"Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."-Cat's Cradle

 

 

I agree that there is tons of love in the world, I do. Despite what we hear in the news and see day to day, there is still more love to be found than hate; there is. And I also believe that people can find if it they just look. They can find it within themselves and for others, but whether they find love that is mutual is a different story.

 

It used to be one of my 'harmless untruths' believing someday love would happen for me. It was only after I stopped deluding myself and made peace with the fact it may never, probably never will, happen that I actually grew less sad, not more so. I'd like to think it's okay to love someone no matter what, as long as we keep things in perspective and understand what is real versus what is not.

I totally get what Kurt Vonnegut means in Cat's Cradle when he talks about 'the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.' But if holding on to something that's not true (no matter how harmless it may be to keep clutching at it) is making you miserable, it's time to let go.



 

Timeless, despite being representative of one of my favorite genres (time travel romance), did not really impress me that much. The novel has a clinical touch, rather than an emotional one, and the narrator comes across as a know-it-all, which may relate to the plot (it's hard not to seem like a smarty pants in high school when you're 30 and trapped in a teenager's body) but still is grating.

I did come away with some great quotes that I can definitely relate to in my life:

“Being attracted to someone unexpected doesn’t have to be the end of the world.”


“I won’t run from anything, but some days I do wonder what it would feel like to run toward something or someone.”

Because you unravel me. Because you affect me in ways no book ever has. Because you override my fear and compel me to speak truth through my pain and confusion.

And then I read this passage from Cassandra Clare's wonderful book Clockwork Angel:

“It's all right to love someone who doesn't love you back, as long as they're worth you loving them. As long as they deserve it.”

On certain days, I struggle a lot with trying to be and feel "normal" emotionally and on those days I try to avoid any kind of passionate music. Certain types of music feed my weirdness and my angst, while books calm them and make me see things at least a little bit more rationally.

I tried "Googling" 'guilt and liking someone you shouldn't', but I can't find any information so far. I did find a more general article on guilt, though:

 http://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/the-ten-most-common-causes-of-guilt-758506

Odds and ends, again...

I saw the above picture on Pinterest last night and immediately felt its truth...because what you know and what you feel are often two vastly different things and can cause lots of inner turmoil.

You might know very well, for example, that someone in your life doesn't like you, yet you still have feelings for them anyway, feelings that you can't seem to get past. You want to make peace with this person and if that doesn't work, conquer your own emotions, the things that are making this your problem and no one else's.

Is it even possible to change how someone sees you? Sometimes, I think the more you want someone to like you, the more you try...the worse it gets. I also think if someone has made up their mind not to like, there's no changing the situation. But I don't see any harm in trying, as long any attempts made are with reason and restraint...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2012/09/16/how-to-win-over-someone-who-doesnt-like-you/

 "I mean, don't you ever get sick of yourself?" he asked Claire. "Doesn't it sometimes seem ridiculous that we have to live our entire lives in one consciousness, and there's no escape? Even when we dream, we dream about ourselves. Doesn't that just seem outrageous?"

I think of this quote, which perhaps because of its stark honesty has always stayed in my mind, whenever I want to escape from my own thinking.

That's why books and music and people are so important in this world. Even though reading or listening to music can be solitary activities, they still can get you to leave your own mind and venture out into a much less scary world than what's in your head.

As Joseph Conrad once wrote in an essay about Henry James:

...the demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, "Take me out of myself!"

I couldn't agree more!

I can't share this with the person I wish I could, so I'll share it here...it is such a lovely poem, one I know well by now, but only first discovered when I heard it read by Ron Perlman years ago on the Beauty and the Beast (tv show, CBS, 1989):

E. E. Cummings

(1894 - 1962)
American

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
 

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

The soundtrack to this wonderful tv show has long been out of print, but if you can manage to track down a seller, you should get a copy...it mixes poetry readings with beautiful songs and is the best Christmas present my sister ever gave me, way back in the 80s! :)

Here is a link: http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Beast-Of-Love-Hope/dp/B000BLI3BG

And you can hear the song "The First Time I Loved Forever," mixed with e.e. Cummings...it's absolutely stunning, but not at all safe to listen to if you're in an emotionally vulnerable state right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI4UBk0ICGc

There's a new biography on author Rebecca West that a review in the Washington Post has inspired me to read. It mentions how good she was at keeping a mask on even as she worried terribly and had deep insecurities as her “worth as a sexual being.” I completely forgot I own two unread books by her, which I dug out out recently and gobbled up quickly.

Lorna Gibb tells us, in this sensible and readable biography of the great Rebecca West, that once at lunch with various luminaries including the Aga Khan, Odette Keun, H.G. Wells’s mistress of the moment, “turned to the Aga Khan, asking him to back up her opinion that the English were prudish in public but ‘lubricious in private.’ ” The remark seems to have embarrassed most (if not all) at the table, but surely truer words have rarely been spoken. If friendships and rivalries are dominant themes of British literary life, sex in all its various manifestations runs them a close second, and rarely more so than in the life of Cicely Isabel Fairfield, born in 1892, who changed her name to Rebecca West in 1911 and proceeded to cut an exceedingly strange swath through the bedrooms of the literati.

For me of this review read here:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-the-extraordinary-life-of-rebecca-west-b-y-lorna-gibb/2014/05/28/5f6c7c3c-df52-11e3-9743-bb9b59cde7b9_story.html