibly hard to quantify. They seem to be more about randomness and fleeting imagery than anything empirical or logic-driven.

B) Memoirs as opposed to autobiographies are driven by vivid, emotive forces. The rich description of an event and its emotional impact trumps any notion of narrative or structure.

C) Memoirs lend history a color and depth that is lacking in a simple recitation of facts.

As class progresses, I'm sure my interpretation of memories (both mine own and those of others) will continue to burgeon and evolve. This after all, is just a beginning.