So, here I am, writing a blog. I've decided to go ahead a do it, because Tosca Lee does. Don't expect anything as funny as that. I'm just going to whine about my writing problems and how my characters won't behave and occasionally give you Enya lyrics that have taken me higher.
Last Time by Moonlight
The winter sky above us
was shining in moonlight,
And everywhere around us
the silence of midnight.
And we had gathered snowflakes;
Remember the soft light
of starlight on snow.
Oooh, remember this,
for no-one knows
the way love goes.
Oooh, remember this,
for no-one knows
the way life goes.
We walked the road together
one last time by moonlight,
as underneath the heavens
the slow chimes at midnight,
but nothing is forever
not even the starlight
at midnight not even
the moonlight...
Oooh, remember this,
for no-one knows
the way love goes.
Oooh, remember this,
for no-one knows
the way life goes.
was shining in moonlight,
And everywhere around us
the silence of midnight.
And we had gathered snowflakes;
Remember the soft light
of starlight on snow.
Oooh, remember this,
for no-one knows
the way love goes.
Oooh, remember this,
for no-one knows
the way life goes.
We walked the road together
one last time by moonlight,
as underneath the heavens
the slow chimes at midnight,
but nothing is forever
not even the starlight
at midnight not even
the moonlight...
Oooh, remember this,
for no-one knows
the way love goes.
Oooh, remember this,
for no-one knows
the way life goes.
Roma and Enya
There's the first one. I suggest you look that up and listen to it.
Sheila turned sixteen today. We've showered her with presents, and now we're going to Bombay Sitar, a warm little Indian place in Belden Village.
Oh, and the other point of this. I am officially protesting a loveless world. So I'll bring little nuggets that I've learned about love.
Here's the essay. I know, I said it was personable, but it's really not. I hate it when I do that. It's as harsh as Solzhenitsyn.
Cancer Ward
If you were dying, what would you do? Alexander Solzhenitsyn asks this question many times in his tragic novel, Cancer Ward. Would you be noble, read books, and determine to help the world before you were gone? Or would you argue and fall in love and despise those around you? Solzhenitsyn has rendered the livings and deaths of big hearted men in broad, yet subtle strokes. He composes their stories with typical Russian frostiness, freezing the tears on my eyelids, but leaving me moved all the same.
Kostoglotov, a victim of neglected medical care in the past, is a lanky and wild exile, angry with his lot and ready to prove his worth to the world, or at least to the women in it. He was taken from his home, and even if they did let him return, his mind is seared with prison camps and hard, hungry labor. His cynicism chills me even now, forcing a tender mind to decide whether life can be good or not. Is there hope for a happy ending, when he is afflicted with such pain and loneliness? He knows that he will die, someday. What will he do before then, in the short time left?
The important nurses, the feminine ones, are Voya and Vera. Voya is a round little blonde, nothing you could commit your life to, but Vera is slender and faithful. Oleg Kostoglotov is confused between the two of them, and chooses neither in the end, but still they rouse him from his dead, self pitying sleep. They were so lively and hardworking they made me sit up and blink.
Rusanov is too important to have cancer. Since the disease didn’t ask his opinion, he occupies himself with reassuring everyone that it is certainly not fatal. He has a family: a cold, brilliant daughter, respectable wife, and a son that is too kind for his father’s tastes. Rusanov is a man that sits before his crackling fire, but is unaffected by the heat. He lives to please the People, but he has forgotten who the People are. He teaches me to remember that life is built on love, not respect.
It’s a long and complicated exposure of human nature, and hope is given to some, but taken away from many. Ludmila Afanasyevna, a talented diagnostician at the Medical Center, discovers a tumor in her belly. Her flailing human emotions are agonizing to observe, and I wonder how much I can really know about this ravaging disease until I get it myself. Dyomka is a young boy who painfully submits to amputating his leg and the cancer inside it. The cancer is gone, and he feels cured, but he only has one leg. What would I give up to live?
The doctors in this book are horrendous sometimes. They let the hopeful go, uninformed of the nearness of death. “I’m free to go?” the patients will say. “Of course,” comes the answer from a bustling heavy figure in a too-tight white overcoat. I never ceased to ask why they wouldn’t tell them, allow them to prepare for death, which comes like a freight train with no brakes. Why keep them hoping when they’re only to be snuffed out? Perhaps the doctors know too well that we will all die, one day or soon.
I know the answer to my question. Hope cannot be killed with the body, or the soul will die as well. The story is only concerning hope and its results. So many of the patients were in great pain, yet they kept a smile on their faces and a kind word on their lips. How is it that those who suffered least were the least resilient? Because the greater the trouble, the more necessary the hope.
Dormidont Tikhonovich, Ludmila’s favorite doctor, at least approached the hallowed ground of the reason for life as he pondered the illness of Ludmila:
“At such moments an image of the whole meaning of existence---his own during the long past and the short future ahead, that of his late [meaning does seem to falter at the word late] wife, of his young granddaughter and of everyone in the world---came to his mind. The image he saw did not seem to be embodied in the work or activity which occupied them [here lies the crux of it for the patronizing Rusanov], which they believed was central to their lives, and by which they were known to others. The meaning of existence was to preserve unspoiled, undisturbed, and undistorted the image of eternity with which each person is born.
Like a silver moon in a calm still pond.”
There is the answer to Alexander’s work. What is life if it ends here? Eternity awaits us.
Ms. Byler (just to be official)
