Individuals, societies.

Trends in (my) recent thinking: I took a class on the history of economic thought last semester and was basically taught to ignore the Lewis & Clark view of scientific progress as inaccurate and too close to hero worship to really be taken seriously. That is, the classic way we're taught to think of famous figures in any field -- as geniuses who acted as individual trailblazers to lead us to enlightenment and greater knowledge -- ignores the fact these great scientists/theorists had to rely on their fellow researchers, the ideas being batted around their fields at the time, and a whole slew of other factors. The story of scientific progress isn't one of revolutionaries who discovered elusive truths; in fact, it's more realistically one of communal effort and cooperative problem-solving.

Pretty easy to accept, in my opinion. What's interesting to me is that in the same class, near the end of the term, we covered a few heterodox economic traditions that all raised specifically different objections against neoclassical economics. However, though these objections were different in detail from each other, they all generally pointed out the ridiculous nature of the neoclassical assumption of the isolated individual. To think that we are all born with neat preferences and valuations that remain unaffected by our surroundings; to think that human beings function as objective estimators of utility -- Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and many other heterodox economists laughed at these suppositions.

Their reasoning? People are defined by their environment: they're either confined to the viewpoints of their social class (Marx) or social animals that thrived on "emulation" (Veblen), or they're just generally irrational beings that looked to environmental cues to determine the value of certain goods (behavioral economics).

Once again, the same issue pops up: individuals are beholden, at least in part, to society. Individuals don't actually exist individually.

Then, of course, Wright's The Moral Animal. This is a clear message: human beings evolved and are therefore born with certain psychological desires, for instance companionship, sex, etc. More importantly, the survival of the individual doesn't matter so much as the continued survival of a certain gene. Evolution is a process that cares very little about the individual and breeds humans with impulses that may not benefit themselves so much as they benefit the survival of their viable offspring. Again, individuals? Not so important or so powerful, really.

Finally, the last in this list: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I just finished a few days ago. Gladwell writes with one clear thesis in all of his books; in Outliers, his thesis is that the success stories of any field are never self-made. They always benefit from cultural heritage, or social conditions, or lucky circumstances -- something that gives them an advantage over others. No one ever rises to the top by himself.

So I am almost forced to the conclusion, after these few months of learning virtually the same lesson over and over again, that individual agents are not as important as we usually make them out to be. We owe a lot to our parents, to our backgrounds, to whatever it is we've been exposed to and influenced by since birth. This doesn't come as a complete shock to me -- I was never convinced that I was somehow detached from my surroundings.

But still, as a subjective being, I can really only say that I know my own thoughts and my own judgments. My own perceptions will always be the most important to me, because they're the only ones I will ever be able to trust. So it's troubling in a sense to think that I'm really worth nothing -- that in the great big game of evolution and scientific process and economics and whatever else, I'm just a pawn to be pushed around by cultural trends.

Moral Animals?

Recently read Robert Wright's 1994 bestseller The Moral Animal. I'm wary of being too eager about it because I know someone better-versed (more well-versed?) in evolutionary psychology than I am will tell me that Wright's ideas are outdated, that the theories he covers have since been torn apart by new findings -- or maybe that he's a misogynistic pig for even questioning the benefits of a monogamous society, etc.?

Regardless of what someone out there thinks, I find The Moral Animal to be reasonably written and Wright to be a pretty even-headed guy. And regardless of whether Wright is right (gross pun) about every single implication of evolutionary psychology, the question of how evolutionary psychology should inform our understanding of morality is without a doubt an important one.

This is a fluffy post that really has nothing to say for itself other than: I really enjoyed this book. It was well-written and thought-provoking. Also I'm thinking about reading The Evolution of God, which is Wright's latest installment.

Bumped on the shoulder.

A note that this piece has three distinct narrators.

Yes, I remember that day. I remember it because it was the night before my seventh birthday, and we were in the kitchen squeezing frosting flowers from makeshift Saran wrap tubes. I cried because you were better at it, then. Your ten-year-old fingers had acquired dexterity, and mine were still pudgy with the remnants of baby fat.

Your flowers were flawless budding wonders, almost lifelike in waxy splendor. When I looked at the confused splotches of icing that seemed to ooze out of my frosting tip with drunken abandon, I felt an emotion I could not name for another decade. It was a pressure in my chest between tightness and paralysis, a flush that rose to my sunburned cheeks without my consent or recognition. I was not a part of my body, but something operating it with strings from a distant corner—tugging at tenuous strands with questionable results, unable to predict the next jerk of my limbs.

I cried with the foggy frustration of a toddler. Later, I swore that I saw you sneer: a grimace frightful for its too-large front teeth and their jagged and plaque-covered edges. Or maybe you bumped my shoulder so that in a moment of distracted envy I dropped my tube of icing and left a path of pink on the tiled floor. Or sometimes I remembered your face as it screwed into a grimace (of what? of anger? of scorn?) and your hand coming toward me, fierce and huge-seeming, and I wasn’t ready but I knew it was coming anyway (why?) and I hated you as even as my shoulder smarted and I knew that I’d crossed a line from somewhere to somewhere else.

“You were picking on me!” I’d insist years later, but you would always deny me my defense. And even to myself, I sounded a little like an excuse worn thin with doubt, but then why the sobbing I remember so well that I can still sometimes taste the salt trails on my cheek? “You were being mean, I know it!”

But the moment would have already passed. They always did that, when I was around you. How often had I turned around to say something, only to find myself talking to your shadow? How many times had I yelled at your back as you exited a room, oblivious to my objection raised a moment too late?

Yes, I remember that day. Maddie and Lea were having their birthday party, but Maddie was scared, poor girl—she didn’t have many friends in her class, and only a few RSVPs had come back for her, though we’d sent out invitations two months before the scheduled date. Lea, we never had to worry about—she was already the princess of her first grade class, the sunny kid who doled out cute smiles as though she’d invented the concept herself.

But Maddie, back then she was always an unfriendly remark away from tears—nudge her the wrong way and she’d whimper and go off somewhere to lick her wounds. We said it was because of that one morning the baby monitor broke and we didn’t hear her crying until well into the afternoon, when we were already about sink gratefully into a session of well-deserved and all-too-rare—and we realized, suddenly, that Maddie was so unnaturally quiet, that she’d never been that quiet before.

