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.