It has been so hard to write lately. It feels like there is just so much sadness in the world right now, although I am blessed to be safe, and warm, and loved. Many of my students are struggling with the overwhelming pressure they feel to be perfect teenage girls; the pictures from Japan break my heart (although I am so glad that our family is safe and even has a new baby to celebrate in Tokyo); and most of all, my colleague and fellow teacher is dying. I went back to find a quote from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves that I remembered standing out for me when I first read it in college, and now it seems even more true:
By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry. When the storm crosses the marsh and sweeps over me where I lie in the ditch unregarded I need no words. Nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor. None of those resonances and lovely echoes that break and chime from nerve to nerve in our breasts, making wild music, false phrases. I have done with phrases.
How much better is silence; the coffee-cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee-cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
