My comfort

It’s so easy to get swept up in the daily rigor of work and responsibilities and socializing. When this happens, I stop writing for me. My career is in writing, so I certainly still write. I write about other people and I write about them for the public.

An unexpected desire to write for myself cropped up this week. So I opened a blank document and I started writing the story I’ve always needed to document. It’s one I couldn’t summon for a very long time. One that was sort of hidden away for compartmentalization purposes at first, and then tucked away in a corner while I enjoyed life.

For the 23 years I’ve lived and the 19 or so I have any recollection of, I can only describe myself as a deeply confused person about life and people and humankind and the things we do and the things we think. I will never unravel these things, but the act of writing things down in my own voice is something I will always find comfort in. Would I be lost if I wasn’t a writer?

I won’t ever finish the story. But I think I’ll keep writing it.

Write

“Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. You feel dull, you have a headache, nobody loves you, write. If all feels hopeless, if that famous “inspiration” will not come, write. If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if not – and the odds are clearly against it – go to your desk, no matter what your mood, face the very challenge of the paper – write.” —J.B. Priestley

Raw

“If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.” —Erica Jong

All this happened, more or less

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

I have read a lot of wonderful books that don’t necessarily enthrall me from the first sentence. Their gems are tucked away, requiring some time and patience to find. But it would seem that the most esteemed writers, past and present, know how to craft that ever-important first sentence.

The editors of American Book Review compiled a list of what they consider the most memorable first lines of novels.

My favorites from the list range from Charles Dickens to Vladimir Nabokov:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, The Pale Fire

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Do you have any favorites?

 

We need stories to live

“If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story. Yours enlarges the circle.” —Richard Rhodes

The future of I-81

I-81 construction

Years before President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System spread across American cities and eventually through Syracuse, the city’s 15th Ward was a vibrant, diverse community. Within it were high- and low-income residents, white and black neighbors and the city’s first black dentist.

But in the 1950s and ’60s, the largely African-American community was razed to make way for an elevated interstate highway that would displace nearly 1,300 residents to the South Side. Whites took to the suburbs, leaving abandoned buildings in their wake.

“No one asked the community what it wanted when I-81 was built 50 years ago,” said James D’Agostino, director of the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council, the organization responsible for Onondaga County’s transportation planning.

Walking underneath the I-81 viaduct

Today, portions of Interstate-81, the expressway that cuts through Syracuse, are nearing the end of their lifespan. The visibly decaying viaduct, the 1.4-mile elevated strip, prompted the transportation council and the New York State Department of Transportation to launch The I-81 Challenge, a public outreach campaign to address the future of I-81 in the next decade.

Images via The I-81 Challenge blog.

Try to be alive

“The most solid advice . . . for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”  —William Saroyan

Simply experience

“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

—Joseph Campbell

Abandoned

 

I like to think of this abandoned room as the home of some unrecognized genius out in the world. Someone who composed haunting melodies, or holed him (or her) self away to write the next Lolita. Or perhaps, this is the future home of an unemployed college graduate.

It remains to be seen. Pretty though.

Via Design Is Mine.

Foot soldiers

Photos by Andrew Renneisen (via The Daily Orange)

Part 3 of 3: Every year, the Syracuse community gathers in the Carrier Dome to celebrate cancer survivors, honor loved ones lost to the disease and fight back to end cancer. Part Three of this series acknowledges those who fight for the cure.

The abnormal cells grow uncontrollably. They first arrive innocently enough, manifesting themselves as an unusual lump barely worth mentioning. Or a cough that lasts a little too long. Or a bruise that, for some reason, just hasn’t gone away.

The cells spread, invading other parts of the body, destroying tissues in their way. They might travel through a lymph or hide in a white blood cell. Eventually, they announce themselves by ravaging the body they’ve invaded. Too often, they end a life.

Not everyone is willing to sit back and watch.

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