The Smoothie that Starts My Day
I sometimes like to pretend that I am not a person who adheres to routines. I have operated for so long under the impression that to be routinized is to be incapable of going with the flow or trying something new. College has been a long exercise in trying to find balance between these two things. How do we create structure for ourselves that can also be strategically dismantled? I suppose it starts with a strong foundation, like if my life in college was Jenga tower whose early layers could never be toppled. This foundation for me is the mornings, the thing from which the rest of my day springs. A huge glass of warm lemon water, an equally large cup of coffee, and this smoothie, are the foundation, the crux of my routine. It is easy and consistently delicious and it is the perfect way to start my day.
Ingredients
1/2 banana
1/4 cup frozen mango
1 piece of frozen ginger, about 10 grams
1 handful kale or spinach
1 scoop @drinkorgain vanilla protein
1 stalk of celery
1 Persian cucumber (about 1/4 cup cucumber)
Filtered water (for desired thickness)
Optional: dash of cayenne, spirulina, chlorophyl or matcha!
Book Review: The Secret History
In the early hours of 2020, blissfully optimistic, I set out to read one book a month. As the goings of quarantine waxed and waned and as the beginning of the school year came, first into view, and then into startling focus, I was reminded why I had, in years past, been unable to successfully complete a year’s worth of reading as I had intended. That being said, as August came to a close and my reading list for the year sat at around seven books finished, I was most determined to not only finish this latest read, but to linger upon its every word. I decided to read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History after I read her more recent novel, The Goldfinch earlier this year, and I’m so glad I did. Where the books differ in almost every way: plot, pace, setting, character development, and conclusion, they shared one subtle but wholly significant undertone, that of profound philosophical reverence. In The Goldfinch, this played a role primarily in the book’s conclusion, with the last five pages unraveling moral reasoning like a spool of yarn that’s been dropped off of a cliff and which served as the context according to which the first 970 pages could be understood. However, in The Secret History philosophy played the part of a secondary character, the type who you come to realize, only in the end, was pulling the strings that made the main characters act in unusual and yet highly specific ways the whole time. The Secret History tells of the complex inner workings of a highbrow Greek class taught at a small private college in New England. The class is exclusive in nature and made so deliberately by its professor, Julian, whose past boasts celebrity dinner parties and extensive travels abroad. The students, of which there are only six, come from starkly different backgrounds themselves and are nonetheless inexplicably intertwined with one another. Henry is the only child of distant and extremely wealthy parents, who is the silent, but unquestioned leader of the group because he is also by far the smartest. Richard, whose life the novel tracks most closely, leaves behind his rather neglectful parents in Plano, California in the hopes of reinventing himself. The twins, orphaned at a young age, have a closeness between them specific to twins orphaned at a young age. Francis is loyal and honest with everyone besides himself. And Bunny, who comes from nearly nothing but acts as if he comes from much, carries himself with a certain confidence that masks his insecurities. It is their shared veneration for the classic Greek and Roman ideals which they study is so commanding, that, only in hindsight, may the story’s conclusion be seen as inevitable. As the eclectic and still harmonious group of six increasingly cut themselves off from the rest of campus, they form their own little secret society inspired by the ancient texts they study. Particularly, they become obsessed with Julian’s recounting of the Dionysian bacchanal — the orgiastic, hedonistic, drug-fueled rituals resulting in the dissolution of the ego — that the Greeks used to participate in. The group ends up successfully performing a Bacchanalian rite, shedding their rational minds in a quiet corner of the Vermont countryside. But trouble arises when, in their haze, someone in the group accidentally murders a local man and the group must collectively bear the psychological weight of murder, under which their bond begins to crumble.
Favorite Quotes:
“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks and the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?”
“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
“ It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them.”
How Long Did it Take to Read it:
About a month. The pace at which I read the book ebbed and flowed to the pace at which the story moved. The beginning of the book took me much longer to get through than the middle, and there was a part toward the end where I almost gave up. However, the story never did come to a stand still, it always keeps moving, and as such, I kept reading. Worth sticking it out.
Where I Read:
Mostly outside at coffee shops once they began, slowly and then all at once, re-opening. Or stretched out on the futon couch in my college apartment.
