Fantastic C.S. Lewis quotes

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."

"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither."

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become."

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."

"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not."

"What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard."

More about that whiney jerk named Holden...

Here's a video of this guy discussing "Catcher". I know this book has been beaten to the ground as far as discussions go, but I think he (whoever he is -- some nerdy vlogger) does it more effectively than most people I've heard. It's in two parts. If you like it, you can search for the other part on youtube. I don't think I'm ever going to get over this book. Or Holden. I hope it never becomes a movie.

Life Story

I love this poem so much, I can't keep it to myself:


"Life Story"

BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,

and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

Thoughts About "Night"

Reading "Night" was... an experience. I tried reading it between my classes, but I always had to stop as I'd start crying. I had to wonder, what kind of a person would I be like in this horrid world? Eliezer was so kind and patient with his father... at least, up until the end when he does nothing to prevent that guard from beating him in the head. I can hardly blame Eliezer for anything... but what would I have done? Everything inside of me screams that I would clearly have attacked the guard, or anyone else that moved to hurt someone I care about... but would I really? Unless you were actually there, it's hard to say. It's pretty naive to assume that your most heroic side would come out in such a hellish place. But I still wonder.

And what about that poor old man that was killed by the other ravenous victims? All because they wanted his bread ration. Would I have been one of them? Driven stupid and desperate by hunger? I have to say, though, I'm proud of Eliezer for not joining in on that.

And what about all of those poems we read about Peter? Would I have denied Christ? I'd like to think never in a million years... but like I said before, how could one really know? And of course he chose to deny Christ, what with free agency and all... but he was warned about it beforehand...? I've always struggled with this concept. This and the Adam and Eve thing. They had to eat the fruit to leave the garden, yet it was technically a sin...? But it was a wonderful choice as they could now experience joy and have children...

Ack. I almost hope I never have to be faced with a situation like that. Of course, I'm sure life only gets harder and more complicated (and more competitive in my line of work. :/) as time goes on...

Do thoughts like this ever plague anyone else?

Were you sad when Beth died in "Little Women"? I was :(

So, today in my ENG 336 class, we were discussing "The Things They Carried" (a very good, but very sad sorta-memoir about Vietnam) and our professor asked the question, "How does writing serve as an escape?" It's a pretty straightforward question, one that makes me think of that "We read to know we are not alone"-type English major sentiment...
I read and write (very shoddily) as a form of therapy-- I invent other people and give them problems that they usually solve in one way or another. Sometimes it helps me solve my own issues, sometimes not. Either way, it's comforting somehow, to feel like I have control.

However, we went on to discuss how writing about horrible, violent, or otherwise tragic events is another form of coping. In "The Things They Carried", the protagonist is never responsible for actually killing any innocent victims. Yet, he goes through great pains to show that he didn't do anything to prevent some from being killed. In this way, he argues, he is now a killer. He makes the scene more awful than it actually was, to live with this weird guilt. So when his daughter asks him honestly if he ever killed anyone, he says he can honestly answer both "yes" and "no".

How complex is that?

It makes me think of something read about Stephen King's "Salem's Lot". In the book, there's a scene where this little boy wanders onto a busy road and gets killed by an oncoming truck. :( In real life, Stephen King had a similar encounter with his own son, but he was able to pull him out of the way the last second. Apparently, he was so disturbed my his son's almost-death that he had to write about the worst possible outcome of the event to get over it.

This seems morbid... but maybe this is why Thomas Hardy wrote the tragic things he wrote. Or why Poe wrote what he wrote, or why Shakespeare wrote things like "Othello" or "King Lear".

I feel like a majority of the best books I read are all... sad. I mean, there's always "Little Women" or "Twelfth Night" or whatever (then again, Beth dies. Who wasn't traumatized by that at age 10???) ... but really. I guess that's what makes them so beautiful too.

Why is that? Why is tragedy so memorable and beautiful?

Art Hurts My Head

I'm so confused right now. All last week I felt I'd had a fairly good grasp on art. Now it's morphed into something large and messy and totally suffocating. Ugh, is there never any respite from this stupid "what is art?" debate?

I just watched a few segments of this TV program about beauty in art. I was excited when I came across it, thinking that the host would give me some great insight into the creative process. But about twenty minutes into it, I was livid. This guy, (can't remember his name-- I hope I never do, he made me so angry), is the most narrow-minded, uppity bore I've ever heard! I just couldn't stand him!

