The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan

p. 54-55

I remembered that Pete had once suggested that I apply my linguistics knowledge toward working with disabled children. He had said this a month or so before he died. He himself had intended to make computerised equipment for people with disabilities. At the time, his suggestion held no appeal for me. I was not particularly fond of children, except as objects of research, and I knew nothing about disabilities.

But once I quit my doctoral program, I found a job listing for exactly what he had in mind: a language development specialist for a county program serving children, newborns to five years old, who had developmental disabilities. At the interview, it was as apparent to the administrator as it was to me that I was both overqualified and specifically underqualified for this job. When the interview ended and I stood to leave, I heard Pete telling me that I should simply tell this woman my motivations in applying for a job with exactly these challenges and unknowns. And out came my story of Pete’s death and my pledge to do with my life what he had intended to do with his. Ten minutes later, I was hired.

It was my job to observe the children, informally assess their communication skills, and then work with parents and teachers to devise a plan and help them carry it out.

I remember the first talk on language development I gave for the parents. I mustered all my knowledge, prepared a detailed examination of the steps and processes entailed in language acquisition, and delivered an impressive one-hour lecture to a dozen parents, many of whom had just been told their babies had Down’s syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism, or some rare congenital disorder that would lead to an early death. At the end of my talk, a mother came up to me and said, “You are so smart.” I never felt more stupid. You just have to learn how to learn, I heard Pete say.

After that, I would listen to parents as they discussed their hopes for their children, and then together we would cry before we set out to find new hopes. With the kids themselves, I learned to play, to discover what made them laugh, what they could not resist watching or touching or reaching for. I found myself observing not deficits but the qualities of souls. Over the next five years, I had opportunities to work with more than a thousand families, and from them I sensed the limitlessness of hope within the limits of human beings. I learned to have compassion. It was the best training I could have had for becoming a writer.

The drawing found its way on to the page whilst listening to Philip Pullman read fairytales from his retelling of the Grimm tales. He wore shoes with red shoelaces.

“Argue with anything else, but don’t argue with your own nature.”

“As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.”

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.”  ― The Amber Spyglass

“Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.”

“Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.” ― The Amber Spyglass

“I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike “identity”, must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (“gay”, “black”, “Muslim”, whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.”

“When he’d sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.” ―  The Golden Compass

“I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.”

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Page 535

He was tall in bed and I could see the silver through his eyelids. His soul sat up. It met me. Those kinds of souls always do – the best ones. The ones who rise up and say, ‘I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.’ Those souls are always more light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places. This one was sent out by the breath of an accordion, the odd taste of champagne in summer, and the art of promise-keeping. He lay in my arms and rested. There was an itchy lunch for the last cigarette, and an immense, magnetic pull towards the basement, for the girl who was his daughter and was writing a book down there that he hoped to read one day.

Drawing inspired by this TED talk.

Women expert in flax weaving explain to learners that the rito, the central shoot from a flax root, is a child, issuing from and protected by its parents and, beyond them, by uncles, aunts and grandparents. The three centre blades should not be cut for weaving or the root will cease to put out new ones.

(Joan Metge’s analysis)

p.176

While Dora and I drafted I walked the room, or the garden if the day was bright, and she sat over her writing pad, flipping the pages around their coil of wire. People often have to be alone to think or to write, but being with Dora wasn’t like being with another person. We rarely made eye contact. I orbited her chair, eyed without seeing how her hair was cut soft into her nape, the gloss of it. To be with Dora was to be relieved of the burden of my self. This is the trick to creative work: it requires a slip-state of being, not unlike love. A state in which you are both most yourself and most alive and yet least sure of your own boundaries, and therefore open to everything and everyone outside of you. The two of us threw ideas and words around until we had carved a new way forward for the world – clearer and surer and nobler than had ever been done before. Then, elated, we went to bed, whatever the time of day.

p.257

A traffic policeman stood on a podium in the road, arms moving from the elbows like a puppet. A scarlet bus careened into the kerb, disgorging its passengers, all of them with somewhere to go. They filed past a street-sweeper in a soft cap with a long-handled dustpan, they wove as if of a single understanding around a group of children being walked out of school. All around me life moved but I could not grasp it.

Although I knew then that there were real forces bearing down on us, this feeling has remained with me all my life, whether in the bustle of London or the beauty of Sydney, on water or land: that there is a complex machinery at work, there are invisible roads in the sea, and there is a meaning to all this which I cannot, for the life of me, uncover.

p. 357

When Bev is gone I get out of bed and make my way down the hall to the front room. My balance is slightly out and I trail my fingertips along the wall. I flick the switch in the room. But the darkness has come inside! The ceiling is black – it is moulting and velvety. Bev must have left a window open; the bogong moths have come in on their migration and lined the place. The room shimmers with brief, misdirected life.

I am a vessel of memory in a world of forgetting.

