Dorian Gray

"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect — simply a confession of failure. Faithfulness! I must analyse it someday. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up."

I love Oscar Wilde. He always seemed like the mad uncle that enjoys confusing the people around him. This may be odd, but I am at the same time both attracted and repulsed by conventionality. Which sometimes makes him just... perfect.

"He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."

This book in particular. I don't think I've ever fallen in love so easily with a book before.

"....There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion, and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims..."

But my favourite is still this one:

"...each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."

In preparation for ZY's visit, I've been trying to complete my assignments ahead of time. But random cravings for books and walks (as well as other little annoyances) have been somewhat distracting.

I think I'm secretly an old person.

If They Come in the Night

Long ago on a night of danger and vigil
a friend said, why are you happy?
He explained (we lay together
on a cold hard floor) what prison
meant because he had done
time, and I talked of the death
of friends. Why are you happy
then, he asked, close to
angry.

I said, I like my life. If I
have to give it back, if they
take it from me, let me
not feel I wasted any, let me
not feel I forgot to love anyone
I meant to love, that I forgot
to give what I held in my hands,
that I forgot to do some little
piece of the work that wanted
to come through.

Sun and moonshine, starshine,
the muted light off the waters
of the bay at night, the white
light of the fog stealing in,
the first spears of morning
touching a face
I love. We all lose
everything. We lose
ourselves. We are lost.

Only what we manage to do
lasts, what love sculpts from us;
but what I count, my rubies, my
children, are those moments
wide open when I know clearly
who I am, who you are, what we
do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor,
with all my senses hungry and filled
at once like a pitcher with light.

- Marge Piercy

Painting is so scary sometimes. This is going to sound strange, but it’s hard to hide who you are in a painting. I’m not as good as painting as I would like, but it does feel nice to have something to indulge in occasionally. So last night, I tried to replicate an oil-on-canvas, this one specifically:

It was done by my mom’s colleague’s husband, Joseph. He hated it and wanted to throw it away, but I liked it, and insisted he give it to me (shameless, yes). And the painting is very much like him in person. Thoughtful, mature and meticulous (he’s a brain surgeon).

Here is mine:

I know, it’s a gaudy piece of hell. This is my first try at an oil painting, and as it turns out, a dreamy landscape with subdued colors and delicate technique is just not in me. I just can’t. Joseph’s painting is who I want to be, but instead I’m surreal, messy and obviously frustrated.

I did this watercolor on paper on a whim a few months back though (it’s still incomplete), and I wish I were in the mood to paint people again. For some inexplicable reason, I like painting people in Singapore, but here I become all angst-ridden and annoyed. I tried sketching a girl a few weeks back, and a friend who was with me asked, “Why is she so angry?”



And here are two random illustrations that I had done on my wall back home (back when I wanted to be a children’s book illustrator). There are a few sketches for more before I left, so you can imagine how messy my room is. I think if someone tried to psychoanalyze me through what I paint, I would appear very much bipolar.

On a related note, I met someone at a gathering recently, and we had a nice discussion about the mbti (my favorite topic at the moment). I mentioned what type I was, and immediately he was able to guess with considerable accuracy what kind of person I was. “So for fun, do you paint or write?” he asked. It was a little disconcerting. Amusingly enough, he is an ENTJ (which if you believe those compatibility theories, go best with an INFP) and he had 5 INFP girlfriends before. I think, more than me, he is hating how accurate the mbti sometimes is.

I’ve been feeling some pressure lately too. Not from my parents (who have been nothing but supportive and encouraging). I don’t know where it has come from, but increasingly, I have had greater expectations for myself, and looming ideas that I won’t live up to them. I am twenty-two this year, and my future is still unknown. But I do know that I want to be able to travel occasionally, I want to have the time to write or paint and hang out with my sister, I want to make the people around me proud, I want to find something I can do which is meaningful. And these things all require good grades in the short-term, which I’m trying to make my first priority. And really, it all comes down to that fear again, of being inadequate. But I promised myself this year to be brave, so I am going to do my best. Hopefully I’ll survive.

I will post some Tasmania photos in awhile, but that’s it for now. Have a good week, you!