When we’d finally hurried to the crib, she was a trembling bundle of snotty sheets, and though we picked her up and soothed her shhhh mommy’s here daddy’s here, don’t you worry now, sweetie, there was nothing sweet about her look of betrayal, about the way she distrusted us, and therefore everyone, and therefore the entire universe. Lea was still blissfully sleeping at the other end of the small mattress, even as Maddie in her infantile tantrum managed to kick her no less than a dozen times, but we were used to that, with Lea.

And you could already see the worry working its claws into Maddie, the way that crease implied itself between her eyebrows even in infancy, before any true worries of the world could have tainted her soft baby-smell aura. It was as though she knew, with a child’s preternatural instinct, what was to come, as though perhaps things just went wrong around her the way the dazed curiosity of innocence clung to other more fortunate babies.

Most years, the reminder of her birth was answered by a reminder of something inevitably gone awry: the economic collapse around her eighth birthday, Greg’s alcoholism that developed around her tenth, the fire that destroyed three-quarters of the house only weeks after her eleventh birthday. She was drawn to disaster, a child of catastrophe.

But it was all started, I suppose, with the accident that happened on the day of her seventh.

That day? That day was the day I started lying. I was only ten, but I knew what it meant to know something that someone else shouldn’t. I knew how to keep a secret. When Maddie saw Lea’s frosting flowers her eyes lit up while the rest of her seemed to darken and become tenser. I knew why she was so interested in Lea’s flowers (my flowers weren’t nearly so plump either), and for a second or two I felt sorry for Maddie, always the withered version of Lea lurking in the background, not quite as brilliant or as friendly or as anything, really, as Lea was.

Which is probably why I didn’t get it at first when Maddie pounced—it was such an action, a dynamism she’d never before achieved and never really did after, either. But that’s the word I would use for it now: pouncing, one feline stroke of motion across my field of vision, savage in its animalistic immediacy. Then Lea was on the ground, her icing tube landing in pink streaks on the kitchen floor, Maddie with her hands pinning Lea’s shoulders and pushing her deeper into the tile, if that could at all be possible.

Lea’s head had grazed the edge of the kitchen counter during her fall, and now where the jagged stone edge had collided with her skull there blossomed a redness that grew steadily and symmetrically into the yellow strands of her hair. In Maddie’s eyes, now, a ferocity that had not been there before—something more alive than the dread with which she’d been whining minutes earlier, it’s no fair that my flowers are squishy and ugly.

I only know that I yanked Maddie off Lea because that’s what they told me I did. Afterwards my hand hurt, and Maddie was too stunned and too young to understand the cause-and-effect of me and her and Lea, still lying motionless on the floor with the redness sloppy-spreading around her.

Silence.

—And then Maddie crying, the always-distant sound of sirens, a party canceled and birthday cake left uneaten on a countertop, how old are you and how old did you become just now?, Maddie staring up at me with a wide-eyed contempt.

And later she would write sentences in her journal such as “If I am cruel, it is because I learned cruelty from my sister,” and I would know she meant me, that though she would almost instantly forget this incident and warp the memory in her mind to fit with a childish purity she never actually experienced, she would remember this.

She would forget the twin sister she had slept next to for seven years of her life.

She would forget the pictures we took that day, and three other photo albums of identical chubby faces—“lost,” in the fire that destroyed much else of our past lives.

She would forget her own role as actor, as catalyst, as killer.

She would forget this, but she would remember that day, at least in part, and the part that she would remember: she would remember me, my violence, my ten-year-old rage, my permanent role solidified as her personal oppressor.

If you are cruel, little sister, know this—if you are cruel, you did not learn it from me. You already knew it. You knew it all along.

Human weakness.

The other day I decided that human need was often mistaken for human weakness.

I've since changed my mind.

Human weakness is often excused as human need. In reality, humans suck. They're pathetic little things with insecurities and imperfections, and no, this doesn't make them more "human" or more "intricate." It just makes them more sucky.

They have no clue what the fuck they're doing. They have no resolve, no self-knowledge, no understanding of what in the world they want or how they're going to get it. They rationalize all their decisions without any regard for the wisdom they would otherwise pretend to understand.

I'm angry because I'm disappointed. I realized that I only know a handful of sane people, and that I could very well be a victim of the same idiocy that I've witnessed so strongly these past few days. Everyone is so selfishly foolish, hopefully and hopelessly romantic. The cynics were right! We suck. Congrats, everyone.

Gimmicky story idea #1.

What if Mr. Right showed up at your door?
What if he had the right clothes and the right color eyes, showed the right sort of embarrassment at the situation ("Wow, um, I'm kind of here with a weird thing to tell you")?
What if he even had the right sort of hesitating, self-deprecating laugh?
What if he promised everything would be interesting (but not overwhelmingly so) and heavy (but not in an unhealthy way), that he would be insecure in the cute way (and not the pitiful way), that you would grow together (but without stifling each other)?

We say all the time that we want him to be delivered to our doorstep. But think about that--going in, knowing that, understanding that This One Should Be Perfect. It would be something, wouldn't it? --something great and awful and mind-blowingly complicated? Yeah. Maybe.

This could be such a Disney Channel movie. I hate it.

English 155.

Here's what my English professor told us today.

He said, The only way I'd do creative writing is, like, if I could write in a way that I could do whatever I wanted and say whatever I wanted, and no one would ever read it, and even if anyone read it they wouldn't understand what the hell it meant. But I also want it to be precise and clear. You see how that works? And even though no one would be able to understand it at the time, I want people to read it a hundred years from now and really like it. And I want to be able to know that, from wherever I am, somehow.

And then he talked about philosophical grammarians.

Never will I ever--.

--hate anyone ever again.

It's draining. "Enervating," as they say (a word that doesn't seem to mean itself -- as I was reminded this past weekend). I've done it. I'm over it. The truth I want to believe is: if we could dig ourselves out of moral stupidity and somehow bring ourselves to full empathy, we could never hate. It would be impossible, because we're all too human. (Read: // we're all // too human, not we're //all too // human.) But supposing that isn't actually true, I still think I could do it, as a personal project! (Personal projects = awesome. Obviously.)

Things go (wrong).

I'm becoming disillusioned.

