Elizabeth Smart

March 22 PreClass Notes

Elizabeth Smart
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Notes to self –
Water metaphor repeatedly.
Violence of body, of sex of birth of death and life.
Violent nature character throughout book.
Mystery, violence, beauty, etc of nature personified Woman/gender specific.
Relatable scenery to my own personal life. Relatable emotions at times – however I doubt that I could return to this intensity of feelings post my twenties. I am both saddened and relieved by this.
Love as necessary, love as reason for living, love as beauty and nature and celestial universe, love as reason to die, love as pain, love as suffering. Love is religion.
This is book whose comments were made of Dostoyevsky’s character in class would be more appropriate somehow. The obsession with the other, the relentless need for fulfillment through the other person rather than within – the demanding, the waiting, the masochistic suffering claimed to be love – this books reeks more of narcissist than the underground man who to me – is more neurotic than self obsessed. Though it is easy to romanticize the passionate and honest sentiments – the inaction, the victim/martyr role taken on by this character far outweigh the troublesome awkward interactions of the underground man who was argued to be passive and lame.
-dramatic binary leaps of emotion, of highs and lows, of peaks of happiness that suggest transcendence and oppositional depths of despair
- some assumption that others do not, could not, will not understand the feelings or could not be capable, their person or their love is subpar
-the husband Mr? asks so is it true that there is such a thing called love?
-she volunteers the excess of her passions to help those without
- a disdain for the banality of everyday, for living, for aging, for pursuits of war of economy of society

The book began with a splendid emotional and nostaligic leisure as Smart relays the tension and delicacy of the threshold of love – this mingled with a forbidden fruit aspect and a roadtrip through the beauty of a coast I know well. I was taken with the first half of this story until the writing swiftly turns you on your head through a tumultuous misery of waiting, uncertainty and troublesome unrequited or intangible affair. The weather, nature and body imagery turns also towards the end and as the character embarks on a contemplative and suicidal diatribe of unfulfilled desires and painfully ruinous obsessive fixation on a lover – I was left crushed and with disdain for the narcissistic and masochistic character who crushes any breathable air out of the potential for a reconcilable ending. This being said – the enraging aspects of the societal bullying and the pregnancy and looming poverty left me wondering who to blame, who to side with and who to root for. The helpless despair felt by the character is easily translated onto the mood of the reader – making for a difficult to digest but beautiful piece of work.

Quotes and noted passages taken during reading.

18. The Pacific in blue spasms reaches all its superlatives.
19. Postponing our lives indefinitely.
22. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done.
24. She is the goddess of all things which the vigour of living destroys. Why are her arms so empty?
33. And then I force my vanity to stand on the cliff and let self contemplate self which only suicide can join.
34. Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.
41. But the noise of my inside seas, the dazzle of this cataclysmic birth of love in me, cannot hear clearly what he says. To make a response is like rousing a heavy sleeper who longs to remain asleep. I smile, but I am in a trance, there is no reality but love.
42. wild sea that treated me like flotsam/But I have become a part of the earth. / I can metamorphose at will.
-Nature , earth, whore, woman
-love, transcendence, metaphor, metamorphosis
-recollect St Augustine revelation scene
42. are you sodden leaves in some forsaken yard?
44. love is a strong as death
55. premature ghosts, straggling homeward over the plain.
64. for I was raised for this event from more than a three-day burial, and would have build memorials to last longer than 2,00 years.
68. the detestable all-female, who grabs and devours, invulnerable with greed
85. I wonder why no one has noticed I am dead and taken the trouble to bury me.
85. all people seem criminally irrelevant.
87.my imagination is snowed under the eternal unpunctuated hours.
88. There is nowhere and nver a time for such a word.
93. it is the state where the unbearable suffers eclipse and becomes coma.
94. is she too pressing her feet into the service of sedative monotony?
104. Heavy WATER/FLUID imagery whole page
- dissolved me into tears
- gushes out of me like an arterial wound. I am drowning in it.
105. my face floated away on that haemorrhage of sorrow
107. He hangs, damp with his impotent tears, nailed by one hand to Love and by the other one to Pity, with his two feet nailed to the longitude of the inevitable, floating in the perpetual seas of tragedy, in the gales of these special times.
110. And I am drenched before I reach the surface. I am almost succumbed.