Sameer Vasta

Orbital is more than a book; it is a meditation. The plot is unimportant; what’s remarkable about this novel is just how moving it is as it explains the mundanity of the extraordinary. You would think that living in a space station orbiting the earth would be astounding—and it is, at moments in this story—but the real narrative driver here is the interiority of those astronauts, their every-orbit lives that are filled with science and domesticity and so much room to think and reflect. And because of this, the novel forces us to reflect along with them, to grapple with the enormity of our own lives while embracing the everyday mundane. Quite simply one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.

This is a controversial book because of its final essay, but when you take the book as a whole you realize that it is more than just about politics, but instead about the way narrative and storytelling shapes the world around us. Coates’ writing is mesmerizing as usual, and there is an incredible lucidity to his arguments. This book is a deft narrative about the power of narrative.

This reflection was originally published on inthemargins.ca and references the following books:

- A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver
- Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
- Islands of Decolonial Love, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, by Audre Lorde
- Summons: Poems from Tanzania
- This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- Upstream, by Mary Oliver

** ****“The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -In the fourth grade, we received an assignment to write a poem. A few days later, we were to hand in our poems to the teacher, who would look them over that afternoon, and we would then recite them out loud to the class the next day. The morning after handing mine in, my teacher pulled me aside and told me she needed to see me after class; I would not be allowed to read my poem to the rest of the class, that day.Crestfallen, I listened to the work of my friends, and cheered them on. That afternoon, before getting on the bus, my teacher pulled me aside and asked, “who taught you how to write this?”I will not pretend that my submission was good, but it was different. Unlike the acrostics, haikus, limericks, and quatrains we were learning about in class and that most of my peers had written, my poem was three pages long, written in sestets with an aabbab rhyme sequence. It was an ode to a young lady in my class—I think her name was Michelle A—where I did not mention her, but instead how the world changed when she entered the room. The imagery was rudimentary and the diction plain, but it was different enough from what we were learning that my teacher was perplexed.The honest truth was that I had discovered Wordsworth earlier that year and was so impressed by his poetry that I had spent weeks imitating his style. The nuance of his language and much of his content was above my head, but by the time I got around to reading “Lucy Gray,” it did not matter that I did not understand what he was saying, but instead that the musicality of his language was enthralling. I wanted to write poems that sounded like song, and so I attempted to do that in my sprawling three-page ode.I did end up being allowed to read my poem in class the next day. The subject of the ode was oblivious; she did not see herself in the words, and like the rest of the class, thought me pretentious and too much of a try-hard. They were all right, of course. I didn't know what I was doing, but instead was trying to impress others with my feeble imitation.Into my late teens, I continued to write poetry, and was lucky enough to have a few of my pieces printed in small journals and magazines. And then, one day, I stopped. I stopped writing poetry, and I stopped reading it.Until this year.- - - - -“The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -If we were all taught poetry in school the way that Mary Oliver teaches the art in A Poetry Handbook, we would all be poets today. Yes, there is discussion about meter and rhyme, but Oliver opens the book with an in-depth look at sound, at how the way we read poetry is an aural experience, and how it is that sound that makes poetry resonate—both metaphorically and literally, when read out loud. Reading this chapter, I am reminded of the first time I read Wordsworth, when I was not yet nine years old, and immediately realized that poetry was about the music you heard when you read it, and not about the strict adherence to form that we had been learning in school.Oliver does remind us that form is important, along with diction, voice, tone, and so much more—that all of these go into the true musicality and resonance of the poem—but opening her handbook with sound was what made my heart stir. This is how I wish I was taught poetry: to learn how sound influenced the soul, and how poetry—how beautiful writing of any kind—could make the spirit flourish.I have written out this passage from Oliver's Handbook and left it on my desk as a reminder of what I can do, what I should do, when I write, and what I should listen for, when I read:“Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part—the content, the pace, the diction, the rhythm, the tone—as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.”I am diving back into poetry this year, and I am looking forward to the sliding, the floating, the thumping, the rapping.