Sweet Lines

I like Charlottesville. It is like a hot and slightly-less isolated Ithaca. I went into some libraries yesterday. The first one was alright, and I got kind of sad. It seemed to have been randomly decorated and consist mostly of tables and chairs and brown colors that remind me of 70s decorating style. Cornell has libraries that you could live in. The second library I went in was much better. It had these red phone booths with no phone in them, which I think are for talking on your cellphone. There was this nice computer lab with red chairs and black and white checkered flooring that made me feel like I was in a PeeWee Herman movie. There were, of course, the typical dingy but wonderful stacks and carrels. There was also a very nice old-fashioned looking room, the closest I've found to an "AD White Library."

Anyway, it is hot here, and I'm considering wandering over to the library just to avoid the heat, but then I will have to take a backpack with a million things, because I am impatient and like to distract myself from whatever I was originally distracting myself with. I am thinking too much about writing and it is like thinking about how to hit a ball in the middle of a soccer game. Either you just do it, naturally, or else you think about it and miss and everything turns out horrible.

I have been reading, a little, and have found some quotes I like from various books. The first (and second, in a way) relate to the previous paragraph:

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” – Ernest Hemingway on F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Moveable Feast, 149

"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." - Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast, 20

"Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing." -- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, final sentence

"In 1920 after marrying Zelda and publishing This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote: 'Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky, I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again." - The Know-It-All, AJ Jacobs, 94

“Brother, I’m not depressed and haven’t lost spirit. Life everywhere is life, life is in ourselves and not in the external. There will be people near me, and to be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter – this is what life is, herein lies its task.”

-- Fyodor Doskeyvsky, in from a letter to his brother after his December 22, 1849 death sentence in which he was reprieved only after facing the firing squad, as quoted in the introduction by Richard Pevear to The Brothers Karamazov, xii

The whole F. Scott Fitzgerald thing happened kind of randomly. It sounds, from these quotes, as if I am obsessed with the man, but really I hadn't read anything by him up until a few months ago when I forced myself to read The Great Gatsby, since some suggest it's one of the greatest books of all time, and also I was living where it took place. Then, a few weeks ago, I read a book about a man who read the encyclopedia, and when he got to the F's he (and I) was halted by Fitzgerald's quote about being so sad because he was so happy (what a curse it is for those of us who feel that, frequently -- and what a contrast it seems to be, for me, to Doskeyvsky's quote, as he was a man who felt sadness before he felt happiness, I think, and could have easily been ruined or dead before writing anything).

Anyway, I have also been trying to read Hemingway. I had read The Old Man & The Sea in high school, and then I wanted to read -- what was it?? -- about war? -- For Whom The Bell Tolls, maybe? It was a book that both Obama and McCain had marked as favorites. I kept reading the first seven pages and then I gave up because I didn't care about the bridge that was going to get blown up and I was impatient. Then I got The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and I read the title story, and another, and then I gave up on that, too. I thought maybe I didn't care for Hemingway. Then I ran into A Moveable Feast in the library, quite randomly, too, because I was in some section I wouldn't have likely visited on purpose, and I thought, what the hell, this book is about a group of writers being poor and starting out, so maybe it will have some good advice for me. And, what do you know, but the second half of the book is about pals Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and thus I collected a few more Fitzgerald quotes. I guess what I'm trying to say is that that this quote list sounds much more academic and intelligently literary than I probably am, and why I feel the need to reveal that, I do not know.