(Originally I titled this post "Bad things happen." -- but then I realized. That's not what I mean. It's not only that shit happens spontaneously, that you turn a corner and suddenly someone's throwing a tomato at you. Obviously that happens too, and it sucks. But more than that, aside from that, independent of that, I'm talking about the phenomenon in which great things turn sour, fruit over-ripens and spoils, the best thing warps into the worst. What I mean is: the transition from the illusion to the disillusion. I mean it very specifically: the letdown, the disappointment, the stark contrast between what you expect and what you get.)

(Or perhaps I should say that I'm becoming more disillusioned, because honestly and realistically I was never all that expectant of anything great. The contemporary age loves tragedy and feeds on melodrama. We're taught that shit happens, that it's artistic, that it's painful and great to fall upon the thorns of life, that blood proves we're alive. We're supposed to suffer actively. We're supposed to relish it.)

In any case, even that notion has turned stale. I've experienced no great travesties, nothing even close to martyrdom. But what I have experienced is something closer to malaise. In the past few months every profound concept has crumbled beneath the weight of triviality. You need so much faith to believe in intangibles: trust, love, gratitude, compassion. They exist to validate everyday interactions, to convince us that yes, something does occur beneath our words. (Our words are supposed to mean something. They're supposed to stand in place of deep understanding. They convey subjective truth -- blahblahblahbutreally? is that really how it works?)

Maybe this is just the age at which I now find myself. All my friends are undergoing painful transitions into the mess we call adulthood, especially in terms of romance. I'm just overwhelmed by all the ways that (ha!) things go wrong. It's difficult -- unspeakably so -- to understand another human being well enough to achieve acceptance. It's impossible to realize the full humanity of someone else.

And even after that, it takes effort to maintain a connection. It's just so much, and we're all so tired, and wouldn't it be easier -- wouldn't it? -- just to fall asleep, to tumble casually over edge of the precipice, to stumble into living and to pretend that we couldn't have predicted our mistakes? We could be blameless. We didn't know better.

(But all along, we did know better. We had to have known. At some point we looked around us and we saw, but it was too much to prevent. And in the end the failure won't be something glorious and tragic, but rather something shriveling, something altogether inevitable/inescapable (not a bang but a whimper), and it'll just prove, once again, the full truth of the matter: that things go wrong, that they have and will and always, always will.)

Cruelty.

I like the idea of it.
I like the idea of inflicting it before it can be inflicted on me. I think there's something beautiful about revenge, about hatred. Compassion is soft; forgiveness, weak. Part of me understands the necessity of it. Part of me knows it to be merely a tactic.

It will never end, this struggle, and I know I will write about it in different ways for a long time. I just don't know what's natural anymore: the urge to love or the urge to hate. Sometimes I think there is no difference, but then I realize I'm just being contradictory for its own sake.

I feel like Ayn Rand. I want to write characters who are stunning in pure internal strength. To write what I lack, perhaps? I'm not too fond of what I have to do to appear . . . the way I'm expected to appear. I can't separate the tactic from the necessity, don't know if there's a difference.

:) Dum da dum.

Recently I just started sharing my music status on a chat application.
It's actually so great to see what my friends are listening to. I feel much closer. And almost spiritually intimate.

Okay seriously this is all coming out in a stream of horrible simplicity. I mean that: music is so ambient and essential to me that to understand, in the moment, what someone four hundred miles away is experiencing actually makes a big difference.

:) I'm all smiley and happy because of it. I just . . . haven't been so giddy and incoherent in a long time.

What I think sometimes.

1. I can reduce some people to the lack of a certain key characteristic -- I think, therefore, that they are defined by their deficiency, a human with a gaping hole.
2. Others, who appear to be well-adjusted, I believe to have been coddled by their environment, growth and self-knowledge stifled by habitual comfort. I find these people limited and delusional.
   

I don't think I know anyone who doesn't fit into these two categories.
...Leaving me with the inevitability of oversimplification, or condescension.

Sucks.

A problem that the Romantics noticed and a problem that I am just now becoming extremely familiar with: emotions are awesome but capricious. They don't answer to anybody. They're inconvenient, sulky messes, and they have no obligation to you.

If I could always maintain a specific mood for as long as I wanted, I would be satisfied. But as it stands I am buffeted by my own moods like nobody's business. Sometimes I don't even feel fully human anymore, because there's just so much I'm conscious of lacking. And then I'm given to writing trite and rambling pieces, and I can tell my work is not good enough, and I can tell I've been completely paralyzed by my own volatility gone wrong.

Logic, to me, has always seemed like a distraction from the underlying emotionality of the universe. It's a very useful distraction, for sure, but somehow not natural, not quite organic. It's a fundamentally unreasonable creature trying to reign in what it fears most about itself. But hiding never helps anything.

H.D.

Another creative writing ditty. (But not technically a ditty, I guess--something's wrong with the fact that words aren't as flexible as they should be.) A complete and utter rip-off of Robert Coover's "Fall Guy's Faith." I am well-aware of this and saddened by it, but what can poor, uninspired, amateur writers do in times like these, really?

He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone.

This was after the accident, of course. Before the accident, he’d been social as anything, chatty to a fault and boisterous too—always flailing about somewhere, committing petty and pointless theft, egging someone else on while they did something tasteless. He’d been recklessly alive, until one day he’d misjudged and leaned too far and—

So not now, not after that. Sure, they’d fixed him up as best they could, stitched together the loose ends of his physique, bandaged him up and sent him home with a slap on the (now-heavily-taped) back. Yet he’d felt a mysterious difference upon arriving home to his sagging couch cushions and his rumpled bed sheets, something not quite right but not quite touchable either.

He looked at his beat-up reflection the mirror every day now, and honestly it could just be that, just the mere act of self-recognition, the moment of identification: hello, yes, you are yourself, an instant all too striking for comfort—and plus he had never been asked by life to be conscious of himself before.

Or maybe it was the scar now running jagged across his face that forced him into something like remembrance. It was ugly, there was no denying that: violent and miscalculated the way that his fall from grace had been miscalculated. And now there was a centimeter-wide trail of pink flesh that cut into his stubble, where facial hair would not even grow. Raised flesh, and an angry tendency for his thoughts to run into each other and—through an act of inertia or near-inertia—tumble sideways and somersaulting away from him, off a mental cliff that he’d never realized the existence of before.

His girlfriend had even taken to tracing her fingers around that part of his face, avoiding the conversation while forcing them both into acute awareness of it.

Really, he convinced himself, it was just the residual weirdness of an all-too-weird situation.

