07.30.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 9:08 pm by Miracle ♪♫
As an aspiring “chef”/housewife, I began propagating several pots of rosemary, sweet basil, and tarragon, to satisfy my quixotic kitchen endeavors. Aside from the nutritive and therapeutic benefits of herb planting, the cultivation of these living things brought about simple joys and ponderings. The burgeoning of a new tiny leaf after a night of delicate rainfall would excite me, and their figures like forest nymphs in green raiment tiptoeing towards the sun would enchant me.
It was an elation to witness the sweet basil leaves augment to half the size of my palm. Nevertheless this did not only signify healthy growth, it also forecasted an ineluctable stage of its life – harvest time. With a cook’s delight and a planter’s reluctance, I pruned the stems and brought them to the kitchen. When I returned to the potted plants, their sundered appearances worried me and I sensed what seemed like remorse. The beautiful nymphs were humbly prostrated to the ground. “What have I done?” I whispered to myself.
Concurrently, a discovery concerning a soul so dear to me severed my heart unexpectedly. Conforming to the predilections of any bleeding person, I felt the need to ask why it had to happen at a time when I did not deserve to experience such pain.
The basil plants provided the answer. When I inspected the plants the following day, I noticed that at the places where I had sheared one stem, there grew two new sprigs! The snippings did not terminate their growths, but increased it rather. So it is with our hearts. Prunings must needs be endured if we are to flourish.
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No sooner had I basked in the delightful botanical sights than another revelation regarding the aforementioned soul reached me. The same had grown from the selfsame wounding experience… but now, like the two new shoots, we offer our hearts for nurturing and tiptoe towards the Light.
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07.26.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 11:03 pm by Miracle ♪♫
“This permeation of the real world by the fictional is a symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial culture. Heroes step down off cinema screens to marry members of the audience. Will there be no end to it? … There can be little doubt that a large majority of us opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged reality, whose resources diminish by the day. After all, few of us would choose to travel in the opposite direction (though there are persuasive reports of an increase in such migrations latterly).”
“Most of us nowadays are sick.”
‘”Home’ has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more. How hard can we expect even a pair of magic shoes to work? They promised to take us home, but are metaphors of homeliness comprehensible to them, are abstractions permissible? Are they literalists, or will they permit us to define the blessed word? Are we asking, hoping for, too much?”
“What price tolerance if the intolerant are not tolerated also?”
“…when the money has become no more than a way of keeping score, a thing happens which I am reluctant to admit: one becomes detached from the earth.
There is a loss of gravity, a reduction in weight, a floating in the capsule of the struggle. The ultimate goal crosses a delirious frontier. Its achievement and our own survival become – yes! – fictions.
And fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous.”
~ Excerpts from At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers
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Alright, I have heard about this writer’s excellence but I did not know he was this excellent. Not until today. I have been asked about reading his books but discounted him due to an unfounded notion that he was “evil” despite his string of prestigious awards. Laugh if you must. What can one expect from his knack for dark and enigmatic titles whose synopses I never bothered to inspect? Moreover, a girl like me with obsessive and instinctive tendencies for dissecting words would almost shudder at those two ominous words so much like his eyebrows merged in a surname: Rush, Die.
Let this be another occasion not only for acknowledging how prejudice and ignorance, even towards authors, can stunt a reader or a person’s cultivation, but let this also be an opportunity to remind us never to judge - um, excuse this modified cliché - a book by its cover nor its title or reviews, or the author’s name, until the contents have been examined first hand. (Nevertheless, let me remain partial to Twilight and Harry Potter and spare my shelf their shelf-space unworthiness without letting me read a single passage. =P)
With a suitably slim size perfect for little interludes from Proust, I was finally able to rub the dust off this ignored exotic gem; “The most original imagination writing,” claims Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer.
East, West by Salman Rushdie is an anthology of short stories categorized in three depictive segments labeled “East”, “West”, and finally, “East, West”, each being furnished with – oh! how ironic – inviting titles:
East
- Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies
- The Free Radio
- The Prophet’s Hair.
