“When I recovered the blouse, I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go. I […] found that my memory had turned it into something more familiar […] ” (Solnit, pg. 3)
Solnit phrases this in a way that frees her of responsibility from this memory that she was unable to wrap her head around. It reads almost like she’s disassociating, as if she’s another entity that’s casually taking note of how the blouse made her feel. When she “finds” that her mind warped her memory of the blouse, it feels like she’s lost control of herself and is now trying to regain control of the reigns to her life. This creates distance, where Solnit seems to reminisce from a 3rd person perspective, resulting in a quiet, melancholy, and dreamy writing style.
“Breakfast. A second breakfast forty-five minutes later. Lunch. Snacks all afternoon: last night’s meat, cold cuts, a hard-boiled egg. Happy hour with my wife: drinks, chips, cheese, and salami; if she wasn’t home, just drinks and chips. Then dinner, with wine, until it hurt.”
I think this moment accurately captures the ferocity with which Louie enjoyed food, the act of eating itself, prior to the cancer treatment. He loved it so much it caused him pain on occasion, when over indulging, but it was a pain worth repeating, worth introducing to the list of every day meals he enjoyed. I think it also prefaces for the reader that pain is a large part of this essay, that pain was an essential part of his experience, although the pain of the absence of something he loves is very different to the pain of the presence of too much of it. I like the way this is formatted like a list as well, I think that it’s effective to the sense of repetition, reinforcing how often he enjoyed food every day on every possible occasion.
“Since when were talking and swallowing optional? And how did one go about choosing? A pros-and-cons list?” (Beard)
This line made me feel so grateful because till now, I do not have to actively make a choice between talking or swallowing. I truly take for granted the ability to talk and swallow anytime I want, and it is certainly easy to not remind ourselves of all the small things we should be grateful for. Like the ability to eat all the food in the world and the ability to say whatever we want. This article written by Beard has been a very timely reminder of how the problems I am facing now are small, and can be solved, because there are many things that I can be grateful for.
So far this has been my favorite article. I always forget how important it is to be grateful for the little and simple pleasures of life, until I read something like this. It made me grateful for being able to experience my grandpa’s food. I always go to my grandpa’s house on Sundays, and he always hosts the holidays, so he cooks a lot of food. I love his food and enjoying those times with him.
“The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.” (Solnit p.1)
I love this line. I love how colors can mean so many things and yet they can all be connected. I often feel those emotions in my body. It’s a very internal and mental idea for me. I really enjoyed the connection to color, location, and emotion. It really pulled all the ideas together in a nice little picture. I think it really helps to bring other things into an emotion, such as color, location, or temperature. I think it’s really powerful and helps other people understand what you’re saying or feeling.
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. (Solnit, 1)
This was the very first line of Solnit’s essay, and it was probably my favorite line that I have read in this unit so far. This one line sets the tone for the entire piece, and how she simply uses the one color, blue, and describes with it so many different emotions. Normally, the color is blue is used to denote sad emotions, but here, I liked Solnit’s usage of the color to represent hope. Based on the essay’s title, “The Blue of Distance”, I thought Solnit would lament about the loss of something. However, I instead was surprised and found it very refreshing to see that the color blue is used in various different contexts in this essay. I also found it very interesting to see the clarity with which the different shades of blue are talked about, such as “melancholy blue” and “blue at the horizon”, just to name a few, along with the vividness and depth with which Solnit relates her personal stories and anecdotes. This, as readers, allows us to have a very visual experience while reading the essay and feel like we are in the moment experiencing what Solnit is saying or recounting.
“’You have control over this,’ he explains in his professor voice. ‘You can decide how long she suffers.’” (Beard, 8)
I was intrigued by how Beard expresses their innermost thoughts through sly remarks in their pieces. Beard expressed a double-ended quote while talking to Chris, their coworker. Even though they are talking about Beard’s beloved dog whom they do not wish to put down, the sentence remains ambiguous. This specific phrase caught my eye because it resembled a metaphor – not quite explicit but there. Beard puts an emphasis on their pet, who struggles every day with her age, from stumbling down the stairs to having strokes, throughout this piece — but why? In a way, the dog might be a representation of Beard’s physical and mental state at that moment. Beard is overwhelmed with their divorce and pestering husband, squirrels in the house, and work. The dog, who suffers, is a representation of Beard and with Chris saying this, he emphasizes that Beard has full autonomy over themselves and can end whatever may trouble them. Yet, Beard decides not to. I thought it was an interesting method to use the third person and an animal to represent the writer as a suffering human being as if they are that distant from themselves from being one.
“Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.” The Blue Of Distance by Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide for Getting Lost (p. 4).
I deeply appreciated both of these pieces for what they both do, which is name what is unnameable, and write down what can never be spoken. They each describe these almost metaphysical experiences, and capture such deeply ephemeral concepts with their writing. How does one describe what it is to be a child and what it is to remember? I don’t know, but I know Solnit does it. How does one invoke the exact terror that one feels when the sun disappears, and the impermanence of our very selves? I don’t know, but I know Dillard does it.
I will admit that the Dillard piece grew on me more the second time I read it. There was a slight nihilism to it that made me balk, but the lines, “We were born and bored at a stroke… Enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home,” absolutely stopped me in my tracks. I find this ability that they both demonstrate to be at the core of what it means to be a writer—to feel the glimmer of moments Didion spoke of, the “Moments of Being” Woolf writes about, and to pay attention to the world and professionally observe, as Sontag said.
“If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?” (Solnit, p. 1)
This line stands out to me because it is the thesis of an essay that is almost not a personal story at all. Solnit’s experiences – witnessing San Francisco and the mountains, wearing her mother’s clothes, walking to Antelope Island, etcetera – form the basis of a larger argument about the relationship between desire and distance. She asks questions about what it means to want something as a human being, and while her anecdotes serve as points of evidence, they do not carry the work on their own. At the same time, they are essential to the argument, an argument which does not have a concrete answer as it would if it were a fully argumentative essay. Instead, Solnit uses them to propose her views on desire and to support her belief that longing is more complex than it is often treated.
“When I recovered the blouse, I lost the memory, for the two were irreconcilable. It vanished in an instant, and I saw it go. I […] found that my memory had turned it into something more familiar […] ” (Solnit, pg. 3)
Solnit phrases this in a way that frees her of responsibility from this memory that she was unable to wrap her head around. It reads almost like she’s disassociating, as if she’s another entity that’s casually taking note of how the blouse made her feel. When she “finds” that her mind warped her memory of the blouse, it feels like she’s lost control of herself and is now trying to regain control of the reigns to her life. This creates distance, where Solnit seems to reminisce from a 3rd person perspective, resulting in a quiet, melancholy, and dreamy writing style.
“Breakfast. A second breakfast forty-five minutes later. Lunch. Snacks all afternoon: last night’s meat, cold cuts, a hard-boiled egg. Happy hour with my wife: drinks, chips, cheese, and salami; if she wasn’t home, just drinks and chips. Then dinner, with wine, until it hurt.”
I think this moment accurately captures the ferocity with which Louie enjoyed food, the act of eating itself, prior to the cancer treatment. He loved it so much it caused him pain on occasion, when over indulging, but it was a pain worth repeating, worth introducing to the list of every day meals he enjoyed. I think it also prefaces for the reader that pain is a large part of this essay, that pain was an essential part of his experience, although the pain of the absence of something he loves is very different to the pain of the presence of too much of it. I like the way this is formatted like a list as well, I think that it’s effective to the sense of repetition, reinforcing how often he enjoyed food every day on every possible occasion.
“Since when were talking and swallowing optional? And how did one go about choosing? A pros-and-cons list?” (Beard)
This line made me feel so grateful because till now, I do not have to actively make a choice between talking or swallowing. I truly take for granted the ability to talk and swallow anytime I want, and it is certainly easy to not remind ourselves of all the small things we should be grateful for. Like the ability to eat all the food in the world and the ability to say whatever we want. This article written by Beard has been a very timely reminder of how the problems I am facing now are small, and can be solved, because there are many things that I can be grateful for.
