Step 53: Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All--Tom Robbins

*Some marriages are made in heaven, Ellen Cherry thought. Mine was made in Hong Kong. By the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at K mart.


*MOCKINGBIRDS ARE THE TRUE ARTISTS of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

*There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness.

*Naked means you just don’t have any clothes on. Nekkid means you don’t have any clothes on and you’re fixing to get into trouble.” Patsy giggled. “Lord, chile, I’ve already done that.” She lowered her voice to a notch above a whisper. “The fact is, your daddy just had his way with me, as is his custom on a Sunday afternoon.

*That she’d been tricked—less than a week after the wedding, that probably was not an excellent indicator of impending decades of marital bliss.

*She parted her robe slightly so that the late afternoon sunlight might warm her between her legs, where she was leaking a rivulet of the manly fluid in which she sometimes suspected her own artistic life had drowned.

*As is sometimes the case, the very absence of cultural stimulation was culturally stimulating.

*Boomer, you see, was thunderously, dizzily, and—this should be said in his favor—sincerely in love.

*“You gotta come home. Be with me. After what we been through! We—we signed into that motel as man and wife! You put—you put your mouth on me.” “Shoulda checked the fine print, hon,” whispered Ellen Cherry, trying to assist him back onto the ivy vines as quietly as possible. “That blow job did not come with a lifetime warranty.”

*Consider that the legs of this bird are called “drumsticks,” after the ritual objects employed to extract the music from the most aboriginal and sacred of instruments. Our ancestors kept their drums in public, but the sticks, being more actively magical, usually were stored in places known only to the shaman, the medicine man, the high priest, or the Wise Old Woman. The wing of the fowl gives symbolic flight to the soul, but with the drumstick is evoked the beat of the pulse of the heart of the universe.

*Few of us nowadays participate in the actual hunting and killing of the turkey, but almost all of us watch, frequently with deep emotion, the reenactment of those events. We watch it on TV sets immediately before the communal meal. For what are footballs if not metaphorical turkeys, flying up and down a meadow? And what is a touchdown if not a kill, achieved by one or the other of two opposing tribes? To our applause, great young hunters from Alabama or Notre Dame slay the bird. Then, the Wise Old Woman, in the guise of Grandma, calls us to table, where we, pretending to be no longer primitive, systematically rip the bird asunder.

*“He’s a complete idiot,” reported Ellen Cherry to Patsy, “but I have to admit he’s a hill of fun.”

*Patsy and Verlin quarreled viciously. Verlin called Patsy a strumpet, a mother who influenced her daughter to behave lasciviously. Patsy called Verlin a hypocrite who enjoyed lasciviousness but lacked the backbone to admit it. “God created my body,” said Patsy. “I’m not ashamed of its nekkidness.”

*For a while, she stood over her father. Floating upon a pond of sleep, his pink face reminded her of a Monet water lily. She thought him an honorable man damaged by dogma.

*Typically, her own interest in sex was abiding and deep. And incognito. In a patriarchal society, the abiding sexuality of the healthy female was obliged to wear a prim disguise. Unaware of the irony, men flaunted their pale desires, while the stronger passions of the woman were usually concealed.

*Eventually, he swept her up in his arms and carried her into the belly of the beast. Her panties were off before she hit the bed. He tricked me, Ellen Cherry was thinking now. With art and sex, he tricked me into love.

*“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.”

*Ellen Cherry was as mystified as the fly that wasted a day following a plastic horse.

*Ambition’s not as bad as AIDS, I reckon. But it can be a whole lot worse than the measles.”

*“Jezebel!” he yelled. “You cheap slutting cunt-whoring Jez-a-fucking-bel!” With that, he lost consciousness. As for her, her orgasm had been lent the necessary dynamic gradient that in classical theater promises its audience catastrophe, immortality, or both.

*Oh, the Goddess had many names, and many roles. She was virgin, bride, mother, prostitute, witch, and hanging judge, all swirled into one. She had more phases than the moon. She knew the dark side of the moon like the palm of her hand. She shopped there. Because the Goddess was changeable and playful, because she looked upon natural chaos as lovingly as she did natural order, because her warm feminine intuition was often at odds with cool masculine reason, because the uterine magic of her daughters had since the dawn of consciousness overshadowed the penis power of her sons, resentful priests of a tribe of nomadic Hebrews led a coup against her some four thousand years ago—and most of what we know as Western civilization is the result. Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman’s superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.

*Veils of ignorance, disinformation, and illusion separate us from that which is imperative to our understanding of our evolutionary journey, shield us from the Mystery that is central to being.

*THERE ARE LANDSCAPES in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour (the wispiest little pasta of cloud can spoil the effect), our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection to space becomes as solid as bone.

*“Not naive,” Conch Shell had corrected him. “He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.”

*We are so enamored of our own activity range that we blind ourselves to the fact that most of the action in the universe is unfolding outside our range, occurring at speeds so much slower or faster than our own that it is hidden from us as if by a . . . a veil.

*The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans’ insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.”

*Isn’t it a fact that when we give up and quit hoping; genuinely, sincerely quit hoping, things usually change for the better? Zen masters say that when we become convinced that the human situation is hopeless, we approach serenity, the ideal state of mind.

*Political convictions weaken morality and religious convictions weaken the mind.

*For a person has not only perceptions but a will to perceive, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it—which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognize that imagination is reality’s master, we call “sages,” and those who act upon it, we call “artists.”

*“Long as you’re not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things. Heaven is refusing to be scared. I mean that literally.”

*Obviously, freedom’s glare is too bright for many. They panic when any sudden gust lifts the hem of the brocade. Eyes blinking frantically, they’ll cling with their last broken nail to the protective folds of social control.

*It’s a city far from our shores, far from our life-styles, yet, it could be argued, a city in which each of us psychically dwells: Jerusalem, sacred and terrible, bloody and radiant, the most important town in America.

