One thousand words

All students attending Harvard College between the years of 1941 and 1945 were given a very special assignment that, as far as I know, no other college has ever required of any other student at any other time.

One thousand words a day, on anything, to be turned into a box in the President’s office.

The box was dumped into an incinerator every day. The students doing the writing did not know this; in fact, no one even knew the purpose of the assignment until much later, when an alumnus asked.

The theory behind the assignment was that writing is not a gift, but a skill. And like so many other things, it must be honed, and improves with practice. The mind, with use, becomes supple, like a muscle that is stretched every day.

Turns out that these students contributed more to American literature than any other group in history. Bamn. How’s that for practice making perfect?

It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that we can’t excel in things that we do not do. And also that improvement comes with practice. And yet this is the only experiment of this kind that there is. I wonder why. Why don’t all colleges take up this practice, knowing what it can do? It’s amazing to me. No one read those pages. They were a secret. They didn’t get graded, commented on, and handed back. There was no critical element. And yet those pages, lost to us forever, of which there remains no evidence today, appear to have made all the difference.

It is not unlike prayer.

I’ve often been disheartened because I don’t always feel what I believe I’m supposed to during my prayers. I don’t concentrate as well as I feel I should. I don’t feel deeply the significance of every bow and prostration, despite the fact that I spend a lot of time outside of my prayer thinking about what makes these things profound. But maybe that’s not entirely the point. Maybe I’m not supposed to have arrived yet. Maybe I’m being prepared by practice – by a practice that, often, no one sees and there is no evidence of. When I pray the afternoon prayer by myself, I can hold up no proof later. It’s a secret between myself and God. But it is wrong to assume that there are no repercussions to a habit that, however imperfect, is consistent.

Non-Muslims are sometimes critical of the literalness of the prayer. Five times a day, at particular times, in a formulaic way. Seems as though it might go without being heartfelt. And what is a connection to God if not heartfelt? What is the point of a prayer that issues from adherence to a timetable, not from your toes?

Valid questions – but I believe there is significance to the fact that Islam asks of us this simple, regular routine. Anyone can perform the prayer; the movements can be altered for the sick, handicapped or injured. It is ground zero, step one. Islam would not have succeeded as such a widespread religion if it asked something extraordinary from the get-go. It doesn’t. It does not ask major contributions to the field of American literature. It asks for one thousand words a day, on anything, that will be thrown into the incinerator.

I derive great hope from the idea that prayer, like writing, is a skill that improves with practice, because I do feel dissatisfied with my prayer, my character, and my heart. I wish for these things to improve, but so often get lost in the how. Maybe the answer was right in front of me the whole time. God tells us: pray, and your prayer will improve. Call on Me, and your call will improve. Bow to Me, and your bow will improve. Until finally, we feel these things as we ought. When we say, Allahu Akbar, God is Greatest, eventually, we will feel in our hearts that He is Greatest. The tremor of this truth will ping along every cell in our bodies, because we have told it to ourselves so many times. It is like language immersion. You go around thinking everything is meaningless until one day you recognize one word. One meaning. And then another word. And eventually everything takes on meaning. God is organizing our lives for us so that our religion will take on real meaning; it is not something we declare, and then leave to atrophy. It is something we stretch, and polish, and build on. We’re not graded on day one. It doesn’t matter where we start; it matters where we end up. Here is the way to get where you want to go: prostration, five times a day.

I don’t mean to say that these rewards will come with only adherence to the letter on our part. If we pray our prayers, but regard the practice as meaningless and routine, without end and without purpose, we can’t hope to reap the same rewards of a person praying with the intention to improve. I can write “the” one thousand times on a sheet of paper every day, but if at the end of four years I am not a better writer, well, what did I think would happen? Spiritless participation will never be the same as sincere striving. But even so, even so. When we are working on sincerity itself – there is hope, there is a system, and there is wisdom at work behind it that we cannot hope to grasp. Perhaps it is enough to have faith that God’s wisdom is in every prayer, even when we feel ourselves lacking. That there is meaningful experience accumulating, even if we lose track of our own progress. The blessings we accumulate may visit us much later in life, or even after death – just because we don’t see immediate benefits to something small does not mean that there is not something magnificent at work.

Glory be to God, Who made it mandatory! May we improve by the system He has so wisely laid out, and become a generation of great contributors to faith and life.

The wisdom of fools.

I’ve been neglecting my writing. Last week, I had the excuse of a midterm. This week, I am ashamed to say that my only reason for staying away was an inability to think about anything other than Jane Austen.

You see, I am jealous of Fanny Price.

Fanny has the good sense that no one around her seems to. At eighteen, she has the forbearance to consistently refuse the man pushed on her from all sides: her rich, benefactor uncle, the cousin she is in love with, her friends, her parents, and all her acquaintance together. He has been a libertine in the past; he tells her he has changed. She is the only one to not believe him, is cast out and called a fool. In the end, he runs away with her married cousin and vindicates her refusal.