- - - - -“Writing actually sucks. Like you're alone in your head for days on end, just wondering if you actually can die of loneliness, just wondering how healthy it is to make all this shit up, and just wondering if you did actually make this shit up, or if you just copied down your life or worse someone else's life, or maybe you're just feeding your delusions and neuroses and then advertising it to whoever reads your drivel.”from This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson- - - - -My colleague and friend Adie was the first to hand me her copy of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Islands of Decolonial Love. It sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks, but once I picked it up, I could not put it down. Instead, when I had turned its final page, I quickly went on to read Simpson's follow-up, This Accident of Being Lost, which was just as enthralling.Most of the poetry we grew up reading was by white people, white men in particular. Eventually, in my late teens, I learned of Latin American poets like Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, and of Middle Eastern poets like el-Fagommi and Rasha Omran, but still, my exposure to poetry was still defined by the Western “classics.”Simpson's collections remind me that there is another view onto the world, that poetry is not just art or craft but also a reflection of life, an expression of emotion and vulnerability and questioning. It can be raw and incisive, and in Simpson's writing, it most often is:“If I had ten minutes alone with you, I'd tell you that I love you. I'd tell you not to be scared, because it's the kind of love that doesn't want anything or need anything. It's the kind of love that just sits there and envelops whoever you are or whoever you want to be. It doesn't demand. It isn't a commodity. It doesn't threaten all the other people you love. It doesn't fuck up and it doesn't fuck things up. It's loyal. It's willing to feel hurt. It's willing to exist on shifting terms. It's willing to stay anyway. It doesn't want. It's just there. It's just there and good and given freely, sewing up the holes unassumingly because it's the only thing to do. There is so much space around it and the space shimmers.”When I was young, poetry was presented to me in one way. Now that I am re-immersing myself, I am excited to find the other paths through verse—the paths carved by people whose voices were often silenced and definitely need to be heard.- - - - -Then there is dissatisfaction,the flesh, the heart and the soul,and most especially the mind.There I always an antagonised idealin this antagonistic world:there is always a craving desireto satisfy the flesh,the heart, the souland most especially the mind.And one never gets alland there is always dissatisfaction.from “Then there is dissatisfaction” by Manga J. Kingazi Mmgaha, in Summons: Poems from Tanzania- - - - -Early this year, I received a parcel in the mail. In it, a copy of Summons: Poems from Tanzania, and a note from a new friend I had made in the fall. In her note, she remarked upon a conversation we had when we first met, where I told her that I was born in Tanzania, and that she told me that she had worked in East Africa, many years ago at the start of her career, and still held a fondness for the region. The collection of poems was one of the mementos she had kept from her time there, and it was now mine to have.It is a modest collection, and I did not connect with every piece, but it got me thinking: why is poetry not an appropriate way to learn about our own history? How can we discover who we are and from whence we came through verse—and why do we not do this more often?- - - - -There is a timbre of voicethat comes from not being heardand knowing    you are not beingheard    noticed onlyby others    not heardfor the same reason.from “Echoes” by Audre Lorde, in The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance- - - - -In elementary school, I learned that poetry was about beauty. I learned that a poem was written to extol, to recognize, to celebrate. We were given odes and sonnets to read, each talking about love and joy and sometimes heartbreak, but beautiful heartbreak. We weren't taught that sometimes, poetry comes of anger, of despair, of rebellion, of revolt. We were taught that we could express the range of human emotion through verse, but then were driven towards only the emotions that echoed with pleasantness.We were not taught that poetry was a way to speak truth to power. It took me far too long to realize this.I finally understood this when I picked up Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and read the now iconic but painfully true stanza:because white men can'tpolice their imaginationblack men are dyingRankine's Citizen is filled with vignettes, prose poems that punch you in the gut while you read them. They are not the poems of my elementary school days: they hurt, enrage, fill you with anguish. They are often harrowing, but they are exactly what we all must read in order to understand our current era. At times, we feel as though these are words used as weapons, verses used as bludgeons, emptiness on the page used as pauses to reflect and recover from the blows.I am currently reading Audre Lorde's The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance. Like Rankine does in Citizen, Lorde speaks of a life lived as a Black woman, and speaks the truth of all the joys and pains of that experience.They are both speaking truth to power. They are both making sure we sit up and listen, and ideally, do something about the injustices they reference. They are using poetry to enlighten, to incite, to create change; they do this with power, with strength, and with beauty.Perhaps my elementary school teachers were right: poetry is about beauty. They were just wrong in telling us what beauty could look like once it was in verse.- - - - -“First and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artificial, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -I am reading poetry, now, after many years away. I am not writing it just yet, but I am told by friends that it is inevitable that the more I read, the more I will be besieged by the desire to write. (I will perhaps hold off on writing three-page odes until I have had much more practice.)For now, I am allowing myself to be enveloped by verse.For now, I am allowing myself to listen to the sliding, the floating, the thumping, the rapping. For now, I am allowing myself to see a poem as a place to enter, a place in which to feel. For now, I am rediscovering poetry, and through it, rediscovering myself.- - - - -“Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it—indeed, the world's need of it—these will never pass.”from A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver** ** **