*“Can’t they comprehend that not ever’thing’s done for a paycheck? That sometimes you just make a thing ’cause you wanna see how it’ll turn out, ’cause you have a feeling in your gut that it oughta be made?”

*Lost now to family, buddies, girlfriend, rabbit hound, society, and himself, this poor young sailor had fallen—not very many miles from Jerusalem—understanding virtually nothing of the situation in the Middle East. He probably believed it involved a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, freedom and oppression. That was his second mistake. His third mistake was in trusting that even if he didn’t understand the situation, his leaders did. His first—and worst—mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do. Without questioning their methods or their motives, he allowed politicians to make the decisions that led to his early demise.

*What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people’s decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude.

*There’s cosmic hate here already. So much to hate, the hate has permeated the dust, the hate has risen to the stars what are up above. It’s no easy thing to reduce such a hate,

*With crocodile claws and mummy jewelry, Egypt scratched its name into the foundation stone of history. Before Islam, Egyptians thought only of immortality. Since Islam, they think only of life after death. What is the difference? To understand the difference, you must live for many months without moisture.

*“The moon is no more Islamic than it is Hindu or Eskimo. The lunar mirror simply reflects the hidden poetry in us all. The sun, however, is a Semite.”

*Sentimental memories were like sugar-water icicles. Was she to be poked in the heart the rest of her life?

*What a dull world this would be were we all alike. What an evolutionary dead end! To be brothers, to live in peace, we do not have to be overly similar. We do not have to admire or even like one another’s peculiarities. We need only respect those peculiarities—and to be grateful for them. Our similarities provide us with a common ground, but our differences allow us to be fascinated by one another. Differences give human encounters their snap and their fizz and their brew.”

*An Arab lies in the desert, sleeping under the crazy-faced moon. A lion sniffs at the Arab, the Arab is unafraid. The Arab dreams on. The river in the background, I think the river is the Arab’s dream. Perhaps the lion is also dreamed: you notice it has left no paw prints in the sand. In any case, that picture, my dear, is the definitive portrait of the Arab character. Fierce and free, sleeping fearlessly beneath the wild night stars. But dreaming. Dreaming always of water. Dreaming of danger when real danger is absent, in order to demonstrate bravado. Arabs live in their fantasies. We are not a practical people like the Jews are. The Jew gets things accomplished. The Arab dreams—and converses with the moon.

*Arabs love the music of the stars. But also the arithmetic of the stars. Both are Arabic inventions. Did you know that? Oh, yes, in the arts and sciences, the Arabs were once masters. Our architecture was original and powerful. We invented astronomy, modern mathematics, map-making, shipbuilding, perfumery. I could go on. We have an ancient literary heritage. In the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, while Europe wallowed in its Dark Ages, while Europe was ignorant and impoverished and altogether barbarous, there was enlightenment in the Arab lands. The Arab world was cultured then, rich, educated, and, in its fierce, dreamy way, refined. Mathematicians strolled in rose gardens. Poets rode stallions. “So what happened? Why, my dear, the Crusaders paid us a little visit. The Crusaders came. Christian knights from Europe. And they massacred men, women, and children—Jew as well as Arab, it should be told: all who were non-Christian. The Crusaders destroyed the intellectual and scientific life of western Asia and northern Africa. They burned the largest, most complete library in the world, the great library of Tripoli, and they reduced to rubble scores of scientific and artistic centers. Such a tragedy. Such a waste.”

*How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand.

*Many men, having been hurt at Point A, try to insure themselves against being hurt again at Point C by becoming assholes at Point B.

*“Alike or different is not the problem. The problem is that they think they’re so different. Each one thinks they’re superior. Their religions teach them they’re superior. I love my people. In modern times, at least, we have been a smart, industrious people, and a caring people. A kind and humorous people. But to say that we’re God’s ’chosen’ people, the ones what are favored above all the others, hoo boy! that’s tempting fate. That’s begging for trouble. And trouble we got already. Jerusalem is the trouble capital of the world. For thousands of years, Jerusalem is the capital of trouble and death.”

*“I’m twenty-four, jilted, and work in food service; I’m free to be as free as I please.” It occurred to her that despite the failure of her marriage, the failure of her career, despite her hangover and chronic horniness, she suddenly was feeling rather light and giddy. She couldn’t understand it. Was she simply too shallow to suffer indefinitely, or was she too wise to become attached to her suffering, too feisty to permit it to rule her life? She voted for wise and feisty, and walked on, kicking leaves.

*It was as if Spike and Abu had been granted a sneak preview behind the veil, a glimpse in which it was revealed that organized religion was a major obstacle to peace and understanding. If so, it was a gradual revelation, for it unfolded slowly and separately, a barely conscious outgrowth of each man’s devotion to humanity and rejection of doctrine.

*Of course, religion’s omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the comfort it provides for the sick, the weary, and the disappointed. Yes, true enough. But the Deity does not dawdle in the comfort zone! If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the “comfort” of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.

*A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in Homo sapiens. (For all we know, it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence. Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.” After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore. Instead, they talked about spirit. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is connected to the sky and its gases. Out of the gases springs fire. Firepower. It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war. “War is hell.” Thus, religious belief propels us straight to hell. History unwaveringly supports this view. (Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die—or kill—to support its presumptuous claims.) Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged “mystics.” They were regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination. The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical. Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished. Those who witness the dropping of the fourth veil might see clearly what Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee dimly suspected: that not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.

*Family trouble was the worst kind. Some families ran their own little versions of the Middle East. Come to think of it, what was the Middle Eastern situation but a family squabble that had gotten out of hand? Isaac v. Ishmael.

*If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.”

