Le fabuleux destin

I saw Amelie when it first came out. I remember seeing the ad in the paper, saying it was going to be shown in the Ayala cinemas only, and I think (I don't know if I remember correctly) that I'd already been waiting for the release for some time. I forgot how I found out about it--only that I was highly interested in French films because I was just starting to learn the language. But I remember how, getting started in livejournal, the background I used was a screencap of one of the last scenes--the one when Hipolito, the writer, turns and sees on the wall an excerpt from his own writing: Sans toi, les émotions d'aujourd hui ne seraient que la peau morte des émotions d'autrefois. My very first icons were from Amelie. The one I use on livejournal is still from Amelie, a shot of the little girl taking a picture of the sky, where there are clouds shaped like a big teddy bear.

Seeing the movie through an adult's eyes, I saw more than I did when I was younger. I think the movie is admired for all the right reasons; the cinematography is beautiful, the story is simple but so accessible and familiar, like real life, and the music is incredible even when you take it out of the context of the soundtrack. And... maybe everyone saw this but me. Or maybe I saw it before but I just forgot. But I can't stop thinking about how sometimes I'm like that man with the bones as fragile as glass, who sits at home with the padded furniture and carpeted floor, because he's so much at risk of getting hurt. Am I the only one who wishes she had such an excuse? Maybe not. I'm sure not. It's just, wouldn't it be so much easier to stay at home? To quit med school, to move out of my apartment, to stop taking risks. To bury myself somewhere that I wouldn't have to be hurt by the small hurtful things that other people do and say, and to stop forcing myself through the torture that is med school, which isn't hard because of the academics, if you know what I mean. Why does the human experience have to be so abrasive?


Monsieur Dufayel, je pense que je deviendrai comme vous. :-/

Asperger's. Or misanthropy at least

Do you ever feel... defective? Like the one inadequate product in a long line of toys that were made perfect, or at least fully functioning.

Was there some manual I didn't get a hold of? Was there some memo I missed?

Lily's Eyes

The Secret Garden is one of my favorite books. I can't really explain why I was attracted, from page one, to Mary Lennox, irritable and knowitallish and (as the song goes) really, really quite contrary. I saw myself in her I suppose. When I was little there used to be a Japanese cartoon on ABS-CBN--it was dubbed into Filipino and had the title of Maria at ang Lihim na Hardin--and that was where I met her first; but there isn't really any kind of substitute for reading Mary Lennox on the page, or seeing Kate Maberley (see photo) play her in the most faithful (at least in spirit) adaptation of The Secret Garden ever made.


Look at her! I love her here, irritable in hot weather and dressed in more skirts than she can play around in.

This is Mary with Dickon and Colin. I loved the unquestioning loyalty of the other two--how they took her, temperament and all, and loved her. I loved how Dickon was with the two of them, easily the poorest and most uneducated, but the wisest, simply because he was the most loved.


This is Mary and Colin. I suppose at the time it was legal to marry your first cousin; I loved the two of them together so much that I didn't particularly care as a child.

When I first read the book, I was charmed by the characters--how uniquely flawed they all were, how miserable, how much drawn into themselves, and how Mary's being catapulted into a life in Misselthwaite manor drew them out--and the tiny details about flowers and gardening, about taking care of things, about building things from scratch and caring for them and loving them. When I grew older and watched the movie (one of my family's favorites; we've memorized the script) and read the book over and over again, I realized that Mary, Colin and Archibald Craven are all like the garden... neglected, and in need of love and sunlight.

There is no real point to this blog. Tonight, the night before my pulmo OSCE, I just kept listening to this song, Lily's Eyes, which is the only song I know from the musical version of the Secret Garden:



The Snape/Lily parallels notwithstanding (eww), I really love this song. It gets better when you think that so much misery is made better when Mary comes along, an unknowing knight errant, sent by God to save the inhabitants of Misselthwaite from dwindling into despair.

The thing is, we can all dwindle into despair if we want--we can all let our spirits become neglected gardens. The movie is so atmospheric, so much rural England (it sounds like Scotland but the original inspiration is English) in the winter, so much snow and dark hallways and walled-in gardens. It fills you with a sort of claustrophobia, and fear, and a sense of despair. What I'm trying to say, in my own feeble distracted-medical-student way, is that everyone has that kind of garden inside us--in hibernation, as though it were winter, snowed under with memories and grudges, and attachment. Archibald Craven had grown too much attached to his wife that he couldn't see that his son and his niece were right in front of him, starving for affection and approval; like a garden in dire need of pruning, Misselthwaite was left to be strangled (as by overgrown branches) by the memory of Lily, Archibald's wife. (In the musical it takes a more sinister turn--Colin's doctor and Archibald's brother was in love with her, too.). We can let ourselves become like that. It's easy. You can exist without living--letting one day after another go by, going through the motions, growing comfortable, never giving yourself entirely.

