Beauty, Longing, Sexuality, Shame, Devotion

I got this shirt for her in hopes to make lite of time I put sonnet 24 on bike. boyfriend kind of thought bike note crossed a line :tongue:, over four years ago now.

 

Sonnet 24
william shakespeare

Mine eye hath played the painter, and hath steeled
Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,
And perspective it is best painter's art;
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes:
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, wherethrough the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art:
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

 

attached letter written: ~10/17/07-10/24/07.

I'm not very sure why these emotions and memories have recently resurfaced. I haven't thought a lot of her last three years, before attached letter, though feelings haven't changed. I've been busy with other things. I suppose I'm also getting nearer to deciding whether move back to Cincinnati.

There were only a few times in two years she was annoyed at me going into store, and this at very end, when I wanted to be sure she didn’t have feelings for me, before I moved away. I went into CNF at least every other day, but most times, avoided going when she might be working, as it sometimes hurt me to see her, and distracted from work I needed to do.

Emily was always polite and kind, even after knowing I had feelings for her, but never gave reason to think she was interested. She did begin avoiding me when boyfriend knew I wanted to talk with her more. I gave her a letter with him standing right there! I wasn't completely sure about them at this point however, though I probably could have been.

 

The Broken Heart
John Donne, Songs and Sonnets, 1635.

He is stark mad, who ever says,
That he hath been in love an hour,
Yet not that love so soon decays,
But that it can ten in less space devour;
Who will believe me, if I swear
That I have had the plague a year?
Who would not laugh at me, if I should say,
I saw a flask of powder burn a day?

Ah, what a trifle is a heart,
If once into Love's hands it come!
All other griefs allow a part
To other griefs, and ask themselves but some,
They come to us but us Love draws,
He swallows us, and never chaws:
By him, as by chain-shot, whole ranks do die,
He is the tyrant pike, our hearts the fry.

If 'twere not so, what did become
Of my heart, when I first saw thee?
I brought a heart into the room,
But from the room, I carried none with me;
If it had gone to thee, I know
Mine would have taught thy heart to show
More pity unto me: but Love, alas,
At one first blow did shiver it as glass.

Yet nothing can to nothing fall,
Nor any place be empty quite,
Therefore I think my breast hath all
Those pieces still, though they be not unite;
And now as broken glasses show
A hundred lesser faces, so
My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,
But after one such love, can love no more.

 

Very powerful, Much Love & Many Thanks for sharing ~~*

 

"He was intoxicated with the party which he hadn't joined, and he was weary with jealousy. It had been the same as always, the same as always! With a flushed face, he had stood in a dark spot, painfully yearning for you, you blonde, lively, happy people, and had then gone away in his loneliness. Someone had to come now! Ingeborg had to come now, she had to notice that he was gone, she had to slip after him, put her hand on his shoulder and say, 'Come on in and join us! Be cheerful! I love you!' But she did not come. Such things did not occur." (-Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel, ~1998.)

 

"The observations and encounters of a loner who seldom speaks are both more nebulous and more penetrating than those of a gregarious man; his thoughts are more intense, more peculiar, and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions, which might easily be brushed aside with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy his mind unduly; they are deeper in silence, take on significance, become experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude ripens originality in us, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude also ripens the perverse, the asymmetrical, the absurd, the forbidden." (-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel, ~1998.)

 

that's an intriguing quote.

 

"Nothing is more bizarre, more ticklish, than a relationship between two people who know each other only with their eyes—who encounter, observe each other daily, even hourly, never greeting, never speaking, constrained by convention or by caprice to keep acting the indifferent strangers. They experience discomfort and overwrought curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally stifled need to recognize and to exchange, and they especially feel something like a tense mutual esteem. For people love and honor someone so long as they cannot judge him, and yearning is a product of defective knowledge." (-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel, ~1998.)

 

I was able to find Emily's address in North Carolina. I sent box to her. If she is in relationship, she will not respond. "Just give up! Move on, my good man!" I hear in echos throughout HipForum halls. And I say to you "Never!" Never have I seen someone and thought I would do most anything to have this person in my life. I will not give up!

 

"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day." (-Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Chapter 9, last paragraph.)

 

I found an article dated 11/7/07 in which Emily Svendsen from FBFC said Tofurky is "pretty popular" and convenient at holiday times, and that, being vegan, she would be subsituting soymilk and vegan margarine into dishes like mashed pototoes, among other things. 12/6/07.
What can I say? She married the boy at CNF. I feel completely stupid for sending those things.

 

-from an undated journal writing-
"If I could go back (Spring 2002), not as I was, but as I am now, I would not have given her first letter, with green and yellow hero image, Plato, and three sonnets; and I would not have moved home in summer to study Greek and Latin and be with my family. I would have stayed and gotten job at CNF, continuing on part time when school started, taking fewer classes, if only just to know about her, be friends with her. I have feeling I would be better off now, had I done these things. Opportunity is there when it is, and then it is lost, sometimes forever."

 

—Elisabeth Vandiver. TTC Course No.243: "Classical Mythology." Lecture six: "Immortals and Mortals." ~2007.

"Let's go back to Pandora's jar, and the fact that Hope is in that jar. The presence of Hope in a jar of evils is very striking, but it's also extremely difficult to interpret. Many commentaries on Hesiod's Works and Days, big learned tomes that talk about just about the meaning of every word of every line, will say things at this point like, "the presence of Hope in the jar seems very surprising", and leave it at that, which doesn't do us much good.

I always like when I teach myth in the classroom to send students away one day with instruction to think about what Hope is doing in the jar, then have them come back the next day and tell me what they think about it. And the most usual suggestion I get, the most modern interpretation, is a rather optimistic one that Hope is there to indicate that no matter how bad things get, we still have Hope. Well, that's nice, but I think it ignores two very important points. Hope is still in the jar. She's not out there in the world—I say she because it is a she in Greek. She's not out in the world with the other evils or with the evils in general. She's still in the jar. She is somehow different. Her status is somehow different from the other things that were in the jar. Secondly, if Hope is a good thing, why is she in the jar of evils to begin with? What is she doing there?

The other interpretation I get, which is equal but opposite, very interestingly, is extremely pessimistic. Someone will usually say that Hope's retention in the jar is meant to indicate there is no Hope, that even that tiny consolation for human kind is utterly absent, that the Greeks were completely pessimistic—there is no Hope; we might as well just all lie down and die. I think that goes a little bit too far in the opposite direction.

I don't have a good answer for this. I'm not sure why Hope is in the jar, but what I've worked out, over years of thinking about this with my students, is that the key may be that the word we translate as Hope, elpis in Greek, is not an unambiguously good thing. We after 2000 years of Judeo-Christian religion tend to think that hope is unambiguously good. It's one of the three cardinal virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. But the Greek word elpis might be better translated expectation rather than hope. It can be good, but it can also be bad. If hope is the only thing that gets you through a dreadful situation, and things do come right for you in the end, then hope was a good thing. But what about if you go years and years with the false expectation that something will happen that never does, and all of your possibilities run out, and all of your chances disappear because of the expectation that was never fulfilled, then it's a very evil thing. And I think the ambiguous nature of hope may be the key point here, that hope is both good and evil, could be good and evil—this might even explain why it's under the lip of the jar. It's not entirely good, so it's in the jar to begin with; it's not entirely evil, so it doesn't escape into the world. At any rate, that's the best I can do with it."

 

...that was amazing that was pretty much the fucking story of my life im honestly baffled and in love with your writing.

 

I would like to say thank you for never deleting or losing this thread--in some unnecessary upgrade. I appreciate that.