May 21 - The Inner Life And Imprisonment

Woke up early-ish, and finished 'Youth.' I guess in the end a large part of what I got from it was the idea that you can't wait for fate or destiny to find you, you have to pursue it through disciplined work. Not such a novel idea, but Coetzee has a very forceful way of getting it across. I caught the train into the city to meet Mara and started in on another book, 'An Imaginary Life,' by David Malouf. The novel is about Ovid's exile from Rome, told from Ovid's perspective. Like 'Youth,' the novel was at first preoccupied with its protagonist's inner life, largely because at the start of the book Ovid doesn't understand the local tongue of his place of exile. I think it's interesting that I was drawn to this book after 'Youth.' I'm relatively sure it wasn't a conscious decision. I suppose that in the course of delving into myself through this journal/blog and in trying to resurrect my own powers of initiative, I've become drawn to the internal lives of others, and how they are constructed and expressed. No grand conclusions as of yet.

Made it into the city and people-watched in Central Park for an hour or two. I ran into Patrick, a former camper of mine. The fact that he said hi and recognized me was great, and shed some light on how my own high school teachers had reacted to me the previous day. Ate dinner at a sushi place a few blocks south east of astor place and barely caught the 8:07 back to New Haven. On the train Bret, one of the guys who I'll be working with this summer, called to finalize plans for exactly what I'd be doing. I had been nervous before this conversation, anxious that I would end up with nothing to do, but those fears were quickly put at ease. My work at HRC-FedUp! will be largely two-fold. I'll be corresponding with prisoners from two state correctional institutions and cataloguing any reported human rights abuses. On top of that, I'm going to write a report on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, using the testimony of prisoners. I'm actually quite excited. In many ways, this is a paper that I might write for school, but the fact that its main function is to help people by documenting and publicizing their awful plight separates it from pure academia in my mind, and makes it something that I anticipate will be both worthwhile and fulfilling.