Part 1 of Notes from the Cave can be found here.
Chapter 4: Day One
Sometimes there’s beauty in the cave:
Afraid to say too much, so as not to lose it.
Stayed up
all night
waiting
for this.
(I need healing too)
ΚΑΛΟΝ.ΕΝΤΑΥΘΑ ΤΟΥ ΒΙΟΥ Ω ΦΙΛΕ ΣΩΚΡΑΤΕΣ ΕΦΗ Η ΜΑΝΤΙΝΙΚΗ ΞΕΝΗ ΕΙΠΕΡ ΠΟΥ ΑΛΛΟΘΙ ΒΙΩΤΟΝ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΩ ΘΕΩΜΕΝΩ ΑΥΤΟ ΤΟ ΚΑΛΟΝ – Plato’s Symposium 211d.
Beauty. In that place in life, my dear friend, said the Maniteian stranger, if life’s worth living for a human being, it is in gazing at beauty itself.
(Indeed, to love Socratically is to
descend into the
lowest
posture of humility. So low as to recognize
that teaching in a prison is in fact not a descent
at all but a philosophical ascent to the
transcendent beauty of students’ imperfection, a beauty to raise
classical scholarship towards the Good.)
Chapter 5: Talk Real
Like a tongue without a breath
Without you
I cannot sing
One left I without a right
Without you
Clear not I see
Like a train on Yom Kippur
Knowing you
I have a place
To go.
To NSM
In golden leaves floating through August
Dust. In chrysanthemums, in ferns
In the wet and fragrant darkness
Under trees. In the night couple, laughing and
Stumbling, as I lie across the bed naked
Blasting the second movement of Beethoven’s
Seventh (and in silence also)
I see you too.
I was apprehensive about going in wearing blue jeans and a black button-down that was beginning to smell. My hair, unlike that of all the other women present, was uncovered. But Olim said, “Don’t worry. This is the modern Church”. And he wanted me to film. Remembering Pussy Riot and the man convicted of playing Pokemon in a place of worship, I refused. But he was adamant, and waited until the end of the services to ask the priest.
Chapter 6: Stop Sophis
She was sitting on the stairwell reading Augustine’s Confessions.
Dust swirled lazily in pillars of sparkles above wall-to-wall carpeting. It was Saturday, and the dormitory was almost empty. “Book X. I’m not sure what he is trying to say, but just listen to how it sounds…”
Therefore is the mind too narrow to contain itself. And where should that be which it does not contain of itself?
Her hair was wrapped in a bright green shawl. She was worried that this would amount to cultural appropriation of Islam, but I assured her that she was just fine.
After all, she was only concealing dirty hair.
— We’re comparing Augustine to Rousseau’s Confessions for Readings in World Lit.
— I haven’t read either actually.
— Really, Ariella?
— Well, I read the part about about his mother dying in the place where it is believed to have happened. Ostia Antica.
It was my first time sight reading in Latin.
— That’s pretty cool. When I first went to China I didn’t know any Chinese. But I look Chinese, so they couldn’t figure me out.
— Miranda thought you were Latin American. Because of your freckles.
— I know… But I still miss Beijing. Standing in the basement of an evangelical church on Christmas, because of how crowded the chapel above it was. Hard boiled eggs with spicy chili oil. Learning French on Duolingo…
It really shouldn’t be called a gap year. Because a gap implies that your life will continue in the same direction after the year is over. But what if the line curves or starts again in a different plane?
— What should it be called then?
— A leap year.
I don’t remember how long we spent talking that day. There were nights when we almost didn’t sleep at all, because we were talking. And mornings when I didn’t sleep because her alarm went off over and over again until I mustered the courage to yell:
SOPHIA, I think that you’ve overslept your alarm.
And a night when I could only sleep, because I slept in her bed.
The day that we were talking about Augustine’s Confessions, I should have been writing an essay about Plato. It felt delightfully transgressive, yet in the end the essay came out well. Sophia, on the other hand, failed a lot.
I wanted to fail like her.
The sky behind the narrow Prairie Style window began to grow purple, so that the dust was no longer visible. “Are you guys ready?” Miranda called. It was time to go down to Bartlett. Sophia unwrapped her hair and ran her fingers through it, trying to quickly untangle all of the knots.
She winced as she pulled out a stubborn tuft, rolled it into a ball and picked up the book.
“Before we go, just listen to this,” she said:
Not only things, but also literature and images, are taken from memory, and are brought forth by the act of remembering.
Chapter 7: Still Shabbos
10.29.18
There were snowflakes in my hair and on my coat. In my grandmother’s fifth floor apartment on Krylatskoe street, it was already cold. I rubbed my hands together under the covers, and, as I was drifting off, I remembered that I had promised I would try to pray.
Before brushing my teeth, I had cried about the massacre. About the heartless spectacle of reading about it on Facebook. Had I cared this much about Charleston?
But now, in bed, it was too warm to assume the proper posture of grief.
How good the soba noodles were at Jagannath.
How good to feel my toes wiggling.
How good to leave the porch door open a crack, so that I could appreciate the covers even more.
Had I embarrassed myself today?
Brianna liked the soba noodles too.
The sauce had wiggled when I poked it with a fork,
Too gelatinous
Not to have been home made.
How good to eat when I am
Hungry.
How good to rub my feet under the arches.
I was supposed to be praying.
Dear Lord,
Please let the ones who survived be able to enjoy your beauty without faulting themselves for it. To be able to eat soba noodles again. To remember the dead, white and sparkling in the majesty.