Or you can choose to embark on the new adventure of falling in love. With life; with your family; with the God who demands but who gives back a hundredfold. And the beauty of a blossoming soul is a thousand times more beautiful than any garden that could grow under Dickon's expert hands.

In between pulmo exams, I give you: this essay by Brian Doyle.

Sometimes I daydream of having rejection slips made up for all sorts of things in life, like for moments when I sense a silly argument brewing with my lovely and mysterious spouse, and instead of foolishly trying to lay out my sensible points which have been skewed or miscommunicated, I simply hold up a card (BRIAN DOYLE REGRETS THAT HE IS UNABLE TO PURSUE THIS MATTER), or for when my children ask me to drive them half a block to the park (GET A GRIP), or when I am invited to a meeting at work I know will drone and moan for hours (I WOULD PREFER TO HAVE MY SPLEEN REMOVED WITH A BUTTER KNIFE), or for overpious sermons (GET A GRIP!), for oleaginous politicians and other mountebanks (IF YOU TELL ONE MORE LIE I WILL COME UP THERE AND PUMMEL YOU WITH A MAMMAL), etc.

On the other hand, what if my lovely and mysterious spouse issued me a rejection slip on the wind-whipped afternoon when I knelt, creaky even then, on a high hill over the wine-dark sea, and stammered would would would will will will you you marry me? What if she had leaned down (well, not quite leaned down, she’s the size of a heron) and handed me a lovely engraved card that said WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT WE CANNOT ACCEPT YOUR PROPOSAL, DESPITE ITS OBVIOUS MERITS? But she didn’t. She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn’t believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse. Anyway, there I was on my knees for a while, wondering if my lovely and mysterious paramour had actually said yes, while she railed and wailed into the wind, and finally I said, um, is that an affirmative? because my knees are killing me here, and she said, clearly, yes.

Um, I promise that's not the best part. It was just the easiest to quote out of context. The entire thing is here: No, by Brian Doyle.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

There seems to be a preponderance of little-girl detective geniuses in the modern mystery genre.

First and most controversial (most unlikeable really!) of all: Miss Mary Russell, aged fifteen, future wife to Sherlock Holmes (at least in the imagination of Laurie R. King, and in the imagination of her thousands of followers); brilliant with a “mind like a diamond” as the Great Detective himself would describe her; tall, blonde, and beautiful; a highly strong and accurate throwing arm; with myopic eyes nonetheless well-trained in the Science of Deduction, and a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Judaism, theology, chemistry, and the various marks and signs that will distinguish individuals of various occupations across the countryside. She speaks manifold languages and can easily learn new ones, and studies in Oxford, where she is reading (if I remember correctly) both theology and chemistry. Her greatest accomplishment of all, nonetheless, may be to have won the heart of the Beekeeper himself; at the tender age of fifteen and with an IQ that’s off the charts, she was in the perfect position to be groomed, and later to be fallen in love with, a la Professor Higgins with his guttersnipe. She’s caustic, generally irritable, and much too aware of her intellectual superiority.

Second, perhaps less prestigious but no less astute: enter Blue van Meer of Special Topics in Calamity Physics fame, daughter of Gareth van Meer, all-around genius, fond of quoting and annotating. It’s hard to describe her as being particularly interested in anything, when she seems to be fascinated by all things and to know, well, pretty much everything. In her teens she manages to uncover the existence of a secret society, long thought to be a myth; solve the murder of her teacher, Hannah Schneider (or at least I think she did solve it); and give every single reader of Marisha Pessl’s debut novel a headache, given her penchant for writing stupid, awkward-sounding metaphors and inserting the title, author, publisher and year of random books and publications into the text of the story.

Third, and most recently: Flavia de Luce, third daughter of Colonel de Luce of the once-grand Buckshaw manor; eleven years old (it is 1950), accomplished and extensively-read chemistry student, now the star of two mysteries by Alan Bradley. Unfortunately for Mary Russell and Blue van Meer—and I say this as one of Laurie R. King’s most dedicated fans, and as someone who’s written Mary Russell fanfiction—Flavia de Luce is the best of them all, the most likeable, the most genuine, the most believable.
All three are: geniuses, motherless, moneyed, unaccountably clever, and with a complicated relationship with their fathers. Best of all, all of them, at very young ages, can compete with the very best minds of their time, and possess the guts and drive to see a mystery to its conclusion. But for me, Flavia de Luce, heroine and narrator of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, is just the most entrancing of them all, and the most sympathetic. Of course no eleven year old can be that precocious, but given that the other two have leveled the playing field (ie if you can suspend disbelief for Mary Russell or Blue van Meer, you can do the same for Flavia), perhaps we can leave that criticism aside.

