Above is perhaps one of my favorite quotes from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Betty Smith
was a genius and she captured life so eloquently that sometimes after
re-reading this book I just have to sit there in amazement. Amazement that the
world, the exact way I feel on things, can be put down into words and presented
in a story. It's wondrous really, and it's so hard to describe to people who
cannot see the power of the written word. Writing it great but moving on…
As like Francie I hope to always be something. Life is so hard and good, and yet, it's hard to know during the bad parts whether you want to life to be there are not. One of my favorite phrases to say, particularly when I'm really depressed, it to say "I just wish I could not exist." It would be so easy, to fade away into nothing, to not be. And I get sad, I really do. And I think about being a human, really being, and the existence. In times of sadness I only know that I'm horrible, horrible about being. But the thing is about being, is that is always going to be there. Even in death I do not think a person cannot cease to be, particularly if they left parts of themselves behind, like say in writing. But it's hard to me, and I imagine everyone else, to know what being is even in the though times. Being is life, and always being there. Francie wants to always be something, because life is so precious and short. And humans, we're always so infinitely young, even in our oldest age, and we can not be, we have to be. It is so great to wish to be, and be more than just a human, to live in every moment, even the sadness. Because being really is more than just existing, it's actually living, and experiencing every drop of life that is squeezed out of that lemon for you.
There is this one phrase that I found once online, it really stirred something in me, so much so that I'm even considering having it tattooed on me one day, but it's still a long way in the thinking process. It's a phrase that says this more, less/ being, human. Only it lines up so that the more falls exactly beside the being and the less, stacked below, is aligned with the human. I feel like people don't get it, because when I try to explain how important that concept is to me, the words fall through the cracks. It really is hard to see. I only this, that with that phrase in mind that I was always to be more, I will always try to be. More than just a human, a simple human that is less than being. It's really not all that hard to grasp, at least not in my mind, but I guess it's all in a matter of perspective.
Now what else? I'm reading this book for My English
Composition class, called White
Privilege. It's actually really interesting, a collection of complicated
essays that present racism and in a unique and interesting way. But not racism
as it is normally thought, but racism from the other side, not that whites are
oppressed but the natural oppression that radiates from people by just being
white. One I find most interesting is that it says how many people never think
about the natural racism that is whiteness itself. But it is seen all over the
place all the time. People or color or separate races are always labeled, how
pictures in the book always say "A young black male," or "an
elderly Asian woman." But the pictures of white people, they do not have
the label white put upon them. And I know this is not the case of all things,
and this book may be a bit outdated (2005) but it's just an odd concept. Being
white is our label of "normalcy".
Currently Reading White Privilege by Paula S. Rothenberg
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