Tuesday vignettes

Polishness

A friend just told me that she’d met a Polish couple in my neighborhood. Polish? Here? Yes, yes, she said – she spent time with them at the Polish Film Festival last year. I asked her how she liked the films. She hesitated, then admitted that they were kind of weird. A lot of animation, crazy stuff, squiggly lines – it made her dizzy so that she had to leave. And the Polish couple? Well – she answered – they were really into it. But they said you had to be Polish to understand it. Polish people have a certain way of looking at themselves that is really different. Most people can’t understand it; they kept saying – you had to be Polish to get it. I get it.

Cuban cigars

Another friend offered me a Cuban cigar. Did you smoke it? You hate smoking, smokers, smoke. You smoked it, didn’t you? Vices in small doses, if they hurt no one, can be very satisfying. Was it satisfying? No. And I can’t get the damn taste out of my mouth. I should have known better. I hate smoke, smoking, smoke-related anything, with the exception, perhaps, of smoked salmon. Never again.

Chinese tea, e-mail and Virginia Woolf

In a more virtuous vein, my walking buddy (I hereby gratefully acknowledge all three of you –K,K and S- for your indulgence of my walking addiction) brewed for me a pot of tea. She has recently traveled to China and she has with her a supply of tea leaves that I’m sure rivals in size the raked pile of fallen leaves outside my window. We sipped tea and talked about banes and vices. What’s yours, she asks. Email, I say without hesitation. I am a compulsive email-answerer. You send it, I answer. In fact, I’ll answer before you even send it. Colleagues will send a Q and bingo! There‘s a reply. You’d think that this would be regarded favorably? Oh no, it places the ball in their park again so instead of feeling deep satisfaction at having crossed off an item from their list, the item is right back on there. My friend kindly suggested that the compulsion is driven by a writer’s temperament. The medium is an odd weapon for people who feel compelled to formulate sentences and stories every waking hour of the day. Imagine the odd behaviors, she said, that would follow, if you placed email in the hands of Virginia Woolf.

I suppose I agree. And how much worse it would be to receive brilliance in your Inbox rather than the trite stuff I place there! Consider this exert from a Woolf essay where she contemplates writing (though in truth, we are in the dark what meaning lies behind these words, because Woolf can be painfully difficult to comprehend; here, you can almost believe that she is writing about email!) and imagine the strain of finding such words in your Inbox were she your acquaintance (emphases are my own):

Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition? The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.