Lincoln by David Herbert Donald

week four.

Books come to you (or you to them) in the precise moment they are supposed to come.
Lincoln is a respected and admired historical figure. A person and a president whose ideas defined a time and a nation. I can't think of a more relevant read at this time, in 2009 in America, than the life of Abraham Lincoln.

I just finished the last of 599 pages. And by reaching the end, I met a new start.

I can't even start to measure the ways in which this book has moved my me in heart and mind. I look at this country's history with understanding eyes. I appreciate better the heartbreaking tragedy of civil war. I admire the precious principles of the constitution. I value more the freedoms we enjoy and the absolutism we fear. I respect, perhaps truly for the first time, the sacrifices made by so many so I can live like so few. And I admire, value and respect Lincoln, his time, his politics and his vision and the incredible significance of his life.

The book also helped me understand better our current world, our problems and our battles. Our disillusion and our fears. But mainly it helped me regain faith in the fellow man.

Personally I do not know sacrifice of the type that was demanded of Americans in those difficult years. We live privileged times today and sadly we take for granted values that were foreign to us just 150 years ago; freedom, equality, wealth and prosperity.
But perhaps the most important lesson I have learned reading this wonderful book is that there are values we must find true, principles we must guard and that patience and understanding must be exercised even more when problems seem more unsolvable.

This fascinating book "starts" in 1962, when the author challenged by J.F.Kennedy "not to grade a President unless one has examined all information available to him when he made his decisions" decide to write a biography from the point of view of what Lincoln knew at his time.

As opposed to other books, where while reading I would find a thought or a concept that would trigger a realization or a meditation, like a participant or player. With this book I've felt more like being part of an audience. Admiring, enjoying and savoring the play as it unfolds. But in need of time to really absorb the full meaning of the whole.

so I will capture what moved, surprised or inspired me about Lincoln, which in itself, its a lot.

When describing Lincoln the author suggests that chance, or accident, played a determining role shaping his (lincoln) life. Lincoln said when referring to the emancipation "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."

Some of his most lovable traits were compassion, tolerance and willingness to overlook mistakes. he also had a very pragmatic approach to problems. If a solution was fated not to work another could be tried.

He had a quality "a man of achievement" a quality which Shakespeare possessed so enormously... Negative Capability, that os when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irriable reaching after fact and reason.

Lincoln had an insatiable desire to educate himself, and enjoyed Aesop's fables, which became ingrained in his mind "a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand"

An amazing fact about Lincoln's life is that during his lifetime he lost his mother, his little brother, his father, a girlfriend and three sons. I thought that many of us would feel a lot of deep and justified sadness. But for some reason, the book doesn't explore the sorrow he must have suffered.

I really enjoyed his speeches and writings. It seems to me that his mind composed thoughts like composing images to be understood by every man, disregarding his background or education. He really had an inherent ability to relate to others.

- let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country, and never to tolerate their violation by others. let reverence for the laws be breathed by every american mother, to the lisping babe, the parttles on her lap, let it be taught in the schools, in seminaries and in colleges, let it be written in primmers, spelling books and in almanacs, let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls and enforced in courts of justice. In short, let it become the political religion of the nation. -

all about love; new visions by bell hooks

week three.
I'm so lucky. I learn valuable lessons every time I read. And in this case, I learned one of the most important ones on the pages in this book.

a (genuine) definition of love
M. Scott Peck defines love as the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will, both and intention and an action. Will implies choice. We do not have to love. We chose to love.
explaining love as the will to nurture someone else's spiritual growth really made me think.The times when I really felt "in love" i remember thinking more about the other and bout myself. really caring for her well being than my own. Hooks continues; to truly love we must learn to mix ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust.
This is why love is hard work. A good, daily, careful, beautiful work, but a work that must be done with care and affection. With respect and recognition, and with commitment and trust. I see it clearly now. More than ever, perhaps because as Hooks does, I believe in definitions. They help us understand and guide us in our journey.

A poem
As a woman and a lover, however, I am moved by the sight of my beloved. Where he is, I want to be. What he suffers, I want to share. Who he is, I want to be.
Santa Teresa de Avila
To feel so much love, is to care so much about the other, you want to be them. Occupy the same space in the universe, as one. That's a soul mate, a communion with another.

My doctrine
to fill the gap between the values I claim to hold and my willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action.

I found that for being a book about love, the lessons shared by Ms. Hooks had a melancholic tone of pessimism. But I did get a definition of love that appeals to my intellectual side, and I'm thankful for that. I only hope I love with care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust often.