Basically, the program was an hour of him whining about how all art after Duchamp's "Fountain", (that urinal created in 1917) was "ugly", useless and a total waste of time. I agreed with his theory that a large amount of art in the 20th and 21st centuries was unnecessarily over the top. I've never been a fan of those weird, naked performance art pieces from the 70's with chicken blood and all that. I tend to think any piece that is created purely for shock value is a waste and a bore (and is very unoriginal at this point in the history of the world). Yet discounting everything that might just happen to be a little shocking as garbage is just as narrow-minded, isn't it?

I think what enraged me was his dismissal of everything that wasn't totally pristine. He focused on the Italian Renaissace, (which is valuable and beautiful in its own right) and classic Greek architecture (very important as well), but totally ignored the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements, and everything that came after. Why? Because their subject matter was too ordinary.

Nobody was painted idealistically during this movement. Nobody was very "pretty". The revolutionary thing about the impressionists was that they made the ordinary beautiful. They focused on light, color, composition and brushwork as it could be applied to their everyday lives. I always loved that idea. As beautiful as Neoclassical/Rococco/any other 18th or 17th century movements can be, it was catered to a very narrow audience. Only the nobles were allowed to enjoy all of this beauty. This host also failed to mention the fact that most of the "beautiful architecture" he was gushing about was built by slaves or lower class individuals who didn't get to live anywhere near it. And he didn't even mention South American, African, Asian, or any other kind of art outside the obvious classical European art.

I'm just upset that he was so hell-bent on showing the world how useless all art after 1917 was. Really dude?

I wanted to smack him in the head with a copy of "Franny and Zooey".

What about Andrew Wyeth? Or Ben Shahn? Maurice Sendak? Winsor McCay? Frida Khalo? Diego Rivera? Rothko? Frank Lloyd Wright? Kathe Kollwitz? And why just stop at visual arts? What about all of the fantastic poetry, film, other literature, music, etc. that's been produced within the last 100 years? Has this man never even read a word of Maya Angelou or read Cisnero's "The House on Mango Street"? Or what about "Le Petitie Prince"? There's still so much beauty to be found in art these days that I never know where to start. And what about self-expression??? Not all art can appease the golden mean when conveying sincere emotion! And if all art never evolved from the Renaissance or made any progress, what would that say about the world?

And yet, I can still understand what he means when he moans about the state of the world. I think he's a tasteless dope, but it is a shame that a lot of the good things in this world get overshadowed by selfishness, consumerism, war, poverty, etc. But still, this mortal coil's not totally hopeless, is it?

I guess my question is this: how does one attain that balance? Like how do you create art that you feel is sincere, beautiful and accessible to humanity without being uppity/exclusive/narrow? Or without being so bent on coming across as "shocking" or "cutting edge" that you lose all humanity?

And then there's this other quote that always worries me (I don't remember where I heard it): "Don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out". How can one prevent that? How do you become a filter, not a sponge?

This is my major question for conference. Honestly, the only living people that never fail to bring me some clarity in this life are the general authorities.

I think the most important thing I've learned in my brief twenty-one years on this planet is that I really don't know that much about anything. There's so much I have yet to understand.

Nomads

I think some people are doomed to be restless souls forever. My dad is one of them. He's always been the quiet sort. Never really socializing at (or even showing up to) social events. He's the sort that says a few polite words, smiles a weirdly uneasy smile, then retreats back to his "bat-cave". This den of his is decked out with maps of south america, a dart board with and shelves of CDs that I was very fond of stealing at fifteen.

Sometimes, when I listen through the walls of my old room, I can still hear him pull a tune from his his acoustic guitar. It's always the same several notes, skipping up and down the strings with a skilled aimlessness. It's like what I do when I can't pay attention in class and begin drawing flowery shapes in the margins of my notebook; it's nothing spectacular, but it hints at something large and impatient shuffling around in our brains.

Mom tells me I'm my father's daughter. I think this is why we get along so well-- she knows how to put up with our type.

I forgot how restless I really was until this last sunday. After church, I slipped into my car before anyone could bombard me with visiting teaching, invitations to those fhe academy-awards that every ward seems to love, and all that Holy-Joe nonsense. I pulled out of the parking lot as discreetly as I could, careful not to drive by the apartments that were in my ward, and drove through Provo canyon. I followed the roads that looked the most familiar to me, and wound my way through Heber, Park City and back again.

I finally wandered in the door at around 9. My roommate, sprawled out on the couch in pajamas, demanded to know where I'd been.

"Oh," I replied, shrugging a little. "Out". I didn't realize until later that this minimalist response is something my dad does all the time.

I don't know why I'm writing about this. And in a blog too... Well, there you have it.