Bildungsroman

Now that I've Met You

Excerpt from C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet.

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another...What you call remembering is the last part of pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. 

When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then- that is the real meeting. The other is the beginning of it.

...the poem is a good example. For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. 

And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back  - if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?"

---

What sweet sentiment? It is my feeling that Mr. Lewis carefully articulated perspective in this clever dialog between Ransom and Hyoi, two characters in his SciFi fantasy triology. Therefore, I wont elaborate to clarify his point.

However, wanted to connect it to a thought that I have been ruminating, as I would on a fine wine, or gummy bears. Ah, et's use this example; marriage. 

I didn't love you until I met you, then I met you and knew I always loved you.

A interview with Peter Rollings brought this libe to my attention. Basically, it develops the idea that one falls in love with someone, not the idea of someone. A beloved's character and self is the one who my affections befalls. Simply, a lover will fall in love with his beloved. Not the idea of the beloved.

E.g. John loves his wife Jenny. John loves Jenny, not his "wife". Jenny happens to be John's wife. Because of his love of Jenny, John married her. Don't get too technical with this, I am just trying to make an illustration.

I mean, that is more romantic right? I wouldnt want my wife to say "yeah, I had the feelings developed and a wedding planned, I just needed for someone to fill in the blank."

I love _(insert name)__ became I love _Jake_.

Not my idea of romance.

So in this idea that Lewis presented, the meeting of my beloved will be a meeting ever coming. Because it builds from the day of the wedding not only the days to it. I meet someone (not the idea) and continually meet them as we dive into the endless depths of a human heart. 

It builds one day upon the next. And the culmination of that meeting becomes greater as the days march on, continually meeting one another. My wedding day will become sweeter with every day wedded. From that celebrated day on is the real meeting of her. 

What hope to see the new day? The sweetness of a new morning is also intrinsically sweet for our relationships and friendships.

I used the wedding analogy to extrapolate a Lewis concept. Other extrapolations can be made. So, extrapolate away.

Young Bonhoeffer in Paris

"On Sunday afternoon I attended an extremely festive high mass in Sacre Coeur. The people in the church were almost exclusively from Montmarte; prostitutes and their men went to mass, submitted to all the ceremonies; it was an enormously impressive picture, and once again one could see quite clearly how close, precisely through their fate and guilt, these most heavily burdened people are to the heart of the gospel. I have long thought that the Tauentzienstrasse [Berlin's red-light district] would be an extremely fruitful field for church work. It's much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity."

-Young Bonhoeffer
Writing from a visit to Paris. 

What do you think about that?

Writing Your Life

Since I've settled down for a couple of weeks here in southern New Mexico, I am trying to focus myself to working on my writing project, Bildungsroman. Working title. Frankly, I have been avoiding it.

In Santa Fe, my workload was too busy at the workshops to appropriately focus my attention on it. So I journaled but excused myself from writing with intentionality.

There is a difference between the two isn't there? 

Journaling is more or less a record. Little bits at a time and not too in-depth. More of how I feel or think, what I did.

Writing, on a project like mine, requires a more focused and connective approach. Taking different parts of life and intelligigently stiching themes. Exaimining life, finding my faults and reaccuring faults.

Nothing lays unseen. 

Sins. Blessings. Failures. Wasted time watching too much Battlestar Galactica? (Trick: Watching sci-fi is never a waste)

"The examined life is no picnic."
    -Robert Fulghum 

 So as I start to write again, I am overwhelmed. Hesitantly I grab a pen, preparing to face the face of my soul. Reluctantly, I strum the lyrics of the song I have been singing. Hoping it is a decent melody. 

 Will it have a good ending? Happy? A comedy or a tragedy? I guess that's up to how I live. 

"The unexamined life is not worth living."
     -Socrates, in Plato's Apology

 But writing, for me, creates intentionality. A way I can be more considerate, more life-giving. Because I can see what vestiges of my self are still dead.

And that process is worth living. That's worth writing about. Here we go.

‘Welcome, Oh Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience, and to forge in the smythe of my soul the uncreated conscious of my race.' 
    -James Joyce