| Jen Hagen Paper 4 25april2002 Pages and Pages. Words on Words. In the third grade I was jealous of a girl in my class who was ambidextrous. Every morning our teacher put a quote or group of words on the chalkboard and we, the class, journaled for 15 minutes. I wrote furiously, while the rest scribbled to waste time. I�d stop short, not because I had run out of things to say, but because my hand ached. The aforementioned girl would give me a cruel grin and would switch hands. Of any super power, I�d choose that. In high school I was still writing furiously. My reading had been narrowed to classics and I spent my days on my screenplays, and my series of short stories. I filled notebook after notebook�I could do 50 pages straight without having to stop. And then I ran out of things to say. When I was 14 I became enthralled with my English teacher�s quote jar. It was a little glass jar filled with prolific and ubiquitous sayings, and we�d get a new one every day. We weren�t journaling anymore, we were funneling ideas, viewpoints, arguments for papers. For ourselves. I sat for hours with the big books of quotes, like Bartlet�s, and copied my favorites. I was taught to start an essay with a quite, so I committed many of them to memory. During this time I picked up Henry Miller for the first time. All of my passion for words and writing was suddenly overflowing. I�d read his words, nodding in concurrence, passage after passage. I pulled my pencil out and began underlining phrases, sentences, and pages. They screamed out to me plain as day�as though they were not part of the surrounding text. It wasn�t long before I formed my own anthologies of quotes�every book I read had dozens that I would copy into my red, hard covered journal. They moved from my book to my journal, and in one day of passion onto a large poster sized piece of cardboard. Different colors and different authors. Life. Love. Art. Writing. Death. They were all alongside each other. It still hangs on the back of my door�everyday I see something new. Get lost in the words. I had given up on quote books�I couldn�t fish through them anymore. They weren�t all meant for me. And I realized what I read in books was where I exclusively needed to look. It held everything I wanted. �In a book, for example, and I say A book, and not THE book, or a certain book�there are lines, just lines page so and so, top left, that stand out like mountain�s peaks�and they made you what you have become. No one else but you could respond to those lines. They were written FOR you, just as everything else which happens to you was intended for you, and never mistake it. Particularly the bad things.� (Henry Miller) Questions are best answered by the random words of a dead man, immortalized in black type on yellow stained paper. You will never exist as you until you surrender control--"We fear to lose ourselves. And yet, until we lose ourselves there can be no hope of finding ourselves."(Henry Miller) I owe my life to the words of other people. Without them, I�d have none of my own. I am Henry Miller. Van Gogh. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Yeats. Shakespeare. Celine. Joyce. Elliot. Tolstoy. Dosteveski. "It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself."(Thomas Paine) Faithful to the fact that you are everything you�ve read. Every word you�ve heard and repeated. Every word you�ve saved inside. You must own confusion, emotion, though, passion. �Every day I live in three times-the past, the present and the future.."(Henry Miller), as each person. "We are always in two worlds at once, and neither of them is the world of reality."(Henry Miller) To be faithful we must see we are complex. That we are all shades of gray. "Our lives consist of how we choose to distort them." (Woody Allen) Our thoughts are filtered through experience. Who we�ve read. Who we are. Our answers are our truths. Our convictions. Only ours. No matter who said them before. You cannot erase words. They can not be burned or destroyed. They are invincible. And therefore so is thought. Writing. Reading. Either words to design the mind for possibility. �Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.�(Rudyard Kipling) It is because f this you are here today. Who you are today. �They were written FOR you.� Where do they stop and I begin? It doesn�t matter. It�s all mesh. It�s all collected. Connected. Gray. There is no rhyme or reason. �Writing is not a game played by rules. Writing is a compulsive and delectable thing.�(Henry Miller) The same can be said about life. Reading. Thinking. Collecting. I picked up �reading is inhailing, and writing is exhailing� some place random years ago. I don�t remember who said it, or if I ever knew, but it�s true. Reading is the fuel for thinking. The next step is writing. �(by writing you) Inoculate the world of disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.�(Henry Miller) Without the words you would not arrive at the place you are today. Who you are today. "Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds."(Juvenal) They suffer. We suffer. But we do not die. Without words you do not survive. Our words are immortal when we cannot be. When our hands tire, and our breath stops, they continue forth. No one can teach you who you are except books. They teach you everything. And most importantly how to write, so you can give back what has formed you. Revolution lives in your pen. The answers live in your books. Words live in your heart. |