Thoughts:
This is the perfect book to read at the beginning of a new school year as the close-knit, intellectual group at the center of The Secret History is in many ways the college ideal. However, as things fall apart for the students at Hampden College in a uniquely dark way, the book still moves along to the soft hum of the mainstream college experience we all come to know: parties and awkward exchanges in dorm bathrooms, late night studying and conversations about future plans. Central to the story, and arguably to the college experience itself, is the nature of relationships, their comings about and the qualities that make them enduring. However, as slow relationship building—the exchange of thoughts and stories, shared experiences—is replaced by feelings of obligation and blind loyalty, Tartt puts into perspective how lonely college can be, and what a person must sacrifice to feel embedded in a college’s social fabric.
Why Every Woman in their 20s Should Read Joan Didion
I came under the sway of Joan Didion’s writing somewhere in the fluorescently lit hallways of my college library. Didion, who is 86 years old, came into reverence in the 1960s and ‘70s with the publication of works, both fiction and non-, that captured the zeitgeist with an honesty that, at some point during the 20th century, was rendered unimportant. Her recent works, notably two autobiographical works about grief and loss, ring with that same honesty. It is the sharpness of this honesty according to which Didion has carved for herself a place in the modern canon of impactful writers generally, and impactful female writers specifically.
Play it As it Lays was one of her early works of fiction, published in 1970. And although it is a work of fiction set in the time at which it was written, it is not necessarily specific to that time, nor does it exist outside of any realm of possibility. From a New York Times review written upon its publication, “What makes the world of this novel…so heartbreaking and inescapable is Miss Didion’s selection of details. There is nothing superfluous, not a word, not an incident.” The world Didion constructs is that of aspiring actors and directors living in and around “hollywood” during the era of hippydom. What we come to know, or perhaps already did—maybe because Didion, in other works, paints this time very clearly—is that all of the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” true to that time were just a means of subduing immense pain.
Maria Wyeth has been subdued. Maria, (pronounced “Mar-eye-ah”, she tells us) is the novel’s main character, if you can call her that, because really, the novel moves around her. The novel is told, for the most part, from the perspective of a narrator who peers into Maria’s life as if intrusively, but not in any commanding sort of way. This diverges from the other voices in Maria’s life, those of the people by whom she is surrounded, who are at once intrusive and commanding. Only at the beginning of the novel and then, increasingly toward the end, but in small ways, we hear Maria speak for herself. As Maria speaks, mostly, but not exclusively to men, you get the impression that she is speaking to no one. The conversation moves around her, avoids her words like one might avoid a pothole in the road and carries on unimpeded. (Opening of chapter 34) By what Maria has been subdued is described by Didion only as “the notion of general devastation.”
In some ways, Maria is what I fear most becoming, a passive observer of my own life. “Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes” Maria remarks somewhere inside the walls of a neuropsychiatric hospital. And in some ways, Maria is what women are at risk of becoming. “What no Didion heroine can entirely reconcile herself to is the split between what she wants and what a woman is supposed to do: marry, have children, and keep her marriage together, despite the inevitable philandering, despite her other hopes and dreams.” (The New Yorker) What we come to find out is that Maria never made for herself a decision. This is elucidated in a conversation with a woman who runs a small cafe in a small town on the edge of the desert in Nevada. Maria finds herself in the Nevada desert often throughout her life. It is where she was raised and where she returns to with her then ex-husband Carter who is shooting a movie there. There is nothing in Nevada. It is a cemetery of long-dead dreams, occupied by people for whom what came in on the next roll was not better than what went out on the last.” (3) It is the place where people become the product of choices that they did not make, the product of circumstance, the product of luck, or its absence.