And—“It’s not that I’m broken,” he said to the shrink he visited out of quiet desperation. “It’s not that. It’s just like I cracked before I even knew what was happening, and now I can’t seem to put myself right again.”

Angles, tangles.

The title of this post has nothing to do with anything. But the rest of this post is just a collection of quotes from the same poetry anthology as before (American Hybrid, Norton 2009). I've been slowly wading through it, picking out lines, etc. And then a select few are from Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A few are from other things, I think.

In any case, I really like these.

It was nice or it was nasty. There was no telling.

A bee fell in love with a peach blossom. Shakespeare wrote a poem about it.

He moved about the country like a sword.

Don’t be afraid of cobwebs. They only scan theatres, and your soul.

And his voice is a sound gone wrong, a noisily flapping one-winged bird.

. . . if not orderly, what defends him from the truth he already stands accused of?

. . . laughing at the worst possible time.

Someone remembers something that happened a long time ago. She forgot it, it changed everything.

What can I tell you that you don’t already know? That life is sad? That this moment brims with too-sweet wisteria?

That she destroys her life by keeping alive.

I think about the future and the sea. And stay.

A long time ago the sky invented flesh.

. . . the breath of every person you’ll be.

I’d been interrupting for years and didn’t know it.

Not everyone can be described.

The idea was touristy, like a postcard.

I write down everything as I forget it, especially at night. I lock the door from the inside.

We’re just trying to make sure that the heart’s desire stays put.

Anything cancels everything out.

He will endure many reverses because of his sudden wrath and his great courage.

You haven’t been listening. And now I know I am not remembering.

It seems none of us has begun to digest the meal of all our lives.

It is an affair of some enormity.

This is to indicate that our actions in this tiny, tragic platform are going to be more than usually infinitesimal, given the superhuman scale on which we have to operate, and also that we should not take any comfort from the inanity of our situation.

It isn’t suitable, and it’s here.

Every year she grew less like other people and more like herself.

You said you don’t want to know any more than you do now, of every thing that might be a person.

I feel sorry for anyone that has to die.

A torn-bread awkwardness.

Nothing is more malleable than a moment.

We were only yesterday tender hearted waiting. To be something. A spring. And then someone says, Sit down, We have a heart for you to forget. A mind to suffer with. So, experience. So, the circus tent.

We are born to begin and to end in infantile fury.

She’d be even more reckless if never she woke. Now that was not said right. Some of the words had got altered.

Dying must happen quite often, said Alice.

Finished? he asked. One was never.

Sleep was a wave one rode to wake gasping.

While nothing lasts, she said, still it is for a while—.

It was all dissolving into a hangman’s noose.

I have been waiting my whole life, he said, to be brought into believing.

Did I tell you? he said. Yes, he had. He had told her. And she had listened.

It takes more than a heartbeat to get me.

We have made gallant our enigmatic ways.

And the uncomfortableness of watching someone’s hand cover the body of someone else.

I empty myself of wit and begin.

The next man who will leave his lover for you.

Keep one eye on the bed. Keep one eye on the door.

Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being.

This, you see, is our domestic partnership—the conclusion of each well-attached earring and fragrant misunderstanding.

Dismal are we who love only recognition. Now hand me the saber.

Tragic event of saber and table.

You are too grounded in something I don’t care about, which is: strength.

She sat atop him as if he were everything,
but not to her—

What you cannot think will be your life.

Listen, friend. I mean well by you: accept the perfect legibility of things.

Look at the lapses in between stars.

She believes she is herself, which isn’t complete madness, it’s belief.

A girl says sweetly, it’s time you begin to look after me, so I may seem loveable to myself.

This morning brought more or less more.

. . . not before the angry residue of possession.

What multitude of faces and voices could alter the longing of our loss and tenderness? Were we tender? And if so, when?

Things become is. We don’t have to make a sentence if we don’t want to.

I answer, “I love you, too,” and I think, “for as long as you will believe it.”

I hope I don’t like you, myself, or anyone else. I hope I don’t like the next song. If I do, I’ll only try to remember it, and I’ll have to look forward to hearing it again.

I want to be tired. And terse.

It’s completely subjective or random, so beauty is dust.

This in a person as young as yourself is startling.

I feel so awful from one thing and the other.

You couldn’t beat it with a stick.

This is awful. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or anyone else in the world.

There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.

d’you think people change? clearing out the cupboard I found my father’s old top hat but ourselves do we change?

His self wore or was wearing out. This or a man’s self is defeat.

Be sure to hold your tongue. Be sure your tongue is sharp.

She will never again write from personal experience.
She discovers: It Is Too Hard. And: Her Life Is Boring.

How can I leave this to the unlove of someone else?

. . . those who gnash and weep alone.

I like to prepare the heart by stuffing it with the brain.

Excuse me while I digest this small galaxy.

I tried to convince myself that passion was not a gyre of dust swirling about my feet.

My categorical imperative is falling in love.

The earthquake is self-conscious because it means no harm.

I’m waiting for my life to be over because it couldn’t be closer to the truth.

Everything.

An excerpt from Joshua Beckman. I don't know the title of this poem, or it doesn't have one. Found in American Hybrid (Norton 2009):

The flesh. In time you will learn to look
at everything. In time you will learn to
touch everything. In time you will learn
to clothe everything. In time you will
learn to eat everything. In time you will
learn to say of everything that it has
been seen, that it has been touched, that
it has been killed, that it has been eaten.
Bloodied are our hours, in reflection,
the knuckle and the finger and the paper.
The shoulder. At dusk I did slip from the town,
the baby under my wing. Now to the water,
where what I have done will be reflected on later.

What happened.

This is something from creative writing, which is to say that I wrote half of it over the summer and half of it about two days ago. It's more autobiographical than I meant it to be. Also I use some of the same imagery. Literary laziness.

She looked up. Craig was now waiting for her response. In the moment that she’d been gone in her own thoughts, the clouds had obstructed the sun and the afternoon had grown gloomy. She could no longer see her own shadow broken by the ripples of the pool water.

She realized that he had perhaps grown anxious. The question was unusual and serious coming from him, and it gave her a moment’s pause. She pulled her legs out of the pool and placed them to drip splotches onto the concrete.

She looked at her feet, noticing the paint chipping on her toenails, before answering.

