Excerpt from "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," after a retirement home visit by a precocious thirteen-year-old and her family to see her paternal grandmother:
On the contrary, we absolutely mustn't forget it. We mustn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about (so it is to retirement homes that they entrust the care of accompanying their parents to the threshold, with no fuss or bother). And where's the joy in these final hours that they ought to be making the most of? They're spent in boredom and bitterness, endlessly revisiting memories. We mustn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty. Colombe thinks you can 'hurry up and forget' because it all seems so very far away to her, the prospect of old age, as if it were never going to happen to her. But just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they're always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now that they needn't think about tomorrow...But if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?
So, we mustn't forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's not that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there's a retirement home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity.
That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
Showing posts with label The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Show all posts
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Moments to Savor, Savory Moments
Yesterday was mostly spent on anatomy. After some preliminary morning errands, I settled down to some alone time in front of the computer with the practice exams from previous years. Then a classmate and I headed over to school, where we went to each of the small group rooms with white boards completely covered in anatomy review diagrams, pictures, lists, tidbits, and various other "high-yield" points (I never really heard the term "high-yield" much until medical school). I walked from room to room, staring at white boards, hoping that there is truly such a thing as learning by osmosis.
So this post really isn't meant to be about anatomy, but I suppose that's the subject hanging in everyone's mind this past week. Anyway, to wrap up that part of the story, I ended up taking the exam last night, even though we have until 11:59PM on Sunday.
What really impressed me yesterday was going over to my classmate's apartment, which is right above the N-Metro train tracks to the side of our student dormitory apartment complex. I haven't been in any other apartment aside from my own, and when I mentioned that point, my classmate remarked that it's been true for her as well. Gone are the excited, adrenaline-charged college days when we'd run from dorm to dorm, room to room, checking out what other people's living conditions are like. When we'd order cheesy sticks in the dead of the night, and hover around a friend's desk or bunk, dipping the greasy cheesebread concoction into ranch or marinara sauce, watching a movie perhaps, or just striking up a "deep conversation," trying all the while not to leave oil stains on our host's blankets or school supplies. There were more of those days in college, than in grad school, I'd say. I remember when there was a total blackout at the Clark Kerr campus at UC Berkeley, where my dorm was located. The darkness had instilled some sort of adventurous electricity in the atmosphere, and students ran around the courtyard with flashlights or open cell phones, jovially joking with one another, the unanticipated darkness a reprieve from one's normal sense of composure. My friend and I sprawled out on the concrete courtyard of the campus, near a trickling fountain, and saw stars in the sky. I think it was the first time, and perhaps only, time I noticed them while I was in Berkeley. It was rarely dark enough, and not to blame modern technology, I rarely had the mood or inclination to look up at the sky.
Fast forward six years, and here I am in medical school, on a sunny but chilly autumn day. My friend's apartment is painted a vivid red, while mine is a lavender blue. I like both colors. She dashes around, taking butternut squash out of the refrigerator (butternut squash! Have I ever even tasted butternut squash?), fresh salsa from the nearby Wednesday farmer's market, Turkish yogurt that she uses in lieu of sour cream, and lovely, fresh, green kale. Not sure how to apply myself, I stand around flipping through Gray's Anatomy, reading a bit aloud about the nervous system. "The sympathetic chain...," I begin reading, "oh, and the prevertebral plexus..."
My classmate hands me a block of cheese and a grater. That's a better use of my time, for now.
What resulted from her efforts was a kale and butternut squash quesadilla! I felt like I should have taken a picture of it. It's rare that I get to experience a home-cooked meal these days, other than the stuff I scrounge up myself. Wash it down with a glass of apple cider, and I was all set to take the midterm.
On another note, I finished "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith yesterday, after I took the test. It's a lovely book. Many tweens and teens apparently read this, but it's still a classic nonetheless, and though I didn't actually read it myself while I was tween or teen, I definitely found myself savoring the book even now. What motivated me to read the book in the first place was visiting Brooklyn three times in the past month. Williamsburg - now a premier hipster enclave - is no longer the poverty-ridden tenement-housing locale that Francie Nolan grew up in. It has gentrified significantly. Yet the brownstones, the feeling of being near Manhattan, being Manhattan's closest neighbor, yet being apart from it all, has not changed. Francie would look across the river, the bridge, and wonder what lay across from her native Brooklyn. She grew up in abject poverty, the product of parents who married too young and were uneducated. She adored her father, who was a dashingly handsome singing waiter, but also the neighborhood drunk. Her mother raised her on a page of Shakespeare and a page of the Holy Bible every day, insisting on her children's education, and she succeeded despite the odds. Francie grew up loving books, loving the library, loving to write, but when she wrote about unpleasant (real) things, one of her teachers scolded her. She burned up much of her writing, promised to give up her writing if God would only insure that her mother stayed well through an illness. But she eventually comes back to it, and at the end, she skips the typical high school education due to having to work and support her family, and finally attends the University of Michigan at Ann-Arbor.