*“I’m thinking it’s the stones,” said Spike. “So many stones in the Middle East, already! When you got that many rocks, it’s too easy to pick one up and throw it at your neighbor.

*“And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe—and go on about our tasks. .

*It’s a foolish being, a being without vision, who has not formulated a contingency plan,

*He could tell that she was smiling. There are smiles that actually travel along telephone wires, although no engineer at Bell Laboratories could explain how it works.

*“People tend to take everything too seriously. Especially themselves.” “Yep. And that’s probably what makes ’em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously.”

*Jerusalem. A mystical metropolis with seven magic gates. Entered by few, forgotten by none. Simultaneously the capital of death and the seat of immortality. Hub of the wheel of pilgrimage. Focal point of all received starlight. Fly-specked mirror of heaven on earth. Jumping-off place to eternity. The town that logic could not shut down. That city, among all cities, into which both the Second Coming and the Redemption have been booked and to where both the Christ and the Messiah are said to be holding tickets. Jeru Salaam.

*Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.

*Money itself was incomprehensible. Almost from its inception, it had perplexed and befuddled those in whose lives it had appeared, and although modern people were used to it, although they dealt with it on a daily, if not hourly basis, and although it worked in their every thought the way that yeast worked in bread, they were no closer to understanding it than they had been at the beginning. Preoccupied with it, dominated—and ultimately bewildered—by it, introspective men and women finally had to confess that it clouded their vision of the world like . . . yes, you guessed it, like a veil.

*Personally, I prefer carols to rap tunes, but not by a wide margin. The carol radiates hope, the rap radiates aggression, but both are rooted in humanity’s overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”

*The Lord was sorely vexed, according to Bud. “Well, what does he expect?” said Patsy. “He hasn’t made a house call in two thousand years. When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”

*I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.”

*“They’re a right sorry admission of defeat, them signs are. If my life was that compromised, I sure wouldn’t advertise it. My sign would say, ’If There Was Something Else I’d Rather Be Doing, I’d Damn Well Be Doing It.’”

*She had never heard him utter a sentence that didn’t amount to a cliché. She concluded that that was what organized religion did to people. It limited them to thinking secondhand thoughts. It caused them to live secondhand lives. Wasn’t that what religion had in common with totalitarian politics? Nazi Germany, the Inquisition, Stalinism, the Crusades, these were what happened when reality was allowed to give way to cliché.

*Wasn’t there a surplus in life of the boring, the repetitive, the mediocre, and the tame? Shouldn’t she be glad, grateful for this intrusion of the unexpected and unexplained? And if she never understood it, why, so much the better. The surprise and shock of the extraordinary, even when embodied in so small a happening as the riddle around the spoon, could be a tonic, a syrup of wahoo, and she found herself wishing a dose—dangerous side effects be damned—for everyone she knew.

*“Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver.”

*INFORMATION ABOUT TIME cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator. Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man’s mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he’s got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.

*While the afterlife concept renders the masses manageable, it renders their masters destructive. A world leader who’s convinced that life is merely a trial for the more valuable and authentic afterlife is less hesitant to risk starting a nuclear holocaust. A politician or corporate executive who’s expecting the Rapture to arrive on the next flight from Jerusalem is not going to worry much about polluting oceans or destroying forests. Why should he? Thus, to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

*’We concede defeat. We haven’t a chance against the masterpieces of the past, against the marketplace of the present, against the annihilations of the future, but, nevertheless, here we are.’

*I wasn’t aware that mediocrity was such a virtue. But it looks like both democracy and socialism exist to encourage it.”

*She didn’t care whether or not artists paid their dues so long as the end product sprayed Windex on the panes of perception?). Contradiction may be an unavoidable trait in a many-faceted sensibility in an expanding universe, but bitterness is reductive in the most trivializing way,

*“The dance itself predates Herod and that particular Salome, his stepdaughter. In fact, it is very ancient and thoroughly pagan. It is connected to the myth of the cyclic death of the sun god. His moon goddess travels to the underworld to rescue him, but to get him back she has to drop one of her seven articles of clothing at each of its seven gates.” “Why?” “I have no clue. But the reenactment of the story apparently continued well into Roman times. Supported by Hebrews. A dancer would drop a veil at each of the seven gates of the Temple in Jerusalem. At the seventh gate, she was in her birthday suit, though we need not suppose that to be the reason Herod requested the dance at his birthday party. I have read that the veils represented layers of illusion. As each veil peeled away, an illusion was destroyed, until finally some great central mystery of life was revealed.”

*“The level of structure that people seek always is in direct ratio to the amount of chaos they have inside.”

*Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don’t give it social services, give it a scary adversary.

*’The rougher the world gets around me, the sweeter I seem to myself.’

*It was futile to work for political solutions to humanity’s problems because humanity’s problems were not political.

*For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one’s holdings and legitimize one’s greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.

*No amount of money could buy security, and if it could, it would be a bad bargain at any price, since security was a form of paralysis, just as satisfaction was a form of death.

*Those who tied all of their dreams to an afterlife had no life for there to be an “after” of;

*Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be complicated, it might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely—but it was the bottom line.

*It was as different for everybody as it was the same, so everybody had to take control of their own life, define their own death, and construct their own salvation. And when you finished, you didn’t call the Messiah. He’d call you.

*Few in government or elsewhere had yet caught on that the prancing donkey-person represented for Arab and Jew a common ancestral deity, because few had been taught that it was for the prince of jackasses, the buck-toothed empress of jennies, that their solemnized and contested land had, appropriately or not, been named. When that information emerged, either Jerusalemites would lighten up or the falafel would really hit the fan.

*She’d paint and paint and paint. She would dedicate herself to . . . well, she’d have to call it “beauty,” for want of a better word. She wouldn’t be sentimental about it, or self-righteous, or even spiritual and pure. And she wouldn’t get defensive when ridiculed or misunderstood. Beauty she would not carry like a banner, nor would she take refuge from the world in it like a hermit in a shack. Beauty would just be her everyday thing.