“I don’t think so,” she began, then hesitated. What did she mean to say? “It would be the end of something—something pretty big. It wouldn’t be so easy, after that.” Another pause. He coughed—a forced burst of air. “What do you think?”

His response came quick and nonchalant, a boy’s reasoning.

“I think it’d be possible,” he said, by which he meant it’d be safe. “We’d still have things to talk about, stuff in common.” He gestured vaguely at the air, an action with which he intended to prove their camaraderie.

In the years that followed, as she grew into a woman wiser than her teenage self, she’d come back to that brief conversation and dissect it into moments. The question. Her silence. Then, her response. His response, so much more and less definitive at once. His friendly eagerness. She grew to resent him.

In the end, it was he who’d been right. But more and more she realized that it was she who’d given the better answer.

My first reaction was: that’s not what happened. I didn’t think it militantly, just: it wasn’t the truth. It wasn’t the truth, and she was beholden to the truth, wasn’t she? Writers are, to intangible concepts like that: truth, beauty, love. And she hadn’t been faithful.

Not to mention the other intangible concepts she hadn’t been faithful to.

Really, it was beyond even the question of leeway. She’d said an infinite number of times on the phone: I twist. It’s what I do. It’s why I write. I’d believed her justifications, her theoretical empathy and sympathy and I-can-do-whatever-the-hell-I-want-pathy, because up until now it hadn’t mattered, because up until now her reasons didn’t seem like blatant rationalizations for exploitation.

But that’s not what happened.

Of course I recognized myself: boyish, affable, maybe simple at times and ridiculous because of it. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t, which is why she sent the manuscript to me, as though it were any random story, any random character.

I recognized myself in the way she wrote about my coughing—she always mocked me for it, the way I got so visibly nervous. Tense, is the word she used. Tense, and then she’d scoff and push me into strained conversation: about mutual respect, about emotional development, about our parents. When I inevitably contrived answers out of a growing sense of panic, she’d call me out, call me naïve.

Here it was, on the page.

But her painted toenails hadn’t been chipped – she would never have let them get like that, back then. And she didn’t hesitate. She never has—she plunges into dialogue and attacks it, slices into it the way she did the pool after she’d answered me:

It would be the end of something. We wouldn’t need each other, after that. We would be separate, independent. It would take so much effort, and there’d be no real reason.

—And then she stood up and dove, one swift and savage motion. She was beside me, and then she was gone. I had been smiling. She must have thought I was a fool.

One more thing: it was a sunny afternoon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I know, because she was squinting as she talked. She wasn’t looking at me, but I could see her eyebrows furrowed, her expression pinched—as she talked and I gestured in vain, and she was looking into the sun, already staring firmly into the distance.

When it matters more than it did.

Late June, I think:

I will never forget, but I will never again be fooled by the radiance of skin salty-bitter-sweet.
Oh, how many words must be written to innocence before it dies crushed beneath the weight?
Idealism is not flattering on you, my dear.

I have a brush and a life somewhere, I say, and dig into my purse.

Was it you who promised to protect me in the never-here and the wasn’t-now?
I’m sorry.
I couldn’t hear you over the roar of tomorrow’s sunset and the thud, sickening, of my own mortality.
Forgive me if I fade before I speak.

It could have been worse, you said that night. It could have been us.
I would have laughed, but you were serious, then.

I ran so they could not see the veins on my ankles, the moisture messy beneath one eye—
Isn’t it true, love, that only poets and prostitutes get the endings they deserve?
My curtain call won’t be so sharp as to draw a gasp, and no, I didn’t bow in your direction.

You were never attentive enough to catch the raindrops before they broke on the surface of our words.
I resent you most of all, for that.

Vague.

A common, permanent, and recent frustration:

Why aren't words ever enough for anything?

The limits of neuroscience?

I was in neuroscience class today.

There exists a particular reaction to the existence of neuroscience -- a shock, I guess, that scientists can actually understand certain parts of human nature in the form of action potentials and neurotransmitters. It exists as a giddiness of sorts, almost an assumption of deviousness, as if what is being committed is some sort of crime against the cosmos, a "fuck you!" to the holiness of humanity.

What am I saying? Last year when I first got really excited about the prospect of neuroscience (of neuroeconomics, specifically), I hyped it so much in my mind, believing it to be some sort of holy grail to my own understanding of Life. Now, in retrospect, I realize how crude and juvenile and almost universal this perception is -- it's knee-jerk; it's uninformed.

Anyway. As I sat in neuroscience class today and thought about how obsessively neuroscientific the entirety of some people's lives are, I felt extremely disenchanted. Neuroscience is nothing more than what it is. So many students who profess an interest in neuroscience actually suffer from some sort of sadistic need to dehumanize everything. They think neuroscience somehow cheapens human concepts of nobility, spirituality, sanctity. They think, as I mistakenly did, that neuroscience actually answers questions about the nature of things, when really it only approaches questions about the characteristics of things.

Oh well. I'm being dogmatic about very little right now. I just hate to see this blind faith in anything, especially because I was a victim of it so very recently.

Danger!

A scantily clad association:

These are related--

• Hemingway's affinity for doing stupid daredevil things.
  
• Fight Club.
• "At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life." ("How to Tell a True War Story," Tim O'Brien)

There is something at once macho and true about the idea that comfort is actually the least spiritually healthy habit. When you test your boundaries, you test yourself, and you prove that you're actually alive -- at least that's the wisdom, right? Whatever. It's just such a prevalent thing, this whole flirtation with danger. It kind of reminds me of dopaminergic neurons and reward systems, but only in the most superficial, cheap thrill way.

End.

The Time Traveler's Wife.

The Time Traveler's Wife--I awaited this movie with bated breath. Adapted from the novel by Audrey Niffenegger, it promised to be . . . something else. A sci-fi romance is awfully risky business in book form, even riskier on the big screen. There really is just too much that could go wrong.

Especially for Niffenegger's little darling of a premise, things could go terribly awry. A guy with time-traveling seizures, somehow capable of meeting and keeping his One True Love? Walking the streets naked, pick-pocketing, engineering winning lottery tickets, picking locks . . . -- it all works on the page, when imaginary circumstances don't have to come to three-dimensional life.

But Rachel McAdams is real. But Eric Bana is real. But, as one critic notes, the depiction of a supposedly 40-year-old man forcing himself on a teenage girl: a little too real for comfort, even if he's actually her future lover displaced in time.

