Tag: Relationships

Books, Professional Development

Book 39: Outward Bound USA: Crew Not Passengers – Josh Miner and Joe Boldt

Geoff W

“I was suddenly aware of how ignorant I was, alive with curiosity, doing academic work at a level I would not have thought possible a few years before. I did not know it yet, but I was learning the basic educational fact of life: the answers are meaningless until the questions are asked.” (17)

This quote pretty much sums up my review of this book and my beliefs in the need to be challenged in education and the push/drive for excellence. Not only was I pleasantly surprised by this book, I learned a lot more about the history of Outward Bound USA and its intricate ties to experiential education in the United States. Now this might seem like a bit of a contradiction with a title like Outward Bound USA: Crew Not Passengers, but I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect. The book sat on the bookshelf in my cubicle the entire time I’ve been at my current position and one day I decided I should read it and not only did it reaffirm my decisions to work where I work, but it also further informed my belief that classroom learning is important, but it’s what you do outside of the classroom in relation that’s just as important.

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Books

Book 27: The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood

Geoff W

What can you say about Margaret Atwood that hasn’t been said? She has been nominated for countless awards (including 5 Booker Awards, winning once) and is just brilliant all around. I recommend checking out her Twitter (it’s political, about books and writing, about people who’ve been influenced by her works, and about any random thing she decides to mention).

I was first introduced to Margaret Atwood through The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopic feminist novel written in the early 1980s. I’ll probably reread The Handmaid’s Tale next year and I’ll review it, but I definitely recommend it (especially if you read it and either precede or follow it with Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time [Wikipedia link]).

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Quotes

Quotes from Before Night Falls – Reinaldo Arenas

Geoff W

“Being a fugitive living in the woods at the time, I had to write before it got dark. Now darkness was approaching again, only more insidiously. It was the dark night of death. I really had to finish my memoirs before nightfall. I took it as a challenge.” – xii

“I used to climb trees, and everything seemed much more beautiful from up there. I could embrace the world in completeness and feel a harmony that I could not experience down below…Trees have a secret life that is only revealed to those willing to climb them. To climb a tree is to slowly discover a unique world, rhythmic, magical and harmonious, with its worms, insects, birds, and other living things, all apparently insignificant creatures, telling us their secrets.” – 5-6

“In those days I had a different idea about sexual relations; I loved someone and I wanted that person to love me; I did not believe that one had to search, unceasingly, to find in other bodies what one body had already provided.” – 64

“The gay world is not monogamous. Almost by nature, by instinct, the tendency is to spread out to multiple relationships, quite often to promiscuity. It was normal for me not to understand this at the time; I had just lost my lover and felt completely disillusioned.” – 64=65

“We would all bring our notebooks and write poems or chapters of our books, and would have sex with armies of young men. The erotic and literary went hand in hand.” – 101

“The ideal in any sexual relationship is finding one’s opposite, and therefore the homosexual world is now something sinister and desolate; we almost never get what we most desire.” – 108

“The sea was like a feast and forced us to be happy, even when we did not particularly want to be. Perhaps subconsciously we loved the sea as a way to escape from the land where we were repressed; perhaps in floating on the waves we escaped our cursed insularity.” – 114

“Her death was perhaps an act of affirmation. There are times when living means to degrade yourself, to make compromises, to be bored to death.” – 135

“It sounded like a unanimous roar. Ever since my childhood, noise has always been inflicted upon me; all my writing has been done against the background of other people’s noise. I think Cubans are defined by noise; it seems to be inherent in their nature, and also part of their exhibitionism.” – 178

“I told him he was a writer even if he never wrote a single page, and that gave him some comfort.” – 256

“In exile one is nothing but a ghost, the shadow of someone who never achieves full reality. I ceased to exist when I went into exile; I started to run away from myself.” – 303

“To discover a city is in itself a unique event, but when we have the privilege of sharing it with friends most dear to us, it becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” – 304

“This man was not a professor in the conventional sense of the word; he was a great reader, and possessed the magical ability to instill the love of beauty in his students. He was the only Spanish-American professor in the United States who inspired a school of critical thought.” – 305-306

“Dreams and nightmares have been an important part of my life. I always went to bed like someone getting ready for a long trip: books, pills, glasses of water, clocks, a light, pencils, notebooks.” – 311

Quotes

Quotes from At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill

Geoff W

“How did Doyler do this? He could make Jim so angry with himself, so ashamed. The next minute he was all alive, like a spark was inside, like the full of him was electric. How did Doyler do this to him? He really didn’t know.” – 274

“Yes there is something altogether tantalizing about truth. One burnt to tell it, for it to be known. Dreaded it, too, that someone else should say it, their saying making it true, the truth true, untolerable.” -278

“How wonderful it was this coming to know, certain of the knowing to come. Every word was weighted and every glance an inquiry. Each gesture gave just that little too much away.” – 327

