Quiet Contemplation

I am a person that hates being alone. It creeps me out and drives me crazy. This rule does not apply, however, to the early hours of the morning I sometimes spend finishing a good book. Not only am I completely unaware of my aloneness while reading, I enjoy the calm, quiet, and stillness of the early morning after finishing the book. This solitude seems to me the perfect closing to any emotional book. I am not alone because the characters are still swirling in my my head. My feelings can stir and settle while my mind goes over the story again and again, finding connections I missed and attempting to fully grasp the story. These early hours are a magical time of processing and emotional closure, during which I can fully appreciate the story while letting the story and characters go.

marginalmaddy's Reading List

I have compiled a few books that I want to read soon:

• The Fault in Our Stars- John Green
• I've wanted to read this book for a really long time- maybe this summer I finally will.
• A Thousand Splendid Suns
• I am actually halfway through this one but I have yet to find time to finish it.
• The End of War- John Horgan
• The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert and Unfair Economy- Lisa Dodson
• Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States- Bernadette Hanlon
• The Myth of Choice- Kent Greenfield
• Reminds me of Blink a little bit
• The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America- Daniel J. Shafstein
• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason- Sam Harris
• From what I gleaned from the cover of this book, it is about how fear is affecting our choices- sounds very interesting.
• What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense- Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P George
• Note: I support gay marriage & am interested in reading their argument.
• Half the Sky: Turning Opression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide- Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
• Oddly Normal: One Family's Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality: A Memoir
• The Link: Uncovering our Earliest Ancestor- Colin Tudge
• The Social Animal- David Brooks
• Acting White? Rethinking Race in "Post-Racial" America
• The Nature of Prejudice- Gordon W. Allport
• Hamlet
• HOW have I not read this yet???

No One Was Dancing

This is a beautiful little blurb on a work of art in my house. I don't know the artist so I can't give him or her credit, though this is wonderful and deserving of praise. Please don't copy any part of this or use it for anything else because it would be impossible to credit the author.  I think one reason I love this is the author chose to ignore the need for capital letters, periods, and quotation marks and didn't seem to mind run-on sentences. For me, this seems to celebrate how simple life can be and how literature doesn't have to have perfect grammar to be beautiful, just like the children in this story didn't have to actually dance to enjoy themselves. I hope you enjoy!!
"I had a dream & I heard music & there were children standing around, but no one was dancing. I asked a little girl, Why not? & she said they didn't know how, or maybe they used to but they forgot & so I started to hop up & down & the children asked me, is that dancing? & I laughed & said no, that's hopping. but at least it's a start
& soon everyone was hopping & laughing & it didn't matter any more that no one was dancing"

HANDS

I'm rather afraid that I will bore whatever unfortunate reader comes across this blog with endless excerpts from "In Short." Be that as it may, I can't resist posting one more for now. This is a truly beautiful piece called "Hands," by Ted Kooser.


More and more frequently since I entered my fifties I have begun to see my father's hands out at the ends of my arms. Just now, the left and more awkward one lies curled in my lap while the right one massages the beard on my chin. On the ring finger of the left is the silver wedding band that my wife gave me, not my father's gold ring with its little yellow sapphire. But I am not deceived; this wearing of my ring on his ring finger is part of my father's respectful accommodation of me and of my life and marriage. Mine have succeeded his, which is, ash he would have said, only as it should be.
I recognize his hands despite the ring. They are exactly as I remember them from his own middle age-wrinkled,of course, with a slight sheen to the tiny tile work of the skin; with knotted, branching veins; and with this dark hair that sets our from beneath the shirt cuffs as if to cover the hand but that within as inch thins and disappears as there were a kind of glacial timberline there. There is, as we know, a field of coldness just beyond the reaching tips of our fingers and this hair has been discouraged and has fallen back.
As a young man my father had been a drapery salesman in a department store and his hands were ever after at their best when smoothing fabric for display-the left one holding a piece of cloth unrolled from a bolt while the right lovingly eased and teased the wrinkles form it, his fingers spread and their tips lightly touching the cloth as if under the was something grad and alive like the flank of a horse. I can feel the little swirls of brocade beneath the ball of his thumb.
These hands have never done hard physical work, but they are not plump, or soft, or damp and cool. Nor are their nails too carefully clipped or too carefully buffed and polished. They are firm, solid, masculine hands, and other men feel good about shaking them. They have a kind of brotherly warmth and when they pinch the selvage of the drapery fabric and work it just a little between thumb and finger they do it with power and confidence. There are pair of hands like these- some brown, some black, some white-in every bazaar in the world-hands easing and smoothing, hands flying like doves through the dappled light under time-riddled canvas.
I would like to be held by these hands, held by them as they were when I was a child and I seemed to fall within them wherever I might turn, I would like to feel them warm and broad against my back and would like to be pressed to the breast of this man with his faint perfume of aftershave, with the tiny brown moles on his neck, with the knot of his necktie slightly darkened by perspiration. Now he has taken his glasses off and set them on the mantel and there are small red ovals on the sides of his nose. I reach to touch them and find the wet, as if I were touching something deep inside him. Now I hear him singing, softly singing, the words buzzing deep in his chest.
But these old hands of his are past all that. They lie side by side in my lap, their palms turned up as if to catch this fleeing moment as it falls away. But as I peer down into them they begin to move on their own, to turn and shift. I watch the left hand slowly rise to place its palm against my heart. and watch the right rise swiftly to enfold the other.




