Whitney FI > Recent Status Updates

It was still unthinkable that any US agency would kill its own civilians & lie about it. So the mystery abided, somewhere beyond youthful absences surely bound to be temporary, yet short of atrocity. Taken one by one, after all, given the dropout data & migratory preferences, each could be explained without appealing to anything more sinister than a desire for safety. Vond referred to it humorously as “rapture.”

She woke in bedsheets smelling of vinegar, motel sheets at very first morning light, cold seeping through the inches of space beneath the metal door, another shape in the dark by the other bed, the smell of a cigarette, long minutes of knowing she was there but not who she was.

They’d been married, as a matter of fact, during a classical sixties acid trip, in which it became beyond clear to them both that in some other world they had been well acquainted. In this one, however, they only seemed programmed for unhappiness.

The schoolroom line was, You’ll never know enough about your body to take responsibility for it, so better just hand it over to those who are qualified, doctors and lab technicians and by extension coaches, employers, boys with hardons, so forth—alarmed, not to mention pissed off, DL reached the radical conclusion that her body belonged to herself.

Many told her, one way and another, that it was enough for them to get by in real time without diverting precious energy to what, face it, was fifteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave.

Zoyd, already well into second thoughts anyway, instead spent the rest of that evening, and in fact many other nights down the years to come, not to mention daylight beer breaks, freeway meditations, and toilet-seat reveries, obsessing about his wife—he never would get too comfortable with “ex-wife”—and managing to bum out everybody inside a radius even these days considered respectable.

Every time Adina brings up that ET was the first movie she saw in the theater I think, “me too!” Then she tells her boyfriend and he’s like, “It was everybody our age’s first film in a theater.” And I was like, “Oh.”

The flight attendant’s voice startles her. He has returned to crouch beside her. “After reaching cruising altitude,” he says, “nothing can force a plane out of the sky. So what are you afraid of? Wind or engine failure?” “Staying the same forever,” she says. “And wind.”

I promised myself I’d never read any Pynchon. He tends to attract insufferable blowhards. Oscar nominations come out tomorrow and I fully expect this to get an adaptation nom. Guess I figured out where my priorities lie. I’ve already seen One Battle After Another, hopefully I don’t hate this too much.

I understand this girl, for I too have a lifelong obsession with Carl Sagan.

This book was purchased for me by my job - we're supposed to be discussing it mid-February. This is tragic and awful and serves to remind there are so few protocols keeping us safe from the food and drugs we consume. And only with diligent oversight can we ever be considered remotely safe.

Human beings, Adina faxes, did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters. A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track. Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off.

When it was time to decide the official food of movie-watching, human beings did not go for Fig Newtons or caramel, foods that are silent, but popcorn, the loudest sound on Earth.

There is no reason to have a swing. This makes the swing an anomaly because in addition to its intended purpose every object in the apartment must also function in two or three other ways. Everything repurposed, everything salvaged. Even she, the child, was meant to fulfill several things at once: to be silent, useful, hardworking, a credit to her father.

Hopelessness has the insidious talent of explaining everything: the reason X or Y sucks is that everything sucks, the reason you’re miserable is because misery is the correct response to the world as we find it, and so on. I am prone to despair, and so I know its powerful voice; it just doesn’t happen to be true.

In all the heartbreaks of reading about tuberculosis, perhaps none has stayed with me quite like the image of a father trying to write in his dead daughter’s handwriting to his living daughter, in the hopes that she wouldn’t be crushed by the truth. In this father we see the humanity of people whose lives are torn asunder by TB—a humanity that is too often denied or minimized through stigma or romanticization.

Magazines also offered instructions for how to apply red paint to the lips and cheeks to capture the hectic glow of consumptive fevers. I probably do not need to point out that these standards of beauty are still informing what is considered to be feminine beauty in much of the world.

We would like to imagine that human history is largely the story of human choice. Perhaps this is why rumors have swirled for millennia that Alexander the Great died of poisoning even though he died of typhoid or malaria. We simply don’t want a world where even the most powerful emperor can be felled by mere infection. But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.

But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

The grave is a shock. A deep, dark rip in the earth, as if made by the careless slash of a giant claw. It is over at the far side of the graveyard. Just beyond it, the river is taking a slow, wide bend, turning its waters in another direction. Its surface is opaque today, braided like a rope, rushing always onwards.

He can feel Death in the room, hovering in the shadows, over there beside the door, head averted, but watching all the same, always watching. It is waiting, biding its time. It will slide forward on skinless feet, with breath of damp ashes, to take her, to clasp her in its cold embrace, and he, Hamnet, will not be able to wrest her free. Should he insist it takes him too?

She had lain down, fitting herself into his form; he had nestled his face into her back. She had found a skein of his hair and smoothed it, twisting and twisting it between her fingers; she had pictured the thoughts in his head drawing upwards, along his hair, into her fingers, as a reed draws water up its hollow stem.

Eliza doesn’t say that she worries about Anne, all alone, so young, without her, wherever she may be. That for a long time she lay awake at night, whispering her name, just in case she was listening, from wherever she was, in case the sound of Eliza’s voice was a comfort to her. The pain of wondering if Anne was distressed somewhere and that she, Eliza, was unable to hear her, unable to reach her.

She grows up feeling wrong, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. But she grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved for what you are, not what you ought to be.

Most of all, Lewis wished he could tell his students that they transfigured his lonely ambition into a dream to change the world; how they were all artists of the highest caliber, fulfilling humankind’s highest duty and delivering the message: faith lived in the darkest rooms.

Wren started to fuss, and Angela bounced her on a hip until she settled. Marcos looked on as if he were a little boy, a helpless victim to adult choices. “Don’t you think everything happens for a reason?” Marcos asked, hoping Angela would, once again, sit at his feet; lap up his recited, unlived wisdom; carry his broken world on her young shoulders. Wind, wind, wind, Angela thought. “No. I don’t.”

Rick could handle the sight of an open wound, work with no sleep, tell a patient they were dying, but did not have the courage to hold his own wife, or say he would love her until the day he died. A man of his era, one in a generation of boys who were trained to lead but never feel, one in a generation of boys who became staunch, withholding men in lonely rooms, looking out at life with no way to touch it.

If she stayed on the road, Wren could continue wrapping herself in the comfortable blanket of liminality. So she took a northern detour because returning home felt like a commitment to a life that could go on without him.

Wren saw now how passion was delicate and temporary, a visitor, a feeling that would come and go. Feelings fled under pressure; feelings did not light the darkness. What remained strong in the deep, the hard times, was love as an effort, a doing, a conscious act of will. Soulmates, like her and Lewis, were not theoretical and found. They were tangible, built.

Lewis was the sort of educator who changed his students, especially the young men, on a formative and fundamental level. As a grown man comfortable with his own vulnerability, he inspired his students to enter an uncommon domain, a place where fear, sadness, and rage were worthwhile experiences rather than things to smile through or tuck away.