emerson – flowers in the library

24 Books That Marked Me

July 15, 2019July 13, 2019Posted in booksTagged a tree grows in brooklyn, austen, birthday post, book lists, books, books blog, cheryl strayed, east of eden, emerson, gone with the wind, harry potter, hemingway, into the wild, ishiguro, literature blog, pullman, thoreau, whitman6 Comments

Yesterday I turned 24. Scary. I’ve had the fortune to read many things along the years, and most of them have taught me something or challenged me in some way. Looking over all the things I’ve read, as one is bound to do when feeling nostalgic, I noticed that while there are hundreds of books I love, the ones that have actually changed me or that became an important part of who I am today are few, so I thought, why not choose a book that has marked me for each time I’ve completed a lap around the sun? These are the books I can’t imagine my life without (order is alphabetical).

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry… have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me sincere—be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dram all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”

East of Eden, John Steinbeck

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us […] Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their arrive and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil […] There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, ill have left only the hard, clean questions Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”

Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

“Burdens are for shoulders strong enough to carry them.”

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”

Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Hymns to the Night, Novalis

“At no grave can weep
Any who love and pray.”

Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

“The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.”

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Trust thyself. Every heart virbates to that iron string”

The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman

“If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.
But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.”

The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector

“The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”

The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe

“I am proud of my heart alone, it is the sole source of everything, all our strength, happiness and misery. All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own”

The Trick is to Keep Breathing, Janice Galloway

“No matter how often I think I can’t stand it anymore, I always do. There is no alternative. I don’t fall, I don’t foam at the mouth, faint, collapse or die. It’s the same for all of us. You can’t get out of the inside of your own head. Something keeps you going. Something always does.”

The Waste Land and Other Poems, T. S. Eliot

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

Villette, Charlotte Bronte

“So peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.”

Walden, Henry David Thoreau

“Not until we are lost do we being to understand ourselves.”

Wild, Cheryl Strayed

“… perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant i too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

An Age for Civil Disobedience

March 15, 2019Posted in UncategorizedTagged american literature, books, books and trave, books and travel, books blog, civil disobedience, emerson, Essays, henry david thoreau, literature, thoreau, transcendetalismLeave a comment

This a continued rant about our society and Henry David Thoreau.

In 1846, Henry David Thoreau was incarcerated for not paying his taxes. He owed the government six years of taxes, but he refused to pay because he knew the money would go to two causes the was against: the Mexican war and slavery. Today we mostly hear of millionaires that avoid paying taxes to get richer, but it’s rare to hear someone making a statement out of not paying taxes. Thoreau did, however, and the night he spent in prison was the motif of one of his best pieces of writing. “Civil disobedience”, as most of Thoreau’s essays, resonates too much with the issues we face today.

In this essay, Thoreau defends his actions arguing that he could not possibly support through his taxes something that he knows in his heart is wrong. But the essay goes further than that, he proposes nobody should abide a law that is wrong, he dismantles the myth of the law-abiding citizen and exposes the moral failing that subordinating one’s conscience to law or social codes represents. Generally speaking, that is what civil disobedience is about: acting according to our own moral code—which, according to Thoreau is not arbitrary, but transcendetal and and valid for all—, whether it contradicts or not the laws.

“Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

Democracy

This might sound problematic if we think of democratically elected governments. But I do not believe that democracy is incompatible with the “higher laws” Thoreau suggests; we must remember that democracy in his time—and still in our time, in many places— excluded women and people of colour from political participation. It is not incompatible with democracy, but it is only possible to act thus in a democratic system in which people are free to choose, and this implies they’re educated. Anyhow, Thoreau is probaby right in deeming democracy as a transitory system, a step towards a form of government in which the state is not above the individuals, but instead recognizes them as the real source of power.

Suffragettes

Moreover, the essay poses some uncomfortable questions: Is it right to support a democratically elected government even when we believe its actions go against the dignity of some people?

“Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

Consumerism

Another issue Thoreau addresses in his essay is the unwillingness that rich people show towards disobeying laws that are unfair. He argues that money is a way in which the government secures the allegiance of the rich, for they’re bound to be loyal to whoever allows their riches to grow. In our times, however, the monster is bigger, more dangerous and complex; it is no longer the government but the corporations, the stocks, thousands of people we can’t see and are more comfortable to call “the system”, which give and take value from properties and goods. The tiny percentage of people who are super rich are mostly supportive of these systems of exclusion and dehumanisation, not to their fellow human beings and certainly not to themselves.

In our times, the disobedience Thoreau poses is not only about taxes, it’s about disobeying the industries that tell us that buy more is to be better, at the expense of the half of the world that suffers for it, at the expense of global warming and pollution. To be disobedient would be to say no to the fashion industry and the plastic industry and the TV and Netflix industries, even at the cost of being uncomfortable or an outcast.

Utopy or possibility?

So why is civil disobedience necessary? Its importance lies in the need for coherence between our actions and and our thoughts, between our lifestyle and what we know to be right. For Thoreau, every one is capable of listening is himself to a higher truth, and acting according to it might sometimes go against laws, regulations or social codes.