-Ted Kooser (Hands)

JUXTAPOSITION

We humans are obsessed with contrast. We need juxtaposition in English. A villain for every hero. Contrasting colors are our favorite. To feel love, we need hate. To feel joy, we need sadness. We love to taste opposing spices in food. We find it easiest to appreciate things when we are reminded that they are not a given. Another story in the "In Short" book is "The Opposite of Saffron," by Mary Paumier Jones, which demonstrates this idea wonderfully:


Minneapolis, Minnesota
I don't remember this, I was too young. But my mother and father told me of my childhood habit time and again. From their point of view: their first child wakes in the middle of the night, wakes them up too, not with cries but with giggles. She laughs and recites all the words they have taught her, her litany. I picture Mom getting back in bed after the first time. "What's the matter?" "Nothing, she's laughing and reciting her words." "Now?" "Yes, now." Night after night I did the same.
One day Dad taught me to say Minneapolis, Minnesota, a triumph of such magnitude it became my permanent finale, new words inserted before its resonance. When they heard "Minneapolis, Minnesota," my parents knew they could go back to sleep.
Dictionaries
One grade school summer I set myself a daily regime. In the room I shared with my sister at a small desk, I-what should I call it, played school? studied? Nothing sounds exactly right. But I allotted time for this and that, and day after day found satisfaction there alone.
Praying was one thing I did, or my version of it, which had a lot in common with daydreaming, a blue and white statue of the Virgin Mary with the snake under her foot there to inspire me to fantasies of sainthood in which i was believed and admired by millions.
And I read the dictionary-yes, read the dictionary. My goal was to get through it in the course of the summer-which I'm suer I didn't do, but no matter. The column of words were an endless feast.
Some forty years later I bought a used set of the tiny print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I had to find a stand magnifier for it because using the hand-held one that comes with it makes me nauseous. So now I can look up any English word and get its entire history compete with examples of use through the centuries, right in the comfort of my own home.
I lust after the large print edition-or the regular size print edition, I should say-the new updated twenty-four volume $2500.00 one. A set sits proudly on the ledge behind the cash register in a bookstore I frequent. Whenever I buy anything- which us appallingly often-I look at it and fantasize saying, "Oh, and throw in the OED too."
Syzygy

A word I looked up; syzygy. (File it away in case you ever have three y's in Scrabble-or can you have three y's in Scrabble?) The morning paper announced that the moon's perigee was falling on its syzygy. The paper called these words "cold and rational," an odd description because syzygy sounds to me as if it sizzles, which indeed it does, coming from the Greek for yoke, pair, conjunction, copulation. (Remember copulative verbs? What a shame they've been demoted to linking.)
A curious thing has happened to syzygy; time can do strange things to words as well as people. Originally referring to the conjunction of two heavenly bodies, since sometime in the 1700's syzygy has included both conjunction and opposition, so the word has become one for those few whose meaning has extended to include its opposite.
I knew there was a full moon coming. The full is the opposition, the syzygy when the sun and the moon are aligned on opposite sides of the earth. The moon's perigee is the point in its orbit where it is closest to earth. About once a year or so, the full moon occurs at the point when the moon is closest, the perigee and syzygy together. If the clouds clear off, we'll see a big moon tonight.
The Possible Sunshine

All February the clouds refused to clear off. "Cold air moving over Lake Ontario formed the clouds that blocked the sun," the paper said. "The city got only twenty percent of the possible sunshine."
Then one morning it is over. Objects have volume in space, reflect light, take up room. We have been looking at the world dimensional page instead of crosshatched sphere bulging forward, casting shadow.
Telephone wires scallop the road. Cars trail bulbous gray shapes. I'll need my sunglasses-where might they be? Porch railings stripe porch and wall. My old dog feels a rush of youth, pulls against the double leash. And I -even I- am here, my being unmistakable, I cast a shadow, therefore I am.
Odd, but we don't think about it, how the absence of sun is also the absence of shadow.
Just the Opposite