It’s possible that I am Fanny’s opposite. I believe the things that people tell me, have faith in everyone’s ability to change (hey, I’m a convert – if not me, who?), and let optimism conquer reason without putting up much of a fight.

These would be admirable qualities indeed – in a world of people who spoke only the truth, changed all the things they intended to, and lived up to expectations. Sadly, this is not the case; disappointment abounds, and it is often mine.

I know many people who are not like this. My brother, for example. He is good and wise, and it seems that he was always so. He is purposeful and deliberate. People more than twice his age seek his advice. Whenever anyone meets the two of us, or hears me talk about him, that person always assumes he is the elder sibling. Always. The reverse is true. It is also true that I am often a fool – so the mistake is understandable.

I once found myself in a situation that was truly pitiful. I fell for a man who (surprise!) said he had changed, and talked about his ability to refine and improve himself a great deal. I was impressed by the commitment to improvement he was always chattering on about. What undaunted struggle! What courage!

What blindness.

My family dutifully raised their objections, as did my friends. All and every one. And I, the loyal lover, defended my man to the last. I defended my own flawed reasoning with logical dances I can’t hope to reinvent. My elaborate maneuverings of love were so impressive and impromptu that when family recounts them for me now, I’m aghast. Really? I said that? Idiot.

A funny thing happened amidst these objections. I noticed that I was unhappy in love.

It would be so great if this didn’t feel so mournful…

Unhappy in love is an unfortunate combination, and is fraught with danger. The danger is that one will say to oneself, I don’t care. I’d rather be with him than without, no matter how miserable I am. Perhaps even more perilous is the suggestion, It will get better. He’ll change. We’ll learn to get along.

I’m not sure why, or how, but remarkably and miraculously, neither of these tempting thoughts won out. I got out. I got out fast, and reflected later on all of the building evidence of my own unhappiness that I did not see at the time. The mounting pile in the corner that suggested, oh so massively, that the man I loved was not actually the one I was involved with, but an elaborate invention we had both spun out of hope and breath and forgiveness. It was so clear in retrospect.

Foresight? We’re fresh out. Try the hindsight store next door; bitterness is on sale, and self-loathing is half off.

I’m seven years older and a good deal more experienced in relationships than Fanny, so what gives? Why does her presence of mind elude me in all the most important ways, in all the most important moments?

This is what I was thinking as I was walking to the post office today. Why wasn’t I just born wise? What is the purpose of all this fumbling towards sense? Couldn’t I have been more like Abdullah? I would have been spared a good deal of false starts and heartaches.

Then I thought: Because I’m a writer. Because I’m a writer, I was born a well-meaning, good-hearted, foolish girl. Because I’m a writer, I have some comic foibles that entertain more than myself. Because I’m a writer, there is a path to wisdom. If it had been easy, there would have been no story to tell. There would have been no point in speaking. If I were all alone, the Buddha on the mountaintop (to steal from Reality Bites), there would be no one up there to relate to me, and no benefit to all my wisdom. Because I’m down here mucking it out, I get to tell stories that are also, on occasion, lessons. It is a peerless joy, purpose. I can say, Here is point A: silliness. If you want to get to point B, which is marginally less foolish, I have recently discovered the secret to doing so, and it is X.

Actually, it is Islam, but that’s a little tangential.

My current suggestion is to read Mansfield Park. It is an incomparable study on patience, modesty, and the will of God making things turn out all right in the end. It still shocks me. Every time! It all turns out all right. Sometimes we just have to ride out the rough wave of sticktoitidness. Definitely holding to your principles is key. Holding to your romanticism, or your faith in the fancy promises of others…not always a great idea.

I know. I read it in a novel once.

 

Come crashing down.

The inevitable end of Atonement has come crashing down on my lonesome little twin bed in Brighton.

I always experience the end of books this way. Or at least the end of beloved novels. The bulk, the bulge of their momentum gathers behind me as I read helplessly on, wanting to savor the delicious details one by one, but unable to stop myself from cramming them into my head pagefulls at a time. I binge on prose. I love it, and then it ends. And I am, frankly, bereft. I grieve the loss of my looking glass into the lives of beloved characters, people I feel that I have come to know and love. People whose most intimate, solitary moments I have witnessed. They are gone, and I will miss them. I will miss their lives unfolding. I will miss looking in.

I have the sensation of a wave building especially with tragedies. Especially with tragic love stories. I want to slosh around in that moment of declaration, when the lovers are young and beautiful and full of the possibility of loving each other…I don’t want to leave. Yet the narrative moves on; it must, and I must.

The crash of separation comes down hard on me (harder, I imagine, than on others – but of course this is impossible to know), a dedicated optimist, and I remember, every time, body-surfing on Nantucket when I was about ten. It was a grey, overcast day, not very warm but not raining, and I insisted on swimming. Ten-year-olds do. The waves were huge, making foam a permanent presence on the surface of the ocean to about fifty feet out or so. Everything was grey – grey-brown beach, grey-light sky, deep grey water. And then there was me, in some horrible black-and-fluorescent swirly suit. Trying to take part in it. This one wave came that dragged me the length of its curling, pummeling the breath out of me underwater, flipping me senseless. I came up at some benign depth, but immediately was slapped down by another curl of water. And so on, until I rolled up on the grey beach, breathless, having had my fill.