West
- Yorick
- At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers
- Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate their Relationship
East, West
- The Harmony of the Spheres
- Chekov and Zulu
- The Courter
.
I shall refrain from describing each short story but I have posted Yorick at Scribd.com because this is the specific work that made me acknowledge the man’s genius and humour. With all the intertextualities and witticisms I would personally rank him with Günter Grass and Umberto Eco. You’ll see why.
Oh, Franz. I should have asked you to get me The Enchantress of Florence instead! Haha
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07.24.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 1:35 pm by Miracle ♪♫
It is not that I have now trouble discerning reality from fiction, but I am beginning to sense a certain attachment to our narrator. Now a young adult in The Guermantes Way, I feel as if I have grown up with him. No, I cannot regard him as a role model or someone I would choose to have as a best friend, but a being akin to a relative, someone with whom you are bound to have close ties one way or another. Moreover, growing up with a fruit of Proustian imagination yields a fancy that one is not only growing up as a reader, but as a person as well – and to think I am already having such sentiments when I have only finished the third volume. Oh, what Proust can do!
The Guermantes Way, I gather, is an exploration on manifold and kaleidoscopic human relations from the recondite to the perfunctory. If one were to single out this third volume apart from the entire In Search of Lost Time, the reader might sense an unexciting plot, but as in reading any great work of literature, we do not seek after the plot, otherwise we should very well settle for a Sidney Sheldon. What we seek after are passages – may it be about pianists, or artists and neurosis – which urge us to ponder, or enhance the way we view art or life. However, in The Guermantes Way, there are lengthy sections that I deem discouraging to some readers, particularly those that are about aristocracy and political issues of that time (distinctly the Dreyfuss Affair) which today’s reader might find irrelevant, even though they were duly appreciated as it gave me a thorough portrait of a past era.
Of these paragraphs describing the superficial conversations and elaborations about genealogies among the elite, the narrator also laments that it “supplied no food for my favourite trains of thought; and besides, even had they possessed the elements which they lacked, they would have had to be of a very exciting quality for my inner life to awaken during those hours in which I lived on the surface, my hair well brushed, my shirt-front starched, in which, that is to say, I could feel nothing of what constituted for me the pleasure of life.”
The prolonged descriptions of high society would dismay some young readers today. In fact I have recently heard of someone who does not like Proust’s works so much. This does not surprise me, and I shall not judge that person since we are all entitled to our own preferences. However, in my view, these aspects of a work which we cannot relate to (excluding graphic obscenities which I find I really cannot take), are like qualities of a person that we cannot fully understand simply because we have been raised differently. If we welcome and try to understand these seemingly un-understandable qualities along with the accompanying higher percentage of wisdom instead of ignoring the work or the person’s entirety just because of these details, something happens. We learn.
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07.20.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 11:53 am by Miracle ♪♫
Dr. du Boulbon speaks of neurosis.
From The Guermantes Way, In Search of Lost Time Volume III, by Marcel Proust.
The Bad Side:
He prided himself on not sharing the mania of others, oblivious of the fact that he had one of his own…
Neurosis has a genius for mimicry. There is no illness that it cannot counterfeit perfectly.
If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient?
¤ ¤ ¤
The Good Side:
That poor lunatic is the most lofty intellect that I know. Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth.Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow gifts on it. We enjoy music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know that they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these…
I have told you that without nervous disorder there can be no great artist.
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07.16.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 11:54 am by Miracle ♪♫
“…so fine a pianist that one is no 
longer aware that the performer is a pianist at all, because (by not interposing all that apparatus of digital effort, crowned here and there with brilliant effects, all that spattering shower of notes in which at least the listener who does not quite know where he is thinks he can discern talent in its material, tangible reality) his playing has become so transparent, so imbued with what he is interpreting, that one no longer sees the performer himself - he is simply a window opening upon a great work of art.” ~ The Guermantes Way, In Search of Lost Time Volume III, Marcel Proust.
.
