The words the happy say

The words the happy say
Are paltry melody
But those the silent feel
Are beautiful--
(F 1767)

Again Dickinson demonstrates her ability to invert the reader's expectations and, in doing so, present a stunningly accurate and peculiar paradox of human nature. Many people have the tendency to speak of things that surpass a description. Perhaps they are not comfortable with silence, or perhaps they do not feel the fullness of the moment. No matter the reason, many people are not comfortable with silence-- they do not know how to let it be, that sometimes silence speaks far more than language.

A person witnessing something especially moving might have words that come to his or her mind, and yet when those words are spoken they seem to cheapen the moment. The enchantment of the event or emotions are often broken when the word is said. And yet some can think of the words that come to mind and can feel the words, in their very fullest, experiencing them in a way that surpasses merely mentioning the word. It is the difference between talking about a breath and taking one of those deep breaths that begin at the very bottom of the lungs, feeling the chest fully expand, taking in the wonderousness that is oxygen, the most essential need to continue life.

It is particularly fitting that Dickinson would write a poem about the fullness of silence. For a person who did not socialize much beyond her family and who filled the night hours alone in her room with a pen and paper, she knew silence well. She knew the awe and beauty of it, and she understood it in a way that many cannot grasp.

enigma

I want to keep this blog for at least a solid year. My goal is to write every single day-- at least to post something. That's probably almost impossible, but it's a goal at least. Some of what I write will be like today's entry, which is mostly reflection.

By the end of this year I hope to have 365 entries to draw on, which will be a lot of writing and reflect a lot of reading about Emily Dickinson. In the past I have been drawn to other celebrities, but never blogged about it and never read so extensively. So far, I've only read more biographies of Katharine Hepburn than I have of Dickinson, but that will soon change.

Hepburn, though, wrote her own autobiography and granted some rare interviews, and she also spent an extensive amount of time in her later years with writer A. Scott Berg, helping him to write a final biography, which was posted after her death, called Kate Remembered. Dickinson did no such thing. Absolutely none of her writings were to written as biography. Her letters give us hints, and the recollections of her family and writings of other friends and family give small hints at who the poet might have been. These are only peeks at a personality that cannot really be captured, and all of these stories and reflections of others are given with layers of opinion and bias.

By the end of this year I will not know Dickinson personally, nor will I really have more of a handle on her poetry. But I hope to discover new insights into her poems, maybe find some new approaches toward understanding her world as I read biographies and articles. And I think that, above all, I'll learn a lot about myself. This year definitely holds a lot of possibility, and I look forward to the challenges of time and mystery that I will face when learning more about the poet. I may not know who she was, but I hope to have a more rounded or faceted view of how Dickinson is perceived and the impact of her work.