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I think being anxious if a writer has the same permission to enter the 'sovereign' woods that Shakespeare hunted in is a common anxiety for any writer.

She equates 'loaded gun' with hunting down Higginson and, thus, hunting down approval, help, appreciation, validation ... and everything a writer hopes to find in the eyes of a fellow creative. To hunt with a gun, however, in terms of creativity, is interesting in that she's a loaded figure full of dangerous potential. And she's a gun he can never figure out how to shoot.

"Lear's world of monstrous necessity where union with Nature means living outside comfort with the forces of destruction". This feels right regrading ED who didn't see nature as something innocent, but she had a more Herzog practicality to nature in that it can be a force, an indifferent, but also beautiful force.

I like how she says that both Emily's "felt God and Nature separating fro each other". Though did ED really see a split, or are they two sides to the same coin?

"God is hidden", but neoplatonic is also everywhere, the invisible (but certain) center of the circle which we diameter and radius endlessly.

Here we see the numerous (and not exhaustive) variations of what "My Life" might refer to. Maybe the trick is that even ED didn't know, but she was fine with that because then she could be all or nothing or some when she wanted (at least in her poetry).

Being captain of a ship with a bunch of starving people and kids would be a nightmare - nobody would know what to do (and what not to do) and everybody would think they have a right to the ship's operation (like the engine or the water supply). Having been in the Navy, reading this section makes me laugh, cringe, and stressed out all at the same time - and yet I'm not the one fleeing for my life.

That's funny: one guy wants to put a sail up on a boat with no keep (which would cause the whole thing to tip over). But then how many people would know this that didn't have any knowledge of boats? And it's ironic because a lot of the people on the boat are the educated fleeing from the communists but they have no good knowledge which can help them easily escape.

Crazy how they used shots of Valium on some of the kids to keep them quiet as they navigated the river past the patrols. It's also crazy how while people are trying to save their kids, it's their kids (being kids) who can so easily get them caught.

That's heartbreaking how her great grandmother knew the family was never coming back and they had to lie to her.

Everyone spying on each other, class disparity, government control - it's like these things just keep happening over and over again no matter what country you live in - now it's becoming America's turn to dive head first into this insanity because if anyone thinks the artifice of society and government and safety are permanent has not opened the books those in power want to burn.

Interesting how the people who the Americans say were cowardly for surrendering were the same people who survived because they surrendered and then had to flee and become Americans who then raised their kids in America who were inundated with the American side of the story of Vietnam. It's a lot of mixed stories and points of view making up the "truth".

At the same time, spring 1975, while Vietnam was (either won or lost, depending on who you asked and which side you were one), Cambodia was also being taken over by communist forces, the Khmer Rouge, and that would lead to the killing fields and the horrific genocide in that country. It feels like Cambodia has yet to recover from those events, while Vietnam currently seems like it stands on its own now.

Lear [as] dark pastoral, Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower, My life has stood - a loaded gun, all go back to Shakespeare as their wellspring.

I like the letter where Browning says "I am perfectly indifferent whether my name is remembered or not. The reward would be that the ideas which were mine, should live and benefit the race!" I can see how ED might appreciate this too. Shakespeare probably would care, being the practical businessman / showman that he was, so I think that analogy falls apart, but the point is still taken.

The two Emily's. This is an interesting comparison and contrast. EB writes, "I threw the flower on the ground; at that moment the universe appeared to me a vast machine constructed only to bring forth evil". How does this square with ED's philosophy? I doubt she saw this much evil in a flower, but she is skeptical of everything, and like Blake, I doubt she's seeing a (just and goodly) universe in a grain of sand.

"the inhumane legalism of Calvinism warred with the intellectual beauty of Neoplatonism".

"If God created Man and Woman to damn them, Emily Bronte sided with the sinners and was recalcitrant".

Howe compares Dickinson's upbringing with the Bronte sisters in that neither had much in the way of maternal influence and brother's who did not live up to expectations, which is too bad since the women were far more reliable but society didn't care about the women (outside of igniting a scandal).

I like how she shows how complicated the situation was for her parents. Her father talks about the general who killed the Viet Cong in the head (the famous photo) and about how he hated that the military treated the people like criminals, but then also talks about how that Viet Cong had murdered his family a few hours earlier. There aren't really sides here, it's more complexities of nuance and gray and surviving.

War turns citizens into enemies of the state, relatives into black market profiteers. Nobody really changed, just their function and how they're perceived.

Must be interesting to see what her parent's reaction is to this book considering they're telling her how they really felt about each other - one wonders if they ever said any of this - such as her thinking her mother thinking Bo probably wouldn't live long anyway - to each other? Maybe it's through the kids that the parents can finally communicate?

Her mother reminds me of my grandmother who also wanted more than what a woman born in 1919 and came of age during WW2 could have had. Sometimes the events of the world dictate your life more than you do, like being part of that chessboard where you don't get to move the pieces, you can only get out of their way.

She says it's hard for her to accept that her mother was happiest without having her family (the time before she met her husband), but I think that's true for a number of people who could have had a career or something better instead of starting a family for practical reasons.

She makes a good point about how the chessboard of war never contains the people who are most effected by war: the regular people. It's always generals and politicians and partisans, but not street vendors and grandmothers selling opium to make ends meet, even though it's their lives that are the most effected by the wars.

"Even standing right in front of our ld house, I had to rely completely on my family's stories to picture how it was when we lived there." Funny how memory works as something handed down when we don;t have our own.

Her grandmother was growing opium to make ends meet. Meanwhile the mafia is fighting the new government, Diem, which didn't ave full control of the south. You can feel the country falling apart.

As he rides the landing craft, it's like he's invading his own country the way the allies did with the same boats at Normandy just 11 years prior. Strange to think of refugees as invaders in their own country, fleeing from their own people, but whom they are separated from across an ocean of idealistic differences.

She also shows the ugly side of Vietnamese independence and how 200,000 were killed in the Land Reforms and that nobody was really free and the police made sure you clapped during the propaganda films. Not much of a life, especially if you've enjoyed the material luxuries of the French. Hard to go back home again (which he literally is doing but is struggling with seeing the upside to).

It's like his father is intentionally making him see the country and how people really live so that he can convince his son to side with Vietnam and not the French. Not that he wasn't already inclined to see the disparity, and even perhaps be sympathetic to the communists, but this is first-hand education, and not idealistic education one gets on school campuses.

It's interesting how even though the French brought so many luxuries to Vietnam, which her father enjoyed, especially since he had been so poor initially before attending French school, so many people were willing to give it up to claim an independent identity, even if it meant sacrificing family. Speaks to the power that blood has over material things, and how much freedom is more valued than being ruled.