It sometimes frightens me to think that we become our choices when I think of all the choices I have made that were not my own. Maria becomes the product of choices that were not her own. And she acts according to the interests of others. Carter wishes her to get the abortion, so she does. Les Goodwin wishes Maria to make him happy, and Maria does. The actor from that party wants to have sex with her, and so they do. There is no compliance in each of these actions, but rather a bone-chilling indifference as if Maria stopped caring about having autonomy in her own life many years prior to the story’s beginning. It is a sort of passivity, emotionlessness, that would be reminiscent of the man in The Stranger if only Maria had been a man. But it is in fact made sadder by the fact she is not. As if Meursault had the opportunity to care, but Maria never did. “Play It as It Lays…comes as close as any book has come to representing what repression does to the soul.” (The New Yorker)
At its heart, Play It As It Lays relays the reality that things happen, and there are no answers. What is so stark about this realization is that how it comes to be true for Didion in her own life upon the death of her husband, and the death of her daughter. “Life changes in an instant, the ordinary instant.” Didion herself is a starkly different character than Maria. Didion has made decisions. Maria has not. Didion was in a loving marriage. Maria was not. Didion became a success in her field. Maria succumbed to the pressures of hers. And nonetheless, the two find themselves equally at the mercy of life’s random, uncontrollable sadness. However, if it is true, as Maria claims, that nothing applies, then shouldn’t it be true of all things. What Didion exposes, then, is the rules we adhere to—from the side of the road we drive on to the roles dictated by gender and sexuality—are arbitrary. They don’t apply.
It is not inevitable that we, women, end up like Maria. In the same way that Didion used honesty as a means to carve herself into the literary landscape forever, we have the power to carve ourselves into the life that we most desire. All we have to do, it seems, is wake up and decide for ourselves what this is. Because ultimately, there are no rules but the ones we create.
5 Books I Loved in 2020
Upon the new year, I made a resolution to read one book every month. Where this goal is an annual one, written each January first for as long as I can remember on the page in my journal marked “resolutions”, it has never been something that I have actually achieved. Little did I know that I would have the time this year to work toward this goal in a way that I have not before. And now I just find myself wishing I had worked harder in all those previous years to read more because I am loving the things I am discovering in literature right now. Some of what I’m reading is “old news”, books that have risen and fallen from the best sellers list. Some of the books are timeless. And some are new, just finding their way into the mainstream. I am a firm believer that no matter what the book, it should only be read if it is going to be enjoyed (this is not the same as agreeing with the book or even understanding it fully). I have struggled through many books before because I thought it was the thing I “should” be reading. But what I know now is that we derive from literature only what we are able to absorb and appreciate, and this comes much more easily if the book is something we enjoy. These are the books that I have recently or presently enjoyed.
“The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America―particularly California―in the sixties. It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.”
In uncertain times, Joan Didion has long been who I turn to not in order to gain a sense of certainty, but rather to feel less alone it its absence. As Didion explains, where Slouching Towards Bethlehem does document the chaos of the late 1960s, particularly in California and more specifically in San Francisco, in her preface she acknowledges that she was trying “to get through to many of the people who read and even liked the piece…to suggest that [she] was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their forehead.” This is to say that at some point, in each of our existences, things seem to fall apart. Although she is recording facts of history, there is so much to discern about the universalisms of the human experience and its imperfections. And in today’s age, that feels all the more true.
“Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community.As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love -- and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).”
This book is sad and chaotic. Although it follows a relatively linear storyline, tracking Theo his years from age 13 through his late 20s, there is seemingly nothing linear about it. In fact, this book contains no clear lines anywhere especially those between good and evil, suffering and healing, happiness and despair. Beautifully written with philosophical undertones, I couldn’t put it down!
“In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.”
“One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.”
Read my full thoughts on this book here.
“On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.”
Review: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gotlieb’s, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, was given to me as a gift. My friend who gave me this gift is the same person who listens to all of my problems, receiving my grievances with an unrelenting humor and a calm which I in no way possess, even when the problem started out as her own, and inevitably morphed into my own. So upon receiving the book, I let out an audible laugh and told my friend that the message had been received and thanked her graciously not only for the book itself, but for always listening to me.
What was additionally ironic about the arrival of this book into my life is that I had recently sworn off self-help books. These are the types of books that have historically catalyzed change in my life without offering me any suggestions for how to go about effecting these changes in a sound way and at a rational pace. I had to cut self-help books out of my life because they would spark in me an idea for change, which, given my impulsive nature, I would act on immediately and without warning, straining relationships in my life and encouraging me to cut out or evolve potentially the wrong thing. (Like having low self-esteem and deciding that getting bangs was the only logical solution). However, I would come to find out that Maybe You Should Talk to Someone diverges from the typical self-help book (despite its quintessentially self-help-book title) in one specific and all be it integral way: its humility. I did not know the importance of humility until I first encountered life without it: in college.