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Step 52: Last day in Japan

Last day in Japan: (pictures are mostly of me and my students)


All of our things packed and the house mostly cleaned, Yohei and I got up around 8:30 looking forward to what would be a very long day. March 21st was my last day in Japan and Yohei’s first in America.

Clockwise from front: Takeru, Remi, Sora, Me, Mayo (Tomamu 1st and 2nd grade nut jobs)

Takeuchi, who has been my go to, my rock, my knowledge bank, and friend was coming to the house at 10am to load the car with all our stuff…including 4 big bags filled with mostly my stuff, 3 carry on bags, a small guitar, and a dog crate. I wasn’t sure why he was coming at 10 considering we didn’t need to leave Shimukappu until 2pm…but I have often found it easier to go with the flow then question things when it comes to Shimukappu life. . And so there he was at 10 ready to help us clean the house only to find we had already done it. I had no idea cleaning was part of his intention, but he was certainly pleased to discover it had already been done. So, we loaded the car…he went off to get a few hours of work in and Yohei and I went to get some early lunch.

Maki, me, Takeuchi, (other guy?) 2 of my greatest students and friends

There are only about 4 restaurants in Shimukappu, Fry Pan (which the other American owns and there isn’t particularly much I could eat), The Owl Café (which is only open in the summer and I ADORE), the Izakaya (kinda a bar/food spot only open at night), and then Maple which we had heard was great but had never been to because it was out by the train station. So…we headed to Maple. We were the first customers and once we got our meal we chatted away about our time in Shimukappu and the excitement about our trip to America.

Tachibana, Kaori, me, Mitchi (my basketball class and friends)

With an extra couple of hours til pick up we went back to the house and put a blanket back down on the bed and somehow fell asleep until we heard the knock on the door. Shimukappu politics and other bullshit required Yohei and Maya to be picked up at a different location so none of the city people would see them in the city car. There had already been about 5 different kinds of farewells for me…but there was to be one final one in front of the city hall building just before we took off. So, Maya and Yohei headed to the rest stop in town and we drove to the city hall.

Wakana, Moe, Haruna, Misaki (first grade monsters!)

There was a small group of people waiting to say goodbye. Some were kid students, some adult students, some teachers, some of my basketball and volleyball friends, and my co-workers. With hugs and a small speech I waved my final goodbye to Shimukappu. We picked up Yohei and Maya and hit the road towards the airport.

LOVE this group of girls!

On the drive I was thinking a lot about whether or not this was really goodbye to all those people, to Japan. In a strange way it just didn’t feel like it…I guess it never does. We always think we will see those people and places again somehow/somewhere.

Ayaka, Yuna, Ayaka, me, Yuka, Aoi (5th grade jr. H. AWESOME class. Miss them!)

Now our flight wasn’t until 9pm, but Maya had an appointment to get checked out and okayed for flying at 4pm. Once at the airport we found the place, they checked all the paper work and her microchip…then they stamped us good to go. Now it was only 4:30…what to do?

Clockwise-Mei, Chiharu, Akane, Arisa, me, Kurumi, Asami, Rina, Keitaro, Shuya (3rd and 4th grade) LOVE THEM!

One of the teachers I worked with had mentioned she might come to the airport to say goodbye before my flight, and just as we were discussing what we should do she called to say she was in the airport already. So we parked and met her in the airport café for a cocoa. After we said goodbye to her and she jumped on the train back to Shimukappu we decided to get an early dinner—my last meal in Japan.

Rara, me, Akihiro, Chiharu (my Tomamu adult class)

Dinner out of the way we still had hours to waste so we headed back to the car to spend some time with Maya. The boys stayed in the car and Maya and I went for a walk…a walk a walk…a walk in which I tried to explain to her how very sorry I was for what was about to happen. We then went back to the car and chilled and chatted. Mostly chatted about the immense number of people in Shimukappu who suffer from depression and what would be required to change that—A LOT.

teaching a lesson in the Tomamu school

We next got a phone call from my best girl friend in Japan…Chisato. She was on our way to meet us to see us off. She parked next to us and we all headed into the airport. Maya had to get into the cage once we got inside and we had to put the cage on a cart to get her to the gate…she HATED it! I was already stressed out and now her crying just put me into tears. We made it to the gate and started getting checked in. We were made aware that we would have to pick up Maya in Tokyo and take her from the domestic terminal to the international terminal and re-check her in. WHAT? Fuck. We only had about 45 minutes lay over in Tokyo…how were we gonna do it? Thank GOD they were able to bump us up onto an earlier flight…which meant we better get through security now.

After Yuna finished her 'thank you/goodbye' speech (in english), my favorite student and i grabbed a hug

Saying goodbye to Chisato and Takeuchi wasn’t easy. My only comfort was a bit of certainty that of all the Shimukappu people, they were two who like to travel and I believe I will see again. We got on the short flight from Sapporo to Tokyo and rushed off like mad people to fetch my dog. Despite our flight being moved up we still had a major rush on our hands. She came off and the tears in my eyes were back as we rushed outside in the rain and got her to do a pee, put her back in the cage and onto the bus headed to the international terminal.

My final exit from the school

Our flight was so close that an agent from ANA (our airline) met us at the bus stop and showed us the way to the check-in gate (you’d never find that in the USA!) Once again we had to check Maya in as she cried in the cage. I handed her little bites of her food and gave her a Benadryl in hopes it would calm her and help her sleep on the flight. Once we said goodbye to her we had to run!

Taichii, me, Hayato (Tomamu 6th graders) great kids.

