Mise-en-scène

Conversational threads, woven together, creating a picture of ideas.

[katierolnick]

She is looking to the side, but in a way that reflects her awareness that she is being scrutinized. She is a beauty. She knows it and likes it but not all that much; there is a sadness in her that trumps her vanity and would remain her signature. When I knew her as an aunt, I felt her kindness, graciousness, reserve, and melancholy.

Janet Malcolm, describing her aunt Jiřina, in “Six Glimpses of the Past.” 

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He’s extremely kind, but it’s the genuine kindness that comes from deep cynicism.

Philippe Lajaunie, describing Anthony Bourdain in The New Yorker.

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Well, there's nothing," McDonald said. "You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you're ready to die, it comes to you—that there's nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain't done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you're the only one that knows the secret; only then it's too late. You're too old.

“Butcher’s Crossing,” by John Williams

[katierolnick]

It seemed to him that he moved forward laboriously, inch by inch, over the space of the vast prairie; but it seemed that he did not move through time at all, that rather time moved with him, an invisible cloud that hovered about him and clung to him as he went forward.

“Butcher’s Crossing,” by John Williams

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...he wondered how often, in their lonely sailing, they had intimations of depthless plunge, and how often they were repeated in their dreams. Looking at the horizon, he could see the line waver in the rising heat of the day; by late afternoon, with the rising winds, the line became indistinct, merged with the sky, and to the west was a vague country whose limits and extents were undefined. And as night came upon the land, creeping from the brightness sunk like a coal in the western haze, the little town that held him seemed to contract as the dark expanded; and he had, at moments, when his eye lost a point of reference, a sensation like falling, as the sailors must have had in their dreams in their deepest fears.

“Butcher’s Crossing,” by John Williams

[katierolnick]

People are mysterious and parents are too, partly because you never really catch up to them. So you take stock, stare at family photographs and sift through mementos.

Manohla Dargis, NY Times review of “20th Century Women”

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It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Joan Didion, Self-Respect: Its Source, Its Power, Vogue (1961)

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Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Perhaps imagining ourselves as parents is not only the expression of a biological drive, but essential to understanding the scope of our lives, who we are and who we might become. For years I have dealt with a dread of old age and death by reminding myself that I have not yet given birth. I can imagine the moment clearly — my husband is there next to me, my parents are waiting to meet their grandchild — and the fact that it hasn’t happened (always, it is at least nine months away) reassures me that some new stage of life is still to come. I’m not sure when people started asking me if I have children — a couple of years ago, I think. “Not yet,” I always say.

Belle Boggs, “The Art of Waiting,” Orion Magazine

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...because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

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To know more is simply a matter of industry; to accept what you will never know is trickier. The belief that questions are precious whether or not they have answers is the hallmark of a mature writer, not the naïve blessing of a beginner.

Andrew Solomon, “The Middle of Things,” The New Yorker

[katierolnick]

Her work was influenced by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher who coined the term solastalgia, a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’

"Not Yet Lost," by Alice Driver, Oxford American

[katierolnick]

...and soon we were all dancing into a sweat, arms and hips and rumps swaying softly; tall, ink-black Luos and short, brown Kikuyus, Kamba and Meru and Kalenjin, everyone smiling and shouting and having a ball. Roy threw his arms over his head to do a slow, funky turn around Auma, who was laughing at her brother's silliness, and right then I saw in my brother's face the same look I had seen years ago in Toot and Gramps's apartment back in Hawaii, when the Old Man had first taught me how to dance—that same look of unquestioned freedom.

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father

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Antigua, Guatemala, a city of palimpsestic beauty. 

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Creative nonfiction is a term that is currently having its day. When I was in college, anyone who put those two words together would have been looked on as a comedian or a fool. Today, Creative Nonfiction is the name of the college course I teach. Same college. Required to give the course a title, I named it for a quarterly edited and published by Lee Gutkind, then at the University of Pittsburgh. The title asks an obvious question: What is creative about nonfiction? It takes a whole semester to try to answer that, but here are a few points: The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of your prose, the integrity of the composition, the anatomy of the piece (does it get up and walk around on its own?), the extent to which you see and tell the story that exists in your material, and so forth. Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.

John McPhee, “Omission,” The New Yorker

[katierolnick]

Melancholy optimism at its best. 

[katierolnick]

Do you have a loaf of bread, break the loaf in two and give half for some flowers of the Narcissus for thy bread feeds the body indeed but the flowers feed the soul.

Unitarian Meeting House inscription, Madison, WI.

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The blizzard that wasn't. 01.27.15