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September 27, 2005
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
Posted by lainey at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2005
Grief
Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves." Erich Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940's and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: "sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain."
Tightness in the throat.
Choking, need for sighing.
Joan Didion deals with death in After Life.
Posted by lainey at 11:57 AM | Comments (1)
September 22, 2005
Note
Finally went to the new National Library and was utterly disappointed by it. The architect could've made better use of space. And inside, it looked like any other ol' library.
Size doesn't matter. You can be a towering inferno but if you are lousy, you are.
Disappointed so I doubt I will ever step in there again.
Posted by lainey at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2005
Another World
Waiting for the Star Ferry to go to Tsim Sha Tsui - the window to a completely different world.
Posted by lainey at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
September 07, 2005
Penumbrae In Love
We had to make the best of our candle-light dinner, even if we couldn't see our food or each other, at least we had our shadows.
That being said, the meal was absolutely delish.
Posted by lainey at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)