Once through security we had just enough time to go to the bathroom and get in line for the plane. Once at the front of the line I gave them my ticket and waited for Yohei to get through before heading into the tunnel…but for some reason they weren’t letting him through. After I had a mini-panic attack that something might be wrong I saw them pass over his wallet…OH MY GOD.

At one of my farwell parties with teachers, coworkers, and teachers.

Someone else found it in the bathroom and gave it to the gate. They looked at his license picture and name to recognize him when he came through the gate. SOOOO lucky! Safe on the plane and as we took off I said a little goodbye to Japan and a little prayer for Maya’s sake hoping she wasn’t panicking below us. See you later Japan.

Step 51: Emma

I've just finished my first book on my new KINDLE. My mom got it for me as a Christmas gift. She knows how much I love reading-- it was such a wonderful gift. To start out, my first purchase was 'The Complete Works of Jane Austen," which, despite having already read four of the seven works included, seemed to be the perfect first collection for my KINDLE. The book is arranged with EMMA as the first book in the collection, so I went ahead and did a re-read of it--loving the feature that allows you to highlight quotes you like and save them for later. Later being now that I just finished it and was able to download those quotes onto my own computer! As the say in Japan--BENRI--which means convenient.  And so here you are, my favorite quotes from my most recent reading of Jane Austen's 'EMMA.'  Enjoy.

*The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself;

*She had been a friend and companion such as few possessed: intelligent, well-informed, useful, gentle, knowing all the ways of the family, interested in all its concerns, and peculiarly interested in herself, in every pleasure, every scheme of hers--one to whom she could speak every thought as it arose, and who had such an affection for her as could never find fault.

*It was a melancholy change; and Emma could not but sigh over it, and wish for impossible things, till her father awoke, and made it necessary to be cheerful.

*"And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess?-- I pity you.--I thought you cleverer--for, depend upon it a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it. And as to my poor word `success,' which you quarrel with, I do not know that I am so entirely without any claim to it.

*she had a husband whose warm heart and sweet temper made him think every thing due to her in return for the great goodness of being in love with him;

*its being a great deal better to choose than to be chosen, to excite gratitude than to feel it.

*It was her own universal good-will and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness, quick sighted to every body's merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother, and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing. The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself.

*they must be coarse and unpolished, and very unfit to be the intimates of a girl who wanted only a little more knowledge and elegance to be quite perfect. She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers.

*I suppose there may be a hundred different ways of being in love.

*"That is the case with us all, papa. One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

*"I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry. Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a different thing! but I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall. And, without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want: I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband's house as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's."

*but a sanguine temper, though for ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. It soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again.

*But you have not an idea of what is requisite in situations directly opposite to your own.

*"Our amiable young man is a very weak young man, if this be the first occasion of his carrying through a resolution to do right against the will of others. It ought to have been a habit with him by this time, of following his duty, instead of consulting expediency. I can allow for the fears of the child, but not of the man. As he became rational, he ought to have roused himself and shaken off all that was unworthy in their authority. He

*We are both prejudiced; you against, I for.

*she saw in her the really accomplished young woman, which she wanted to be thought herself; and though the accusation had been eagerly refuted at the time, there were moments of self-examination in which her conscience could not quite acquit her.

*If ever there were people who, without having great wealth themselves, had every thing they could wish for, I am sure it is us.

*Harriet was one of those, who, having once begun, would be always in love.

*The ladies here probably exchanged looks which meant, "Men never know when things are dirty or not;" and the gentlemen perhaps thought each to himself, "Women will have their little nonsenses and needless cares."

*ball!--why did we wait for any thing?--why not seize the pleasure at once?--How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!--

*"Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise."

*she must be a little in love with him, in spite of every previous determination against it. "I certainly must," said she. "This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing's being dull and insipid about the house!-- I must be in love;

*"There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart," said she afterwards to herself. "There is nothing to be compared to it. Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the world, for attraction,

*I condition for nothing else; but without music, life would be a blank to me.'"

*`Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, `And waste its fragrance on the desert air.'

*a vast deal may be done by those who dare to act.

*flatterers?--Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?" "Not your vain spirit, but your serious spirit.--If one leads you wrong, I am sure the other tells you of it."

*have you actually found happiness in treasuring up these things?" "Yes, simpleton as I was!--but I am quite ashamed of it now, and wish I could forget as easily as I can burn them.

*Emma denied none of it aloud, and agreed to none of it in private.

*I can have no self-command without a motive.

*scarcely are her remains at rest in the family vault, than her husband is persuaded to act exactly opposite to what she would have required. What a blessing it is, when undue influence does not survive the grave!--

*How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under!--The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart!--she

*Never had the exquisite sight, smell, sensation of nature, tranquil, warm, and brilliant after a storm, been more attractive to her. She longed for the serenity they might gradually introduce;

*through the rain; and had walked up directly after dinner, to see how this sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults, bore the discovery.

*I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other;

Step 50: The Things They Carried

Woe...my 50th Blog!!

The Things They Carried: Tim O'Brien

I first encountered this book as a freshman in college in my English 101 class. I remember the teacher, Mr. Kula, he had a lovely red tint to his hair. He was young. He loved creative writing. He assigned some really great stuff for an intro to English class, most of which was made up by students only taking the class for the required credit, not because they had any interest in the subject. He assigned one of the chapters from this book called, ‘How to Tell a True War Story.’


I still have saved the short essay that I wrote on the piece and recall how wonderful I felt about the idea that “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” It’s the feeling, the way you have stored it in your mind that really matters, not the exact what happened truth of a story.


My sister and I have often discussed this subject of ‘truth’ as we both have a similar collection of stories from our past and yet details of the exact truth of it differ extremely. Whose version it right? I guess both of them, because underplayed or over exaggerated they are the way we experienced them through who we are, our own psychology, our own sense of the world.