At worst, the entire thing could seem ridiculous and cheesed-up--unconvincing, absurd, stitched together. This is what the critics reacted to, the sheer improbability of it all (really, a genetic basis for his condition seems too conveniently pop-science-y to be relevant). And granted, the movie doesn't try all that hard -- or even at all -- to win you over. Opening scene: enter six-year-old Henry, disappearing from his mother's car only seconds before the inevitable car crash that kills her. He reappears outside the car, shivering in the cold, as perplexed as we are, but in two or three sentences from a randomly appearing older Henry, everything is explained!

. . . Or it's not. Or it must be, because the movie takes off from there, any confusion be damned.

Uhm.

In any case, I'd already read the book, thankfully--you must, I think, in order to be genuinely moved by the film (in order to be genuinely moved by the movie? Hm). Once you suspend your disbelief (and your discombobulation), however, the true power of Niffenegger's themes overwhelms you. For Henry, time-traveling is a cruel imposition, tearing him from his wedding ceremony, from his wife, ultimately from his happiness. But it's also an inconvenience that forces the purest of human experience on its victims. It allows Henry and Clare to live life distilled, never forgetting the brilliance of new romance (how could they, when younger Henries are always traveling forward to smooth any ruffles in their relationship?). Henry's time seizures lend a certain immortality to his love: it never begins, it never ends. It just is, popping up unexpectedly years after his death, always passionate, always as though brand new.

If I envy Henry and Clare anything, it is this: they never forget. They're always so painfully aware of every second, every moment. If modern society is always accused of being distracted while the really important things slip away, then Henry and Clare exist in the opposite extreme. They only live in each other, to the point of amorality. Their tragedy is something different from the plight of every other love story, because they don't forget, because their affections never peter out or fade away or get lost. They're always reminded of the immediacy of their love, whereas the rest of us are stuck with the mere memory of idealism. Yes, they never had a true choice in the matter, but those of us with free will (or the illusion of it?) can only hope that memory is enough--and that we will all eventually make the right choices anyway.

Sexuality.

Here we go. I've spent outrageous amounts of time talking about sexuality these past few days. People come home from college with stories about random hook-ups, or random friends with random hook-ups.

It bothers me to no end that I'm bothered by these tales, that I get squeamish when close friends give me detailed accounts of their sexual exploits, even though (or especially because?) I ask them for all the grimy specifics. It feels illicit somehow, to sit in a park where I've attended high school English class--to sit there and discuss such obviously "grown-up" things. I push myself to reveal information that I know I would have taken to my grave a year ago. The words seem strange coming out of my mouth, I feign nonchalance, I grit my teeth and tell myself it's important to shed such moral pretensions.

This is related, I guess, to D.H. Lawrence's conception of pornography and obscenity as "the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it" (quoted from his 1929 essay on the topic--always a good read, and very telling of Lawrence's general outlook). Anything "dirty" is only so because of the way we approach it, because we want to hate it and hide it behind closed doors. It's shameful only because we're ashamed, because we force an element of impropriety onto it, not because it's inherently disgraceful.

Definitely, of course, in high school, sexuality was a horrible, horrible desire that we avoided in discussion. Or rather, we avoided discussing it until the lights were out and we were in someone's bedroom telling secrets. In the dark, we could say things we wouldn't have said during the day -- but isn't that what Lawrence was talking about? Hiding, secrecy, not admitting to certain parts of ourselves. . . . Now it all seems so sadly tragic, the fact that we were too repressed to recognize our own dishonesty.

Anyway, we're all older now, more "liberated," staunch about our acceptance of physical desires. And yet I still find myself cringing when I realize how incredibly fast these "mature" relationships move. I can't help but have a very visceral reaction to promiscuity. Why, why, why? How could my socially-imposed morality have become such an instinct? --How do I make it go away? Ideally, I would actually be casual about all of it; realistically, part of me still wonders if maybe I wasn't better off innocent and prepubescent. It's cognitive dissonance at its best, I guess. I just wish I didn't feel so awkward about both perspectives.

Closer.

I'm massively fatigued due to an international flight, but I will forget everything if I don't remember it now.

The 2004 film Closer boasts an all-star cast and a plot so psychologically twisted as to be inscrutable. I've seen it twice now but have come to differing conclusions both times.

Clive Owen's character is at once animalistically sexual and brutally honest--I think that if we are to sympathize with any of the movie's characters, we would have to root for him. He's tough, he's real. He doesn't skirt around issues of infidelity. He doesn't hide behind false modesty. There's something admirable in that, right?--even in the crude way he approaches human intimacy, in his fits of violent rage?

Maybe. Meanwhile, I kind of wish we could all be Natalie Portman, and we could all giggle and make bold assumptions of permanence and innocence. Why is she a stripper? What is there in her commodification of sexuality that allows her to idealize romance so? (Some random critic says that her vitality brings out both the best and worst in her costars, but I'm not sure if this is true. It seems more to me that her simplicity is easy for others to essentialize.)

--And Julia Roberts and her martyr complex, Jude Law the obscure and sometimes all-too-witting romantic-hero freak with moral pretenses shoved up his ass. These people are so complex that I can't make any sweeping generalizations of anything, but I would like so badly to dissect their characteristics and make sense of the "subtext." All I know is that it's a movie about deception vs. honesty, love, sexual politics. Things are cruel, but life is cruel, and splayed out on the screen, human nature is not much better than animal nature (perhaps even worse in its potential for duplicity?).

"Have you seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood!" -- what Clive Owen says to Jude Law, pityingly. We are all flesh and blood, flesh and blood and passion and pain. Writers like Law might try to make things better, smooth over the edges, but art (so we are told by both Portman and Owen) is a lie. It makes ugly things beautiful. Closer isn't a beautiful movie, but its atavism and its cruelty are both much more intriguing than beauty could ever be.

Mistakes were made.

A filler post. Right now I have other things on my mind, but no time to actually make these thoughts coherent.

I wanted a sestina-esque repetition without the work, thus the form of this.

You find yourself in a field at midnight.
You say cruel things because you can, because you are you.
I am me. I grow quiet. You grow nervous.
I am quiet.

You do not understand what you said in a field at midnight.
Its vitriol eats me alive. I am not alive.
I have been destroyed by what you said because you could, so
I grow quiet.
You are nervous because you were cruel, and now
You try to fix the damage caused by what you said, but too late:
It is midnight.