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07.14.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 1:15 am by Miracle ♪♫
If not for someone very concerned about my un-Filipino readings, I would not have read F. Sionil Jose sooner. I thank this person deeply. From Proust’s Combray and Balbec to the Cordilleras and backroads of Manila and Negros, I made the detour and did not regret it. Every short story in The God Stealer is profoundly provocative and even gradually poetic towards the end of the book. I appreciate the way the author does not press nationalism on the reader but instead broadens the mind to the truths of the Filipino people.
Nevertheless, something plagues me more than the disturbing stories do. I have a recent 2001 edition in my hands and considering F. Sionil Jose’s calibre, it was vexing to see a cornucopia of typographical errors! I commit typos and I am not with the grammar police even though FB once dubbed me one, but mistakes such as “slipping on the job” and “something wrong wity my hearing” are truly irksome especially when multiplied, and we are not even talking about blogging here. This leads me to a rather harsh question and conclusion. Why are we incapable of producing an impeccable edition of this man’s work? Surely the majority of Filipino people do not lack talent, but in my view, what most of us lack is the will to strive for excellence, or if excellence is too much, just plain betterment. While publishing houses of other countries are doing justice to their award-winning authors, is this careless publication all we can offer someone whom we call a “National Artist for Literature”? It might seem exaggerated but I truly deem this a serious failure that even I, a simple reader, feel the weight of responsibility on me. How can we think of doing something as magnanimous as loving our country or insist Filipino pride if we do not even have the hearts to do our jobs diligently - editing a national artist’s work, in this case?
………………………………………………………………………….
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07.13.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:05 am by Miracle ♪♫
(Another Mouth to Feed)
My Dear Sofia,
In many Filipino stories and everyday provincial jargon, it is not only once that the words “another mouth to feed” appear whenever there is a looming childbirth, and the phrase is not usually without an accompanying wistful or worried indication. This bothers me. It means that a child is unwelcome and only viewed as an additional burden. Surely children do not just sprout by themselves, or come in bundles delivered by storks, nor do they beg to be created.
Whenever I see an infant’s tiny fingers and toes, look into their immaculate eyes, smell their pure breaths, fondle their petite ears, kiss their button noses, and hear their gentle purrs, I always find myself asking, how can such a remarkable creature be unjustly labeled as “another mouth to feed”? No matter how moneyless a family is, a child is still [supposed to be] the product of a unity bound by great love. Children are miracles, blessings, and a heritage from above.
As for you, when you enter our lives, you will not be merely another mouth to feed. You will be a fruit of consummate love. Without wistfulness or anxiety, you will be another heart to nurture, another brain to cultivate, another hand to hold, another foot to guide, and another soul to love.
………………………………………………
.
To read all Letters to a Future Daughter, Click Here.
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07.08.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 11:02 am by Miracle ♪♫
The first two short stories from F. Sionil Jose’s The God Stealer portray extreme antipodes. Simply speaking, The Heirs recounts one rich family’s life, while The Mountain relates a poor family’s life. Instead of reading the rest of the stories, I paused and pondered on these two for I found their junction very interesting.
Unbeknownst to the author or not, The Heirs illustrates the futility of wealth whereas The Mountain exhibits the yearning for it. I am not about to speak of the book or those two stories however.
Poverty. Our country’s literature abounds with it. In fact, the majority of Filipinos find a certain appeal to the topic for the simple reason that most of us share an affinity with it. Even Filipino bloggers who write of pauperism garner the most readers and acclaim. If not ourselves, we always know of somebody in dire straits. And yet almost every country in the world cradles their own proletariat which means that even the most successful countries have not found a panacea for poverty.
But what is poverty? Being homeless? Jobless? Hungry?
I observe my little brother all the time and consider how blessed he is for being able to grab a jar of peanut butter and cream a piece of bread with it during any time of the day, drink milk three times a day, or have a balanced diet at every meal. Still and all, his eyes sparkle with envy every time I recapitulate my early childhood living in a bahay kubo, nipa hut and all, and having to fish in a nearby pond for our lunch, pick wild fruits for breakfast, and harvest kamote-tops or alugbati among the shrubbery. We had no money. A twenty-peso bill was a rare novelty. Bread was a luxury. But we did not care eating “leaves” every single day for several years. The family was wealthy in Love and Joy.