This reflection was originally published on inthemargins.ca and references the following books:

- A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver
- Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
- Islands of Decolonial Love, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, by Audre Lorde
- Summons: Poems from Tanzania
- This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- Upstream, by Mary Oliver

This reflection was originally published on inthemargins.ca and references the following books:

- A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver
- Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
- Islands of Decolonial Love, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, by Audre Lorde
- Summons: Poems from Tanzania
- This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- Upstream, by Mary Oliver

** ****“The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -In the fourth grade, we received an assignment to write a poem. A few days later, we were to hand in our poems to the teacher, who would look them over that afternoon, and we would then recite them out loud to the class the next day. The morning after handing mine in, my teacher pulled me aside and told me she needed to see me after class; I would not be allowed to read my poem to the rest of the class, that day.Crestfallen, I listened to the work of my friends, and cheered them on. That afternoon, before getting on the bus, my teacher pulled me aside and asked, “who taught you how to write this?”I will not pretend that my submission was good, but it was different. Unlike the acrostics, haikus, limericks, and quatrains we were learning about in class and that most of my peers had written, my poem was three pages long, written in sestets with an aabbab rhyme sequence. It was an ode to a young lady in my class—I think her name was Michelle A—where I did not mention her, but instead how the world changed when she entered the room. The imagery was rudimentary and the diction plain, but it was different enough from what we were learning that my teacher was perplexed.The honest truth was that I had discovered Wordsworth earlier that year and was so impressed by his poetry that I had spent weeks imitating his style. The nuance of his language and much of his content was above my head, but by the time I got around to reading “Lucy Gray,” it did not matter that I did not understand what he was saying, but instead that the musicality of his language was enthralling. I wanted to write poems that sounded like song, and so I attempted to do that in my sprawling three-page ode.I did end up being allowed to read my poem in class the next day. The subject of the ode was oblivious; she did not see herself in the words, and like the rest of the class, thought me pretentious and too much of a try-hard. They were all right, of course. I didn't know what I was doing, but instead was trying to impress others with my feeble imitation.Into my late teens, I continued to write poetry, and was lucky enough to have a few of my pieces printed in small journals and magazines. And then, one day, I stopped. I stopped writing poetry, and I stopped reading it.Until this year.- - - - -“The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -If we were all taught poetry in school the way that Mary Oliver teaches the art in A Poetry Handbook, we would all be poets today. Yes, there is discussion about meter and rhyme, but Oliver opens the book with an in-depth look at sound, at how the way we read poetry is an aural experience, and how it is that sound that makes poetry resonate—both metaphorically and literally, when read out loud. Reading this chapter, I am reminded of the first time I read Wordsworth, when I was not yet nine years old, and immediately realized that poetry was about the music you heard when you read it, and not about the strict adherence to form that we had been learning in school.Oliver does remind us that form is important, along with diction, voice, tone, and so much more—that all of these go into the true musicality and resonance of the poem—but opening her handbook with sound was what made my heart stir. This is how I wish I was taught poetry: to learn how sound influenced the soul, and how poetry—how beautiful writing of any kind—could make the spirit flourish.I have written out this passage from Oliver's Handbook and left it on my desk as a reminder of what I can do, what I should do, when I write, and what I should listen for, when I read:“Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part—the content, the pace, the diction, the rhythm, the tone—as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.”I am diving back into poetry this year, and I am looking forward to the sliding, the floating, the thumping, the rapping.- - - - -“Writing actually sucks. Like you're alone in your head for days on end, just wondering if you actually can die of loneliness, just wondering how healthy it is to make all this shit up, and just wondering if you did actually make this shit up, or if you just copied down your life or worse someone else's life, or maybe you're just feeding your delusions and neuroses and then advertising it to whoever reads your drivel.”from This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson- - - - -My colleague and friend Adie was the first to hand me her copy of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Islands of Decolonial Love. It sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks, but once I picked it up, I could not put it down. Instead, when I had turned its final page, I quickly went on to read Simpson's follow-up, This Accident of Being Lost, which was just as enthralling.Most of the poetry we grew up reading was by white people, white men in particular. Eventually, in my late teens, I learned of Latin American poets like Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, and of Middle Eastern poets like el-Fagommi and Rasha Omran, but still, my exposure to poetry was still defined by the Western “classics.”Simpson's collections remind me that there is another view onto the world, that poetry is not just art or craft but also a reflection of life, an expression of emotion and vulnerability and questioning. It can be raw and incisive, and in Simpson's writing, it most often is:“If I had ten minutes alone with you, I'd tell you that I love you. I'd tell you not to be scared, because it's the kind of love that doesn't want anything or need anything. It's the kind of love that just sits there and envelops whoever you are or whoever you want to be. It doesn't demand. It isn't a commodity. It doesn't threaten all the other people you love. It doesn't fuck up and it doesn't fuck things up. It's loyal. It's willing to feel hurt. It's willing to exist on shifting terms. It's willing to stay anyway. It doesn't want. It's just there. It's just there and good and given freely, sewing up the holes unassumingly because it's the only thing to do. There is so much space around it and the space shimmers.”When I was young, poetry was presented to me in one way. Now that I am re-immersing myself, I am excited to find the other paths through verse—the paths carved by people whose voices were often silenced and definitely need to be heard.- - - - -Then there is dissatisfaction,the flesh, the heart and the soul,and most especially the mind.There I always an antagonised idealin this antagonistic world:there is always a craving desireto satisfy the flesh,the heart, the souland most especially the mind.And one never gets alland there is always dissatisfaction.from “Then there is dissatisfaction” by Manga J. Kingazi Mmgaha, in Summons: Poems from Tanzania- - - - -Early this year, I received a parcel in the mail. In it, a copy of Summons: Poems from Tanzania, and a note from a new friend I had made in the fall. In her note, she remarked upon a conversation we had when we first met, where I told her that I was born in Tanzania, and that she told me that she had worked in East Africa, many years ago at the start of her career, and still held a fondness for the region. The collection of poems was one of the mementos she had kept from her time there, and it was now mine to have.It is a modest collection, and I did not connect with every piece, but it got me thinking: why is poetry not an appropriate way to learn about our own history? How can we discover who we are and from whence we came through verse—and why do we not do this more often?- - - - -There is a timbre of voicethat comes from not being heardand knowing    you are not beingheard    noticed onlyby others    not heardfor the same reason.from “Echoes” by Audre Lorde, in The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance- - - - -In elementary school, I learned that poetry was about beauty. I learned that a poem was written to extol, to recognize, to celebrate. We were given odes and sonnets to read, each talking about love and joy and sometimes heartbreak, but beautiful heartbreak. We weren't taught that sometimes, poetry comes of anger, of despair, of rebellion, of revolt. We were taught that we could express the range of human emotion through verse, but then were driven towards only the emotions that echoed with pleasantness.We were not taught that poetry was a way to speak truth to power. It took me far too long to realize this.I finally understood this when I picked up Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and read the now iconic but painfully true stanza:because white men can'tpolice their imaginationblack men are dyingRankine's Citizen is filled with vignettes, prose poems that punch you in the gut while you read them. They are not the poems of my elementary school days: they hurt, enrage, fill you with anguish. They are often harrowing, but they are exactly what we all must read in order to understand our current era. At times, we feel as though these are words used as weapons, verses used as bludgeons, emptiness on the page used as pauses to reflect and recover from the blows.I am currently reading Audre Lorde's The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance. Like Rankine does in Citizen, Lorde speaks of a life lived as a Black woman, and speaks the truth of all the joys and pains of that experience.They are both speaking truth to power. They are both making sure we sit up and listen, and ideally, do something about the injustices they reference. They are using poetry to enlighten, to incite, to create change; they do this with power, with strength, and with beauty.Perhaps my elementary school teachers were right: poetry is about beauty. They were just wrong in telling us what beauty could look like once it was in verse.- - - - -“First and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artificial, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -I am reading poetry, now, after many years away. I am not writing it just yet, but I am told by friends that it is inevitable that the more I read, the more I will be besieged by the desire to write. (I will perhaps hold off on writing three-page odes until I have had much more practice.)For now, I am allowing myself to be enveloped by verse.For now, I am allowing myself to listen to the sliding, the floating, the thumping, the rapping. For now, I am allowing myself to see a poem as a place to enter, a place in which to feel. For now, I am rediscovering poetry, and through it, rediscovering myself.- - - - -“Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it—indeed, the world's need of it—these will never pass.”from A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver** ** **

