* * *
Here We Aren’t, So Quickly
by Jonathan Safran Foer

I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers. I was just going through a tunnel whenever my mother called. I was not able to make toast without the radio. I was not able to tell if compliments were back-handed. I was not as tired as I said.

You were not able to ignore furniture imperfections. You were too light to arm the airbag. You were not able to open most jars. You were not sure how you should wear your hair, and so, ten minutes late and halfway down the stairs, you would examine your reflection in a framed picture of a dead family. You were not angry, just protecting your dignity.

I was not able to run long distances. You were so kind to my sister when I didn’t know how to be kind. I was just trying to remove a stain; I made a bigger stain. You were just asking a simple question. I was almost always at home, but I was not always at home at home. You were not able to cope with a stack of more than three books on my bedside table, or mixed currencies in the change dish, or plastic. I was not afraid of being alone; I just hated it. You were just admiring the progress of someone else’s garden. I was so tired of food.

We went to the Atacamama. We went to Sarajevo. We went to Tobey Pond every year until we didn’t. We braved thirteen inches of snow to attend a lecture in a planetarium. We tried having dinner parties. We tried owning nothing. We left handprints in a moss garden in Kyoto, and got each other off under a towel in Jaffa. We braved my parents’ for Thanksgiving and yours for the rest, and how did it happen that we were suddenly at my father’s side while he drowned in his own body? I lay beside him on the bed, observed my hand reaching for his brow, said, “Despite everything -” “What everything?” he asked, so I said, “Nothing,” or nothing.

I was always destroying my passport in the wash. You were always awful at estimating. You were never willing to think of my habits as charming. I was just insisting that it was already too late to master an instrument or anything. You were never one to mention physical pain. I couldn’t explain the cycles of the moon without pen and paper, or with. You didn’t know where e-mails were. I wouldn’t congratulate a woman until she explicitly said she was pregnant. You spent a few minutes every day secretly regretting your laziness that didn’t exist. I should have forgiven you for all that wasn’t your fault.

You were terrible in emergencies. You were wonderful in “The Cherry Orchard.” I was always never complaining, because confrontation was death to me, and because everything was pretty much always pretty much O.K. with me. You were not able to approach the ocean at night. I didn’t know where my voice was between my phone and yours. You were never standing by the window at parties, but you were always by the window. I was so paranoid about kind words. I was just not watching the news in the basement. You were just making a heroic effort to make things look easy. I was terrible about acknowledging anyone else’s efforts. You were not green-thumbed, but you were not content to be not content. I was always in need of just one good dress shirt, or just one something that I never had. You were too injured by things that happened in the distant past for anything to be effortless in the present. I was always struggling to be natural with my hands. You were never immune to unexpected gifts. I was mostly just joking.

I was not neurotic, just apocalyptic. You were always copying keys and looking up words. I was not afraid of quiet; I just hated it. So my hand was always in my pocket, around a phone I never answered. You were not cheap or handy with tools, just hurt by my distance. I was never indifferent to the children of strangers, just frustrated by my own unrelenting optimism. You were not unsurprised when, that last night in Norfolk, I drove you to Tobey Pond, led you by the hand down the slope of the brambles and across the rotting planks to the constellations in the water. Sharing our happiness diminished your happiness. I was not going to dance at our wedding, and you were not going to speak. No part of me was nervous that morning.

When you screamed at no one, I sang to you. When you finally fell asleep, the nurse took him to bathe him, and, still sleeping, you reached out your arms.

He was not a terrible sleeper. I acknowledged to no one my inability to be still with him or anyone. You were not overwhelmed but overtired. I was never afraid of rolling over onto him in my sleep, but I awoke many nights sure that he was underwater on the floor. I loved collapsing things. You loved tiny socks. You were not depressed, but you were unhappy. Your unhappiness didn’t make me defensive; I just hated it. He was never happy unless held. I love hammering things into walls. You hated having no inner life. I secretly wondered if he was deaf. I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything. We were learning to see each other’s blindnesses. I Googled questions that I couldn’t ask our doctors or you.

