SEAGULLS AND OTHER SIGNS OF RIGHTNESS

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

- T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (Little Gidding)

Though I'm heading back to China in nine days and won't be settling down here in Seattle until November this return already feels different. It's never mattered how long I've been away -- the beauty here has always astonished me -- but this time I feel it more deeply. My skin and bones seem to have their own memory of home: the angle of the light at this familiar latitude, the cool mornings and long sunsets, trees tall or stout with leaves coarse or pliant whose names I never learned but to whom something in me turns in happy recognition.

It feels like all of the accumulated wrongnesses of the past few months, all those times I felt hounded by unnameable anxieties and fears (rather like what Holly Golightly so memorably referred to as the mean reds) that only multiplied as I reflected on the oppressive heat, the smallness of a small town, my own considerable limitations as a scholar and a human being; it seems those wrongnesses melt away in the face of mountains and water or when a seagull squawks overhead and I think yes! this is right! there should be seagulls flying overhead! that's what was missing!

Of course it's not just seagulls that I've needed. I've needed my friends close, close enough that we can take for granted mundane moments together, without the pressure of squeezing a year of triumphs and catastrophes, lessons and mistakes, old memories and new dreams, into a few hours of "catching up". I've needed to stop living out of suitcases and learning new kitchens (at least for awhile) and not be forever planning the next move. And most recently, I've needed to accept that trying to write one's dissertation can make you entirely too aware of your own shortcomings but that is no excuse for not getting the mother done. I've needed to accept that if most people were confronted with the prospect of writing something worthy of ~6 years of intellectual labor, capable of meeting the expectations of a respected council of academic elders, and completed on self-determined schedules and deadlines, than most people too would wake semi-optimistically then watch the day dissolve into errands, e-mail, and endless tiny projects, and give way to a night of angry self-recriminations, nameless fears, and troubled dreams.

By which I mean to say I think I've realized that my slow progress at writing does not indicate moral turpitude, but merely shows that I, like most people, need structure and support to face this beastly challenge. And that's a nice mental vista to make a fresh start with as I enjoy the view from home.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo to you all. 十一月见！