the most beautiful little bidding

In German, bitten means to ask. Ich bitte, du bittest, er bitt.
And bitt/biet evolved into bid. Ah, the musical things we learn at Midd...

Send Me A Leaf, by Bertolt Brecht, three times so you won't forget it

Send me a leaf, but from a bush
That grows at least one half hour
Away from your house, then
You must go and will be strong, and I
Thank you for the pretty leaf.

Next, the version scrawled by my (once) S:
Send me a leaf, but from a little tree
That grows no nearer your house

Than half an hour away. For then
You will have to walk, you will get strong
and I
shall thank you for the pretty leaf.

(I like this translation much, much better. Seems to be more solicitous a love)

And of course, auf Deutsch (the language that further distances pre-Middlebury loved ones):
Schicke mir ein Blatt, doch von einem Strauche

Der nicht näher als eine halbe Stunde
Von deinem Haus wächst, dann
Musst du gehen und wirst stark, und ich
bedanke mich für das hübsche Blatt.

P.S. Heidegger and Arendt. A love story, a friendship story:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27569287?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

seemingly semiotic: two reader responses

no matter what, I'm only ever saying to you
what has already been said.

2/16: To acknowledge the author of a text is to attach an authority to it. The notion that meaning may be ascertained according to the will of its presenter -- the author -- invites the rebuttal of Roland Barthes, author (or rather, writer, owner, or dictator) of “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text.” In the first essay, Barthes transfers responsibility and credit from the writer of a work to its reader; in the second, he differentiates between the work (the tangible text, the gravity- and establishment-obeying component of a text) and the text (the dormant dimension that requires reader production). Put neatly by Barthes, “the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse." 

Barthes writes that giving a text an Author “[imposes] a limit on that text," subjecting it to absolute interpretation. Is it not more comfortable and valuable to turn to the Author, the arranger of past thoughts and experiences into a bouquet (flowers borne from previous flowers, but which are nevertheless unique flowers), for truth? For a truth that may elaborated/improvised upon by the reader? That “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” does resonate with me; yet Barthes’s criticism calls for the emptying of the reader: “the reader is without history, biography, psychology."

What distinguishes the Text from its Work is, apparently, “its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.” Does this mean that the Text evades all labels and definition? Attempts to impose a single meaning onto a Text are futile. The Text’s “plural” identity draws from Barthes the words of a previously-possessed man: “‘My name is Legion: for we are many’” (Mark 5:9, 1329). How do Barthes’s musings, which so clearly challenge absolutes, apply to and undermine monotheistic beliefs? Then, Barthes describes the discourse that occurs in the “methodological field” between reader and writer, proposing that unconscious, “bored” consumption of a text is a result of one’s reluctance to “produce the text, open it out, set it going." Like a music score, the work remains dormant until it is “completed," not merely expressed, by the performer.

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2/24: What Heidegger presents in “Language” is a reversal of order. Man speaks language into being, like God his creation; rather, language speaks man into being. What use arises from shuffling man and language, A and B (what was the consequence of “man speaks language” -- C -- to begin with?). Heidegger dissuades us from seeking out a “generally useful view of language that will lay to rest all further notions about it” (986) and claims that “we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already.” Where we “are,” perhaps, is that place of “being,” escaping the endless conversion of past to future for the usually unsticky present. By thinking of our thoughts as by-products of the speech once attributed to them, do we draw closer to that state of simply being, where “we leave the speaking to language” (986).

If man and his world are the products of language, this must mean that language preceded man in existence. From where, then, did language originate? Proponents of language-preceding-man assent that “the word of language is of divine origin” (987). Thus, God begot word; word begot man. Heidegger accepts this answer for the sake of liberating the “question of origin” from logical “fetters” (987), and consults what he considers the purest form of speech: the poem. Apparently, poetry best captures the interplay between what we think and what language tells us. But poems are the most meticulously planned and precise presentations of language -- why does Heidegger consider that which was creatively crafted and manipulated by its producer to be the best representative of language’s control over man?

one month of German, not to be topped

~ Felix & Theo's Tödlicher Schnee, a book for German learners, inspired this insipid thing. To be clear, I am a detective called Helmut, not a frog. All songs were reproduced on a dinky keyboard and belted out in haste.