Ideally, every individual would be capable of determining what is good or evil without being subordinated to a government or religion. The ideal role of the state would be to regulate affairs between individuals, but it would not hold any authority in itself: every individual would be capable of acting, thinking and expressing in the way he chooses, but he would also have every tool to form an autonomus conscience, aka education and time for introspection.

“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law,
so much as for the right.”

It could sound impossible and anarchic, but Thoreau is not talking about the kind of individualism we are familiar with today. He is nor for “every man for himself”, but rather for “every man for the greatest good, for he knows in his heart what this greater good is”. Thoreau’s approach is very similar to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson—his mentor: they both propose an individual search—for truth, justice and meaning— that goes beyond the limitations of culture and governments. In his essay “Experience”, Emerson also speaks of individualism as the source of good, and argues that the best access to knowledge and innovation is through personal experience. Both texts are about individuals that dare to go beyond old conventions in search of a higher knowledge, a better way of living for them and the other living creatures.

London, that great sea

May 8, 2018June 30, 2018Posted in TravelTagged emerson, england, london, percy shelley, places in london, Travel, travel blog, ukLeave a comment

“You are now

In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow

At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore

Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.

Yet in its depth what treasures!”

—Percy Shelley

Things that come to mind when thinking of London: Westminster, The Houses of Parliament in the fog, double-decker buses under the rain, the grey, trembling waters of the Thames. Ben Aaronovitch said once that there are some people who feel like Londoners the minute they set a foot out of the plane at Heathrow, I don’t think I know what it is like to feel like a Londoner. The first time I set foot in the city I had with me a really long list of places I had to visit. Too many for the time I was staying. As the night fell the city had already set its own rhythms on me, and I realized I was mistaken to think all those places I wanted to see were in the same city. The rythms of that vast mass of stone and fog were like those of the waves, and Shelley’s words then made sense to me: London, a great sea with its roaring waves, each of them as different from the others as majestic.

Because there are many Londons; there is the London of Picadilly and Oxford Circus, of displays and consumerism, a European Times Square; there is the London of Soho, alternative and boheme, ; the London of Westminster, a palimpsest of cities; the West End and the East End; layers of city on top of each other, and the underground moves between spaces but also between times.

The city is eclectic not only in its freneticism, but also in the way in which its history actualizes itself on the present in every building, in every park and street. Trying to imagine everything that has happened there, on the pages of innumerable books, what happened in life but also in imagination, is enough to get dizzy, it feels like being on board of a little boat afloat in a raging sea.

There is, in Southwark, one of the places that give account of the immense history of the city and its very intricate links with literature: The George Inn, a vaulted pub, founded in the Middle Ages and restored after the great fire in 1677. The place was used for theatre during the Elizabethan time, its yard and big rooms were enough to entertain a considerable number of people. Later on the inn still worked as a coaching pub and looking at it I couldn’t stop thinking of the place where Austen’s Elizabet Bennet receives the news of her sister’s elopement, or where the characters from Dicken’s Bleak House discuss the mysterious past of a young lady in a private chamber.

The inn actually appears in Little Dorrit and it is known that Dickens was a frequent client. The place is also a vestige of an industrial London, dirty and dangerous during the Victorian time, a time of beautiful dresses, top-hats and oiled mustaches as much of crime and violence; Sherlock Holmes’ time, Jack the Ripper’s time. How many cities can overlap over a simple stone structure? Almost everything has changed around it, but the George Inn still stands.

Places like these are like anchors. Or perhaps like the remains of a shipwreck that inhabitant the depths of a sea that violently yet gracefully agitates itself towards the shores of the future, Another one of these is, undoubtedly, The Globe, where one can’t help but wonder if Shakespeare’s contemporaries felt the same things when they witnessed Juliet or Ophelia’s sufferings. it is a curious feeling, to feel surrounded by a fictional past, déjà vu like reminiscences, like feeling we have seen somebody’s face before, perhaps in a dream, when we have only read about it. A feeling, too, that Londoners seem to share, for they surrounds themselves with plaques and statues of poets, bringing back all those past wanderings of the city.

In Westminster Abbey, the poet’s corner hoards hundreds of tombs and tributes. To think that under one same building lie the remains of Browning, Chaucer, Dickens, Dryden, Hardy, Johnson, Kipling and Tennyson. There also are, on stone carved letters, the names of Austen and the Brontës— enough, anyway, to make someone want to go to church. The poet’s corner is rarely empty, people wander about looking down to make out the names, some completely foreign. Every footstep is light, every moment soft, as if not to wake up someone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “the best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, ins such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts”. And London’s charm could not be better described; there is an East End at night for the contemporary Poètes maudits, surrounded by cafés and curry places; a Hyde Park for the romantic and, next to it, the Kensington Gardens, crowned by a Peter Pan statue, for the nostalgic; there is also Bloomsbury for the disenchanted; Camden Town for the rebels; and even a Platform 9 3/4, inside King’s Cross Station, for those who still believe in utopias.