You never deigned to believe

Sometimes while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride – and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look – a gray furry question mark of a look: “Oh no, not again” (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours – how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and – “Pulease, leave me alone, will you” you would say, “for Christ’s sake leave me alone.” And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov 

Part 2, chapter 10

The Verve Pipe - The Freshmen (Boyce Avenue acoustic cover)

My most favorite song of all time! (loved it since it came out in 1997) ... here is a cover version which amazingly enough, I'm absolutely in love with as well:



♩ ♪ ♫


When I was young I knew everything
She, a punk who rarely ever took advice
Now I'm gilt stricken, sobbing with my head on the floor
Stop a baby's breath and a shoe full of rice now

I can't be held responsible
Cause she was touching her face
I won't be held responsible
She fell in love in the first place

For the life of me
I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise
For the life of me
I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins
We were merely freshmen

My best friend took a week's vacation to forget her
His girl took a weeks' worth of Valium and slept
Now he's guilt stricken sobbing with his head on the floor
Thinks about her now and how he never really wept he says

I can't be held responsible
Cause she was touching her face
I won't be held responsible
She fell in love in the first place

For the life of me
I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise
For the life of me
I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins
We were merely freshmen

We've tried to wash our hands of all this
We never talk of our lacking relationships
And how we're guilt stricken sobbing with our heads on the floor
We fell through the ice when we tried not to slip, we'd say

I can't be held responsible
Cause she was touching her face
I won't be held responsible
She fell in love in the first place

For the life of me
I cannot remember
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise
For the life of me
I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins
We were merely freshmen


♩ ♪ ♫


To download the Original Song, click here: The Verve Pipe - The Freshmen MP3

Part of a letter to a friend

Maybe I am somewhere so deep & I'm so accustom to that I can't fathom the possibility of there being a better brighter alternative? ... It's hard to grasp. Can we become COMFORTABLE with pain & sadness to the point it really does become the norm?

If your fear becomes a wordless darkness...

"I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild- mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you. The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you."

From the book Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Progress... Tragedy

A quote from a friend's blog The Heights and The Lows, re-posted to my blog:

The progress of the world lies in man’s innate desire to possess that which he is denied by all forms of convention and constraint. The tragedy of the world is that man always loses appreciation for that which he possesses.

Can you feel it?

"...Learn to detach.”

…

But wait, I said. Aren’t you always talking about experiencing life? All the good emotions, all the bad ones?

“Yes.”

Well, how can you do that if you’re detached?”

“… detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience *penetrate* you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you *fully*. That’s how you are able to leave it.

…

Take any emotion – love for a woman, or grief for a loved one…. if you hold back on the emotions – if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them – you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. … I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.”

I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don't say anything because we are frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.

- Morrie's approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won't hurt you. It will only help.

Now I know

Except from Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss


"I believed it concerned the fear of death, which is the fear
deep within the volcano. The fear of death, that hidden, constant fear
that no amount of money or power can neutralize-this is the core. But
if people knew that "life is endless; so we never die; we were never
really born," then this fear would dissolve. If they knew that they had
lived countless times before and would live countless times again,
how reassured they would feel. If they knew that spirits were around
to help them while they were in physical state and that after death,
in spiritual state, they would join these spirits, including their
deceased loved ones, how comforted they would be. If they knew
that guardian "angels" really did exist, how much safer they would
feel. If they knew that acts of violence and injustices against people
did not go unnoted, but had to be repaid in kind in other lifetimes,
how much less anger and desire for vengeance they would harbor.
And if indeed, "by knowledge we approach God," of what use are
material possessions, or power, when they are an end in themselves 
and not a means to that approach? To be greedy or power-hungry 
has no value whatsoever.
But how to reach people with this knowledge?"

The Zahir - Do we really think about it?

My initial reaction was a defense 'what? this man have it backwards!... maybe it got mixed up in translation'


I re-read it, knowing it was intentional. Then oddly enough, the following quote really did strike me & I had to admit to its relevance according to my own experience thus far:

Our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives

Paulo Coelho

The Zahir.

I am not a cynic in the least. I just observe 
.................................................................................................


Finally, another quote...

The all-powerful Zahir seemed to be born with every human being and to gain full strength in childhood, imposing rules that would thereafter always be respected:

People who are different are dangerous; they belong to another tribe; they want our lands and our women.

We must marry, we are authorised to take possession of another person, body and soul.

 We must do jobs we detest because we are part of an organised society, and if everyone did what they wanted to do, the world would come to a standstill.

 We must buy jewellery; it identifies us with our tribe, just as body-piercing identifies those of a different tribe.

 We must be amusing at all times and sneer at those who express their real feelings; it`s dangerous for a tribe to allow its members to show their feelings.

We must at all costs avoid saying “No” because people prefer those who always say “Yes”, and this allows us to survive in hostile teritory.

What other people think is more important than what we feel.

 Never make a fuss, it might attract the attention of an enemy tribe.

 If you behave differently, you will be expelled from the tribe because you could infect others and destroy something that was extremely difficult to organise in the first place.

 We must always consider the look of our new cave, and if we don`t have a clear idea of our own, then we must call in a decorator who will do his best to show others what good taste we have.

We must eat three meals a day, even if we`re not hungry, and when we fail to fit the current ideal of beauty we must fast, even if we`re starving.

We must dress according to the dictates of fashion, make love whether we feel like it or not, kill in the name of out country`s frontiers, wish time away so that retirement comes more quickly, elect politicians, complain about the cost of living, change our hairstyle, criticise anyone who is different, go to a religious service on Sunday, Saturday or Friday, depending on our religion, and there beg forgiveness for our sins and puff ourselves up with pride because we know the truth and despise the other tribe, who worship a false god.

 Our children must follow in our footsteps; after all, we are older and know about the world.

 We must have a university degree even if we never get a job in the area of knowledge  we were forced to study.

We must study things that we will never use, but which someone told us was important to know: algebra, trigonometry, the code of Hammurabi.

We must never make our parents sad, even if this means giving up everything that makes us happy.

 We must play music quietly, talk quietly, weep in private, because I am the all-powerful Zahir, who lays down the rules and determines the distance between railway tracks, the meaning of success, the best way to love, the importance of rewards.

Like I said, it's a realists view... not cynical, just sad, but true

The pdf copy of this book is available here: *click me*

Odd

I need a new outlet, not another shoulder. I thought to myself, I need something, something else... and my mind came right back to this. It's not new, but it may as well be, since I haven't been expressing myself much here in awhile.

Everyone needs a fall back plan.

I think I realized this when I found myself blogging in my head. I thought to myself that talking to myself in my head, is not entirely healthy... and worst yet, telling myself that I'm thinking that talking to myself in my head is not entirely healthy, is even worst.

I can be a recluse, I know. I can't ignore the fact that this does not affect me and me alone. But a small part of me wishes it didn't.

I end this with a quote from the book I'm currently reading "Forever Odd" by Dean Koontz:

Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused"

PS: The link takes you to the official Dean Koontz, Odd Thomas series page! It's kinda cool.

Possibility vs Certainty

This is one of my favorite quote from a book I read called 'Brick Lane' by Monica Ali

'Anything is possible, so everything I wanted was possible,but what about all the other possibilities? The ones we never see when we are young, but are there all along. One day you wake up and say to yourself, I didn't choose this. And then you spend a long time thinking, but did I?'.... 'The thing about getting older, is that you don't need everything to be possible anymore, you just need some things to be certain.'

I really love this quote!