With school and all that comes with it, I can’t put the same time I’d otherwise like to into my blog. I apologize. However, I’d still like to continue it in a series of “updates,” petit posts to fill the interim as I write my thesis, lead clubs, and cram classwork via tea and naps.
That said, I can’t put the same level of polish and professionalism that I’d otherwise like to, but hopefully a few phrases still ring and a few ideas linger after that final punctuation point.
By eighth grade, most guys find girls. I found Stoicism. Girls came later.
In eighth, I read my first philosophy book–a brisk, colorful introduction called Get a Grip on Philosophy by Neil Turnbull. The recycled-paper pages reminded me of paper bags, and its binding soon faded from many rereadings on bus rides home.
In the section about Hellenistic philosophy–the period following Aristotle–Turnbull wrote, “the Stoics didn’t lose their sense of wonder” and described a Stoic as “a person who advocates an ethic of resilience in the face of adversity; a believer in cosmopolitan politics.”
There were a few paragraphs , not much else. Still, Stoicism made an impression. It’s focus on reason, morality, and tranquility had roots in my personality, and the idea of being a cosmopolitan, “a citizen of the cosmos,” sounded fascinating.
So I converted.
I just finished God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by the recently
deceased polymath, essayist, and atheist Christopher Hitchens. I bought the book after seeing it linger on shelves and cropping up in my recommendations on Amazon.com for the past year.
It’s a systematic, caustic critique on religion that ends with a plea for secular rationalism and a “New Enlightenment,” a book bound to spur controversy.
I’m no stranger to religion. After an incident involving milk and foam cups at one pre-K, my parents moved me to Gingerbread House, a Catholic pre-K in the nearby City of Syracuse.
My dad drove our blue-green Volvo each day, past the gutted factories and black windows, beneath the low bridges etched with rusty rivulets, and past the sidewalks with tufts of grass and weedy tendrils.
Among the nap-time, craft-time, and play-time typical of most pre-Ks, Gingerbread House had prayer time. Teachers took us to a low, dark chapel with clean floors and a white flame incased behind red glass. A crucifix hung in the front. Now and then, the stories of the Bible cropped up in conversation.
My memory is hazy, but Gingerbread house must have hit something. My mom said I dragged her to the chapel once, and as we stood in the silence, I shushed her and pointed to the crucifix.
“That’s God,” I whispered.
I often sit and stare at the sky, watching the clouds drift and dissolve in silence. Bugs
furrow through the grass. Pools of shadow sift light. Branches murmur in the wind. Now and then, people cross on sidewalks, their soft strides pacing conversations as they pass away. Sometimes they wave.
Right now, I’m doing the same: sitting under my favorite tree on campus, looking at the brick buildings strapped to the ground, the drunken sky a whirl of cirrus and cumulous flooding the blue above. It’s summer and the quad is quiet and still–almost deserted. The buildings slumber, their windows dark, their doors closed.
Normally I feel lonesome in the slow trickle of strangers and the empty hours before me. I do today. But something deeper always opens in such moments, as if it requires the sun-laced stillness of an empty afternoon.
I propped open The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn while sitting on my bed in a Zen Monastery, day two of a spiritual pilgrimage. It’s an older book, coming out in 2012, but a teacher recommended it.
The day started just before 5 a.m., when some monk jangled a handful of bells outside the door. At the time, I imagined he took a sadistic joy in it.
“Hey, here’s a crammed group of exhausted travelers—how can I give a good start to the day?” he probably thought. “Loud bells!”
Rubbing my head, I greeted the others with a nod.
Night still drenched the windowpanes in reflection as we entered the meditation hall. I crossed my legs into a half-lotus and a bell pitched the space into silence, broken occasionally by the rattling radiator or the rasp of a stuffy nose.
I wrestled with my thoughts for the next hour or so. The rest of the day blurred as we moved from one lecture to another and a silent work call. I stayed in the kitchen, cracking 160 eggs for a massive casserole.
Thirteen hours after waking up, I was choking on Zen. Flynn’s tense prose challenged the backdrop of silence that permeated the day. But I needed it.
Some days all I can do is cling to my art. I feel my world withdrawing, but my fingers rib red lines along words as 
they grasp and hold and strain. It’s more feeling than reality, but it keeps me moving past my insecurities. The past few days, a quote by Albert Camus has lingered on edge of my thoughts, flashing now and then into focus:
Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.
I feel heavy.
The nursing home smelled of stale urine and had the wallpaper of a 1970s mental home, with calm colors and a bland boarder of flowers. An elderly lady clutched a baby doll with blue eyes and a prim smile as she rolled her wheel chair down the hall.
“The baby’s smiling at you,” my uncle Matt said, pointing to the doll with a quiet chuckle.
I smiled. Televisions droned in the background, filtering into the hall from open doors and an alarm sounded.
“What do you think that alarm is?” my dad said.
“Someone probably trying to get out,” said Matt with the same quiet chuckle.
My dad nodded.
A young nurse with blond hair pulled out of the room. Without smiling she said, “All set.”
We walked inside. My grandfather smiled as he saw us enter. He wore a blue woolen cap, khakis, and a striped blue shirt. His face looked like putty molded into a face–sunken cheeks, eyes dazed, mouth loosely hanging–and his body had skin stretched taut over thin bones. He was gray and tired. I shook his hand, a vague clasp that hung in my palm.
“Hey Grampa, nice to see you,” I said.
I started on my novel again Monday. I began it during my winter break from mid-December to mid-January, then 
took a hiatus during school. I’ve been home for summer for about a week, but spent most of last week finishing final essays and creative writing assignments for classes and proofreading a literature magazine.
It felt great to hit the page again.
I’m going back to the beginning, editing to where I left off and resuming with all the threads in mind. It’s about 50,000 words now, which is about the length of The Great Gatsby. I aim to make it about 100,000, the typical soft-cover length.
So far, working on the novel has been hard but rewarding, especially since I’m neither a professional writer nor do I know what I’m going to do with it. But it begs completion. That’s enough.
Last night I had a horrific case of insomnia. It hits me now and then, but it’s not regular–at least not normally. When I was in high school, I would sneak out through the garage–the front and back doors squeaked–and walk around my neighborhood. I’m blessed by a secure ring of suburbia, so I was never afraid. I watched the cars sail along the road and the televisions coloring the windows.
I descovered a word for it a few years ago: “noctivagant,” night wandering.
The time of an insomniac differs than a day-dweller. It seems to expand when we have nothing to fill it with, like long Sundays or silent miles passing down a long road. It’s looser, less rigid. Free.
Sometimes I picture time like a flag on windy day, straining to break away from its pole. It rips away and glides high and free, untethered. Such is insomnia time.
Sometimes I sit and watch water drops form and fall in the sink. One at a time. A small bead gathers on the faucet’s tip, its surface swarming with the water. Then it begins to fall, stretching into a strained neck that clips itself apart and separates into a falling droplet.
For those brief milliseconds, a world forms on the tense surface of the drop. It’s not attached to anything. An individual drop. At first I thought of the literal world of microbes and particulates swarming and whirring through the bead, like H.G. Wells describes at the opening of the War of the Worlds, “transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
The rotifers and paramecium stretch and move along the drop, but then their world shatters like falling glass and rolls down the drain.
I soon imagined a world like ours: skyscrapers, cathedrals, complicated ideas. The infusoria building houses, getting an education, pondering their future, framing an ethical code, “finding themselves,” getting married, divorcing, fighting, killing, preaching, and dying amid the ritual and fanfare of civility. Then their world fragments and drains away.
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