Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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The following assortment of notes, musings, proposals for future consideration, lists,
and quotations is by design doubly open: exposed to the reader, but also subject to revision, expansion,
excision in a way that a traditional written journal (or even a blog) is not.
On Dreams (1) “They had fallen asleep with their heads touching and there, in that physical immediacy, in that almost total coincidence of attitudes, positions, breathing, the same tick-lock, the same stimuli of street and city, the same magnetic radiations, the same brand of coffee, the same stellar conjunction, the same night for both of them, tightly embraced there, they had dreamed different dreams, they had lived unlike adventures, one had smiled while the other had fled frightened by herself, one had taken an exam in algebra again while the other was coming to a city built of white stone. “Talita would put pleasure or doubt into the morning retelling, but Traveler would secretly insist on looking for correspondences. How was it possible that his daytime companion would inevitably turn off into that divorce, that inadmissible solitude of the dreamer? … For a long time he waited for a miracle, that the dream Talita was about to tell him in the morning would also be the one he had dreamed. He waited for it, incited it, provoked it, calling upon all possible analogies, looking for similarities that suddenly would bring him to a recognition. … “Traveler kept on hoping and waiting less and less. The dreams came back, each one on its own side. Their heads would fall asleep touching each other and in each one the curtain would rise on a different stage. Traveler thought ironically that they were like those two movie theaters side by side on the Calle Lavalle, and he lost his hopes completely. He lost his faith that what he wanted could happen, and he knew that without faith it would not happen. He knew that without faith nothing that should happen would happen, and with faith almost never either.” — Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch Chapter 143 (2) “I grew up at a time when the great promise of America probably was at its peak. Optimism ruled in the 1950s and '60s. Jobs were plentiful and standards of living were improving. Access to a decent education was becoming easier. Despite tremendous problems — the war and Vietnam, bitter and sometimes deadly racial struggles, assassinations — there was a sense that the nation was trying to right its wrongs, that it was moving in the right direction, however difficult and dangerous the road might seem. “I don't feel that sense as I travel the country now, meeting and talking with ordinary men and women who are directly affected by the major events of our time. The winds have shifted and are blowing in a more ominous direction. There are too many stories now about anxious and bewildered men and women who are desperate for work but can't find jobs, about middle-class families drowning in debt, about public schools swarming with students but starved of books and supplies, about gays caught in the backlash of disputes over values, about sick people who can't afford lifesaving drugs, about hunger and homelessness and innocents sent off to prison, and about young men and women killed and maimed in George W. Bush's dark venture in Iraq. “It's not that life in America was better in the 1960s. It wasn't. But it seemed to be moving in a better direction. For me, a young person with energy, ambition, and prodigious dreams, that counted for a lot. “The United States today is more powerful and prosperous than ever, but it feels very much like a nation on edge. The electorate is sliced right down the middle, with the two sides glaring at each other, as if from armed camps. The joy and optimism that one would expect to be widespread in the most successful nation in the history of the world are oddly missing. Instead there is a sense of things out of whack, of the center caving, of obligations unmet and promises betrayed.” — Bob Herbert Promises Betrayed: Waking Up from the American Dream 5/1/2005 Postscript (6/06): I don't know how many times I heard Freedy Johnston's “Emily” before I actually listened to the lyrics: I wonder who knows
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