This reflection was originally published on inthemargins.ca and references the following books:

- A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver
- Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
- Islands of Decolonial Love, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, by Audre Lorde
- Summons: Poems from Tanzania
- This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- Upstream, by Mary Oliver

At first, I thought that I didn't enjoy Russell Smith's Confidence because all the characters are the kinds of people I abhor: well-off, young, hip, upper-middle class Torontonians that don't do anything productive with their time or money but still find it in them to complain about how life is so hard and how nobody can ever understand their existential anguish. None of them acknowledge any of their privilege, and instead use that privilege to abuse—mentally, emotionally, financially, to varying levels—those that are less fortunate than them. In between their wanton drug use and insatiable sex drives and borderline alcoholism, they whine about not being able to get everything they want, without realizing that they get so much more than the rest of the world around them.

That's when I realized that while I didn't enjoy Russell Smith's Confidence, I certainly respected and admired his collection of short stories. Mr. Smith's portrayal of Toronto's upwardly-mobile, overly-hip, and aggressively-image-conscious class is scathing in its ridiculousness; none of the characters can be taken seriously, and because of that, the stories act as an incisive satire on our city's urban culture. His prose is effectively curt: he does not want to elicit any sympathies for the cheating husbands or drug-addled adult students, and isn't afraid to craft a narrative that is disdainful of their lives and actions.

The Toronto that Mr. Smith captures in his collection isn't squalid—he does not focus on what would be typically considered the seedy underbelly of the urban environment—but is instead more the scratch marks on an overly-glossy surface: everything seems shiny and new, but is marked by flaws and blemishes. (These flaws are the failings of his characters, all manipulative and mostly-reprehensible despite their outward appearances.) It is a Toronto that makes me shudder, full of lying, cheating, and misogyny—a Toronto that I know exists but choose to hide myself from during my day-to-day life.

Despite the recoil I experienced reading about these characters, I have to recommend this short yet impactful collection of stories; Mr. Smith is a talented chronicler of the human condition, even when he is chronicling the most abhorrent among us. We should all read Russell Smith's Confidence not just because his prose is terse and his tales are despicably captivating; we should all read Confidence to remind us of the kinds of people we should endeavour never to become.

(Full review on I Tell Stories.)

There are times when I read something and realize halfway through that I'm not smart enough, or cultured enough, to fully understand what the author is trying to do. It's clear that Heti is trying to write an “ugly” novel, but a lot of that intent seems to have passed me by. Mostly, I found this book to be a lot of words about art and friendship and self-questioning, without really saying much about all of them. The prose is heavy, but that is likely done in purpose; there were some beautiful moments in its leadenness, but overall it didn't quite resonate. It's probably a great book—I'm just not “with it” enough to get it.

When I was reading 1984 in middle school, I never really considered what the story would look like from another character's perspective. Julia is a captivating shift of perspective on the classic, and the first half of this novel brilliantly acts as exposition to a side of the Orwellian world that was sorely missing. The second half languishes a little, and the ending doesn't quite land the way that Orwell's does, but I was glad to have had this glimpse into a different side of a story that is part of the modern canon.

The one thing I have missed most over the past few weeks, as I have been healing from my herniated disc, is the ability to stroll. While previously I would spend hours a day on my feet, journeying on sidewalks and in parks, never moving in a direct line to get from A to B, but instead wandering in indefinite directions and on undefined pathways to eventually find myself somewhere, now I am rarely a pedestrian. When I must go to a certain place, I take transit and taxis; my strolling has been replaced with purposeful walking, a maximum of five minutes at a time, when my destination is close enough and I can quickly sit down when I arrive.

My propensity to walk everywhere, before my injury, meant that I was always discovering somewhere and something new. I made an effort to rarely duplicate my routes, and to allow serendipity guide me towards new locations and experiences. On these rambling strolls, I would rarely be lost in place — my impeccable sense of direction emerges even in foreign and strange cities that I have never before visited, but can navigate within minutes — but I would be lost in time and mind. I may have always known where I was, but I never really knew how I got there and where I was going next.

It's that feeling of being lost in mind and in time that resonated most with me upon reading Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. The stories of being lost in place were more illustrative of the meditative power of ambling, while the stories of being lost in time and mind were resonant of my favorite kind of exploration: of discovering something new in places that are familiar, of being lost in experience and not necessarily in location.

As if illustrating its commitment to the idea of aimless ambling, A Field Guide to Getting Lost does not present a tight, cohesive narrative, but is instead constructed more loosely, a collection of stories and illuminations that are held together more by a sense of wonder than any commitment to structure. It is a book that allows you to get lost in it, and to subsequently find yourself, dozens of times.

This ambling and rambling narrative, and Ms. Solnit's incredible ability to craft poetry in every paragraph, is what makes A Field Guid to Getting Lost so meditatively appealing. It is a book that can be devoured in one sitting, and then re-read in bits in pieces, in highlighted passages that evoke some kind of emotion, whether it be nostalgia or excitement.

There are few authors that can manipulate prose the way Ms. Solnit can, and she does so deftly in this book. The lyricism of each paragraph reminds us of just how beautiful it is to get lost — each word I read, and re-read, reminds me just how anxious I am for my back to heal, so that I can begin my strolls, my aimless ambling, again.

(Review originally published on Flashing Palely in the Margins.)

