Value Systems

"My father's generation grew up with certain beliefs. One of those beliefs is that the amount of money one earns is a rough guide to one's contribution to the welfare and prosperity of our society. I grew up unusually close to my father. Each evening I would plop into a chair near him, sweaty from a game of baseball in the front yard, and listen to him explain why such and such was true and such and such was not. One thing that was almost always true was that people who made a lot of money were neat. Horatio Alger and all that. It took watching his son being paid 225 grand at the age of twenty-seven, only two years on the job, to shake his faith in money. He has only recently recovered from the shock.

I haven't. When you sit, as I did, at the center of what has been possibly the most absurd money game ever and benefit out of all proportion to your value to society (as much as I'd like to think I got only what I deserved, I don't), when hundreds of equally undeserving people around you are all raking in faster than they can count it, what happens to the money belief? Well, that depends. For some, good fortune simply reinforces the belief. They take the funny money seriously, as evidence that they are worthy citizens of the Republic. It becomes their guiding assumption -- for it couldn't possibly be clearly thought out -- that a talent for making money come out of a telephone is a reflection of merit on a grander scale. It is tempting to believe that people who think this way eventually suffer their comeuppance. They don't. They just get richer. I'm sure most of them die fat and happy.

For me, however, the belief in the meaning of making dollars crumbled; the proposition that the more money you earn, the better the life you are leading was refuted by too much hard evidence to the contrary. And without that belief, I lost the need to make huge sums of money. The funny thing is that I was largely unaware how heavily influenced I was by the money belief until it had vanished."

Beauty

"Down the upper part of the woman's right arm there was an eight-inch-long herringbone-pattern scar. When she saw him looking at it, she at once crossed her arms and put her left hand over the injury, not understanding that it made her more beautiful, that it perfected her beauty by adding an essential imperfection. By showing that she could be injured, that such astonishing loveliness could be broken in an instant, the cicatrice only emphasized what was there, and made one cherish it... all the more."

Sorority

After we've looked at the photographs, as we're walking out, Monalisa says to me about the model, "She's also cut."

"What?"

"I saw, on her arms."

Rustom later confirms this. I've met Marika at least a half-dozen times, but I've never noticed the cuts. Monalisa knew within five minutes of meeting her. The bar girl noticed some tension on the model's face, noticed she was talking a little too much, laughing a little too much. So she looked at her wrists. Later I find out the model's story. She is the mistress of a married man with three children...

Her lover will never leave his wife, so Marika marks time on her wrists. There must be a citywide sorority of these woman who've slit their wrists and survived, who recognize one another automatically. A sisterhood of the slashed.

Reading about Running

"I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People's minds can't be a complete blank. Human beings' emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain insubordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void."

Little Bee

Stuck with the selections at Newark Airport's Hudson News*, I picked up Little Bee for my flight to LA. And, despite distractions from fellow passengers, I found myself utterly engrossed.

I don't want to give too much away -- the book's back cover explicitly warns against it -- but the book is told from the perspective of two women, one of whom is a refugee living in London. So I'm admittedly biased, since I'm soaking up anything London-related these days, but what really struck me were the passages on displacement told from the asylum seeker's perspective, since they struck home.

"I was thinking, That sunshine, that color yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now. Maybe the new color of my life was gray. Two years in the gray detention center, and now I was an illegal immigrant. That means, you are free until they catch you. That means, you live in a gray area. I thought about the years, living as quiet as could be. Hiding my colors and living in the twilight and the shadows."

"I am only alive at all because I learned the Queen's English. Maybe you are thinking, that isn't so hard. After all, English is the official language of my country, Nigeria. Yes, but the trouble is that back home we speak it so much better than you. To talk the Queen's English, I had to forget all the best tricks of my mother tongue. For example, the Queen could never say, There was plenty of wahala, that girl done use her bottom part to engage my number one son and anyone could see she would end in the bad bush. Instead the Queen must say, My late daughter-in-law used her feminine charms to become engaged to my heir, and one might have foreseen that it wouldn't end well. It is all a little sad, don't you think? Learning the Queen's English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had."

* Note: Fail, Newark Airport, fail! According to their website, there's a Borders in Terminal A. Not true! (Also fail: no bagels at LAX's Terminal 4!)

Enchanting

While I wouldn't recommend the book -- it was overly stylized, unrealistic, and (worst of all) dull -- this passage touched me:

"She recounted everything in that special Maya way, her eyes lighting up, her lips dancing in half-smiles, her hands flying everywhere. Prem stopped listening and concentrated on the aesthetic spectacle of Mayaspeak, trying not to hear the actual words."

Black

"Nearly every culture has a history, and some still have a practice, of mourning rituals, many of which involve changes in the dress or appearance of those in grief. The wearing of black clothing or mourning jewelry, hair cutting, and body scarification or ritual tattooing all made the grief-stricken immediately visible to the people around them. Although it is true that these practices were sometimes ridiculously restrictive and not always in the best interest of the mourner, it is also true that they gave us something of value. They imposed evidence of loss on a community and forced that community to acknowledge it. If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up."

The Love Of My Life, Cheryl Strayed