They encouraged us to buy insurance. We had sex to have orgasms. You loved reupholstering. I went to the gym to go somewhere, and looked in the mirror when there was something I was hoping not to see. You hated our bed. He could stand himself up, but not get himself down. They fined us for our neighbor’s garbage. We couldn’t wait for the beginnings and ends of vacations. I was not able to look at a blueprint and see a renovated kitchen, so I stayed out of it. They came to our door during meals, but I talked to them and gave. I counted the seconds backward until he fell asleep, and then started counting the seconds backward until he woke up. We took the same walks again and again, and again and again ate at the same easy restaurants. They said he looked like them. I was always watching movie trailers on my computer. You were always wiping surfaces. I was always hearing my father’s laugh and never remembering his face. You broke everyone’s heart until you suddenly couldn’t. He suddenly drew, suddenly spoke, suddenly wrote, suddenly reasoned. One night I couldn’t help him with his math. He got married.

We went to London to see a play. We tried putting aside time to do nothing but read, but we did nothing but sleep. We were always never mentioning it, because we didn’t know what it was. I did nothing but look for you for twenty-seven years. I didn’t even know how electricity worked. We tried spending more time not together. I was not defensive about your boredom, but my happiness had nothing to do with happiness. I loved it when people who worked for me genuinely liked me. We were always moving furniture and never making eye contact. I hated my inability to visit a foreign city without fantasizing about real estate. And then your father was dead. I often wasn’t reading the book that I was holding. You were never not in someone’s garden. Our mothers were dying to talk about nothing.

At a certain point you became convinced that you were always reading yesterday’s newspaper. At a certain point I stopped agonizing over being understood, and became over-reliant on my car’s G.P.S. You couldn’t tolerate trace amounts of jelly in the peanut-butter jar. I couldn’t tolerate gratuitously boisterous laughter. At a certain point I could stare without pretext or apology. Isn’t it funny that if God were to reveal and explain Himself, the majority of the world would necessarily be disappointed? At a certain point you stopped wearing sunscreen.

How can I explain the way I shrugged off nuclear annihilation but mortally feared a small fall? You couldn’t tolerate people who couldn’t tolerate babies on planes. I couldn’t tolerate people who insisted that having a coffee after lunch would keep them up all night. At a certain point I could hear my knees and felt no need to correct other people’s grammar. How can I explain why foreign cities came to mean so much to me? At a certain point you stopped trying. I couldn’t tolerate magicians who did things that someone who actually had magical powers would never do.

We were all doing well. I was still in love with the Olympics. The smaller the matter, the more I allowed your approval to mean to me. They kept producing new things that we didn’t need that we needed. I needed your approval more than I needed anything. My sister died at a restaurant. My mother promised anyone who would listen that she was fine. They changed our filters. I wanted to learn a dead language. You were in the garden, not planting, but standing there. You dropped two handfuls of soil.

And here we aren’t, so quickly: I’m not twenty-six and you’re not sixty. I’m not forty-five or eighty-three, not being hoisted onto the shoulders of anybody wading into any sea. I’m not learning chess, and you’re not losing your virginity. You’re not stacking pebbles on gravestones; I’m not being stolen from my resting mother’s arms. Why didn’t you lose your virginity to me? Why didn’t we enter the intersection one thousandth of a second sooner, and die instead of die laughing? Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?

I am not unrealistic anymore. You are not unemotional. I am not interested in the news anymore, but I was never interested in the news. What’s more, I am probably ambidextrous. I was probably meant to be effortless. You look like yourself right now. I was so slow to change, but I changed. I was probably a natural tennis player, just like my father used to say over and over and over.

I changed and changed, and with more time I will change more. I’m not disappointed, just quiet. Not unthinking, just reckless. Not willfully unclear, just trying to say it as it wasn’t. The more I remember, the more distant I feel. We reached the middle so quickly. After everything it’s like nothing. I have always never been here. What a shame it wasn’t easy. What a waste of what? What a joke. But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere: on the split stools of this bar, by the edge of this cliff, in the seats of this borrowed car, at the prow of this ship, on the all-forgiving cushions of this thread-bare sofa in the one-story copper-crying fixer-upper whose windows we once squinted through for hours before coming to our sense: “What would we even do with such a house?”

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“One cannot contribute unless one feels secure, one feels big, one feels: I have enough.”

“To be compassionate is not a joke. It’s not that simple. One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself. The self: you are self-aware. On that self, it should be centered — a bigness, a wholeness. Otherwise, compassion is just a word and a dream.”

“That experience confirms that, in spite of all your limitations — all your wants, desires, unfulfilled, and the credit cards and layoffs and, finally, baldness — you can be happy. But the extension of the logic is that you don’t need to fulfill your desire to be happy. You are the very happiness, the wholeness that you want to be.”