Anyways, this book in its entirety or read in small excerpts is excellent. Of course those of us who haven’t lived through war can never truly know anything about it, but this book conveys some powerful emotions of that time (the Vietnam War) and I think anyone who reads this can gain valuable lessons from it, as well as laughter, tears, joy, and every other fearful emotion.


The Things They Carried:
Tim O’Brian

*First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there.

*To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.

*Almost everyone humped photographs. In his walled Lieutenant Cross carried two photographs of Martha. Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of the things he should’ve done.

*They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

*She had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-but-together quality that had inspired her to pick up the pebble and carry it.

*She was a poet, with the poet’s sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March.

*Whatever was down there—the tunnel walls squeezing in—a swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Do rats carry rabies? Would your buddies hear you if you screamed? Imagination was a killer.

*He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike or sitting off by herself—even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love.

*They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworms and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

*They carried it all on their backs and shoulders—and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

*They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs, they talked grunt lingo.

*They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.

*He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.

*It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

*There was something restful about checkers, something orderly and reassuring. There were red checkers and black checkers. They playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.

*Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

*I was twenty-one years old when I was drafted to fight a war I hated. Young, yes, and politically naïve, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.

*The only certainty that summer was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.

*The afternoon was sunny and cold. A stiff breeze came in from the north, and I remember how the little fourteen-foot boat made sharp rocking motions as we pushed of from the dock. The current was fast. All around us, there was a vastness to the world, an unpeopled rawness, just the trees and the sky and the water reaching out toward nowhere. The air had the brittle scent of October.

*I sat in the bow of the boat and cried. It was loud now. Loud, hard crying. Elroy Berdahl remained quiet. He kept fishing. He worked his line with the tips of his fingers, patiently, squinting out at his red and white bobber on the Rainy River. His eyes were flat and impassive. He didn’t speak. He was simply there, like the river and the late-summer sun. And yet by his presence, his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the true audience. He was a witness, like God, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them.

*A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

*He couldn’t stop bragging. He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.

*Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say. If Rat told you, for example, that he’d slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half. For Rat, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

*Whenever he told a story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.

*Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country—the dirt, the death—I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me. That’s how I feel. It’s like this appetite. I get scared sometimes—lots of times—but it’s not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I’m out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and I’m glowing in the dark—I’m on fire almost—I’m burning away into nothing—but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am.

*He was a good man. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of food but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. Like his country, too, he was drawn toward sentimentality.

*The town could not talk and would not listen. “How’d you like to hear about the war?” he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted and the agencies of government did their work briskly and politely. It was a brisk, polite town. It did no know shit about shit, and did not care to know.

*I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. Yet it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others.

*But listen. Even that story was made up. I just want you to feel what I felt. I want you know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

*There were birds and butterflies, the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere. Below, in the earth, the relics of our presence were no doubt still there, the canteens and bandoliers and mess kits. This little field, I thought, had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage. Still, it was hard to find any real emotion after all those years. It simply wasn’t there. After that long night in the rain, I’d seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. Over the years, that coldness had never entirely disappeared. There were times in my life when I couldn’t feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been.

*When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends.

*I hated him for making me stop hating him.

*The darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over. That’s basic psychology. The fear factor gets multiplied as you sit there hour after hour, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your own sorry soul. The hours go by and you lose your gyroscope; your mind starts to roam. You think about dark closets, madmen, murderers under the bed, all those childhood fears. You blink and shake your head. Bullshit, you tell yourself. But then you remember all the guys who died.

*We were both nine then, but we were in love. And it was real. I know for a fact that what we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get. It had all the shading and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things.

*The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then be dreaming along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.

Step 49: Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day & Never Let Me Go:


-Kazuo Ishiguro


Just finished reading ‘The Remains of the Day,’ 1989’s winner of the Booker Prize. This is the second book I’ve read by author Kazuo Ishiguro (born in Japan but moved to England when he was about 5) and it hasn’t clarified for me whether or not I’m a fan of his. The other book I read of his, ‘Never Let Me Go’ was certainly an interesting topic (I’m excited to see the film being made) however I recall thinking throughout my time reading it, ‘where on earth is this going?’ The book is set in England, presumably in the future, and is about children who are born only to be used as organ donors—their future set to soon die. With that book there was, at least, a rather imminent tone that had me continue reading just to see what would come next. However, by the end of the book I was left feeling perplexed as to what was the point of it all.


Now here I am at the end of reading his most famous book and I am similarly puzzled. It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy the book and it was in fact rather easy reading. But I can’t say that I loved it. It is written from the mind of a traditional old-fashioned English butler who is taking a road trip and, throughout the trip, looking back on the life he and his employers have lived. He often addresses the reader as if we are also butlers or some sort of person serving others—or more I suppose simply that we are also people of little consequence and what impact does he or any of us have on the world. Once again I am left wondering what was the point of it all…perhaps that is precisely the question Ishiguro desire’s his readers to think—I’m unsure. Being written as they were I was unable to pull many delicious quotes out to share so here are the few that I did. Hope you enjoy.



*I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how I think it is with us. It’s a shame because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.( Never Let Me Go)


The rest of the quotes will be from ‘The Remains of the Day’

*I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen encyclopedias and the National Geographic Magazine breathtaking photographs of sights from various corners of the globe; magnificent canyons and waterfalls, raggedly beautiful mountains. It has never been my privilege to have seen such things at first hand, but I will nevertheless hazard this with some confidence: the English landscape at its finest—such as I saw it this morning—possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe, a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term ‘greatness’. We call this land of ours Great Britain, and there may be those of you who believe this is a somewhat immodest practice. Yet I would venture that the landscape of our country alone would justify the use of this lofty adjective.


*I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.


*It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exist in England. Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are as a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of. Continentals are as a rule unable to control themselves in moments of strong emotion, and are thus unable to maintain a professional demeanour other than in the least challenging of situations. In a word, ‘dignity’ is beyond such persons. We English have an important advantage over foreigners in this respect.


