Excerpted from a 2011 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross and children’s book writer Maurice Sendak, animated by Christoph Niemann. Here, Sendak discusses the pain and beauty of aging.
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An Update: Thesis
Again, I apologize for my lack of posting. I’ll try to maintain one per week until my schedule dies down–perhaps posting a quote or video now and then as well. For now, here’s an update.
Last week, I applied for a Fullbright in France, a dream I’ve had since my high school trip to France. Unfortunately, I had forgotten it, but last year, a Fullbright scholar named Ahmed came to teach French at my school. I met him at tryouts for a play and the two of us became friends. He rekindled that dream and my love for French culture and language.
He’s back in France now, but we write sometimes, and little by little, I’m putting aside money for a possible voyage to Provence. Unfortunately food and bills often take precedent.
Now, I must focus on my thesis: the challenges of absurdity and judgment in the fiction of Albert Camus. By tomorrow, I hope to have a 30-page draft for my adviser. From there, let the edits begin.
Kafka Quote
“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.”
Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak
Happiness and Anxiety
I apologize for my recent absence. I’ve been moving into school, which as I’m sure you
can imagine, sucks up time. I’ve had ideas, but every time I face the page, something interrupts.
Also, I’ve been happy. I’m no teenage-angst poet or grungy expressionist, but problems often prompt reflections. Beethoven’s pain crafted chords and melodies. Edvard Munch’s phobias etched anxiety into The Scream. So no problems, no reflections. No one wants to hear a bout a “good” day.
To me, that paradox is fascinating. As Marcel Proust said in his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, “Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
Road Trip
Shortly–i.e., any minute now–I’ll be heading out on a brief road trip with friends. I’m not a “full-time traveler,” like some sporty young people these days, flinging themselves across the globe to taste turgid well water from Tibetan monasteries buried in snow and silence. No, but perhaps I’m a part time traveler.
Seneca, a Stoic I mentioned in my last post, said, “To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole lives traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.”
Maybe I haven’t traveled enough, but I disagree with Seneca.
I’ve traveled alone, as when I flew to England, and the sight of travelers spilled like marbles into bus terminals and airports has troubled me. I’m lost in their anonymity. The way they feel like ghosts. And the gray impersonal walls of the terminals feel alien, smeared with the presence of people passing by but never staying.
The road, at times, has a has a lonesome murmur.
But I’ve also joined the fabric of another world, building friendships and leaving traces with the footfalls and echoes of existence we all leave behind. I know one English girl has a poem I wrote while watching boats drift down the Thames. Unless she threw it out.
But I often wonder if the people I meet–like a man named Walid who worked in a cafe at Cairo–remembers my fumbling Arabic and the daily exchanges we made over the counter.
“Brett!” he’d say, smiling.
*Insert messy attempt at Arabic
*Insert correction
“How’s your family?” I’d ask.
I have a collection of cards gleaned from my travels: contacts that I haven’t contacted, businesses, monasteries. They’re reminders, but they fill me with joy.
…Well, my friends just arrived. Who knows where the road leads. Cheers for now.
Brokenness and Healing
I’ve been home from Egypt for about one and a half weeks. I’ve been busy setting
seeing friends and family, prodded with requests for stories. “What were the pyramids like?” they ask. Or, “Did you see the Sphinx?”
I’ve also been reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus and organizing loans and finances to prepare for my final year at college. Soon, I’ll be moving into campus housing, seeing old friends, and attending classes as if nothing happened.
But the transition to “reality” has been hard.
My third night home, my dad and I went out for a hot fudge sunday at a place nearby–an irregular tradition for past few years. As I ate my ice cream, the other customers walked up, laughing and buying their cones.
To me, they felt unreal. I couldn’t take my mind from the students I had taught in Egypt. Some had lost friends and family to religious violence. All had endured the throes of violent political change the past year. For some of them, justice was a truth worth dying for. Then, my thoughts turned to Libya and Syria, torn by their own violence, like the hundreds killed in the recent attack at Tremseh.
It hurt to know that a month and a half ago, I was just an oblivious American eating ice cream, too.
Return
I just got back from Egypt last Saturday, then spent a week in New York, so I promise I’ll start updating regularly again. But for now, here’s a link to some posts I did for another blog while abroad. Cheers.
Egypt…
So… I meant to post before I left on Thursday, but I got caught up with packing and goodbyes, “tying up lose end” I called it. A few remained undone. One of them was here, so I’m getting back to it now: I’ll be in Egypt for a month teaching English with ESL/Arabic teachers to a group of seminarians.
I got here Friday and have already had some powerful impressions. Once the schedule gets more regular, I hope to post a few blurbs now and then to highlight my stay. So far, I’ve been writing them in a notebook.
I hope you excuse my absence, and I hope to repay with some interesting anecdotes. Cheers.
Travel
I just got back from a few days on the road. I spent some time with friends and canoed for a bit, then stayed with an old friend (from fourth grade) in Cornell since Sunday. He’s an RA there and is spending the week looking after the seniors before the graduate. Really, he just wants to see his girlfriend, I think.
It gave me time to break my stagnation at home and sketch a few ideas for another essay. I hope to start it soon–ideally tomorrow. I finished some major edits on a short story today and hope to send that out as well. Writing, reading, traveling, writing. It seems like there should be formula somewhere.
As I sketch out my essay and review the notes I made during my trip, I hope to write more about travel, but in the mean time, here’s a sketch since I haven’t posted in a few days.
The nearness of the distant
I’ve done a bad job updating this blog so far, so I’m going for a shift of focus: I’m going to make it more personal. I apologize for the gaps in posts so far. Scouts honor–and I was a Boy Scout–I’m going to post more regularly from now on. So to get to business…
I’m nearing my final weeks of junior year. Clouds cover the sky like a rumpled old blanket, sapping color from the St. Bonaventure campus. I imagine Heidegger walking by the nearby river on such days, his steel gray hair matching the clouds, his footsteps lagging as a new thought turns over in his head. He was a heavy guy. Even his name. Heidegger.
I’m writing a paper, drawing from an essay he wrote: “Who is Zarathurstra?” He analyzes the unity he sees between Nietzsche’s concepts of “overman” and “eternal recurrence,” doctrines threaded through Nietzsche’s works. The ideas are heavy, sunken cathedrals built on traditions of metaphysics dating back to Plato.
Through the dry but brilliant essay, a line stands out: “Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”
Sometimes philosophy has poetry wedged between the arguments; the line captures my mood during these final weeks.
Backyard Philosophy 