This reflection was originally published on inthemargins.ca and references the following books:

- A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver
- Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
- Islands of Decolonial Love, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, by Audre Lorde
- Summons: Poems from Tanzania
- This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- Upstream, by Mary Oliver

** ****“The best use of literature bends not toward the narrow and the absolute but to the extravagant and the possible.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -In the fourth grade, we received an assignment to write a poem. A few days later, we were to hand in our poems to the teacher, who would look them over that afternoon, and we would then recite them out loud to the class the next day. The morning after handing mine in, my teacher pulled me aside and told me she needed to see me after class; I would not be allowed to read my poem to the rest of the class, that day.Crestfallen, I listened to the work of my friends, and cheered them on. That afternoon, before getting on the bus, my teacher pulled me aside and asked, “who taught you how to write this?”I will not pretend that my submission was good, but it was different. Unlike the acrostics, haikus, limericks, and quatrains we were learning about in class and that most of my peers had written, my poem was three pages long, written in sestets with an aabbab rhyme sequence. It was an ode to a young lady in my class—I think her name was Michelle A—where I did not mention her, but instead how the world changed when she entered the room. The imagery was rudimentary and the diction plain, but it was different enough from what we were learning that my teacher was perplexed.The honest truth was that I had discovered Wordsworth earlier that year and was so impressed by his poetry that I had spent weeks imitating his style. The nuance of his language and much of his content was above my head, but by the time I got around to reading “Lucy Gray,” it did not matter that I did not understand what he was saying, but instead that the musicality of his language was enthralling. I wanted to write poems that sounded like song, and so I attempted to do that in my sprawling three-page ode.I did end up being allowed to read my poem in class the next day. The subject of the ode was oblivious; she did not see herself in the words, and like the rest of the class, thought me pretentious and too much of a try-hard. They were all right, of course. I didn't know what I was doing, but instead was trying to impress others with my feeble imitation.Into my late teens, I continued to write poetry, and was lucky enough to have a few of my pieces printed in small journals and magazines. And then, one day, I stopped. I stopped writing poetry, and I stopped reading it.Until this year.- - - - -“The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -If we were all taught poetry in school the way that Mary Oliver teaches the art in A Poetry Handbook, we would all be poets today. Yes, there is discussion about meter and rhyme, but Oliver opens the book with an in-depth look at sound, at how the way we read poetry is an aural experience, and how it is that sound that makes poetry resonate—both metaphorically and literally, when read out loud. Reading this chapter, I am reminded of the first time I read Wordsworth, when I was not yet nine years old, and immediately realized that poetry was about the music you heard when you read it, and not about the strict adherence to form that we had been learning in school.Oliver does remind us that form is important, along with diction, voice, tone, and so much more—that all of these go into the true musicality and resonance of the poem—but opening her handbook with sound was what made my heart stir. This is how I wish I was taught poetry: to learn how sound influenced the soul, and how poetry—how beautiful writing of any kind—could make the spirit flourish.I have written out this passage from Oliver's Handbook and left it on my desk as a reminder of what I can do, what I should do, when I write, and what I should listen for, when I read:“Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part—the content, the pace, the diction, the rhythm, the tone—as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.”I am diving back into poetry this year, and I am looking forward to the sliding, the floating, the thumping, the rapping.- - - - -“Writing actually sucks. Like you're alone in your head for days on end, just wondering if you actually can die of loneliness, just wondering how healthy it is to make all this shit up, and just wondering if you did actually make this shit up, or if you just copied down your life or worse someone else's life, or maybe you're just feeding your delusions and neuroses and then advertising it to whoever reads your drivel.”from This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson- - - - -My colleague and friend Adie was the first to hand me her copy of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Islands of Decolonial Love. It sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks, but once I picked it up, I could not put it down. Instead, when I had turned its final page, I quickly went on to read Simpson's follow-up, This Accident of Being Lost, which was just as enthralling.Most of the poetry we grew up reading was by white people, white men in particular. Eventually, in my late teens, I learned of Latin American poets like Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, and of Middle Eastern poets like el-Fagommi and Rasha Omran, but still, my exposure to poetry was still defined by the Western “classics.”Simpson's collections remind me that there is another view onto the world, that poetry is not just art or craft but also a reflection of life, an expression of emotion and vulnerability and questioning. It can be raw and incisive, and in Simpson's writing, it most often is:“If I had ten minutes alone with you, I'd tell you that I love you. I'd tell you not to be scared, because it's the kind of love that doesn't want anything or need anything. It's the kind of love that just sits there and envelops whoever you are or whoever you want to be. It doesn't demand. It isn't a commodity. It doesn't threaten all the other people you love. It doesn't fuck up and it doesn't fuck things up. It's loyal. It's willing to feel hurt. It's willing to exist on shifting terms. It's willing to stay anyway. It doesn't want. It's just there. It's just there and good and given freely, sewing up the holes unassumingly because it's the only thing to do. There is so much space around it and the space shimmers.”When I was young, poetry was presented to me in one way. Now that I am re-immersing myself, I am excited to find the other paths through verse—the paths carved by people whose voices were often silenced and definitely need to be heard.- - - - -Then there is dissatisfaction,the flesh, the heart and the soul,and most especially the mind.There I always an antagonised idealin this antagonistic world:there is always a craving desireto satisfy the flesh,the heart, the souland most especially the mind.And one never gets alland there is always dissatisfaction.from “Then there is dissatisfaction” by Manga J. Kingazi Mmgaha, in Summons: Poems from Tanzania- - - - -Early this year, I received a parcel in the mail. In it, a copy of Summons: Poems from Tanzania, and a note from a new friend I had made in the fall. In her note, she remarked upon a conversation we had when we first met, where I told her that I was born in Tanzania, and that she told me that she had worked in East Africa, many years ago at the start of her career, and still held a fondness for the region. The collection of poems was one of the mementos she had kept from her time there, and it was now mine to have.It is a modest collection, and I did not connect with every piece, but it got me thinking: why is poetry not an appropriate way to learn about our own history? How can we discover who we are and from whence we came through verse—and why do we not do this more often?- - - - -There is a timbre of voicethat comes from not being heardand knowing    you are not beingheard    noticed onlyby others    not heardfor the same reason.from “Echoes” by Audre Lorde, in The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance- - - - -In elementary school, I learned that poetry was about beauty. I learned that a poem was written to extol, to recognize, to celebrate. We were given odes and sonnets to read, each talking about love and joy and sometimes heartbreak, but beautiful heartbreak. We weren't taught that sometimes, poetry comes of anger, of despair, of rebellion, of revolt. We were taught that we could express the range of human emotion through verse, but then were driven towards only the emotions that echoed with pleasantness.We were not taught that poetry was a way to speak truth to power. It took me far too long to realize this.I finally understood this when I picked up Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and read the now iconic but painfully true stanza:because white men can'tpolice their imaginationblack men are dyingRankine's Citizen is filled with vignettes, prose poems that punch you in the gut while you read them. They are not the poems of my elementary school days: they hurt, enrage, fill you with anguish. They are often harrowing, but they are exactly what we all must read in order to understand our current era. At times, we feel as though these are words used as weapons, verses used as bludgeons, emptiness on the page used as pauses to reflect and recover from the blows.I am currently reading Audre Lorde's The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance. Like Rankine does in Citizen, Lorde speaks of a life lived as a Black woman, and speaks the truth of all the joys and pains of that experience.They are both speaking truth to power. They are both making sure we sit up and listen, and ideally, do something about the injustices they reference. They are using poetry to enlighten, to incite, to create change; they do this with power, with strength, and with beauty.Perhaps my elementary school teachers were right: poetry is about beauty. They were just wrong in telling us what beauty could look like once it was in verse.- - - - -“First and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artificial, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.”from Upstream, by Mary Oliver- - - - -I am reading poetry, now, after many years away. I am not writing it just yet, but I am told by friends that it is inevitable that the more I read, the more I will be besieged by the desire to write. (I will perhaps hold off on writing three-page odes until I have had much more practice.)For now, I am allowing myself to be enveloped by verse.For now, I am allowing myself to listen to the sliding, the floating, the thumping, the rapping. For now, I am allowing myself to see a poem as a place to enter, a place in which to feel. For now, I am rediscovering poetry, and through it, rediscovering myself.- - - - -“Poetry is a river; many voices travel in it; poem after poem moves along in the exciting crests and falls of the river waves. None is timeless; each arrives in an historical context; almost everything, in the end, passes. But the desire to make a poem, and the world's willingness to receive it—indeed, the world's need of it—these will never pass.”from A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver** ** **