I found the book to be a satisfying read. Now onwards to "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery. Did I mention how wonderful the New York Public Library is?
So this post really isn't meant to be about anatomy, but I suppose that's the subject hanging in everyone's mind this past week. Anyway, to wrap up that part of the story, I ended up taking the exam last night, even though we have until 11:59PM on Sunday.
What really impressed me yesterday was going over to my classmate's apartment, which is right above the N-Metro train tracks to the side of our student dormitory apartment complex. I haven't been in any other apartment aside from my own, and when I mentioned that point, my classmate remarked that it's been true for her as well. Gone are the excited, adrenaline-charged college days when we'd run from dorm to dorm, room to room, checking out what other people's living conditions are like. When we'd order cheesy sticks in the dead of the night, and hover around a friend's desk or bunk, dipping the greasy cheesebread concoction into ranch or marinara sauce, watching a movie perhaps, or just striking up a "deep conversation," trying all the while not to leave oil stains on our host's blankets or school supplies. There were more of those days in college, than in grad school, I'd say. I remember when there was a total blackout at the Clark Kerr campus at UC Berkeley, where my dorm was located. The darkness had instilled some sort of adventurous electricity in the atmosphere, and students ran around the courtyard with flashlights or open cell phones, jovially joking with one another, the unanticipated darkness a reprieve from one's normal sense of composure. My friend and I sprawled out on the concrete courtyard of the campus, near a trickling fountain, and saw stars in the sky. I think it was the first time, and perhaps only, time I noticed them while I was in Berkeley. It was rarely dark enough, and not to blame modern technology, I rarely had the mood or inclination to look up at the sky.
Fast forward six years, and here I am in medical school, on a sunny but chilly autumn day. My friend's apartment is painted a vivid red, while mine is a lavender blue. I like both colors. She dashes around, taking butternut squash out of the refrigerator (butternut squash! Have I ever even tasted butternut squash?), fresh salsa from the nearby Wednesday farmer's market, Turkish yogurt that she uses in lieu of sour cream, and lovely, fresh, green kale. Not sure how to apply myself, I stand around flipping through Gray's Anatomy, reading a bit aloud about the nervous system. "The sympathetic chain...," I begin reading, "oh, and the prevertebral plexus..."
My classmate hands me a block of cheese and a grater. That's a better use of my time, for now.
What resulted from her efforts was a kale and butternut squash quesadilla! I felt like I should have taken a picture of it. It's rare that I get to experience a home-cooked meal these days, other than the stuff I scrounge up myself. Wash it down with a glass of apple cider, and I was all set to take the midterm.
On another note, I finished "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith yesterday, after I took the test. It's a lovely book. Many tweens and teens apparently read this, but it's still a classic nonetheless, and though I didn't actually read it myself while I was tween or teen, I definitely found myself savoring the book even now. What motivated me to read the book in the first place was visiting Brooklyn three times in the past month. Williamsburg - now a premier hipster enclave - is no longer the poverty-ridden tenement-housing locale that Francie Nolan grew up in. It has gentrified significantly. Yet the brownstones, the feeling of being near Manhattan, being Manhattan's closest neighbor, yet being apart from it all, has not changed. Francie would look across the river, the bridge, and wonder what lay across from her native Brooklyn. She grew up in abject poverty, the product of parents who married too young and were uneducated. She adored her father, who was a dashingly handsome singing waiter, but also the neighborhood drunk. Her mother raised her on a page of Shakespeare and a page of the Holy Bible every day, insisting on her children's education, and she succeeded despite the odds. Francie grew up loving books, loving the library, loving to write, but when she wrote about unpleasant (real) things, one of her teachers scolded her. She burned up much of her writing, promised to give up her writing if God would only insure that her mother stayed well through an illness. But she eventually comes back to it, and at the end, she skips the typical high school education due to having to work and support her family, and finally attends the University of Michigan at Ann-Arbor.
I found the book to be a satisfying read. Now onwards to "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery. Did I mention how wonderful the New York Public Library is?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)