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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Yiyun Li
Read between
March 9 - March 14, 2021
Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.
Our memories tell more about now than then. Doubtless the past is real. There is no shortage of evidence: photos, journals, letters, old suitcases. But we choose and discard from an abundance of evidence what suits us at the moment. There are many ways to carry the past with us: to romanticize it, to invalidate it, to furnish it with revised or entirely fictionalized memories. The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation.
I have had a troublesome relationship with time. The past I cannot trust because it could be tainted by my memory. The future is hypothetical and should be treated with caution. The present—what is the present but a constant test: in this muddled in-between one struggles to understand what about oneself has to be changed, what accepted, what preserved. Unless the right actions are taken, one seems never to pass the test to reach the after.
But my pain was my private matter, I thought; if I could understand and articulate my problems I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don’t show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn’t make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.
One hides something for two reasons: either one feels protective of it or one feels ashamed of it. And it is not always the case that the two possibilities can be separated.
Night for those sound sleepers was a cocoon against time. For me, I wanted to believe, it was even better. Time, at night, was my possession, not the other way around.
Still, that one possesses a dreamer’s personality and that one has dreams do not guarantee that one knows how to dream.
I would have liked to be called a dreamer had I known how to dream. The sense of being an imposter, I understand, occurs naturally, and those who do not occasionally feel so I find untrustworthy.
What I admire and respect in a dreamer: her confidence in her capacities, her insusceptibility to the frivolous, and her faith that the good and the real shall triumph and last. There is nothing selfish, dazzling, or preposterous about dreamers; in everyday life they blend in rather than stand out, though it’s not hiding. A real dreamer has a mutual trust with time. Apart from feeling unqualified to be called a dreamer, I may also be worrying about being mistaken for one of those who call themselves dreamers but are merely ambitious. One meets them often in life, their ambitions smaller than
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What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What makes you forget the good things in your life and your responsibilities toward others? One hides from people who ask these unanswerable questions only to ask them oneself again and again.
Have you ever thought of leaving him? I asked. She said she had throughout the marriage, but she would not. I don’t want my children to grow up and think a man can be abandoned in that state, she said. Yet she had tried to kill herself—an attempted abandonment of both her husband and her children. But this I did not say because it was exactly what many people would say to a situation like that. One has to have a solid self to be selfish.
There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing. This emptiness does not claim the past because it is always here. It does not have to claim the future as it blocks out the future. It is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had. Some days I battle it until we both fall down like injured animals. That is when I wonder: What if I become less than nothing when I get rid of this emptiness? What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?
Omfg!!!
Can you see into my soul???!!!
“Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams.”
It reminds me too why I do not want to stop writing. The books one writes—past and present and future—are they not trying to say the same thing: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life? What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance, if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.
My mind was in poor shape. The week before there had been the thought of admitting myself to a hospital, but Ireland had seemed more sensible. I traveled often during this time, as with every trip, there was the hope of returning a different person. Amid the unraveling I did not foresee the peril of misjudgment. The week after Ireland would end in an emergency room.
The journal was—and remains—a long argument with myself: a lucid voice questioning judiciously, and a more forceful voice speaking defiantly, sometimes in reply, other times in digression. The experience is like a confrontation between George Eliot and Dostoyevsky. The former counsels self-restraint through self-improvement, and the latter interrupts with monologues on impassioned and imprisoned souls; when the latter strives to be coherent or even sincere, the effort, under the gaze of the former, seems ludicrous. One always knows how best to sabotage one’s own life.
To see the setting of an autobiographical author is to hold fleetingly another person’s reality.
What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?
Harder to endure than fresh pain is pain that has already been endured: a reminder that one is not far from who one was. Why write to open old wounds. Why relive a memoir, when that too is an indulgence.
A person, by dismissing her own self with a morbid carelessness, could easily bulldoze another person’s beliefs.
I am easily influenced by people’s ways of talking—their words, intonations, and quirks.
To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.
to be seen by all is the easiest way to hide;
This must be greed too; wanting nothing is as extreme as wanting everything.
The part that could be so free and happy on its own is not fit to live among people. It strives in vain to articulate its right to be; it shies away from drama or feeling yet the avoidance only leads to melodrama; it compromises one, it shames one, it terrorizes one; it makes one’s life into a cautionary tale. But subtract it and one’s life becomes another cautionary tale. A life lived to forget is a life lived to remember, too.
To exist as fully as the world expects one to, yet to remain absent inwardly: not equipped with words to articulate the secret I nevertheless understood it at a formative age.
Why are we told to seek out people? In forming attachments, does one become more than oneself, or does one lose an essential means of preserving oneself? The danger of forming an attachment—to a person, to a place, to a profession, to a cause, even to one’s own life—is that one can trick oneself into believing that an attachment has a reason, and worse, that the reason can be mistaken as a right.
Death, except for someone entirely isolated, is always a personal moment made public. Suicide, among the most private decisions one can make, is often taken over by the public. Those who express strong feelings mistake themselves as the center of a story. The intense emotions around suicide—anger, pity, unforgivingness, even condemnation—demand what no one has the right to claim: an explanation, and the authority to judge the explanation.
I have arrived at a point where defending and disputing my actions are the same argument.
The talent of argument becomes about finding the right rivals—those who can be awed or bullied into agreement—and dismissing those who cannot be as irrelevant. That talent needs an audience.
I have always believed that, between living and dying, from being to being no longer, there are secrets understood by those nearer death. I want to know them, too.
Both tragedy and comedy allow us to experience solid emotions, which are possible to share. Sorrow becomes less excruciating, laughter more resonant. Melodrama puts us on guard. We are the uneasy enemies of our own melodramas as much as other people’s.
I offer this hypothesis: memory is melodrama; melodrama preserves memory.
Day after my bday :)
I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement.
SOMETIMES I IMAGINE that writing is a survey I carry out, asking everyone I encounter, in reality or in fiction: How much of your life is lived to be known by others? To be understood? How much of your life is lived to know and understand others? But like all surveys the questions are simplifications. How much does one trust others to be known, to be understood; how much does one believe in the possibilities of one person’s knowing and understanding another.
what others and the world have done should not define one as much as what one has done to oneself.
Does giving have to do with generosity, or with the selfish comfort it brings? The self-deception it offers, when the truth is one has little, or nothing, to give? If one keeps giving, will one be good enough to be loved one day?
People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain—that eternal fight against one’s melodrama so that it does not transgress—is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments—Mann’s or anyone’s—on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.
Sometimes I suspect that I am drawn to those who don’t converse with me because I have not outgrown a childish wish that they will teach me how to live.
When one understands another person, perhaps knowing no longer matters, or it matters too much for one to bear.
I ran away that evening because I did not want McPherson to see my panic. The next day I called a friend and asked her how he lived without killing himself. It was a terrible question, but what I could not say at the time was this: How could one stop oneself from seeking solace in the peace brought by death?
What is more indefensible, to give up one’s own life, or to give up hoping for one’s loved one’s?
bookish.
Any young mind has to fall in love with a book once to learn how to read.
Worse than enduring a tyrannical parent is to be the favored child. I wonder if, even for the most uncharitable parent, there is a child whose role is to be the chosen one, and to be beaten when he cannot return the love at a reciprocal level.
Who knows what we did in our past lives to others, he said; what we have is what we deserve.
“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.”
Writing fiction is about understanding how time passes, years ago I had said to a friend. What I had not realized was that time could also stand still.