So far this has been my favorite article. I always forget how important it is to be grateful for the little and simple pleasures of life, until I read something like this. It made me grateful for being able to experience my grandpa’s food. I always go to my grandpa’s house on Sundays, and he always hosts the holidays, so he cooks a lot of food. I love his food and enjoying those times with him.
“The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.” (Solnit p.1)
I love this line. I love how colors can mean so many things and yet they can all be connected. I often feel those emotions in my body. It’s a very internal and mental idea for me. I really enjoyed the connection to color, location, and emotion. It really pulled all the ideas together in a nice little picture. I think it really helps to bring other things into an emotion, such as color, location, or temperature. I think it’s really powerful and helps other people understand what you’re saying or feeling.
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. (Solnit, 1)
This was the very first line of Solnit’s essay, and it was probably my favorite line that I have read in this unit so far. This one line sets the tone for the entire piece, and how she simply uses the one color, blue, and describes with it so many different emotions. Normally, the color is blue is used to denote sad emotions, but here, I liked Solnit’s usage of the color to represent hope. Based on the essay’s title, “The Blue of Distance”, I thought Solnit would lament about the loss of something. However, I instead was surprised and found it very refreshing to see that the color blue is used in various different contexts in this essay. I also found it very interesting to see the clarity with which the different shades of blue are talked about, such as “melancholy blue” and “blue at the horizon”, just to name a few, along with the vividness and depth with which Solnit relates her personal stories and anecdotes. This, as readers, allows us to have a very visual experience while reading the essay and feel like we are in the moment experiencing what Solnit is saying or recounting.
“’You have control over this,’ he explains in his professor voice. ‘You can decide how long she suffers.’” (Beard, 8)
I was intrigued by how Beard expresses their innermost thoughts through sly remarks in their pieces. Beard expressed a double-ended quote while talking to Chris, their coworker. Even though they are talking about Beard’s beloved dog whom they do not wish to put down, the sentence remains ambiguous. This specific phrase caught my eye because it resembled a metaphor – not quite explicit but there. Beard puts an emphasis on their pet, who struggles every day with her age, from stumbling down the stairs to having strokes, throughout this piece — but why? In a way, the dog might be a representation of Beard’s physical and mental state at that moment. Beard is overwhelmed with their divorce and pestering husband, squirrels in the house, and work. The dog, who suffers, is a representation of Beard and with Chris saying this, he emphasizes that Beard has full autonomy over themselves and can end whatever may trouble them. Yet, Beard decides not to. I thought it was an interesting method to use the third person and an animal to represent the writer as a suffering human being as if they are that distant from themselves from being one.
“Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.” The Blue Of Distance by Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide for Getting Lost (p. 4).
I deeply appreciated both of these pieces for what they both do, which is name what is unnameable, and write down what can never be spoken. They each describe these almost metaphysical experiences, and capture such deeply ephemeral concepts with their writing. How does one describe what it is to be a child and what it is to remember? I don’t know, but I know Solnit does it. How does one invoke the exact terror that one feels when the sun disappears, and the impermanence of our very selves? I don’t know, but I know Dillard does it.
I will admit that the Dillard piece grew on me more the second time I read it. There was a slight nihilism to it that made me balk, but the lines, “We were born and bored at a stroke… Enough is enough. One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even from the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home,” absolutely stopped me in my tracks. I find this ability that they both demonstrate to be at the core of what it means to be a writer—to feel the glimmer of moments Didion spoke of, the “Moments of Being” Woolf writes about, and to pay attention to the world and professionally observe, as Sontag said.
“If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?” (Solnit, p. 1)
This line stands out to me because it is the thesis of an essay that is almost not a personal story at all. Solnit’s experiences – witnessing San Francisco and the mountains, wearing her mother’s clothes, walking to Antelope Island, etcetera – form the basis of a larger argument about the relationship between desire and distance. She asks questions about what it means to want something as a human being, and while her anecdotes serve as points of evidence, they do not carry the work on their own. At the same time, they are essential to the argument, an argument which does not have a concrete answer as it would if it were a fully argumentative essay. Instead, Solnit uses them to propose her views on desire and to support her belief that longing is more complex than it is often treated.