In Tai Chi class Dr. Young talked about yin and yang. In the beginning square form, each movement is followed by a pause: the movement is yin, the pause yang. To my Western ears this smacks of sexism:the masculing principle acting;the feminine doing nothing. But I eventually begin to learn the pause is not nothing. Given its proper weight, gravity, and time, the pause does its work, its stretch, its subtle modification of the quality of the move before and the one to come. Later in the round from, the movement is continuous. Yin and yang, though still opposite, are inscrutably simultaneous, engaged in an ancient abstract intercourse.
In Sunday's New York Times David Richards reviews a stage performance by George C. Scott. TO encompass it he proposes what he calls a "thoery of contradictory impulses." Scott excels in a mediocre role, Richards says, because before giving the audience one emotion, he gives a hint of its opposite: laughter before tears, hate before love. This works because it reflects how life is, each emotion closer to its opposite than to anything like itself.
As a child in Eastern Europe, fiber artist Neda Al-Hilali know a lot of gray socks for the family, always gray. She lusted for color and when she once managed to get some bright yarn, she hid it as a American boy might his copy Playboy, looking at it, touching, working in secret ecstasy under her bedcovers.
Now she is internationally known for her mastery of color. And personally known as a wonderful cook-her classes usually end with festive party meals. When asked how she gets her colors so vibrant, she replies that she always puts a dash of the opposite dye in the pot. "You know, " she says as if everyone does, "just like you put in a bit of an opposite spice when you cook."

IN PRAISE OF THE HUMBLE COMMA

My English class reads from a book called "In Short," a compilation of short, non-fiction essays. One of my favorites is about punctuation:

The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said -- could it not? -- of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma -- unless it be breath itself?

Punctuation, one is taught, has a point: to keep up law and order. Punctuation marks are the road signs placed along the highway of our communication -- to control speeds, provide directions and prevent head-on collisions. A period has the unblinking finality of a red light; the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down; and the semicolon is a stop sign that tells us to ease gradually to a halt, before gradually starting up again. By establishing the relations between words, punctuation establishes the relations between the people using words. That may be one reason why schoolteachers exalt it and lovers defy it ("We love each other and belong to each other let's don't ever hurt each other Nicole let's don't ever hurt each other," wrote Gary Gilmore to his girlfriend). A comma, he must have known, "separates inseparables," in the clinching words of H.W. Fowler, King of English Usage.

Punctuation, then, is a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.) Small wonder, then, that punctuation was one of the first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age of the corset, that the modernists threw off: the sexual revolution might be said to have begun when Joyce's Molly Bloom spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almost unperioded and officially censored prose; and another rebellion was surely marked when E.E. Cummings first felt free to commit "God" to the lower case.

Punctuation thus becomes the signature of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("Caramba! Quien sabe?"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-called inscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the '60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Glo italics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State is absolute, the dignity -- and divinity -- of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, Sub-Committees and Secretariats.

Yet punctuation is something more than a culture's birthmark; it scores the music in our minds, gets our thoughts moving to the rhythm of our hearts. Punctuation is the notation in the sheet music of our words, telling us when to rest, or when to raise our voices; it acknowledges that the meaning of our . discourse, as of any symphonic composition, lies not in the units but in the pauses, the pacing and the phrasing. Punctuation is the way one bats one's eyes, lowers one's voice or blushes demurely. Punctuation adjusts the tone and color and volume till the feeling comes into perfect focus: not disgust exactly, but distaste; not lust, or like, but love.

Punctuation, in short, gives us the human voice, and all the meanings that lie between the words. "You aren't young, are you?" loses its innocence when it loses the question mark. Every child knows the menace of a dropped apostrophe (the parent's "Don't do that" shifting into the more slowly enunciated "Do not do that"), and every believer, the ignominy of having his faith reduced to "faith." Add an exclamation point to "To be or not to be . . . " and the gloomy Dane has all the resolve he needs; add a comma, and the noble sobriety of "God save the Queen" becomes a cry of desperation bordering on double sacrilege.

Sometimes, of course, our markings may be simply a matter of aesthetics. Popping in a comma can be like slipping on the necklace that gives an outfit quiet elegance, or like catching the sound of running water that complements, as it completes, the silence of a Japanese landscape. When V.S. Naipaul, in his latest novel, writes, "He was a middle-aged man, with glasses," the first comma can seem a little precious. Yet it gives the description a spin, as well as a subtlety, that it otherwise lacks, and it shows that the glasses are not part of the middle-agedness, but something else.

Thus all these tiny scratches give us breadth and heft and depth. A world that has only periods is a world without inflections. It is a world without shade. It has a music without sharps and flats. It is a martial music. It has a jackboot rhythm. Words cannot bend and curve. A comma, by comparison, catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

Punctuation, then, is a matter of care. Care for words, yes, but also, and more important, for what the words imply. Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between "Jane (whom I adore)" and "Jane, whom I adore," and the difference between them both and "Jane -- whom I adore -- " marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place," in Isaac Babel's lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods.
-Pico Iyer (In Praise of the Humble Comma)