(Or.

Or did I say cruel things without saying them,
And forget before I remembered?
I grow quiet because I am not sure anymore,
Because I am me. You are you.
There is a field at midnight, scratching at our souls.
I am quiet.)

Time passes.
We grow tired.
We find ourselves.

Is it enough, who I tried to be in a field at midnight—
Is it enough, these stars, these thoughts, this pale lamplight
Not bright enough to force the right words out of my mouth?
I am me. I find myself.

We are in this field at midnight, but we are even now,
Ever more becoming me and you, you and me,
Me and you and you and me in a field—
I grow quiet. You grow nervous.
It is midnight.

Even now.
Even now, you do not know me.

Tess.

Is it true that to love someone means to essentialize them? I’m writing about Tess and Thomas Hardy, and the fact that he was in love with his own character, and it seems to me to be so essentially true, this concept of blind judgment, of studied ignorance.

Thomas Hardy was so infatuated with Tess that it showed through his characterization of her, into the very way his narrator describes her character. It’s almost eerie to see how invasive, how graphic, how focused the narrator’s scrutiny of her is, almost as if he’s standing behind her in the bushes: stalker-writer.

Of course, this sort of controlled captivation is true of any author, any narrator, any story, but with Tess, it leaves a taste of perversion, perhaps because Hardy’s other characters also so easily mistreat her and essentialize her. Angel finds her to be the essence of womanhood, Alec treats her as a sex object. We really want to believe that someone understands her, even if it’s the omniscient narrator—but even he, it seems, suffers from a sort of need to make her what she’s not. I think this is the worst of everything for Tess, even worse than the cruelty of fate and the missteps and mistimed coincidences of her life. The fact that no one will ever understand her (not that even I do, of course . . .)—it leaves me so desperate for someone to rewrite her, to allow her an escape from her horrible destiny.

I do believe that Tess is real, but it’s not because of Hardy’s brilliant portrayal (as some scholars claim), not because she is so complex and brave and vulnerable at the same time. I believe she’s real in spite of the way Hardy treats her on the page. But poor Thomas Hardy, I think. Poor man, so infatuated with the ideal of a simple country girl with rustically good intentions and eternal purity. He couldn’t have her any other way, could he?

This is all predicated on the assumption that we can speak about characters as if they’re real, as if they have a core of identity. It’s still a question whether humans even achieve this: solipsism abounds. We cannot know the full extent of anyone’s existence. (Indeed, I just spent a few days questioning the reality of other people, so.) But if we can really come into a three-dimensional understanding of each other, and if we are allowed to treat the characters in books as flesh and blood, then—then I’m as sad for Tess as I am for her author.

Time.

I just found this in my email inbox, sent to me from myself exactly a year ago via futureme.org.

I find certain parts of it to myself rather ironic, and certain other parts juvenile, and certain other parts very telling.

Hey you,

So I'm trying this email time capsule thing out. I was originally planning to send one to C***, you know, to check up on things, but I guess I'm obligated to send one to myself as well. Time is a funny thing, isn't it? Even now I can almost feel a presence in the future, as if I'm defining destiny as I type. Someday I will read these exact words and think of myself as immature. Eerie and bizarre.

Anyway, I'm a little worried about this future thing. I've lately noticed that I'm too shy and soft-spoken around strangers, yet oddly argumentative around those I know too well. A deadly combination? How am I ever going to get into a nice corporate job and work my way up the ladder if I'm so darn NICE?! I feel like I've beaten some sort of instinct out of myself with all this philosophizing about humanity and suffering and meaning-of-life-stuff. Maybe everyone was right about the value of greed and self-pride.

I hope everything is well and that nothing tragic has occurred. Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about all the terrible things that could happen -- floods and car accidents and tragic diseases. It all seems so likely, to the extent that happiness would almost be a miracle. Please, be happy. Remind yourself to keep in touch with your parents, and be a good influence for J***, and don't forget about examining life. And most importantly (or, at least, what seems important right now, as I'm heading into college and risking the first real relationship I've had), love C***. All those insecure diary entries...all those almost-break-ups and uncomfortable phone conversations...have led to this point in our relationship. I hate all the cynics because I'm scared that they'll be right.

Please. You could have a real life with him. You could be happy with him. I feel pathetic right now, crying over mistakes that have yet to be made, but I sincerely sincerely hope that this is the one high school relationship to work. Prove them wrong.

Stay strong,
Me.

The realization of maturation is so old that it fails to be freshly interesting, but I'm still struck by how extreme my priorities were and how fickle I am -- also how much of a hypocrite I could possibly be. I must resist the urge to smile and play the role of the wiser, more experienced scholar. These snapshots of a mood long-forgotten are at once grounding and perturbing. I am not so myopic, not so reliant on any one aspect of existence, but I haven't exactly lived up to other more reasonable hopes either. Oh well. Such is life, is life, is time passing and things happening and being vague.

(C*** -- then boyfriend, J*** -- younger brother.)

Emotional fluidity.

Last night I spent a good amount of time considering the validity of sociopathy.

Others would perhaps hesitate to couch it in such terms, but here's what I mean: a layer of defense from even the closest of friends, a portion of yourself to be squirreled away for no one else to see, autonomy in any social situation, a reversibility of commitment to everyone.

Now I regret my words, because such a disregard toward humanity isn't defensive so much as it is necessary and instinctive. It means a certain impervious attitude that prevents defense from even being up for debate. It's subtle, difficult to detect--not sinister, really, but hard, in the way that gemstones are chiseled yet transparent.

I imagine myself to be a pretty emotional person at times, because I cry more than I should, because I make close friends easily, because I idealize vulnerability and deep human connection.

But.

Is it Nietzschean of me to think that at a certain level of emotional intelligence, people become flat? They become repetitive, predictable, manageable. Granted, they also become infinitely more interesting, but only after the recognition of their characteristics as just that: characteristics. Varied, intricate, captivating . . . but not affecting, in the end.

I make human interaction an intellectual exercise.

I admit this because though I know it to be socially unacceptable (or at the very least a little too telling, a little too eerie to be flippant), though I know my own ideals of spiritual openness and unconditional love, I feel an even deeper apathy toward my own apathy. Or maybe I'm even being pompous about it, because I have the horrible urge, sometimes, to laugh at tragedy, to ridicule the emotional climax of a story, to approach cruelty with curiosity instead of with fear--

It makes humanity easier to study. And it makes it easier for me to feign (feign?) something which I know I am not. Ultimately I am most interested in fluidity, in the ability to get in, get out, and move on.