This reflection was originally published on inthemargins.ca and references the following books:

- A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver
- Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine
- Islands of Decolonial Love, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, by Audre Lorde
- Summons: Poems from Tanzania
- This Accident of Being Lost, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
- Upstream, by Mary Oliver

Kiese Laymon's memoir is about more than physical weight, but also of the heaviness of the things we carry inside us. A stark portrayal of growing up Black in the South, Heavy is often startling, often jarring, often difficult to read. The rawness and honesty, particularly when Layton outlines his struggles with gambling and eating disorder, makes this a heavy read; the discussion of family and how they shape you is weighty. This is not a memoir to be taken lightly, but it is one to read knowing you will learn, and feel, a lot.

Jenny Xie's debut is impressive, though ultimately not what I had hoped it would be. Exploring ideas of family, intimacy, and “feeling stuck” in life, there's a lot to like here. The pervasive exploration of touch and shared experience is interesting; I only wish she had dived in deeper into some of those themes. The plot meanders a bit and many of the characters remain unexplored and unfulfilling, but the prose is evocative. An enjoyable read, but you can't help but wish it was a little bit more than what it ended up being.

Eight years ago, I got to join a small group of incredible people to work on something we all knew was going to be bigger than us.

Over my career, I've mostly worked in the areas of digital governance, digital policy, and communications. I had carved out a small niche in being someone who could tell stories about technology in ways that made tech accessible to leaders and decision-makers. It wasn't always the most interesting skill, but I was good at it and proud of what I did.

Eight years ago, a handful of us came together to create a digital organization within our provincial government. Our thinking was simple: if government was to serve people in a digital era, it needed the skills, expertise, and structures to think digitally. We knew that the success of any government program was “3am government”: the ability to deliver service to people in the ways they wanted and expected that service, when they needed it most.

Our motley crew eventually became the Ontario Digital Service, a not-so-small group of people who not only worked across government to help build better services, but also worked with people across government to rethink what it meant to deliver services in a digital world. (I'm still working here; the name has changed over the years, but the ethos remains the same: we're here to make government work for people.)

Reading Jennifer Pahlka's Recoding America was a perfect reminder of why I do the work I do; why a few of us got together eight years ago to build something new. Pahlka provides a number of examples of how thinking differently about the way we deliver services leads to better outcomes for people, and how thinking differently requires having digital talent inside government. Policy and legislation isn't enough: implementation needs to be built into the decisions we make, and that requires having people who have the skills, expertise, and experience to understand what good implementation looks like—and then give them the space and power to make the necessary decisions.

Pahlka clearly makes the case for embedding digital practitioners into the public service:

The degree of government's reliance on the digital realm has grown steadily for decades, without a corresponding growth in digital literacy.