*I was so fond of that view from the second-floor bedrooms overlooking the lawn with the downs visible in the distance. Is it still like that? On summer evenings there was a sort of magical quality to that view and I will confess to you now I used to waste many precious minutes standing at one of those windows just enchanted by it.


*Miss Kenton, if you are under the impression you have already at your age perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.


*We are all much too complacent about the great wonders that surround us. I mean all this we’ve been talking about; treaties and boundaries and reparations and occupations. But Mother Nature just carries on her own sweet way. I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if the Almighty had created us all as—well—as sort of plants. You know, firmly embedded in the soil. Then none of this rot about wars and boundaries would have come up in the first place.


*Dignity isn’t just something gentlemen have. Dignity’s something every man and woman in this country can strive for and get. That’s what we fought Hitler for, after all. If Hitler had had things his way, we’d just be slaves now. The whole world would be a few masters and millions upon millions of slaves. And I don’t need to remind anyone here, there’s no dignity to be had in being a slave. We won the right to be free citizens.


*You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it. You should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of the day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took.


*It is curious how people can build such warmth among themselves so swiftly. Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in—particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

Step 48: The Woman in White

Recently finished the Classic mystery of the "Woman in White"  I had been suggested this book by one of my college professors and finally got around to reading it. It really keeps you on the edge throughout; wondering always how things will be resolved. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the way Men and Women are portrayed in the book. I love that such a smart woman character dominates and creates the vital movements of the story.

Below are a few favorite quotes, though most of what is great about this book cannot be quoted, just needs to be read from start to finish to really appreciate it.

The Woman in White


-Wilkie Collins



*This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.

*She was the woman who first gave life, light, and forms to our shadowy conceptions of beauty; she filled a void in our spiritual nature that had remained unknown to us till she appeared. Think of her as you thought of the first woman who quickened the pulses within you that the rest of her sex had no art to stir.

*“I shall believe all that you say to me” she answered simply. In those few words she unconsciously gave me the key to her whole character; to that generous trust of others which, in her nature, grew innocently out of her own truth. I only knew it intuitively then. I know it by experience now.

*At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. Our capacity of appreciating the beauties of the earth we live on is, in truth, one of the civilized accomplishments which we all learn, as an Art.

*Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

*I loved her! Ah! How well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth.

*When two member of a family, or two intimate friends, are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been traveling, always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage, when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems, at first, to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side.

*Where is the woman, in the whole range of our sex, who can regulate her actions by the abstract principles of honor, when those principles point one way, and when her affections, and the interests which grow out of them, point the other?

*I am a bad man, am I not? I say what other people only think; and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.

*Women can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money; but they cannot resist a man’s tongue, when he knows how to talk to them.

*Surely you like this modest, trembling English twilight? Ah! I love it. I feel my inborn admiration of all that is noble and great and good, purified by the breath of Heaven, on an evening like this. Nature has such imperishable charms, such inextinguishable tendernesses for me! I am an old, fat man: talk which would become a ladies lips sounds like a derision and a mockery on mine. It is hard to be laughed at in my moments of sentiment, as if my soul was like myself, old and overgrown. Observe, dear lady, what a light is dying on the trees! Does it penetrate your heart, as it penetrates mine?

*Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.

*I had just entered on a lonely part of the road, with a sharp turn at some distance ahead, and had just concluded that I must be getting near to the town, when I suddently heard the steps of the men close behind me.

*The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

*Through what mortal crime and horror, through what darkest windings of the way down to Death, the lost creature had wandered in God’s leading to the last home that, living, she never hoped to reach! In that sacred rest, I leave her—in that dread companionships, let her remain undisturbed.

*I thought of the disheartening circumstances under which the long struggle that was now past and over had been pursued. It was strange to look back and to see, now, that the poverty which had denied us all hope of assistance, had been the indirect means of our success, by forcing me to act for myself. If we had been rich enough to find legal help, what would have been the result? The Law would never have obtained me my interview with Mrs. Catherick. The Law would never have made Pesca the means of forcing a confession from the Count.

Step 47: Birdsong quotes

“When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.” - Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

Below are my favorite quotes from the book BIRDSONG, written by Sebastian Faulks. It is a really wonderful book set in two different times--both the present and during the First World War.  It is a story of faith, love, friendship, family...but ultimatley a story about if it's possible to find any meaning in our lives. Really beautifully written. I hope you enjoy the quotes.

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

*Throughout the building the floors made distinctive sounds beneath the press of feet, so that with its closed angles and echoing air, the house was always a place of unseen footsteps.

*The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up in the heart. The great composers of the past were able to do this; to make the hairs of your head stand on end!

*Music is a democratic form of art. You don’t need money to buy it or education to study it. All you need is a pair of ears. The gift of God at birth.

*When any art is put to practical ends it loses its essential purity.

*But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.

*This blood was supposed to be shameful, but she had never thought of it that way. She valued it because it spoke of some greater rhythm of life that would lead them away from the narrow boredom of childhood. Though she could never quite reconcile herself to the fact that this secret thing that promised new life and liberation should manifest itself in the color of pain.

*I am driven by a greater force than I can resist. I believe that force has its own reasons and its own morality even if they may never be clear to me while I am alive.

*He watched as she spoke and wondered if he could have told that she was lying. Nothing in her manner was different. One day she might lie to him and he would never know. Perhaps all women had this ability to survive.

*The strain of his anguish lasted for another year, then went cold in him. He had no sensation of healing, no awareness that time had soothed him or lent him a longer perspective in which to view his passion. He experienced it only as a loss of memory. Her presence, which he had felt permanently in his mind, abruptly disappeared. He was left with the feeling of emotions undischarged, of a process uncompleted. The coldness enabled him to live more easily, to respond with some degree of conviction to other people. However, the sudden chill loss of her also made him uneasy. Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

*He saw half of his platoon die under the shells of the enemy’s opening bombardement. He grew used to the sight and smell of torn human flesh. He watched the men harden to the mechanical slaughter. There seemed to him a great breach of nature which no one had the power to stop.