I don't mean to villanize myself, only to question motives. I'm not a mercenary; I'm just a dilettante.

Moments in time, once lost, now found.

Old stuff before new, I guess:

I
The pot roast was still too hot to eat when she told him and barely cold by the time he left, the door slamming shut behind his forgettable figure, suitcase dangling from one defeated arm.

II
Once I had thought, perhaps to comfort myself, perhaps to dull the ache that had taken up permanent residence inside my chest: “This will someday only be memory.”

Was it a lie? Or was it a convenience?

III
“If I don’t write it—,” she confessed, blowing a smoke ring that dissipated into the night air. “If I don’t write it, I’ll live it.”

IV
The idea was always to approach authentic emotion without falling victim to it, to caress it lovingly while stepping to one side of its paw-swipe. You don’t commit, you dodge the bloody aftermath—and you escape unscathed.

V
She did not pause to consider what she was doing, only to lick the postage stamp and to append it to her envelope in one smooth, savage motion.

“I know that my bluntness will not win me any favors with you,” she had written, in uncharacteristically shaky hand. “But this is no longer a game with winners and losers, is it?”

VI
Lesson Learned #554: Nothing is ever anything all the time.

VII
The author was found in his apartment on Saturday afternoon with paper cuts trailing in angry zigzags across his body, a pool of blood artistically red and sticky on his kitchen tiles. The sheets of his latest manuscript had been taped to his walls, a mysterious and haphazard homage to the New York Times Best Seller.

A funeral will be held a week from Sunday and will be open to the public.

VIII
Everyone knows—or assumes, at the very least—that Jane Austen fell in love with men before she fell in love with writing about them.

IX
No, I would not like to say more on the matter, thank you, thank you very much.

X
In high school, he’d been taught Jean-Paul Sartre and had found the Frenchman a delightful misanthropist. Hell is other people, hell is other people—until he graduated and realized how easy it is to jest, how difficult to tell one slightly crooked truth.

XI
“Hello there,” the Little Prince said to a very confused Pilot Saint Exupery. “Draw me a sheep, please.”

But the sheep the befuddled author drew were ghastly, each bent over in arthritic pain, each more malformed than the last, until he crumpled his paper in frustration and, flying off, disappeared into the cloudless sky.

XII
I wrote my deepest secrets on the soles of my feet and ran outside into the downpour.
I left the unspoken parts of me to be washed away, running in rivulets from puddle to puddle.

XIII
She snuck off into an abandoned field when it was nearly midnight and, giggling, slipped her shirt over her head. They laid in the grass, two unclothed figures visible only to themselves, swathed in darkness and a swarm of mosquitoes that they carelessly slapped from their skin.

In the morning, they would awaken and discover bites that blossomed pink and bumpy on their flesh—in between toes, on elbows, behind ears, in navels. The mosquitoes had left their traces everywhere, and in itchy absentia they continued to remind of shaky innocence and illegitimate friendship, until eventually the mosquito bites faded and with them the details of that night. Years later, the story would be reduced to myth, and only one of them would still believe that it had happened at all.

XIV
It was after all the record that would outlive the people who kept it,
the song that would outlive its bard,
the beauty that would outlive the artist.

XV*
In the beginning, he thought wildly, and attempted to catch his thoughts as they tumbled past him.

In the beginning was the gesture, and that gesture was: he opened his mouth to say it aloud, but too late—his face cracked into a crooked smile and the words died on his lips.

Always in my writing I want to express some vague understanding of emotional truth, but I find myself so scattered, so unable to control anything the way that the masters can. The subtlety, the intricacy, the very premeditation of it: not me. Perhaps one day I'll learn. Or I'll learn to fool people.

*borrowed from "The Fall Guy's Faith," by Robert Coover, published in Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton 2006).

Parisian.

More substantially speaking, this is an attempt at a poem of some sort, written during a family trip to Paris in early July:

parisian.

that day, the play was played out. she turned
from him before saying "you could not even
know two and a half things about me" and
wiped a tear from her cheek, delicate—like a
victorian would. the next morning she woke
with your name on her lips. "mon cheri"
began her letter to you. "je t'aime." I love you.
she lied with the first sentence. in the next,
she did not. "we should be in love." she had
dreamt it before she wrote it. "I want us to be.
come to paris."
                       you did.

like a true american, you believed romance
to be in the gestures: you stepped gladly into
the one she offered, graceful, grateful. at night
you asked "now?" but she locked
the bathroom door behind her and did not
answer. "now?" she slid from her clothes
and did not answer. "now?" she bathed
until she could feel herself disappearing in bubbles.
"now?" she opened the door.
                                          "now."

in a gesture, she and you explored the city arm
in arm. she did not love you because your
sleeves were empty and your eyes were earnest,
but she knew she could, with time, in time. the
eiffel tower was tall and made life seem forgettable
at the top. "romantic" you thought. "————
——————" she thought. it was not enough
to place her but too much to free her, and she fell
into a mood as though it were red hot and she were
tired. she was tired: of the mysteries becoming less
mysterious, of the luxuries so flippant as to become
nothing. (then: she knew she could love you.) then:
an old woman with spotted skin passed her and
grabbed her hand. "you are happy" the woman said,
the only english words she knew. “j’ai tombe dans
l’amour” came the reply, in garbled french. words are
great because they can become
                                               nothing.

then: you were nervous at the louvre, so she and you
took a boat tour of paris, and she could smell
your cologne vaporized in the mist. you passed
under a bridge as old as time itself. "make a wish"
the guide insisted. "it will come true"—but before
you could finish yours, she was gone.
she was smiling,
                          and then she was gone.

Note the lack of capitalization, cohesion, and meaning.

Starting.

A few scattered, initial thoughts:

1. The confinement of Victorian morality vs. the eeriness of Victorian depravity (Charlotte Bronte's madwoman in the attic, Browning's homicidal male protagonists, the Havishams in Dickens' Great Expectations).
2. Visual art and its blending with literature?
3. The meaningfulness or meaninglessness of vagueness.
4. Social dynamics and the inevitable crumbling of cordiality.