This is what tragedies are to me. It’s all fun and games, however foreboding, until the letdown comes…and then I just get beat to a pulp until the end. It won’t stop; I’m already steeped way in there, a helpless observer of my own weepy fate. I suppose the end is merciful, in its way. Really I couldn’t bear to go on.

I don’t think I could write such a story. Not now; not while I inevitably cast myself as the spirited heroine (for who would cast themselves as Briony, the unwitting Iago of her own story?) . Not while she and I share the barely caged heart of a twentysomething single woman. Not while my life is to be lived, my husband, God willing, to be married, my children, God willing, to be born and raised. I couldn’t do it. It’s too ruthless. I would feel like I was cutting myself, or downing too many pills. A story decades away, in a different country, whose heroine doesn’t even remotely resemble me in appearance, inclination, or manner, is still too close to my own fragile reality. It’s that simple; to me, it is not just a story…a great one can be almost a prayer that I will ardently wish to live out.

I don’t think I’ve grown completely out of that childlike fascination with stories. I am still able to lose sense of my separateness from the page. Perhaps there is some missing developmental link there; more than one person in my life has delicately hinted to me that I lack some sagacity. I daresay they’re right; still, I’m reluctant to let go of that complete entrance into another world.

Will I forever be this girl?

[note: I really am unable to keep these posts from being appallingly personal. Perhaps I'll learn with time - until then I hope these aren't too bare to bear. So to speak.]

A little austere

I’m currently devouring Ian McEwan’s Atonement as though the act of finishing it will be some saving grace for me.

It feels incongruous, wrong, and perhaps that is part of the deliciousness of the novel. The title implies a world, or a life, overtaken by sin, hijacked. I suppose we all dread doing something unfixable, something dreadful and permanent. Something that we cannot come back from. But what may be irredeemable about the story is contradicted completely by the way it is told; I’m still stunned, hours and days later, by small details in McEwan’s prose that cause me to reexamine my own experience: the smell of cow dung is leathery. I find myself pausing and inhaling deeply, trying to remember the farm fields I regularly drive through with the windows down in a town adjacent to my home. I can’t ever remember having made the same association, but I feel renewed, somehow, by it all the same. There is no doubt that next summer I’ll be searching the air for that clean, functional scent among the cows.

And then there is the love scene, the love, the lovers. I remember being struck during the film at how artful it was: the colors, the shapes of bodies against the dark leather of bound books, splayed like giant spiders conquering a wall. And I’m left wondering if that’s not how we all want to be loved, really: for that mole, that scar, to be not a blemish, but an adornment. Something specific and extraordinary, to be kissed and adored simply because it doesn’t exist on any other person in quite that spot in quite that shape or hue. To be familiar and strange all at the same time – to be able to be remade by the beloved. I’m slightly (very) fanciful, but I like to think that we all want that. That kind of intimacy is a very human need. I think we’d all like to be examined, not for what’s right with us, but for what’s there. Acceptance pre-guaranteed, affection secured. And then we lay ourselves bare. It’s so safe – McEwan paints it – or types it, rather, exactly. And without saying so in the crude way I have.

And the smell of perspiration like cut grass. How often I’ve felt awkward to be comforted by the smell of a loved one’s sweat. How fresh and human it feels to breathe it in. How natural. I’m a bit of a hippie in disguise, but I’ve always felt that this urge we’re all encouraged to have (and spend fountains of money on) to smother every innate scent, to smooth every line, to pluck and dye and starve ourselves into severe, gaunt, unanimous perfection is bizarre. One of my favorite scents in the world is that of my sister’s bedsheets. Hers always smelled different than those draping the other beds in the house, and it was between them that I crept after every nightmare, during every insecure midnight of my childhood. Nothing can replace that for me, and it smells like person. And I like it that way. It’s proper. Someone shouldn’t only smell like Chanel, or Polo. We should smell like people. It’s so meaty and personal. Why should we want to stuff it away, ashamed of our failure to be a flower? Roses smell like roses. Let them. I’ll take in the tang of my father’s musty neck, the mildness of my mother’s hair, and be satisfied.

I know I’m focusing on scents here. But I’m so haunted. I can’t help it. This whole novel wound around an obsession with repentance is the most luscious thing I’ve ever held between my two hands. It’s ludicrous. And perfect in its irony. And the feel of reading it is so bracing and wonderful that everything is fresh, every word tormentingly flawless, and I never want it to end.

…On a more personal note (if possible): I’m afraid that I’ll never write anything so beautiful. But that failure wouldn’t be so bad. I could write something that falls far short of McEwan’s mark and still exceed my own hopes. It would be pathetic not to try, but I often feel crushed under so much beauty that has come before. To dream of joining the ranks of the published (and read admiringly, fingers clutched, breath held) seems so presumptuous. But we all have our purpose, and I can’t imagine dreaming of anything else anymore.