Privileged Glimpses

Meditations on Empathy (and how postsecret.com is making me a better person)

Empathy underpins everything good and wonderful that happens on this pretty planet of ours. Cultivate an ability to put yourself in the shoes of any other person, rich or poor, lefty or fascist, ugly as a foot or pretty as a Cara Delevingne, and you probably have this business of living cracked.

One fabulous website instilling good empathic (or should that be empathetic? The eternal question...) habits in all who visit is http://www.postsecret.com/, 'an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard'. Every Sunday provides twenty or so privileged glimpses into the human heart; some will break your heart, others will make you hoot with laughter, all expose the myth that there is such a thing as normal.

Postsecret is doing a really valuable thing; encouraging us to see beyond the boxes we put people in and the labels we shove on them and to just see the human being underneath. It is a lovely little reminder that many people are terribly lonely or a little bit broken, that we all carry secrets, and that what we see on the surface is never the full picture. 

On this, a tricky and divisive weekend in my part of the world, railing against a 'them and us' culture and showing some love is all I ask of the world.

(Brené Brown (of that fabulous TED talk on 'The Power of Vulnerability') gave some rather dazzling insights into the difference between sympathy and empathy, among other things, in a recent lecture at the RSA which I would highly recommend. Have your mind blown here.)

Here endeth the hippy rant.

PEACE LOVE AND HAPPINESS,

Ailbhe

x

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. - Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Summer Reading List

My last chance to read whatever I feel like before punishing university reading lists start ruling my existence.

1. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis (because Oxford baybay.)
2. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (see above)
3. Candide, Voltaire (because my English teacher said it will teach you how to live your life and that kind of wisdom is always welcome.)
4. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
5. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (to honour this great Nigerian writer in the year of his death, and because I like the Yeats allusion.)
6. The Art of Happiness, The Dalai Lama
7. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (because women owe her everything.)
8. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
9. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (To my eternal shame, I never finished it.)
10. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (likewise.)
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Middlemarch, George Eliot
13. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx (because why not and it is nice to make one's own mind up about things.)
14. Hard Times, Charles Dickens (because I am already in love with that amazing opening.)
15. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
16. The Accidental Theorist, Paul Krugman (because my friend lent me it and my understanding of economics is limited to the point of embarrassing.)
17. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
18. Something by Iris Murdoch (because I hear great things about this woman.)
19. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel (to keep my finger on the literary pulse of the nation.)
20. Think, Simon Blackburn (to indulge the philosopher within.)

'What you read when you don't have to determines what you will be when you can't help it.' - Oscar Wilde

Explain The Name

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats

This is my favourite poem. I have known it off by heart for years now; of all poems, this is surely the most beautiful to carry around in the heart always. Resisting the temptation to write a long, dry analysis that no one would enjoy, I am just going to highlight a few of the things that I think make it great.

I adore it for its simple expression of the vulnerability assumed by a lover when declaring his feelings, and by a poet when laying himself bare at the foot of the reader. The poem evokes both the grand ambitions and the feelings of inadequacy experienced as a lover and artist; the grand ambitions presented with the richly lyrical, flowing first five lines and the powerful extended metaphor of the sky as 'embroidered cloths'. This opulence of language reverts to a gorgeous simplicity in the final few lines; the paucity of language (repetition, no adjectives) a reflection of the poet/lover's inadequacy.

The chosen rhyme-scheme of tight quatrains (ABABCDCD and so on) mirrors the weaving of a cloth (I don't know the technical term for rhyming a word with itself and google was not at all forthcoming, but the unforced way it is employed here is a tiny bit marvellous). The form also leads the reader to expect a traditional Shakespearean love sonnet; falling away after line eight serves to further our impression of the speaker's uncertainty, unable even to offer a full sonnet.

The fragility, the defiance of traditional forms, the doubts, and so on, all strike me as proleptically modernist in the very best sense. Yeats' confident manipulation of language perfectly presents the lack of confidence of a lover, a poet and, eventually, of an entire age. Gorgeous.

Pleased To Meet You

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.  

Hello stranger.

I'm Ailbhe (pronounced alva; explaining this appears to be my burden in life), an 18 year-old thinker/tea-drinker from the tiny, sometimes troubled, city of Belfast. A levels depending (pray for me), I'm starting at Wadham College Oxford in October to read the glorious subjects of French and English Literature.

I believe that literature and ideas matter, that life is glorious but tricky and we owe it to the world to be wholly, unapologetically, joyfully, embarrassingly ourselves. I'm not as arsey as that makes me sound.

Expect thoughts on books and films (from the high to the most furrowed of low brow), the F word (...feminism), philosophy, ideas, the arts, places I love (Paris), a smattering of politics and fashion, my pursuit of happiness (à la Gretchen Rubin, Leo Babuta and Montaigne), and accounts of being fresh at Oxford. Also expect the unexpected, because I'm not quite sure what I'm about here.

Please comment with ideas for future blog posts, questions, opinions, criticism (but please be gentle with me; no bad vibes here if you don't mind), and if you're sad or bored or lonely just tell me your life story or whether you like marmite or not.

I also tumble and tweet @PronouncedAlva and wishingfortheclothsofheaven.tumblr.com for those technologically inclined.

Over and out,

Ailbhe

x

I have spread my dreams beneath your feet. Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.