What to say about Flavia? Where the other two are, quite frankly, Mary Sues, Flavia is nowhere near one; in fact in all things except her intelligence, she is just like any other eleven year old, curious and energetic and sometimes acerbic. Despite herself she bursts into tears when afraid, and despite her best efforts she still would like even the scraps of affection from her distant father. She argues with her sisters Daphne and Ophelia (Daffy and Feely for short) and plays the nastiest tricks on them; she rides a bicycle and yodels songs with childlike glee; she gets dirty often enough to earn a reputation for being generally grotty (as she says to Ophelia in the opening pages, “If you’re insinuating that my personal hygiene isn’t up to the same high standard as yours you can go suck my galoshes”); she’s self-sufficient like most neglected children learn to be, and finds her fun in strange places, like in the abandoned chemistry laboratory (belonging to an old de Luce) or with the gardener, Dogger.

She’s named her bicycle Gladys and is conducting an experiment on her sister Ophelia, into whose lipstick Flavia has mixed a quantity of poison ivy. Her knowledge is by no means encyclopedic—all she knows is the stuff in the old textbooks upstairs; she knows bugger-all about stamps (her Father’s passion and the theme of the book), cooking, most literature, and music. She’s not at all a smooth operator—more than once she’s interrupted by authority while she tracks down clues, even being captured by the police while she’s trespassing. She’s no Mary Sue, and I hate to confess this, but she’s just lovely.

All the while, as I was finishing the book—and it’s a terribly quick read, much too quick really!—I kept thinking, I have to write this down, or what a beautiful description (Marisha Pessl’s clumsy metaphors suddenly seem like so much rubbish). I kept my book dog-eared and kept marked some gems like this one:

Leaving Gladys to graze in a bicycle stand that was more than half-full of official-looking black Raleighs, I went up the worn steps and in the front door.

Leaving Gladys! The bicycle! To graze, like you would a horse! Brilliant, and so simple and commonplace, I likely wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t taken a liking to the bicycle, that faithful companion.

I’m so excited to find the next book—and excited to think that the book’s Inspector (because every British detective novel has to have one, whether or not he actually does any detectorin’), Inspector Hewitt, might appear again, the one true audience to Flavia’s brilliance, courage, and adorably ham-handed way of sleuthing. It struck me, as the book was winding down, that I might like to read a story where Flavia grows into a young lady that, say, an inspector might come to love, to court and to marry; two sentences later Hewitt throws out an anecdote about his wife, the implausibly-named Antigone. Oh, well! I’m sure that even without a romantic counterpart, Flavia will keep me glued to the next book, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag.

As is repeated so often throughout the book… Vale!

To Love and be Wise

Every time I open and finish a Josephine Tey, I’m convinced it’s my favorite—until I read another, and by then I’m not so sure. Though in retrospect Daughter of Time, my first Tey, was something of a pointless read—the detective was dissecting a historical mystery that had already been solved!—I have to admit that I fell in love with the author when I picked up Brat Farrar. It is the perfect book and I couldn’t think of a way to better it, and now, years later, I still can’t. I still think it’s one of the holies of holies of mysteries.

Then there’s Miss Pym Disposes, so beautifully and sympathetically written that I could forgive Josephine Tey the strange quality of her mystery (both the crime and its solution are in the last third of the book—the first two thirds being merely setting). People can argue all the day long about whether Josephine Tey was a good detective novelist, but I don’t think anyone can deny that she was a true novelist—a really, really good one. She builds her characters—their choice of words and clothing, their mannerisms and predilections and flaws—so clearly, draws them so lovingly, that at the end of each book you are sorry to be saying goodbye, even to the perpetrator.
Finally, my most recent read, finished in between classes and during daily trips to and from Manila: To Love and be Wise.

Leslie Searle, the enigmatic photographer, is missing, and the household that had welcomed him—that of Lavinia Fitch, a romance novelist; Walter Whitmore, BBC commentator and household name; and Walter’s all-too-loveable fiancée, Elizabeth—is under suspicion. It’s up to Alan Grant of Scotland Yard to figure out whether Walter Whitmore—who had quarreled with him the night he died and who might have pushed Leslie Searle into the massive and unforgiving River, the Rushmore, beside their campsite—was responsible. Query: the river has been dragged and there is no body; where could it be? Query: if Leslie Searle is in fact not dead, and had left the site of his own free will, why would he do it, and why would he leave behind all of his belongings?

I kept guessing who had done it, thinking myself clever, but then a few pages later I would be presented with clues that made my hypotheses untenable. Since I don’t really make it a habit to guess whodunit—I prefer to just watch things unfold—this was a uniquely frustrating experience. The frustration, however, was worth it if only for the denouement. Brilliant detectorin’ worthy of the Great Detective himself, and a brilliant adversary worthy of James Moriarty’s highest praises. Five stars!

Next on the list: A Shilling for Candles.