*As the fever in his abandoned body reached its height and he moved toward the welcome of oblivion, he heard a voice, not human, but clear and urgent. It was the sound of his life leaving him. Its tone was mocking. It offered him, instead of the peace he longed for, the possibility of return. He could go back to his body and to the brutal perversion of life that was lived in the turned soil and torn flesh of the war, to the awkward, compromised, and unconquerable existence that made up human life on earth. The voice appealed to his sense of shame and of curiosity unfulfilled: but if he did not heed it he would surely die.

*His innocence was not the same thing as ignorance; it was a powerful quality of goodness that was available to all people: it was perhaps what the prayer book called a means of grace, or a hope of glory.

*It seemed to Jack that if an ordinary human being, his own son, no one particular, could have this purity of mind, then perhaps the isolated deeds of virtue at which people marveled in later life were not really isolated at all; perhaps they were the natural continuation of the innocent goodness that all people brought into the world at their birth. If this were true, then his fellow-human beings were not the rough, flawed creatures that most of them supposed. Their failings were not innate, but were the result of where they had gone wrong or been coarsened by their experiences; in their hearts they remained perfectible.

*He remembered a day when another woman had lain naked like this, her legs parted in front of his eyes, and he had kissed her there, allowing his tongue to open her, as though this unlocking would provide a way into her deepest self. He remembered her gasp of surprise. He had obliterated himself in her; he had purged his longing and desire; he had lodged and invested himself in her body. In her trust and love for him, he had deposited the unresolved conflicts of his life. Perhaps his self was still in her—betrayed and unhealed. The body was only flesh, but she had taken hers away from him; and in her physical absence there was more than missing flesh: there was abandonment.

*He found something more than humility, a feeling of complete inconsequence. He felt no fear for his blood and muscle and bone, but the size of what had begun, the number of them now beneath the terrible crashing of the sky, was starting to pull at the moorings of his self-control. He found the word Jesus in his mouth. He said it again and again beneath his breath. It was part prayer, part profanity. Jesus, Jesus…

*I believe his death was God’s will. We would have kept him, but God knew best.

*Nothing was divine any more; everything was profane. Bloodied beyond caring, he watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.

*He stood on the river bed, trying to hold himself together. The noise pressed against the skull on both banks of the river. It would not diminish. He tried to calm his thoughts. Bryne was dead. It was not his death that mattered; it was the way the world had been dislocated. It was not all the tens of thousands of deaths that mattered; it was the way they had proved that you could be human yet act in a way that was beyond nature.

*They were built to endure and to resist; they looked like passive creatures adapting to the hell of circumstances that oppressed them. They had locked up in their hearts the horror of what they had seen, and their jovial pride in their resilience was not convincing. They boasted in a mocking way of what they had seen and done; but in their sad faces wrapped in rags were the burdens of their unwanted knowledge. They did not feel hardened or strengthened by what they had seen; instead they felt impoverished and demeaned.

*I heard a voice. There was something beyond me. All my life I had lived on the presumption that there was no existence beyond…flesh, the moment of being alive…then nothing. I had searched in superstition but there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so tender. I regretted that I had paid It no attention. Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me…I saw that those simple things might be true… I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. But now I see that you can believe in something without it compromising the burden of your own existence.

*He’s not afraid of gas or shells or being buried. He’s frightened that it doesn’t make sense, that there is no purpose. He’s afraid that he has somehow strayed into the wrong life.

*It seems as though the random violence of the world runs supreme; there is no point in trying to find an explanation.

*I have made this mistake in my life: not once but twice I have loved someone more than my heart would bear.

*The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley. The air had a feeling of purity, as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of evening. He stopped, and leaned against a gate. The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside time; there was no human voice to place it.

*Nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness; he clung to the wood, he wanted to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it.

*She smiled at him. It was the first time he had seen her smile, and he believed it was the most extraordinary expression he had seen on a human face. It began with a slow widening of the lips, then the pale skin of her face became radiant, not with blood but with an inner light that made it shine. At last it reached her eyes, which developed squares of brilliance as they narrowed into trusting humor. It was not just her expression but her whole face that had changed into something forgiving and serene.

*Once upon a time there was a very attractive girl. She had lots of friends, a very good job, a flat in town, and everyone envied her. Then, as time when on, her friends got married and had babies and this girl became a very attractive woman. But she didn’t get married. The older she got, the more she pretended it didn’t matter to her, but the more, deep down inside, she longed for children and a husband. Part of the problem was that the more she pretended, the more she frightened men off. Because they, poor little creatures, believed her when she said she was happy.

*Our own choices might not be so good as those that are made for us.

*Of all the human beings that I have met, if I had to choose one to hold my hand before death, I would chose my son. He died though two years ago. I miss him. I loved him so much. My world was in his face. I wondered what my life had been about until he came along. It was nothing. I treasured each word he gave me. I made myself remember each thing he did. It was as though I knew it wouldn’t be for long. He was from another world, he was a blessing too great for me.

*At some deep level, far below anything his exhausted mind could reach, the conflicts of his soul dragged through him like waves grating on the packed shingle of a beach. The sound of his life calling to him on a distant road. He looked into the face of the man who stood in front of him and his fists went up from his sides like those of a farm boy about to fight. But then his arms began to spread and open. Levi looked at this wild-eyed figure, half-demented, his brother’s killer. For no reason he could tell, he found that he had opened his own arms in turn, and the two men fell upon each other’s shoulders, weeping at the bitter strangeness of their human lives.