How Fiction Works by James Wood

week two.
I now realized that James Woods is a literary God. He is considered "the best literary critic of his generation," and he is staff writer at the New Yorker. When I picked "How Fiction Works" as the second book of the year, I didn't know him and I didn't know what this book was really about.
Through its pages I felt like I was attending one of those classes where the teacher is everything we want him to be, even snobbish and petulant.
I enjoyed it and learned a lot, much more than I had anticipated.

the three languages.
Mr. Wood talks about the languages of a novelist; the author's own language, the character's language and the language of the world. (newspapers, advertising, blogs and text messaging)
and speaks of a novelist as a triple writer.
What I liked about this is realizing the 3 voices coming together in one, the writer. The intimacy of our own realizations give room to our artistic/philosophical/professional voice. Its this intimacy that we must encourage. Its deep but its a deep realization.

room for Flaubert?
... His narration favors the telling and brilliant detail, knows how to withdraw from superfluous commentary, judges good and bad neutrally, seeks out the truth even if its repelling, and the author's 'fingerprints are traceable but not visible". This describes how deep and brilliant the style of the french writer is. Impersonal prose. Where an author is like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
I love when I'm given tools to be able to appreciate brilliance.

optical zoom.
Mr. Wood says; we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not he way literary narration selects... our memories are aesthetically untalented.
In a way, a writer can zoom in and out at will. we in life use detail to recall, to navigate. But, whereas life is full of detail we barely notice, literature teaches us to notice, which makes us better readers of detail in literature, which in turn makes us better readers of life. funny how you get better noticing as one gets older. I find this fascinating... we select to notice the things we choose to notice, writing by our own will, our own dramas, comedies, in prose or poetry.

their insignificance is precisely their significance.
there is no such thing as irrelevant detail in fiction. It made think of how quickly we file the most ordinary moments in life as boring when in fact, they might very well be a preface for our finest, most extraordinary times.

we begin in misplaced certainty and end in placeless mystery.
I can relate to this point. How many times we see people riding the subway, at the airport or simply at the store and we immediately figure them out; our "misplaced certainty" only gives itself to mystery. Because we all are fictional works that revealed ourselves to us and to others, minute by minute, with unintentional suspense.

3 layers of a character
first is the announced motive. Second is the unconscious motivation. the third is beyond explanation. Many pages are written explaining our favorite characters from books and films, and in every case, the 3 layers will appear, making the fictional real, and the real to look more like fiction.

our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.
Proust said this. I don't disagree with him.

sympathy
three aspects of of the experience of reading fiction; language, the world and the extension of our sympathies toward other selves.
This is perhaps the pages of the book that I enjoyed the most. When Wood swims between works dissecting language and intentions, adjectives and metaphors. its feels like one is finally able to savor a good wine, not just drink it.

a witty essay
in the Condemned Playground Cyril Connolly wrote a criticism of conventions in novels. I am tempted to create such a list for "conventions" in advertising... conventions so rusted, that nothing moves.

Fiction
Fiction does not ask us to believe something, in a philosofical sense, but to imagine them, in an artistic sense.

I can't capture all the interesting thoughts and ideas that Wood explores in the last pages of the book. I have to admit that I loved the book, Wood's ideas and his knowledge of classic works of literature.

At the end, I think that I put the book down with a better understanding of a character and language. I couldn't ask more from a book.

What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami

week one.
Someone has finally decided to write about running from inside a runners mind... about the thoughts that come to us while running, about goals and expectations and about discovering what so often is overseen.
I enjoyed this book in part because it felt like going for a run... familiar in tone. In part because in the process, the writer tough me some valuable lessons.

... getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed.
How important, yet how simple and beautiful is this insightful analogy. It made me think of all the times we start doing something new; a new job, move into a new apartment, being a parent of 4... our expectations are always to hit the ground running. Yet, things are as they are, and they come with their speed already set. We jump inside this "flywheels" (neighborhoods, cities, customs and personalities) and intent to fit right in.
This line made me think about setting the right expectations but it made me think hard about getting in synch with the speed of things around me.
It doesn't matter if I can run fast, if I can go long, or how long I can run for... what really matters is that the flywheel and my legs run at the same speed. Being in synched with the earth, your kids, you love ones and your interests makes a big difference.

... water under the bridge...
I've always heard this common expression, I juts don't think that I had ever taken a second to think about the implications. When we pictured a bridge, we think of the traditional, majestic, needful pieces of architecture. We also think about the water running under the bridge, as passing, always renewing itself. Therefore, water under the bridge comes to mean that whatever happened, its long gone, forgotten, no longer relevant.
and for all its rightfulness, this saying took a new meaning for me. I thought for the first time about the bridge. Constant, resilient and observant. We are supposed to be the bridges... our life's happening as a flowing stream of events, right under our solid rocks and structure.
Those events happen fast, but we know one thing for sure, they pass. A life never stops its flow... and you never know what the current will bring.

thoughts are like clouds in the sky.
I love this analogy. Our thoughts come and go, adjust to the influences of weather. Some belong in a beautiful spring day, some create storms. ll these thoughts don't define who me are, the same way, the clouds don't change the sky above them. We should remain at a higher level, separate from our thoughts.

pain is the emotional price we need to pay to be independent.
I love when I am made to look at a common principle with totally new eyes.
I love the concept of embracing the idea of pain. This is a concept that already called my attention in "Little Miss Sunshine" Suffering builds the fiber of our character, its unique and individual.
And by suffering this pain in only the way we can experience it, we become our own person.

appreciate red for being easy to see.
so simple, so hard.

one in ten.
Again Mr. Murakami's talks about setting the right expectations, running and in life. He shares that when he opened a night bar in Japan in his early 20's, he set his expectations to that if one in ten customers liked his place, his business should be alright. He later on applied this principle to his writing, which also seemed to serve him well.
I love the idea of one in ten. Maybe beacuse I start this blog today, but 1 in 10 sounds like a good idea to me.