I sit under the canopy of moths. It is deep dark outside. Everything out there, every squat, sun-bleached house and frangipani tree, the domed synagogue and brick school, the rag-tag shops, the cliffs with the ocean behind them, has vanished. The world has shrunk to a small area of light from the streetlamp. Lines of rain slash through its bright cone. The bogongs are welcome here.

I pick up Ernst. It occurs to me only now: he must have thought of me in his last hours in that hotel.

Toller was always kind to me, but it was clear he inhabited a different sphere. I was neither beautiful nor important enough to occupy a place in his world. But he did not send me this life of his with Dora put back in because I am her cousin. He has sent it because we had her in common. We were the two for whom she was the sun. We moved in her orbit and the force of her kept us going.

His book opens in my hands to this: ‘Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.’

This is what we all believed. It is what he believed, I suppose, till he could no longer.

Imagining the life of another is an act of compassion as holy as any. We drafted the leaflets, cyclostyled the truth. We told the stories on butter paper, in cigar canisters, smuggled them back into Germany. We risked our lives to help our fellows – there and in London – imagine. They did not imagine it. But Toller, great as he was, is not right. It is not that people lack an imagination. It is that they stop themselves using it. Because once you have imagined such suffering, how can you still do nothing?

All That I Am by AnnaFunder

p.96

After he leaves, the happiness of his company persists in the room. I lay my head over the chair back and close my eyes again.

I am slouching, head back on the leather car seat. Dora and I are in a cathedral of trees; from each side of the road poplars arch above us to touch. The dapples of light they admit rush over the bonnet and the windscreen and over our bodies, so we can feel our speed. Dora drives; I never learnt. Her arms are bare but she wears cream kid gloves that fasten across the back of her wrists, and she talks and talks, eyes ahead as the ribbon of road flattens under the car. She is counting votes for something – her politics were much more practical than mine – but I have stopped listening. The wind plays with her hair.

Yesterday afternoon we signed in as man and wife at the Schloss Eckberg in Dresden. As her hand moved across the register I reached into her hair, casually as I could, and removed some grass stalks. Smiling mildly all the while to the concierge. By Dresden on the banks of the Elbe the reeds grow to chest height. Dora had dragged me off the path and deep into them, laughing and pushing me down till the world was a patch of sky in a blurring green frame. In the morning she had three cups of coffee and toyed with her egg before she could smoke, this woman who was all appetite.

I have never felt so wanted. I reach across to hold her neck in my hand.

‘You hungry?” she interrupts her stream of talk. ‘They packed us some food.’

There’s a basket at my feet under the dash. In it I find a magnificent pear. When she bites, the juice drips down.

‘Damn,’ she laughs. I grab my handkerchief and start dabbing in her lap and she shoots me a look, swiping her chin with the back of one leathered hand. The other hand then slipping on the wheel and the wheel spinning through it, the pear airborne past my nose and the car screeching, failing to match the turn in the road. Her feet pump the pedal but it’s no use and we go, slower than is possible, to the end, which comes in a metal scream against one of the poplars.

Steam hisses from the bonnet. Dora pulls herself back from the steering wheel and sees that I am all right. A man runs towards us who turns out to be the town policeman. After he checks that we are unharmed, he shakes his head, looking up and down the empty road on this blue-sky day and wondering aloud how such a thing could happen.

‘Officer,’ Dora offers, as if in full and final explanation, ‘I was eating a pear.’

All That I Am by Anna Funder

p.7

And he had seen inside my mind; he is preparing to tell me the shape and weight and creeping betrayals of it. Last week they loaded me into the MRI machine, horizontal in one of those verdammten gowns that do not close at the back: designed to remind one of the fragility of human dignity, to ensure obedience to instruction, and as a guarantee against last-minute flight.

p.9

Afterwards, I take the bus to hydrotherapy. It is a kneeling bus, one which tilts its forecorner to the ground for the lame, like me. I ride it from the pink medical towers of Bondi Junction along the ridge above the water into town. Out the window a rosella feasts from a flame tree, sneakers hand-dance on an electric wire. Behind them the earth folds into hills that slope down to kiss that harbour, lazy and alive.

p.11

A siren sounds, bleating on and off. Over at the big pool, the waves are going to start. Children walk-run through the water with their hands up, keen to be at the front where the waves will be biggest. Teen girls subtly check that their bikini tops will hold; mothers hip their babies and walk in too, for the fun. A little boy with red goggles darts in up to his chin. Behind him a slight young woman with hair falling in a soft bob on her cheeks walks calmly forward, shoulderblades moving under her skin like intimations of wings.

When we tell one another stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase of the creative process. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problems were impossible to solve. Because such failures contradict the romantic version of events- there is nothing triumphant about a false start- we forget all about them. (The failures also remind us how close to having no stories to tell.) Instead, we skip straight to the breakthroughs. We tell the happy ending first.

The danger of telling this narrative is that the feeling of frustration- the act of being stumped- is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer- before we probably even know the question- we must be immersed in appointment, convinced that the solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost.”

- Imagine, John Lehrer