Yes, I'm back from Italy. We arrived home a week ago after one very grueling day of travel, which I will write more about later. Now I'm just playing catch up. The laundry's done, I have one more little pile of things to put away and I'm working up the courage to tackle the dirt and mess that two weeks (well three now) of no deep cleaning can leave. On top of it all I have a tonsil infection and absolutely no voice, and Jeremy's leaving for India tomorrow. Also, I'm trying to sort through all of the pictures and pick out some good ones for a nice Italian travel post. Maybe by Friday I'll be able to post. We'll see.
But, my presence in the Blogosphere has been too long. So I thought I'd do a little review of a book I read while in Italy. It's called, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's about a woman, recently divorced, recently broken up with her latest love, who is depressed and broken. She decides to take a year off to travel. She decided to go to three different places, Italy, India and Indonesia. She chose Italy to learn how to appreciate beauty, India to learn devotion or deeper spirituality, and Indonesia to learn how to fuse the two together. I loved this book, but it may not be for everyone. There is some (not too much) coarse language, and one sexual encounter that gets kind of descriptive. And although I don't necessarily agree with her philosophically, and my journey would be very different from hers, I think there are some realy nuggets of wisdom that can be found. In true Jill style, here are a few of my favorite quotes. In my mind there is no possible way to do this book justice.
ITALY
Page 23: For years I'd wished that I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses--but I could never make the practical justification for studying it. Why not just bone up on the French or Russian I'd already studied years ago? Or learn to speak Spanish, the better to help me communicate with millions of my fellow Americans? What was I going to do with Italian? It's not like I was going to move there. It would be more practical to learn to play the accordion.
But why must everything always have a practical application? I'd been such a diligent soldier for years--working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved ones, my gums and my credit record, voting, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?
Page 44: Everybody, even the uptight German engineer, shares what I thought was my own personal motive: we all want to speak Italian because we love the way it makes us feel. A sad-faced Russian woman tells us she's treating herself to Italian lessons because "I think I deserve something beautiful." The German engineer says, "I want Italian because I love the dolce vita"--the sweet life.
Page 90: A family in my sister's neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three0year old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace." She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I don't know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.
Page 113: "No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens. . .do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love."
But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel thorough time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then do it again the next day?
Page 114: To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business--not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking into. . .rhetoric and plot.
Page 115: . . .and when you sense a faint potentially for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
INDIA
Page 122: The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. . .The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that were individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper diving character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
Page 176-177: Casting yourself at God's feet in helpless desperation is all well and good--heaven knows, I've done it myself plenty of times--but ultimately you're likely to get more out of the experience if you can take some action on your end. There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, "Dear saint--please, please, please. . .give me the grace to win the lottery." This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, "My son--please, please, please. . .buy a ticket."
Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention.
Page 177: Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate. In making an effort to stay alert, I am assuming custodial responsibility for the maintenance of my own soul.
Page 177: There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life--whether I will see them as curses of opportunities (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all I can choose my thoughts.
Page 196: Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world. One instant you're just a regular Joe, schlepping through your mundane life, and then suddenly--what is this?--nothing has changed, yet you feel stirred by grace, swollen with wonder, overflowing with bliss. Everything--for no reason whatever--is perfect.
INDONESIA
Page 260: Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to it's good attainments.
Page 260: I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once--that all the sorrow in the world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hilter-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease to be an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