College is a world stripped of humility by design. In a one square mile radius exists one group of people pontificating to another, each person so enamored by the place in which and the people from whom they learn, they think that they, above all others, deserve to be there. Although college was meant to be a place in which curiosity drove forward innovation and collaboration, it has, on the back of the notion of deservedness, morphed into a place where people are afraid to make a mistake or admit to the fallacies of their own understandings. As if admitting that we don’t know something is the same as stripping us of our place in the university entirely. So, in a place devoid of humility, I begrudgingly began reading a book which predicates itself on just that.
The suggestion that is the book’s namesake, that maybe you should talk to someone, is universally applicable. The sample of patients from which Gotlieb pulls, which includes herself, each finds themselves in therapy for a different reason. And, as Gotlieb suggests, and eventually finds out for herself, the reason for going to therapy, or the “presenting problem” as it is deemed, ends up only being part of any patient’s motivating factor that lands them in therapy. For Gotlieb, the catalyst for returning to therapy was being spontaneously dumped by her boyfriend (aptly named “Boyfriend” in the book) and the man she thought she was going to marry, although Boyfriend ends up just being the “presenting problem”, the tangible thing in a Gotlieb’s life which seems to be falling apart. For John, a middle-aged man working in the entertainment business in Hollywood and a patient of Gotlieb’s, his trouble sleeping was caused by his constant frustration with being surrounded by “idiots” compounded with family tragedy. For Julie, a young and active newlywed who was dying of cancer, therapy was prescribed as part of her end-of-life treatment. For Rita, therapy was a means by which to delay the inevitable: death. Despite their different reasons for going to therapy, the thing universally realized by all of these people in Gotlieb’s book was pain. Gotlieb writes, “there’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.” And with this, Gotlieb demands of her reader the same humility which she offers in her own personal anecdotes, the freedom from the belief that we are above or even entirely invincible from experiencing pain ourselves.
On Building the Perfect Cheese Board
There are certain things in life that I have longed to capture, not unlike a child tries to capture fireflies in a jar. The blue grey color of the sky right before the twilight on an evening in June. The feeling of being kissed unexpectedly. The smell that lingers in the doorstep of a French boulangerie. The familiarity of my hometown. I grew up in the type of small town in New England that you might encounter on the backside of a postcard that is sold at a kiosk in Logan Airport, with its white church steeple that pokes out above the tree line and a town hall with a stone facade. I often think of my hometown as being in perpetual state of late autumn, when the leaves on the trees take on a series of oranges and reds and yellows that are almost impossibly radiant. To try to capture these colors would be an exercise in futility, and yet I have nonetheless tried.
Against the backdrop of everlasting fall, thoughts of my hometown are in other ways non-changing. If you drive down the one lane ride that intersects the town’s center, you would bear witness to a scene that I have come to know like the back of my hand. Cars will fill the parking spots that run parallel on both sides to the wide sidewalks and the man in the khaki outfit with the safari hat will be pacing the curb looking for expired meters. People coming back from soccer games will be grabbing their morning coffee from the café on the corner. The man who owns the toy shop will be standing in his doorway engaging in casual conversation with the older gentleman who runs the adjacent watch shop, standing in his respective doorway. And a line will be forming at the Cheese Shop with people waiting eagerly to get their fresh cheese and pairing wine for the typical Saturday night dinner parties which will be taking place that evening on every block.
The Cheese Shop has all of the epicure of a French fromagerie and the quaintness of the town in which it operates. On Christmas Eve, you can expect there to be a line of people waiting eagerly in the bitter cold to place their orders. When you reach the front of the line and step up to the marble counter on which wheels of cheese are stacked and piled at random, you are greeted with a friendliness akin to that of two neighbors who meeting to exchange sugar for eggs. And although you are one in the front of a line of dozens of cold and hungry people, you are treated with all the time in the world. For each cheese you order, and even for some you don’t, you are offered a sample, and if you don’t know what to order, suggestions are made in the way of consecutive tastings until you try something you like. The experience is at once wholly personal and simultaneously uniquely communal. In that way, cheese and it myriad forms, flavors and textures serves as the vehicle for the type of small talk that in no way feels frivolous. Food is meant to foster a sense of familiarity among the people who enjoy it. This guide to making cheese boards, above anything else, serves as a means for making connection, and is an attempt to capture its importance in my own life.