It's easy to complain about government but more satisfying to help fix it.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has written a novel that is unflinchingly violent and almost gruesome, but incredibly poignant and pointed at the same time. A world where convicts are forced to fight to the death for sport—and for the enjoyment of spectators who have no qualms about what they are watching—feels dystopian, but hews closely to our current abhorrent criminal incarceration system—something Adjei-Brenyah reminds us with no subtlety through footnotes and overt metaphor. It's a book that forces its messages on you, which can feel heavy-handed but still manages to be captivating because of the richness of the narrative and the well-written characters. It's not a book for everyone, but if you can stomach the violence and internalize the moralizing, it's a tour de force of storytelling.

The one thing I remember from my first visit with my then-family doctor (after I had “graduated” from my pediatrician in my early tweens) was that the first thing she told me was that I needed to lose weight.

It was a refrain that I got used to hearing, one that I had heard often from people in my childhood but most saliently from healthcare professionals when I started to enter my teens: the space I took up in the world was a problem, and that the problem could be fixed if I just ate less and worked out more. Every doctor I spoke to brought up my weight first, and often neglected to engage in any other health-related conversations that didn't center around my weight. This is what I thought doctors did: told you that you were fat, and that fatness was a problem to be fixed.

Now that I'm a father—still in a larger body, all these decades later—I think a lot about how the world will treat my daughter as she grows up. I worry especially about how she will see and accept her body for what it is, no matter what shape or size it will take. I spent so many years of my life (and really, still do) feeling inadequate because of how I look, because of how the world saw my body; this is not a reality I want for my child.

Fat Talk is the book I needed to read, not just as a parent, but as someone who is fat. It reminded me that I am worthy of kindness at any size, and that I can help my daughter learn and understand that as well. Virginia Sole-Smith's new book is rooted in science and incredibly well-sourced, but what resonated most with me were the stories she told of people who, like me, have struggled to accept their body, and those who have accepted themselves for who they are and are teaching their children these lessons too.

We may live in a world rife with anti-fat bias, but that doesn't mean we have to perpetuate it; Fat Talk gives the tools to dismantle fatphobia and to create “a safer and more weight-inclusive space for kids of all sizes.” I can't recommend this book enough.

There are important nuggets of wisdom in here, but nothing that I didn't already learn in my corporate communications class in university: keep things simple, clear, concise, and write from an “audience-first” perspective. The examples in here are helpful, but this book mostly reads as an ad for Axios and AxiosHQ more than anything else.

The pursuit of perfection is an impossible one, and that's something How To Be Perfect acknowledges: no matter how we strive for it, we will never achieve perfection.

We can, however, strive to be better. We can make better decisions that are grounded in moral philosophy and that bring us closer to being good people, however you may define that status.

As a primer on moral philosophy, How To Be Perfect can't be beat: it takes grand ideas and distills them into easily-understandable concepts. It compares and contrasts these philosophies helping us understand that our desire to be “good” can be interpreted in many ways and can lead to a multitude of oft-contrasting decisions.

In the end, being good—being perfect—relies both on circumstance and choices, and according to existentialism, choices are all we have in a meaningless world. I try to make the right choices every day, but I know I often fail. We all do.

All we can do is continue to make choices based our own philosophy of the world—guided by the moral philosophy that came before us—and hope that the decisions we make are good. Not perfect, but at least in its pursuit.

I understand the importance of satire, and for the most part, I enjoy it as a method of elucidating things that need skewering in culture. But this novel—where a young white man is convinced he's a Black man in the wrong body—didn't quite hit the mark. The book doesn't quite make the satire biting enough, and there are long passages where the plot feels almost too earnest rather than satirical. It is gorgeously well-written, but by the end, I didn't feel like the absurdity of the premise had paid off.

There are some things I'll take away from this book that are useful, but on the whole, I find the exercise of comparing ourselves to other cultures and then figuring out what we're doing wrong a useless one. Contexts are different, connotations are different. This book feels like it's talking down at me for not being like other people across the world, and to be honest: parenting like the Mayans isn't going to fix this.

Today is #BellLetsTalk day, a day where well-meaning people spend their day talking about mental illness, raising funds for research, and doing their best to end the stigma that surrounds diseases of the mind. It's also a day that I mostly avoid the internet, for fear of being triggered.

I've lived with mental illness—specifically, bipolar type II with some schizoaffective psychosis and mild anxiety—for almost two decades now. I'm not on medication anymore, managing my condition through cognitive-behavioral therapy and mindfulness, but the illness lurks, ready to escape when the time is right. I've learned to identify triggers, to take care of myself when I feel a relapse coming on; to any person I meet, I'm a high-functioning, seemingly-normal individual with a strong self-care regimen.

That doesn't mean that it's not hard, or not frustrating, or not simply exhausting. I'm always on guard, always being careful; I know I'm not 100% well, so I have to be extra vigilant in avoiding situations that could cause me pain.

When I read the late Carrie Fisher's thoughts on living with bipolar disorder in her memoir, Wishful Drinking, I nodded my head vigorously in complete understanding:

“At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.

The should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication.”

Wishful Drinking

(originally published on inthemargins.ca)

Here at home, we subscribe to a few newspapers and magazines, but I often feel like it isn't enough.

The truth is that good journalism costs money, and that's not something we think of very often. It's easy to read an article online and forget about the immense amount of work that went into writing that piece, and because of that ease, I know I'm guilty of not always giving journalism its due.

She Said, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's recounting of how they broke the news of Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment and abuse for the New York Times, is striking and sobering because of the subject matter of the book, and also because of just how seminal their reporting was to launch a movement. It is especially poignant, however, as an exposé on how journalism actually works, and how much time, effort, and frustration goes into reporting a story of this magnitude.

