Staggering Velocity
If I were to fall in love with a person because of how he writes, I would fall in love with Dave Eggers.
When I first read his autobiographical work ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," I was rendered speechless. It was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. He writes the way some rivers have miraculously maintained their waters clear and untainted by flowing with graceful but powerful force.
I remember pestering my mom, begging her to listen while I read a few paragraphs from the book, wanting desperately to share my amazement, my awe at how prose so simply written can be both poetic and pure.
Eggers writes with a wealth of feeling, but he is never goopey. AHWSG is his narrative about how he and his siblings lived after their parents died one month after each other– the mother of stomach cancer, and the father of a sudden stroke. The mother had been suffering for a long time, but they all sought to make things appear and feel normal though nothing was: she stayed on the couch all day,the stomach acid dripping out through a small hose; her nose bleeding intermittently. She loved her children, and they loved her; and the family’s happiness was like a fragile Christmas tree ornament that hung precariously from the edge of a cliff.
The shock was, the father died first, suddenly, far-from-expectedly — he fell to his knees as if moved by a need to pray, the garage pavement his sudden chapel, his eyes closing with the last image of gray concrete.
One realizes that the words come from a person who has experienced a lang-drawn tragedy that culminated gently, but it did not in any way lose any of is devastating effects. He is a chronicler of pain that pierces like steel, cold and focused; the kind that doesn’t spread, but stays intact within, never leaving, never waning, and becomes a permanent part of you the way your heart is.
His first (fiction) novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, is about journeys people take, the ones where we carry with us bags and suitcases filled with memories that will never lighten; the kind we can only learn to carry if we grow stronger with time and the gift of occasional forgetting.
In the book, Will (the narrator), travels around the world with is friend Hand with the mission to give away $38,000. They money became Will’s when his bestfriend Jack was crushed in a car accident.
I find certain truths in it, how we sometimes try to run away from pain, not fully realizing that we carry it with us, that it actually shapes us and we will never be the same after it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in most cases, if we only accept the pain and learn from it and how it affects us, we could be the better for it.
Everything is sublimated; and pain is something we should all learn from.We learn more things from pain than from happiness; and surviving pain strengthens us.
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It has been three years today since my father died. I carry the pain of losing him with me everywhere, and I feel it everyday. Time does not dull this pain, but I am grateful that I’ve become stronger and more able to bear it. It’s baggage I can never lose.
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More dead activists. I’ve lost track of how many have been killed since last week. I get confused by the reports, the whos and wheres and whens, but I will never make the mistake about the whys.
He was killed because he spoke up and against the government.
She was killed because she refused to be afraid and insisted on being heard.
He was killed because he did not believe in the lies of the government and sought to seek the truth.
She was killed because she wrote about the truth.
He was killed because he wanted to help poor people fight back.
She was killed because she began fighting back.
He was killed because he had started to become an activist.
She was killed because she was an activist.
He was killed because other people listened to what he was saying about how the government destroys lives and why it was not only a right but a duty to speak out against this.
She was killed because she listened to him and wanted to do what he did.
The same themes over and over. The stories of men and women, Filipinos who chose not to live as victims but as arbiters of their own personal histories, makers of their country’s history.
