Woohoo!

Two papers: done and done. Final exam was last Monday, I think I did relatively well. The other paper, I will work on at a leisurely pace, at the pace of a snail if you will, over the summer break, and only when I'm done basking in the Palawan sun.

Ah. Tonight I celebrated.

I cut myself a big piece of focaccia bread, slapped an inordinate amount of cream cheese on top, poured myself a glass of red wine, and sat down with Mr. Gopnik and his New York stories.

C'est la vie. :)

The sloth

The problem with me is that I like to waste my time. For hours, I obsess over what I call "art," only to tuck it away in a dog-eared brown envelope with pages of other "art" that look exactly like it, never to see daylight again. For hours, too, I agonize over three-sentence paragraphs, which, in the end, do not say anything. For weeks and weeks, I watch television shows over and over again out of sentimentality, because I do not like endings. Books, too, take forever to finish because I pause every paragraph or so to ruminate over every slight sign of profundity. I spend half the day daydreaming, and the other half telling people about it. For all I have I done so far is think, I have, in the end, accomplished nothing.

Snap out of it. Now, most of all!

What I learned #1

I learned that the beautiful is tedious.

I find that if anything is to be beautiful, it has to be intentional. It is because they are crafted painfully and painstakingly that art and literature possess sublimity. That a poem is not a word more or less, that the letters are positioned so, make a poem a poem. On the canvas every dot is thoughtfully planned-- what color, how big, and why? It is because they are not natural- not mere fruits of the stream of consciousness or the instincts of an effortlessly deft hand- that they are literature and art. For to create a thing of beauty is to go against one's every impulse and to push one's every limit. The artist's concern is to transcend his nature and play god. Art and literature cannot be natural. Beautiful things are beautiful because they are unhuman.

The trick is to extend yourself without snapping.

Imagine yourself a piece of freshly-made taffy, still warm and malleable. Imagine yourself being pulled at the sides. You find yourself stretched to thrice your size. You are folded in half, and then you are stretched again, and then you are much longer. Before you know it, you are all about the room, infecting everything with your sticky sweetness, leaving not a piece of furniture untouched. It's hard to imagine you started out so small, the size of two hands clasped.

The trick is to extend yourself while you are still warm. When you wait until you are hardened, at the faintest tug, you snap and shatter into smithereens.

A part of me actually thinks I can do this. :)