The book—simple, direct, detailed, and weighty—can be hard to read because the subject matter is so horrific. It is, however, important to read because of the truth it unveils:

The United States had a system for muting sexual harassment claims, which often enabled the harassers instead of stopping them. Women routinely signed away the right to talk about their own experiences. Harassers often continued onward, finding fresh ground on which to commit the same offenses. The settlements and confidentiality agreements were almost never examined in law school classrooms or open court. This was why the public had never really understood that this was happening. Even those in the room with long histories of covering gender issues had never fully registered what was going on.

She Said

(this snippet of marginalia was originally published on inthemargins.ca)

(This is an excerpt from a longer blog post originally posted on inthemargins.ca)

In the first few pages of Jacqueline Woodson's Red At the Bone, Melody comes down the stairs to the music of Prince's Darling Nikki. Immediately, I was transported to my first memories of hearing that song, of being scandalized and titillated and enthralled all at the same time. It was music like I had never heard before—every song by Prince was a revelation for me—and the memory of the first time I heard that song is imprinted in my mind.

It is perhaps perfect that my first reaction of reading that passage of Red At the Bone was the recalling of a memory, especially since the novel is itself a rumination on remembrance, and how our memories—and the intergenerational memories passed on to us through those that came before—shape who we are, who we become, and how we live in the world. Throughout Ms. Woodson's poetic and entrancing prose, we are reminded that our histories, that our intergenerational traumas, are part of who we are, and that we must remember those histories in order to be truly ourselves.

The idea of being shaped by intergenerational trauma is also at the core of Watchmen, Damon Lindelof's (very loose) television sequel of the comic by the same name. Set in an era of Redfordations and racial unrest, Watchmen explores how we can not, try as we might, escape the decisions of those who came before us. Instead of running from the trauma of the past, we must remember it; to remember, to acknowledge the trauma, is to allow us to become who are meant to be.

Our memories are not just our traumas, intergenerational or our own: they are also beacons that guide us and buoy us through hard times. Our protagonist in Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Water Dancer, Hiram Walker, is both freed and burdened by his memory. He can remember everything with a photographic recall, but it is only when he chooses to open his memory and remember his mother—to see her as she was before she was taken away and sold to another plantation—that he is able to embrace his real gift: to use memory, to use remembrance to move across space and time. Like Ms. Woodson's Red At the Bone, Mr. Coates' The Water Dancer is a poetic rumination that reminds us that as hard as it may be, we will only realize our full selves if we remember.

(This is an excerpt from a longer blog post originally posted on inthemargins.ca. Read the entire blog post here.)

(This is an excerpt from a longer blog post originally posted on inthemargins.ca)

In the first few pages of Jacqueline Woodson's Red At the Bone, Melody comes down the stairs to the music of Prince's Darling Nikki. Immediately, I was transported to my first memories of hearing that song, of being scandalized and titillated and enthralled all at the same time. It was music like I had never heard before—every song by Prince was a revelation for me—and the memory of the first time I heard that song is imprinted in my mind.

It is perhaps perfect that my first reaction of reading that passage of Red At the Bone was the recalling of a memory, especially since the novel is itself a rumination on remembrance, and how our memories—and the intergenerational memories passed on to us through those that came before—shape who we are, who we become, and how we live in the world. Throughout Ms. Woodson's poetic and entrancing prose, we are reminded that our histories, that our intergenerational traumas, are part of who we are, and that we must remember those histories in order to be truly ourselves.

The idea of being shaped by intergenerational trauma is also at the core of Watchmen, Damon Lindelof's (very loose) television sequel of the comic by the same name. Set in an era of Redfordations and racial unrest, Watchmen explores how we can not, try as we might, escape the decisions of those who came before us. Instead of running from the trauma of the past, we must remember it; to remember, to acknowledge the trauma, is to allow us to become who are meant to be.

Our memories are not just our traumas, intergenerational or our own: they are also beacons that guide us and buoy us through hard times. Our protagonist in Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Water Dancer, Hiram Walker, is both freed and burdened by his memory. He can remember everything with a photographic recall, but it is only when he chooses to open his memory and remember his mother—to see her as she was before she was taken away and sold to another plantation—that he is able to embrace his real gift: to use memory, to use remembrance to move across space and time. Like Ms. Woodson's Red At the Bone, Mr. Coates' The Water Dancer is a poetic rumination that reminds us that as hard as it may be, we will only realize our full selves if we remember.

(This is an excerpt from a longer blog post originally posted on inthemargins.ca. Read the entire blog post here.)

If you're looking for good news, or for a concrete way to get us out of this climate change crisis we find ourselves in, this book is not that. Yes, it does outline what needs to be done to fix the problem, but it also acknowledges that we are far too late to fix it all. We have f**ked up, and now we have to pay for the damage we have done. According to Mr. Wallace-Wells, that damage is extensive, and the consequences are dire; if anything, reading this will scare you about the future, but in a way that still holds out a very slim glimmer of hope. It's hopeful in its direness, and it the stark honesty of the miserable reality that awaits us feels almost galvanizing. The Uninhabitable Earth reminds us that yes, we've really screwed up, but if we want to save what we can, it's time for us to get to work.

An admission that comes as no surprise to anyone that knows me well: I cry easily.

I cry when I watch a sad movie, or a happy one; I cry at commercials that tug at the heartstrings; I cry when I hear stories of courage and perseverance and heartbreak. I tear up when I think of the sacrifices my family made to let me become who I am, and I sob when I think of all the hardship of others just to carve out a life of peace and opportunity.

I've been crying more than usual, these days. The tears haven't been effusive, but instead short bursts of emotion, a few drops from the eyes and shudders of the shoulders when I think of this geopolitical tempest surrounding us.

When I am ashamed of my crying, ashamed of my inability to keep all this strife and struggle hidden inside me, I think of the words of Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning:

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”

(The preceding was an overview of the notes I took while reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning in January 2017. Originally published on inthemargins.ca .)