andave's place

!! I wrote a whole blog and lost it! !!

I'm so excited for 2009! This year I'll turn 18 and go to college. Now, I think I understand what the poets mean when they speak of the glories of youth. It's all a whirl...one life is ending and another beginning...all the world before me...To know of the world and to realize that I am just one of many -- but with a capacity to influence and be influenced by those around me.

I feel especially akin to Ivan from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov -

Would you believe it that ever since that scene with her, I have though of nothing else but my youthful greenness, and just as though you guessed that, you begin about it. Do you know I've been sitting here thinking to myself; that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment -- still I should want to live, and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty, though, I shall be sure to leave the cup, even if I've not emptied it, and turn away -- where I don't know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything -- every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in this world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy.

--although I'm not sure about the 'thirty.' Hopefully by that time I'll have settled into my career as a geeky lit prof by that time, still with some sort of 'unseemly thirst for life' still very much alive in me --

I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha. I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a grave-yard, that's what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I'm convinced in my heart that its long been nothing but a gravek-yard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in my emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky -- that's all it is. It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's stomach. One loves the first strength of one's youth. Do you understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?

It's AMAZING to be alive. All the best to you all in 2009!


Me at the New Year's Ball


A full length pic