getting started
picking your board
The first step in any cheeseboard is picking the right plate as your “canvas”. What you choose will depend on how many people you’re serving, how many different cheeses you have, and the aesthetic you are trying to achieve. I have linked some of my favorites below!
products i love
grocery list
Soft Cheeses (Pick 1-2): Brie, Chèvre, St. Agur, Harbison, Taleggio
Semi-Soft Cheeses (Pick 1-2): Gouda, Fontina, Goat Cheddar, Gruyere
Hard Cheeses (Pick 1-2): Sharp Cheddar*, Parmesan, Pecorino, Aged Gouda
Crackers: Mary’s Gone Crackers original, homemade crostini, FireHook crackers, sliced apple
Fruits and Nuts: dried figs, dried apricots, seasonal fresh fruits (berries and figs in the summer, apples and grapes in the fall, citrus and pomegranates in the winter, grapefruit and apricots in the spring), Marcona almonds, salted cashews, sesame sticks, craisins
Snacks: olives, stuffed grape leaves, artichoke hearts in brine, caprese skewers, cornichons, salami, prosciutto, fresh vegetables (cucumber, bell pepper)
Dips and Spreads: honey, olive tapenade, fig jam, pesto, quince paste, stone ground mustard, hummus
*I always go for a cheddar on my cheeseboards because it is a cheese that most people are familiar with and like.
assembly
classic cheese board
A few basic guidelines:
Always cut up your hard cheeses—this makes it easier for people to grab a piece without having to saw through a hard cheese with a cheese knife. To do this, I often take the pronged end of my cheese knife and chunk off pieces to give them a more rustic and less uniform look. You can also slice hard cheeses or cut them into more uniform pieces and pile them.
It’s easiest to put your largest items on the plate first. I usually put my bowls down and my soft cheeses first, then fill in the space around them with crackers, meats, and fruit. I add dried fruit, nuts, and little snacks last.
Don’t be afraid to move things once you have put them down. A cheese board is a work in progress until everything has been added!
Fill every space! This can be done by using nuts, berries, herbs, or dried fruit (anything with a pop of color) after all of the larger items have been placed and the board has been mostly filled. This is what will ultimately elevate your cheeseboard!
Have fun with it! At the end of the day, a cheeseboard is meant to be eaten, so make sure to add the things you most enjoy. I like to make sure my cheeseboard it filled, but if you like more space to maneuver, leave some things off. These aren’t rules, just some tips, but ultimately do what makes you happy!
cocktails
(because what is a cheeseboard without cocktails to go with)
honey mojito
1-1/2 tsp honey + 1-1/2 tsp boiling water combined and cooled
10 mint leaves, muddled
juice from 1/2 lime
2 oz white rum
ice
aperol g&t
1-1/2 oz gin
1/2 oz aperol
juice from 1/8 orange
juice from 1/4 lime
orange peel for garnish
ice
On Making Bread
There is something uniquely cathartic about kneading bread. What begins as a puddle of flour and water becomes bread only through the process of kneading, of stretching and folding dough over itself, of running your fingers along the side of the bowl until no flour sticks.
Bread is perhaps our most universal thing and its components, flour and water, our most fundamental. At a time when everyone is sheltering in their respective place, bread, and the process by which it is made, remains unwaveringly global. Although it emerges in different forms, each of which represent a host of heritage, bread always begins as that same puddle of flour and water. I think about this every time I am kneading my own bread, sheltering in my own place just outside of Boston.
“Breaking bread”, a euphemism for having a meal together; “bread and butter”, referring to the basics in life; “breadwinner”, a person who earns money to support a family. Bread, in its many essences, for its many idioms, is also the thing I take most for granted. I have started making bread in quarantine in part because I thought it would be a good use of my time and also because, if this pandemic has taught me anything it is that things can seldom if ever, be taken for granted. “Life changes in an instant, the ordinary instant'“. (Joan Didion, Blue Nights)
Making my own bread is, in a way, an exercise not only in catharsis, but also an exercise in gratitude. What has become clear is that even something as seemingly universal and essential as bread requires copious amounts of time and care. (This was especially clear after my first attempt at making sourdough bread went completely awry.) Making bread is a fragile. And the things that bread stands for are just as fragile. We take bread, among other things, for granted often because we don’t understand what goes into the process of their becoming. Once we are able to understand how precarious things really are, even the simplest of things, we start to have a better appreciation for their existence. Making bread has given me this, I hope it can bring you the same.