“MacMurrough recalled his own discovery of touch, the willing of it, its exploration: so very different from the being touched, the receiving into one’s seclusion the touch of another, and so maddeningly sensual.” – 376

“Let the people be classified into sexes, of which there shall be two, male and female. The criterion shall be generative function, though please to note, this function is ideal and not actual: the prepubescent, the celibate, the emasculate, the nulliparous, the non-generative for whatever reason, shall yet be classified by sex. They shall be male or female. Female or male shall they be, though the greater shall be male.” – 391

“He rested his chin in the crook of his hands, watchful and listening. The fire spat at the hearthrug. Long time ago he would used curl on that rug, a ball of pinky heat, while the furniture winked and tall shadows peopled the walls. Then, like now, though he had not then the words to describe it, he was aware of his detachment, of his being a witness to the moment, witness not participant. Now, in a lazy way, he was pleased to remain so, these last few hours, a time yet.” – 438

“Oh sure he knew that, he had no doubt about that, all along he never doubted, leastways he believed he knew, save he couldn’t see it back last summer, he was scared then, but he wasn’t scared now, he had longed for it to be this way, and how could it be any different, it was never a case of whether, only of when or who first, weren’t they made to be this way–” – 441

“He bundled himself small the close to be held. He felt a great emulsive flow of love, all the truer for his needing no arm to hold him. The parts had shifted. He felt he marvel of his will that had brought Doyler to him that night. Doyler had not understood about the island. but that would come. Doyler had nothing to fear. Jim would swim him to the Muglins, he would swim him home again. There was no end to the swimming they would do.” – 444

“MacMurrough said, ‘Aunt Eva, you sting me and provoke me. I do not protest. I am too conscious of your pain. But you are misinformed, I find, of the gutter.’
‘And what will you pretend to teach me?’
‘Perhaps that, gutter or mountain, the heart breaks as surely.’
‘Perhaps it is. But it is proud too. There is a boy I love and his soul too shines in his face. Though it never may be, I am proud to love him.’” – 450

“It truly was the morning of the world. The sky blued above to shade and silver in the sea.” – 457

“I’m just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me–my neck, say, or my knee–and I’d carry on reading, i might let a smile, no more, wouldn’t lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We’d come so close, do you see, that I wouldn’t be surprised out of myself every time you touched.” – 509

“He was so sure everything was right and square. I don’t know how but I loved him that minute. He frightened me a bit too. He’ll be a great leader of men one day.” – 522

“It was true what Jim said, this wasn’t the end but the beginning. But the wars would end one day and Jim would come there then, to the island they would share. One day surely the wars would end, and Jim would come home, if only to lie broken in MacMurrough’s arms, he would come to his island home. And McMurrough would have it built for him, brick by brick, washed by the rain and the reckless sea. In the living stream they’d swim a season. For maybe it was true that no man is an island: but he believed that two very well might be.” – 560

Quotes

Quotes from A Year in the World – Frances Mayes

Geoff W

“From a crack in the house, two yellow beaks open and the mother sparrow flits over our heads, to and fro from the grove. Her angry chirp warns us that she might dive-bomb our reclining forms. A visiting gray cat stretches on the warm stone terrace, purring at her reflection in the door. She ignores the sparrow. Under my pulled-down hat, I begin to think of old attachments, friends, those I have failed, those who failed me. The elemental nature of Greece, I suppose. Or sometimes travel just unlocks Pandora’s box. What I’ve put off considering in my quotidian life rushes forward when the body and mind achieve a quiet level of receptivity. What has been lost comes looking. Problems overly suppressed can erupt as a full-blown crisis. I start with the drifty thought, ‘Mother would love this,’ followed by the petulant, childish (but true) thought, ‘She failed me, no?’ Then an old friendship I bluntly broke off. My mind jumps to Bill D. ‘Oh, he let you down, big time,’ then the tidal rush of how he would have loved Greece, how funny he was, and what a good poet. Drunk, he lurches over the hors d’oeuvre table, I reach to catch him, but he crashes into the bowls and plates. Hardest to understand, the friends who recede, become vague, their names in the address book but their numbers forgotten. Friends from college stay fixed. I pick up with Anne and Rena immediately, out of such long connections. As an adult, I moved six times, and for the most part the intense friendships of each place gradually faded, replaced by the next set. And yet I still care about Ralph and Mitra and Gabby and Hunter and Alan and, and, and…”

“We like getting dressed for dinner as we slip out of a harbour every night. Our mood as we enter the dining room shifts to celebratory. We’re having great dates. I begin to remember that I was quite good at flirting. Ed becomes more romantic, swooping out of his jacket pocket a small blue-velvet box. Inside I find gold earrings with round sapphires–the very ones I’d coveted in a jewelry shop. And I thought he was off looking for stamps. They will remind me of the colour of the sea. After dinner we walk all around the deck. The stars are enough to break your heart, so intensely present, close enough to reach. They do not seem like the same stars that hang over the rest of the planet.”