~ A little essay about my dream city, Gulangyu, China's "Island of Music/City of Pianos."
Die Eltern meiner Mutter kommen aus Xiamen, einer südchinesische Stadt in der Fujian Provinz. Weil Fujian in Südchina ist, sie ist wärmer und schöner als andere Provinzen, und die Luft ist frischer. Vom Sommer bis Winter ist das Wetter sehr schwül. Xiamen liegt entlang dem Südchina Meer, und man hat immer einen Blick auf das Meer. Nicht zu weit vom Xiamens Ufer, zwischen China und Taiwan, ist eine kleine, grüne Inselstadt. Sie heißt Gulangyu, und sie ist meine Traumstadt.

Gulangyu hat eine große Fußgängerzone -- man darf nicht Auto, Motorrad und Roller fahren, nur zu Fuß gehen oder segeln. Deshalb sind die Straße so schmal wie Nudeln. Kinder tragen nur Unterwäsche und laufen durch die schmalen Nudelstraßen, und alten Omas jagen sie. Wenn sie müde werden, sie können unter den Palmen liegen und sich erholen (es gibt so viele Palmen, dass die Sonne verdeckt ist). Dann kann man geheimnisvolle Klaviermusik hören, denn in jedem Haus der Gulangyu Insel gibt es mindestens ein Klavier. Weil Gulangyu so viele Klaviers hat, sind die Spitznamen der Gulangyu Insel “Die Insel der Musik” und “Die Stadt der Klaviers.”

Gulangyu ist auch eine besondere internationale Insel. Es gibt Hotels und Botschaften in jeder Straße. An der Kreuzung von den Nudelstraßen ist ein farbenreicher Markplatz. Hier kann man tropischen Obst, Musiknoten und internationale Souvenirs kaufen. Später kann man mit Freunden die Schätzen genießen.

with my mama in Gulangyu, 2010

talking to myself

On the last day of our Middlebury orientation trip, we were told to write ourselves a letter, to be delivered at the start of the next term. It's strange to see how consistent I am with my pre-college self, but I'm also a bit disappointed to find that many of my post-trip convictions have since faded. Tomorrow night, we reunite.

Lake Dunmore
September 8th, 2014

Dear Gloria,
I'm writing to you from beneath a skinny sapling on the shore of Lake Dunmore, half in sun, half in shade. I'm at my most 三八阿花: Taiwanese hat on backward to prevent sunburn of neck; round glasses on because I was too grubby to pop in contacts this morning. It's been three days since I've showered, and my thighs are sliced like honeyed hams by scratches from the cornfield. Spread out across the grass carpet are my Midview comrades (Dylan closest, Ernesto and Ashley on benches, Heather and Lizzy browning on a blanket, Amosh and Ariana in repose, Elissa and Nikki in straight sun, Julia on a baby peninsula with a tree), ones that I hope to see again, that I hope will want to know me again, too.

It's amazing what 72 hours can do to total strangers, each representing a personality previously formed; that our eclectic pod of people could go from silence in the van to howling Adele, that we'd know the degrees to which the other's feet were dirtied and not mind twinge. We admire each other. Leaders just reunited... Some kids just walked by, ascertaining strawberry milk's origins, and an old lady on a bench with a book converses with a woman in green.

I wonder if, by now, you've returned to the Bridport Central School to make more signs, or help in the music class that you longed to fix (you haven't), if you've begun a MESH-like project with Su Lian Tan and Community Engagement (ditto), and if you can bust out a few German words (ja Mann!). I wonder if you've begun to have confidence in your gentle character, strength in your shyness, and persistence in your pursuits.

I hope that you have held fast to Jesus, that you will never forget or shove aside his never-ending grace and love, and that you will pray for those that have, especially S. If your heart is broken, I hope that you fight for a friendship to mend it; if it remains loyal to him, I hope that you will love and support him with wisdom, as I hope you have done already, never losing yourself in him but instead trusting in God's plan for you both.

If you have lost contact with Catherine, Nova, Sarah, Trio, Sabrina, Shereen, Vivian, or Julianne, please write them something beautiful, and pray for them as they embark on their respective adventures. Meanwhile, cherish the new friends you've made at Midd, remembering to greet them brightly per Lizzy's advice.

Write on blog frequently, and check all of Dad's emails; find a job to support Mom and Dad as they have yourself. Assure Bobo that a purposeful college admission lies ahead, and relate your own once miserable situation and now happy resolution.

