What motivates someone to run into war rather than away from it? Why risk your life for a photograph?
Reading this memoir, I was overwhelmed with fear What motivates someone to run into war rather than away from it? Why risk your life for a photograph?
Reading this memoir, I was overwhelmed with fear over the hardships she faced, heartache towards the cruelties she documented, and disbelief over her compulsion to her craft. But most of all, I was filled with admiration for the dedication of her and her colleagues—their unshakable resolve that photography mattered as a form of both documentation and art. And looking at her photographs themselves, I undoubtedly agree.
This book also told of a personal struggle to find love in a dangerous profession, and what it truly means to live a balanced life. How her femininity was perceived in foreign countries and across various cultures. How, being female, she had a different set of difficulties than her male counterparts, and how she felt the continual need to prove herself despite eventually being part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team and being awarded the MacArthur Grant.
With her story, I see the importance of journalism as a means of documentation and telling the truth. Her stories of censorship took something I knew only as something that happened remotely to something that left me indignant and disgusted. She gave me an intimate view on how democracy, in its rose-covered glasses, is often guilty of hypocrisy and lacking of compassion for the very people they try to help. Yet, in her story, I found hope that ordinary people with enough conviction (and perhaps some naivety) could help us remember that we are all broken and beautifully human, beneath it all.
“I wondered what we were doing there when so many others had failed to occupy Afghanistan in the past. Were we tried to influence and change a culture that was hundreds of years old?” ...more
Mary Oliver writes with a simplicity that pierces straight into the matter—or precisely, what matters: our connection to ourselves and the natural worMary Oliver writes with a simplicity that pierces straight into the matter—or precisely, what matters: our connection to ourselves and the natural world. Apart from the most famous poems in this collection (“Wild Geese” and “The Journey”), I particularly loved “Rage”, “The Fire”, “Members of the Tribe”, “Orion”, “Landscape”, and “1945-1985: Poem for the Anniversary”.
I saw what a child must love, I saw what love might have done had we loved in time. — “A Visitor”
In the films of Dacau and Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen the dead rise from the earth and are piled in front of us, the starved stare across forty years, and lush, green, musical Germany shows again its iron claws, which won't
ever be forgotten, which won't ever be understood, but which did, slowly, for years, scrape across Europe
while the rest of the world did nothing. — “1945-1985: Poem for the Anniversary”
This book gave me insight into the benefits of therapy and why it's so important to go through the (often dark and painful) process of healing. ThrougThis book gave me insight into the benefits of therapy and why it's so important to go through the (often dark and painful) process of healing. Through the lives of her clients and her own, this book shows the contradictions of what it means to be human. We're all pretty messed up, but we have the capacity to grow and love. A funny, enriching, and compassionate quarantine read.
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Some favorite quotes:
"People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings."
"Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize when our deadline is announced, that we'd been skating by on the project: our lives."
"There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest."
"Why would we choose a profession that requires us to meet unhappy, distressed, abrasive, or unaware people and sit with them, one after the other, alone in a room? . . . [T]herapists know at first, each patient is simply a snapshot, a person captured in a particular moment. It's like a photo of you taken from an unfortunate angle and with a sour expression on your face. There might also be a photo in which you are glowing, caught opening a present or mid-laugh with a lover. Both are you in that fraction of time, and neither is you in your entirety."...more
A clever book with such charming characters. Reads overly cutesy at times and is filled with twists and turns and tied-up-ends only made-up stories haA clever book with such charming characters. Reads overly cutesy at times and is filled with twists and turns and tied-up-ends only made-up stories have, but funny and heartwarming nonetheless. This book is about a lot of things—connection, desperation, redemption—and it deals with some serious topics in a way that feels entirely human. Because, given the circumstances, aren't we all just a few steps away from a bank robbery and hostage drama?
"The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything. So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow."
These letters teach not just how to be a poet, but how to live a rich life. Art is just the byproduct of a compulsion to express an inner awakening, oThese letters teach not just how to be a poet, but how to live a rich life. Art is just the byproduct of a compulsion to express an inner awakening, or perhaps to understand it.
"Take refuge in your own day-to-day life; depict your sadnesses and desires, passing thoughts and faith in some kind of beauty—depict all this with intense, quiet, humble sincerity and make use of whatever you find about you to express yourself, the images from your dreams and the things in your memory. If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon top its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place."
"Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
"Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with the pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!"
"For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn."
". . . someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being."
". . . what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us."
I cannot recommend this work enough. I want to read these words over and over until they are engrained in my being.
In a world that pushes you away from your inner realizations, that tells you that you need ever more—more money, more fame, more recognition, more love—let these words pull you back. Let these words show you that it is enough to just be....more
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