I used the following guide to making sourdough bread from the New York Times.
making sourdough
bread
On College and its labyrinth of Promise
This was a photo taken from a trip to Yellowstone National Park that I took with two friends from college in the late summer after our Freshman year. I was awestruck by the landscape, its expanse, and its beauty. It was on this trip that I spent a lot of time reflecting on the previous school year and anticipating the one that was fast approaching. It was on this trip that I made the goal to start writing more, recording my thoughts and feelings as the came. And it was after this trip that I made changes to the way I approached happiness, its comings and goings, and the person I wanted to be both in its presence and in its absence.
This is an essay that I wrote in the spring of my second year of college. I was just coming to the end of what had been a difficult time, that had spanned most of my first year of college and the early months of my second. “Difficult” is an all encompassing term for the sense of confusion and grief that I had experienced. College implicitly connotes vast promise, which is easy to get lost within. This was my attempt to record my own experiences somewhere within the confines of that vast promise and the ways in which I navigated and ultimately emerged from its labyrinth.
On August’s last Saturday, I climbed into the passenger seat of my 2001 Honda C-RV, whose trunk was packed full with boxes and bags containing the things I would need for my second year of college. My father was in the driver’s seat. Together we began the twelve-hour drive from Boston to Charlottesville to the soft hum of the old car and the din of Neil Young playing on the stereo. As we headed into the last hour of the drive, the sun was beginning to set and the deep blue of Virginia’s oppressively warm summer nights made me think of the blue nights that Joan Didion writes about in her latest memoir. Named for summer’s long twilights, Blue Nights tells the story of Didion’s relationship with grief in the years following her daughter’s death. “Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness” Didion explains, “but they are also it’s warning.”
W. B. Yeats’ The Second Coming
I came upon Didion’s writing in the same place many millennials search for meaning: Netflix. Didion’s documentary, “The Center Will Not Hold”, is a nod to W.B Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” I first read the Second Coming during my junior year of high school as a prelude to Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, at a time in my life in which the center was beginning to hold. Reading The Second Coming marked the beginning of my efforts to derive a sense of self and meaning from literature. Later, during my senior year of high school, Cormac McCarthy put to words the system of values which I had created when he writes about “the fire we carry” in The Road. In the bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape through which they walk, the man and his son each maintain a faith in the capacity of love and goodness, respectively, as a means to their end.
My mind began to turn increasingly to these texts after my first year of college during which the slow unraveling of my sense of self eventually gave way to complete collapse. The center began to crumble under the tumult of change which I experienced. I took classes which in no way pertained to my interests; my peers seemed to settle into this place which, to me, seemed far from home; a friend died; I held a job in banking. In this year, the drowning of innocence revealed itself and my youthful curiosity was lost in the shadows of life’s looming realities: mortality and uncertainty. The fire which I carried into college, predicated on the power of curiosity to propel forward the change I hoped to effect in the world, was reduced to embers.
“Can you evade the dying of the brightness?” Didion asks. “Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?” The dying of the brightness, as I see it, is the moment in which a deep sense of meaninglessness revolutionizes our understanding of what is important. Historically, I have relied on the things that I have found in literature to ground my understanding of meaning and my sense of place both within and beyond this university. As The Second Coming and Blue Nights, among other texts, have allowed me to reflect on what I have felt, lost, and longed for over the last year, I found myself so confounded in light of the things I have yet to learn.
We all go to college looking for something and we are so focused on finding it that we miss along the way all the bright and beautiful things that in no way resemble the thing we set out to find. Those things are made not less beautiful because they are different. In the end, we realize the whole time we were just looking for a version of ourselves that is somehow complete—complete with friends and knowledge and a new job, complete with visions of success. And what we come to find is that all the things we ignored, the bright and the beautiful, were the things that were imperative our wholeness. And that in our pursuit of being complete, we left ourselves as porous as a honeycomb, but perhaps not as sweet.
