Why We Do This

A meditation on being an English major.

These passages are from some of my go-to works, texts that remind me of why we do what we do.
I urge you to keep a collection like this handy, for when you need to remember that it's not all papers, exams, deadlines, and grades. It's connecting, touching, being moved by one another.


Volare — David Citino

Just as the lights inside our living room
and steam from water boiling on the stove
erase Cleveland from the picture window;
father comes in,
stands in the kitchen, one shoulder thrust forward,
feet apart the way he's seen Lanza stand,
eyelids drooping like Dean Martin's or Como's,
Lucky Strike to lower lip.
We can leave the confusion
and all disillusion behind.
And we know he got the raise,
his laborer's share of the chemical company profits
from the Manhattan project
and the revolution in plastics.
Four hundred a year.  And that's not hay.
He grabs my mother
and spins her before the stove,
wooden spoon brandished like the fine lady's fan
she saw that day in the pages of Life.
Just like birds of a feather
a rainbow together we'll find.
Then he comes for me,
and I'm soaring above cauldrons
of rigatoni and sauce bubbling bright
as the scarlet cassocks altar boys wear
at Christmas and Easter.
He brings me back to earth
and twirls away to phone his mother.
That night when he comes home from moonlighting
in the credit department at Sears,
feet heavy as bricks,
he'll come to my bedroom and tell me again
how there'll be no promotion for him
because he couldn't go to college
but he's still risen higher than his father
who put in fifty years with the B & O.

He'll step out the door
and for a moment his head will be caught in light
like some raptured hoary saint drunk on love
in the window of Ascension of Our Lord
and the last thing I'll hear
will be his lovely forlorn baritone
fading, falling into stillness.
Volare.   Wo-wo.   Cantare.   Wo-o-o-o.



From The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

. . . love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.



Wild Geese — Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.



Those Winter Sundays — Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?



From Paradise Lost — John Milton

How can I live without thee! how forego
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn!
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart: no, no!I feel
The link of Nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.



Sonnet 73 — William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
     This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
     To love that well which thou must leave ere long.



From Il Postino — Furio Scarpelli and Giacomo Scarpelli
(Based on Ardiente Paciencia by Antonio Skármeta)

Dearest Don Pablo,

This is Mario.
I hope you haven't forgotten me . . .
Anyway . . .
Do you remember that you once asked me . . .
To say something nice about my island . . .
and I couldn't think of anything?

Now . . .
I know . . .
So I want to send you this tape . . .
Which, if you want to . . .
You can play to your friends . . .
If not, you can listen to it . . .
Then you'll remember me . . .
and Italy.

When you left here . . .
I thought you'd taken all the beautiful things away with you . . .
But now . . .
now I realize . . .

that you left something behind for me.



From "Newly Wed and Quickly Unraveling" — Wendy C. Ortiz

As I unsealed the envelope, I knew there was a certain kind of love I might never have been privy to until that moment. It was the love of someone who knew me, who had loved me and then had to let me go, in that way you hear about in stories and songs through the ages.

He let me go respectfully, mindfully and lovingly, as best he could while in his own dark lake of loss.



Quarantine — Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking — they were both walking — north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.



From Moonstruck — John Patrick Shanley

I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either. Love don't make things nice; it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are bullshit.



What Work Is — Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.



From "Requiem" — Anna Akhmatova

X
Crucifixion

"Do not weep for Me, Mother,
I am in the grave."

1
A choir of angels sang the praises of that momentous hour,
And the heavens dissolved in fire.
To his Father He said: "Why hast Thou forsaken me!"
And to his Mother: "Oh, do not weep for Me . . ."

2
Mary Magdalene beat her breast and sobbed,
The beloved disciple turned to stone,
But where the silent Mother stood, there
No one glanced and no one would have dared.



Epilogue II
Once more the day of remembrance draws near
I see, I hear, I feel you:

The one they almost had to drag at the end
And the one who tramps her native land no more,

And the one who, tossing her beautiful head,
Said: "Coming here's like coming home."

I'd like to name them all by name,
But the list has been confiscated and is nowhere to be found.

I have woven a wide mantle for them
From their meager, overheard words.
 
I will remember them always and everywhere,
I will never forget them no matter what comes.

And if they gag my exhausted mouth
Through which a hundred million scream,

Then may the people remember me
On the eve of my remembrance day.

And if ever in this country
They decide to erect a monument to me,

I consent to that honor
Under these conditions—that it stand

Neither by the sea, where I was born:
My last tie with the sea is broken,

Nor in the tsar's garden near the cherished pine stump,
Where an inconsolable shade looks for me,

But here, where I stood for three hundred hours,
And where they never unbolted the doors for me.

This, lest in blissful death
I forget the rumbling of the Black Marias,

Forget how that detested door slammed shut
And an old woman howled like a wounded animal.

And may the melting snow stream like tears
From my motionless lids of bronze.

And a prison dove coo in the distance,
And the ships of the Neva sail calmly on.



From "Clearances" — Seamus Heaney

3
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

7
In the last minutes he said more to her
Almost than in all their life together.
‘You'll be in New Row on Monday night
And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad
When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?'
His head was bent down to her propped-up head.
She could not hear but we were overjoyed.
He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,
The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned
And we all knew one thing by being there.
The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

From Omeros — Derek Walcott

His wound healed slowly. He discovered the small joys
that lay in a life patterned like those on the quilt,
and he would speak to her in his normal voice

without feeling silly. Soon he lost any guilt
for her absence. Her absence was far, yet closer
than the blue hills of Saltibus in their cool light.

His memories opened the shutters of mimosa
like the lilies that widened in her pond at night
secretly, like angels, in the faith that was hers.

In the lion-clawed tub he idled in his bath,
he loved the nap of fresh towels, he scrubbed his ears
the way she insisted, he liked taking orders

from her invisible voice. He learned how to pause
in the shade of the stone arch watching the bright red
flowers of the immortelle, he forgot the war's

history that had cost him a son and wife. He read
calmly, and he began to speak to the workmen
not as boys who worked with him, till every name

somehow sounded different; when he thought of Helen
she was not a cause or a cloud, only a name
for a local wonder. He liked being alone

sometimes, and that was the best sign. He knew that Maud
was proud of him whenever the squared sunlight shone
on the taut comforter, that it was so well made.

Chapter LXI, III

from The Commencement Address at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, May 12, 1996 — Seamus Heaney

I have to say this even if it is on Mother's Day, but when my mother was out for the day —indeed especially when she was out for the day— she was a frugal woman, far too self-denying and far too much in thrall to the idea of keeping going to indulge herself or her children in the luxury of catchpennies that she would see, like buckets and spades. After all, we were only out for the day; next morning we'd be back on the land, up in the morning for our porridge, out to the field to bring the cows to the byre and after that to deliver the milk to our neighbors. But still, in her mother's heart, she desperately wanted to do something for us, so off she went to a hardware store and bought not the conventional seaside gear that we desired but a consignment of down-to-earth farm equipment which she could utilize when she went home: instead of bucket and spade, she brought us a plain tin milkcan and a couple of wooden spoons, durable items indeed, useful enough in their own way, but wooden spoons, for God's sake — totally destructive of all glamour and all magic.

I hope it will be obvious why I tell you this: I want to avoid preaching at you, but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another. Calling a spade a spade may be a bit reductive, but calling a wooden spoon a wooden spoon is the beginning of wisdom. And you will be sure to keep going in life on a far steadier keel and with far more radiant individuality if you navigate by that principle.