Tuesday, February 26, 2008

BOOKS! and stuff

so i mentioned i'm reading Against Happiness, that book by the Wake Forest Lit professor that...well, argues against happiness (crazy title for a book about that, eh?). and it's quite good, and i find myself underlining and making notations as if i were to be tested on it or something. but it is a tad heavy. and thinking about "melancholia" so much isn't always to best thing to do, especially if one has spent the majority of the day feeling kinda blah.

so last night i read some more of another book i'd been reading called The Namesake. it's not that good, so i'll spare the book report, but the part i read last night really resonated with me.

Gogol/Nikhil, the main character, has been shacking up with a wealthy Manhattanite, Maxine, and they end up going to spend 2 weeks with her parents at their lake house in New Hampshire one summer. i have a soft spot for lakes, as nearly every summer vacation my family ever went on when i was young was to a lake. Deep Creek (before it got really built up), in Western Maryland, Lake Saranac in the Adirondacks, and (closest to my heart) Keuka Lake, in the Finger Lakes region in Upstate New York.

Gogol has never vacationed like his girlfriend's family does--they own a lake house in a secluded spot in which one must drive down a long, gravel road, way off the beaten path to get to. the house has no driveway; Gogol observes the car in just parked on the grass. the main house is unremarkable--mismatched furniture, exposed pipes, rustic, etc. Gogol and Maxine sleep in a guest house, down a path from the main house, that is, in actuality, a shack that Maxine used to use as a play house when she was younger.

anyhow...Gogol keeps talking about the lake house, the lake itself--the blueness of the water, the enormous amount of stars in the sky, the way the temperature dips at night, the fullness and brightness of the moon... he talks about the lack of television, playing board games at night, going to bed sometimes by 10, the musty smell of the lake, the heat of the his shoulders in the afternoon sun, wading into the water and swimming out to the dock when it gets unbearable...

like i said, the book isn't all that great--i just found it on my book shelf and realized someone had let me borrow it after my last hospital stint and i never read it (you'd be surprised at how difficult it is to read anything when one is on a morphine drip and epidural...). i've been reading a few pages before bed every night, to sort of lull my eyes to close, but then i got the Happiness book, and shelved the other one.

i digress. this description last night just hit really close to home. the house sounded exactly like the house we used to go to at Saranac--a house that belonged to my mother's cousin's husband's family... everything sounded the same. and the way the experience is described--the delicious isolation--evoked every memory i have of Keuka. Keuka has been in my family for years and years and years; my great-grandparents spent their honeymoon there, and my grandmother and her three sisters spent every summer there growing up, and my mother and her three brothers spent every summer there growing up. and in my life, we don't go every summer--that's nearly impossible, but we went quite a bit with other members of the family--specifically, my uncle and his 3 boys--and most recently, that same uncle has actually bought a house of his own on the lake and my mom and i have managed to go for a few days for the past two summers.

i cannot begin to describe the lake to you; i cannot begin to describe the way it makes me feel. all i can say is that being there recharges me and brings me to a peaceful place within myself and carries this sort of romanticism that i cannot find anywhere else. perhaps it's the history of my family there; perhaps it's way the lake has not been ruined by tourism or the 21st century. perhaps it's the fact that no one else really knows about Keuka, so i feel like it's my secret or something... i don't know. whatever it is, i crave it constantly, and it saddens me tremendously to know that i probably will not be able to make it there this summer. (the drive from bmore to keuka is quite a bit shorter than the drive from chicago to keuka...)

and since things are a little mixed up right now, and the weather's a little less than desirable in the midwest right now, the only thing that i can think about is the lake. and how badly i want to go back...

this is more than likely a worthless blurb of information to anyone but myself, but the lake makes me want to write, and i've spent a large chunk of my free time today at work google imaging keuka. and sighing. and feeling near tears. and feeling like my heart is going to burst.

this is my Zen:


i cannot wait for summer. i need to find my Zen.

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