As Sure As Shadow

"That is your virtue and your defect. You have a wholesome character, and you want all of life to be made up of wholesome phenomena, but that doesn’t happen. So you despise the activity of public service because you want things always to correspond to their aim, and that doesn’t happen. You also want the activity of the individual man always to have an aim, that love and family life will always be one. And that doesn’t happen. All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shade."

―Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina” published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the magazine, The Russian Messenger

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Dear Alex,

Why are we haunted so often by our past? Like a bandit in chase, past pressing on present.

From a dream I’ve escaped. Moments ago, in a deep void devoid of time, I was at once and again a younger mom, driving back to Vancouver where my daughter a toddler stayed with my parents. Time kinked and snapped. I was startled with the decision to take or leave her. I’d just started working. Who would care for her? What classes should I put her in? Geography came up.

But in my college years, I never considered Geography - nor Art, Music, Literature - as relevant elective classes to explore for my personal growth. I resented my parents for having required me to learn classical piano playing and music theory by formal exams. I did not even recall glancing at any novel or a nonfiction book for the pleasure of discovery. I thought these realms were fluff. I was sure of it.

It would surely be sorrowful but not then nor thereafter until decades wore me out without an inkling of tune or theatre in my dreaming by day or way through now. Here lies driftwood, washed ashore from the sails of age, salted by the sun, pocked with visions, songs and stories shared and singular.

I walked in downtown yesterday to my single local library, chasing a book on special order. For good reasons, doors sealed, signs spoke, silence seeped in concrete. This could be the hush before a drumroll: hundreds of national guards are coming to help us in our hospitals this week, the flurry of a dream I could not have foreseen last month.

In light and shadow, the haunting of my past passes from what’s real to the surreal, taunting me to change the monotone in my head. I thank you for the passages you’ve travelled brief enough to sketch for us a question in writing and image broader than much of my imagination. Dream of something grander, more terrifying and dark, unrealistic in every way and more so than how our forefathers and matriarchs have mapped for us at this hour the roads, pillars and windows to shift.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

I am reading Yasunari Kawabata's "Beauty and Sadness" again, this time in Chinese.  I believe it will be a better experience, at least different, than reading an English translation.  There's sadness in knowing I shall never know the first voice.  There's beauty in knowing Kawabata would probably say the same about his own.

I love how this book feels on my hand, no bigger than my palm, like a thick pad of blank receipts, a book of sparse scribbles but consequential, and very light, like a cheap diary with thin pulp pages meant to keep a short record of sins, mistakes you can't rub off a page without leaving a hole in the middle of it all. 

I don't think you need to take any course in literature and art and etc.  The holes are meant to be there.

Yours, Alex