No, anonymous 2, I have no idea about the Melville quote. So anonymous 1, if you’re reading, care to explain?
Since last week was all about taking tests, naturally, this week is all about getting them back. Cell bio test went better than expected, all the motivation to do better. My happy news last Saturday couldn’t have come at a better time, just when next semester promises to crush me with math and genetics.
I tell my over-achieving friends (when they get what they think is a bad grade), that grades aren’t everything. But are they? I think hard work matters, persistence matters, attitude matters… in that sense, grade matters. But if a bad grade was to diminish all the hard work and persistence, and make you doubt your very competence and intelligence, then perhaps it is better to think otherwise.
Madame Butterfly was wonderful (thanks Maria)! Butterfly had the most amazing voice, so piercingly bright my eardrums hurt (in a good way). Her vocal cords cannot possibly be made of the same muscles/nerves as mine. Truth be told, parts of my 21st century, semi-feminist mind wanted to scream at her to plunge that knife not into herself, but into he who abandoned her for three years, married another woman, and then came back to claim the son he never knew he had! I believe in love, in waiting, in suffering, in agony, in mourning, but what I cannot accept is resignation. It was a beautiful ending for the opera, but a tragic ending for women-kind.
3 comments:
"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."
(T. S. Eliot)
Suicide isn't an act of resignation. The Christian who prays for resignation isn't trying to subdue his self-preservation instinct. The suicide is someone so invested in his desires, he can't cope with having them unfulfilled. This is the opposite of resignation.
It's simple, really. In your post you described your guileless friend and said you needed to acquire some measure of her wariness. In the passage I transcribed from Melville, the old sailor observes the innocent Billy Budd and wonders what will become of him without a touch of "defensive ugliness" in a world where purity of heart may avail nothing in the everyday struggle.
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