When in a schoolwork-induced rut, I make my way to the library to find a quiet, unoccupied crevice and spend hours flipping through art books at the oversize stacks. I read early-Islamic poetry, Tuareg oral histories, picture books that contain Coptic art and Alphonse Mucha’s works. After a while, my frazzled nerves untangle and my breathing comes to a comfortable slow; but sometimes this method of art therapy backfires because looking at Mucha’s women make me feel inadequate as a human being. His women are soft and delicate and have wonderful names like Camellia, Ivy, and Magnolia. I am not soft or delicate, and my name begins and ends with the most agressive consonants in the English alpabet. My schoolwork-induced rut is then further exacerbated into a more general rut, and my self-esteem flounders.
When this happens, I wander over to the literature section and pick out books printed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I like hunching over musty anthologies of chapbooks, second-edition Jules Verne prints, and short stories involving ladies who turn into foxes (stories which, I reckon, would make for amazing films). I find warm-and-fuzzy type gems like the following:
“For when we are overcome with the greatest sorrow we act not like men or women but like children whose comfort in all their troubles is to press themselves against their mother’s breast, or if she be not there to hold each other tight in one another’s arms.”
- David Garnett, Lady Into Fox, 1922
I could use a visit to the library. Or my mother’s kitchen. Or something.
Second Floor Living Without A Yard
Posted on April 14th, 2008
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