Gahhh just noticed my handwriting is atrocious here lol. Late night scribbling by the English Lit geek in me…
nksheridan
There is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.
“By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic ‘the self-transcendence of human existence’. It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fufill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.”
from ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by Viktor E. Frankl
Anatomy Class by Suhayl Saadi
“We had a whole human body to dissect over a period of eighteen months. As the corpus of our knowledge slowly grew, the corpse before us steadily shrank.
In those days (the early 1980s) we were encouraged not to wear gloves. As a teenage medical student, cutting up, pulling apart and examining every last millimetre of this body, spending more time in intimate contact with it than I had spent with any other being, it began to dawn on me that the flesh beneath my fingers, the brain half-floating in the glass jar, was actually a person who had given permission for me to dissect her in this manner and that for me this was an unimaginable privilege. In spite of the thousands of living bodies that I have examined and treated over the years since, this one corpse - her smell, her texture, the sounds and shadows of her slow dismemberment - lingers most in my memory, in the prints of my fingers. I never knew her name. nor the slightest detail concerning her life, yet after meeting her, I was never able to view the human body, or life, in the same way again. In a sense, her humanity had been stolen. But she took my innocence.”
Second Tooth
The first one came out the week of her birthday.
This second tooth's harder: she pushes
and pushes at it with her tongue, tries to grip and drag it out.
Nothing comes but blood.
*
In the museum is the jawbone of a child, undated.
A label in fine ink: Upper and Lower Milk Teeth and first permanent molar.
You can see the next loose milk tooth,
jutting squintly from the lower jaw.
Nobody dislodged it when the child died,
nobody kept that little white seed-pearl.
They left the mouth as it was, when its tongue
could wiggle the wobbly tooth,
and there was almost a gap in the grin.
*
At the school gate she's clutching the tooth
in a paper towel. It fell out at playtime
just when she'd finished her apple and milk.
That night she wraps it in tissue
puts it under her pillow
with a note for the fairy not to take it away.
In the morning, a shining twenty pence
that she puts with the tooth in her heart-shaped box.
Inside her mouth, the permanent molars,
the teeth of an adult, are pushing and pushing through.
“Well if a single cell contains so much perhaps a single molecule and atom has more than we think.. Have you ever had any personal experience of dermoid cysts?.. You know that such cases are common enough in surgery, and that no pathological museum is without an example.. But what are we to understand by it? So startling a phenomenon must have a deep meaning. That can only be, I think, that every cell in the body has the power latent in it by which it may reproduce the whole individual”
- Arthur Conan Doyle, Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life, 1915
“Mummy and Daddy were the same, talking about their yesterdays and smiling in that sad-happy way while selecting each picture, each frame from the past, examining it lovingly before it vanished again in the mist. But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated - not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain”
from Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Fine Balance
Broken men
Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poor shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners.
They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.
Then they get a taste of battle. For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their friends die, fathers lose their sons; friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.
They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting.
If they want new boots or a warmer cloak, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be.
- A Feast for Crows (A Song of Ice and Fire #4) by George R.R. Martin
“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
― Viktor E. Frankl
I shall endure harsh words
As the elephant endures the shafts of battle.
For many people speak wildly.
The tamed elephant goes to battle.
The king rides him.
The tamed man is the master.
He can endure hard words in peace.
Better than a mule
Or the fine horses of Sindh
Or mighty elephants of war
Is the man who had mastered himself.
Not on their backs
Can he reach the untrodden country.
But only on his own.
The mighty elephant Dhanapalaka
Is wild when he is in rut,
And when bound he will not eat,
Remembering the elephant grove.
The fool is idle.
He eats and he rolls in his sleep
Like a hog in a sty.
And he has to live life over again.
“My own mind used to wander
Wherever pleasure or desire or lust led it.
But now I have it tamed,
I guide it,
As the keeper guides the wild
elephant.”
Awake.
Be the witness of your thoughts.
The elephant hauls himself from the mud.
In the same way drag yourself out of your sloth.
If the traveller can find
A virtuous and wise companion
Let him go with him joyfully
And overcome the dangers of the way.
But if you cannot find
Friend or master to go with you,
Travel on alone -
Like a king who has given away his kingdom,
Like an elephant in the forest.
Travel on alone,
Rather than with a fool for company.
Do not carry with you your mistakes.
Do not carry your cares.
Travel on alone.
Like an elephant in the forest.
To have friends in need is sweet
And to share happiness.
And to have done something good
Before leaving this life is sweet,
And to let go of sorrow.
To be a mother is sweet,
And a father.
It is sweet to live arduously,
And to master yourself.
O how sweet it is to enjoy life,
Living in honesty and strength!
And wisdom is sweet,
And freedom.
- Chapter XXIII “The Elephant” from Dhammapada (English translation by Müller (1881) from the Pali text). The text is traditionally ascribed to the Buddha himself.