I myself wonder why I do not often write about that experience even with the knowledge that if I did, I would allure more readers. The plurality of my new friends is not even aware of this certain period in my life. Certainly I am not ashamed of being poor, but I fear that people would somehow present pity, and if that happened, I sense that I would be exploiting a very prismatic and wonderful aspect of my life.
“You don’t know how it feels” is a common retort whenever I try to reach out to the poverty-stricken. My interests recline on books, music, different forms of art, coffee, exquisite cuisine, fine manners and amenities, but that does not mean I do not know about being hungry and penniless.
I remember being very poor, but I remember being very happy.
A person is only truly needy when he is destitute of love.
There is a panacea for poverty.
But it is something very difficult to attain.
Contentment.
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07.07.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 1:58 am by Miracle ♪♫
First, the highlighted passages:
- “In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can rest assured. So it is with Time in one’s life.”
- “What brings men together is not a community of views but a consanguinity of minds.”
- “All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind.”
- “Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.”
- “…in the state of mind in which we “observe” we are a long way below the level to which we rise when we create.”
- “But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth’s surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves…”
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¤ ¤ ¤
After abundant intermissions and distracting emotional caprices, I finally finished the second volume of À la recherche du temps perdu.
Within a Budding Grove or In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower earned Marcel Proust the Prix Goncourt in 1919 and though it is a tome that can prevail without having to lean on the other volumes, it makes a staggering sequel to Swann’s Way.
Truth be told, I was slightly disoriented as our narrator meticulously described coming of age in a society I could hardly relate with. Yet there was the timeless keynote of growing up, and that, I could identify with. Within a Budding Grove chronicles the narrator’s recollections as an adolescent in the seaside resort of Balbec where he meets titillating characters who open his eyes to the adult realm of politics, art, philosophy, and love. I could have blamed my lack of focus or its seven hundred and forty ornate pages for the perplexity I felt at times while reading, until I comprehended that my sentiments only reflected what this book is mainly about – that perplexing stage in our lives called adolescence, retold in a most masterful manner.
“…we were still at an age when enthusiasm cannot keep silence, and had been transported into a life where anonymity is suffocating…”
“My intelligence might have told me the opposite. But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through – awkward indeed but by no means infertile – is that we do not consult our intelligence… In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer posses the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything. “
¤ ¤ ¤
I would compare reading Swann’s Way to witnessing pastel-coloured fireworks while in Monet’s garden, and cross one of those bridges to Withing a Budding Grove, then come to an atmosphere brushed by Renoir, and on to a place with Manet-like shades… where the strokes remain beautiful, and where the pastel-coloured explosions and imaginations of childhood fade away and are gradually replaced by deeper colours. Swann’s Way enlivens the senses, Withing a Budding Grove arouses the mind.
I have left the budding grove at last, but I take it with me.
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07.03.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 9:20 pm by Miracle ♪♫
“You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?” An older lady armed with an inoffensive frankness asked me in the boat on my way home from Cebu. I was a bit thrown back by her query that all I could manage was a puzzled laugh.
“Not with all those books!” she continued, smiling.
“Ahhh…” said I inwardly.
I had to smile back as I realized the amusing spectacle I displayed in my cot. There I was, surrounded by books obtained in Cebu while trying to fit them inside one bag; the beautifully-bound Jack London treasury for Misha… my Günter Grass… Colette… Sionil Jose… Anzia Yezierska… (I am indebted to my sources.)
Why does reading give others the impression of alone-ness? This is not the first time my books and I have communicated this notion, but when I adeptly examine how books have affected the most meaningful relationships in my life, I am persuaded that they have only made bonds stronger, deeper, and truer.
How about you? How have books touched your relationships with other people?
….………………………………………………..
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