“To discover compassion, you need to be compassionate. To discover the capacity to give and share, you need to be giving and sharing. There is no shortcut: it is like swimming by swimming. You learn swimming by swimming. You cannot learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water. You learn swimming by swimming. You learn cycling by cycling. You learn cooking by cooking, having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook.”

Happy New Year

Full transcript   |   TED talk page

- Lily

P.S. This poem reminds of another I love.

Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

When I think about how I approach the rest of my life though, I find myself trying to hedge more and put preventative measures in place. I’d like to get to the point where I’m not constructing to avoid pain and can instead find a way for fear to simply be the complement to all the good problems I’d like to have. And then I move forward.

You know that feeling when you’ve been on vacation a few days, and then it kicks in that you’re in a vacation state of mind? That’s how I felt during a conversation at dinner in Manhattan when somebody was talking about Google Buzz. I think it went something like this:

Him: “What’s this Buzz stuff? I can’t seem to make it go away…tell me the secret.”

Me: “Um, well it’s sort of like Twitter, but more private. It’s cool…”

Him: “Huh? I don’t want that in my email. Also, why is Google telling me to make phone calls from Gmail? Why the f*ck would I want to make calls from my email?”

In that moment, I remembered that most people don’t care about whether Google is going to kill Skype or how Facebook Places compares to Foursquare. In fact, most people have never heard of either, and they continue on in their daily lives quite happily.

A few days later, at my friend’s wedding, I met a lot of interesting people, none of whom were in technology. I found myself trying to explain software-as-a-service at one point, and then realized that I had no interest in talking about technology at all, and wow did it feel refreshing! Instead, we talked about education and affordable housing and shared personal stories, and some people even talked about how much they didn’t like their jobs. Somehow I feel that doesn’t happen all that much in San Francisco. We either have the best jobs in the world, or we’re never actually not working when we’re excitedly talking about the next feature or product we’re building.

I love technology and I love San Francisco, but it felt really good to be reminded that there’s a whole lot more out there too.

Ion Square

Ion square, perspex swings
I breathe out, you breathe in
Permanent midnight
Our love, our love
How we’ve come to depend
On each other to the end
The space between us has disappeared
You finish my, you finish my words for me
I remember how it began
So many great days in a row
Barefoot on Bishopsgate
Trying to find Blake’s grave
If we could stay like this in a silver foil
Trapped in amber for a life
Permanent midnight
Our love, our love
I carry your heart here with me
I carry it in my heart
I carry your heart with me
I carry it in my heart
Who said unbroken happiness
Is a bore, is a bore?
Who said it, my love? I don’t mind it
Anymore, anymore
And I reach out a hand over your side of the bed
Pull that blanket over your shoulders exposed to the night
And the hunger of those early years will never return
But I don’t mind, I don’t mind
‘Cause I love my mind when I’m fucking you
Slowed down to a crawl
Years of crime and the bread line
Have not at all dimmed your shine
So let’s stay in, let the sofa be our car
Let’s stay in, let the TV be our stars
I found my dancing shoes but they don’t fit
All the bright lights do is bore me
They bore me
I carry your heart here with me
I carry it in my heart
I carry your heart with me
I carry it in my heart

***************************************************
These lines in particular strike me as devastating:

And I reach out a hand over your side of the bed
Pull that blanket over your shoulders exposed to the night
And the hunger of those early years will never return
But I don’t mind, I don’t mind
‘Cause I love my mind when I’m fucking you
Slowed down to a crawl

***************************************************

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

One of the books I picked up was Words in Air, the complete collection of letters exchanged between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. After having read just a few letters so far, I already wish that technology and letter writing could have continued to exist and grow side by side. The act of receiving and sending a letter is so different than that of an email. While emails provide instant gratification, letters are pleasurable for the exact opposite reason. They require more time to write, process and receive, and somehow that “work” results in something that feels more whole and thought out.

As a first step toward trying to make literature a greater part of my life again, I’m going to share poems I love here at least once a week. I’m also going to start writing letters to myself on futureme.org (+3 months) and send them to a separate posterous blog. I’m not sure whether I will make it public and/or anonymous, but it seems important to do a better job of documenting my days, and I imagine it will be a good exercise in getting to know myself better.

In honor of what I’m reading right now, please enjoy this poem by Elizabeth Bishop!

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.