Be kind, be bold; be inquisitive, be open. Ask much and do more. Wring this college for every droplet it has, with unrelenting and uncanny determination and energy. Re-cast the Middlebury mold. Run with determination this race set before you, going two miles where everyone goes one.

Have faith and love, and love,
Gloria Breck, past.
When future becomes present...

Boy, I really like myself... I seldom speak so warmly to anyone else!

to a pea of the pod

with you, I dance in perfect time

Hey, vivacious. You've taught me what it means to be both tenacious and gracious. Few can withstand so gracefully the pressures that you did and still do. You soar above the silver lining, gesturing with enthusiasm toward those beauties that evade us, the colorblind; out-chuckling others' sad, sarcastic snickers; baring your heart's fanciful flights and flickers so honestly. You don't fear people like the rest of us do; you vivify them.

There's a certain species of moment that I miss the most: a summer afternoon in the living room of my old house, us languishing on the couch much in the manner of Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, listening to Kapustin and then your Scherzo. You had your signature polka-dotted pants on. Another time, in mid-January, right before the audition that always corresponded with your birthday: we closed our eyes and recited our pieces in our heads, waited patiently for the other to "wake," then took turns as each other's live audience. That's a world stuck somewhere in space-time that only you and I will remember.

Some wordy words from À la recherche du temps perdu: "The very memory of the piano falsified still further the perspective in which he saw the elements of music, that the field open to the musician is not a miserable stave of seven notes, but an immeasurable keyboard (still almost entirely unknown) on which, here and there only, separated by the thick darkness of its unexplored tracts, some few among the millions of keys of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity, which compose it, each one differing from all the rest as one universe differs from another, have been discovered by a few great artists who do us the service, when they awaken in us the emotion corresponding to the theme they have discovered, of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden, unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void."

Of tenderness, of passion, of courage, of serenity. At the keyboard or away, you chisel these from the fray of formal notation. To the endlessly inspiring Vivian Wang: may your nineteenth year be marked by even purer tenderness, deeper passion, greater courage, and truer serenity. Love you, forever! 

cultural history of the piano, in colored pencil

“The piano keys are black and white / but they sound like a million colors in your mind,” wrote Maria Cristina Mena. But they do more than merely sound.

練習語法，哈哈

競爭是一種最普遍的現象。不管人們的地位或者他們的年齡，大家都會受到競爭的影響。競爭的確控制我們生活所有的方面：高中生天天追著好成績，超級大國為了自然資源打仗，甚至於明德學生在食堂裏搶好吃的菜也是一種競爭。世界上的人越來越多，競爭只會變得更殘酷。有些人認為競爭是公平社會最重要的特性，但是競爭可能就是社會貧富不均的原因之一。

賽跑的時候，如果跑步者跑的距離都是不一樣的，當然是不公平的情況。現代社會制度跟這種不公平的賽跑一樣：有些人必須跑又長又辛苦的距離，別人可以座上汽車，把距離縮短。有些人有很多朋友在旁邊一直鼓勵他們繼續跑，但是更多人摔倒的時候身邊一個朋友都沒有。競爭只會讓一個已經不公平的社會變更不公平。
地位跟學問的關係說明這個現象。有財富的人有能力把他們的孩子送去質量最好的私立學校，聘請私人家教，加上捐很多錢給大學。這種方法會讓富人保證孩子和財富的未來。比較窮的高中生，不管他們有多聰明，沒有辦法跟這些有錢人們比。有錢人保護他們的財富和地位是很容易的事情，但是窮人把他們的情況改成比較好的是非常不容易的。
所謂的“美國夢”就是大家有一樣的希望，一樣的機會，和一樣的資源的社會制度。許多美國人和移民還相信美國夢，說明他們又天真又理想化的態度。有這種樂觀的態度其實製造了一些壞處。其中的壞處就是人們會比較不在乎別人，因為美國夢暗示失敗者有能力自己幫住自己。把失敗者的責任交給表面上很公平的社會制度其實阻礙社會的進步。公平的競爭要求公平的基礎。因為社會已經不太公平，人們的態度也不能太公平：他們應該對地位低一點的人比較寬容，讓他們追上富人。
競爭是現代社會去不掉的現象。如果大家互相關心，讓社會一步一步的變得比較公平，以後競爭不會造成那麼多不公平的痛苦。