Wow. So… #1 thing that is rough about studying abroad at Oxford: when literally everyone else on the planet (by which I mean students at most U.S. colleges) finish up in May, and in Oxford you still have… a good month left of heavy reading and essay writing. XP Once this week is up, I will be starting on Ulysses, and my work load will be increasing significantly, so… that is going to be fun.

What’s really making it hard to focus, though, is that I feel like my social group here has had all of the drama that would happen over an entire four years at school at home, shoved into 2 short terms. Particularly in the last couple days, a lot has happened, and I am struggling to know how best to support my friends, to take care of myself, to continue to build my relationships with everyone, to balance it all…

And I’m realizing how little I understand loss.

One of my friends here is going through an incredible loss at the moment, and I’m watching everyone try to support her, telling her there is a reason for everything and it will make sense at some point, that she’ll bounce back like she always does… and I don’t know. I can’t tell her that there’s a reason for everything; I don’t know that. I am… left without words. Trying to communicate in gestures: a hug, a gift, a gaze.

It’s odd, I think, to relate a situation so personal to what I’m studying in my tutorial, but it’s also something I can’t quite avoid doing. I’ve been speaking a lot with my tutor about how Joyce, especially in Dubliners, communicates almost entirely through underlying feelings, created by patterns of repetition and webs of association; the words alone aren’t enough to say what he is trying to say. I struggled with Joyce quite a bit when I first read him in high school; this time around seems vastly different. He is a master of using words to communicate something that cannot be communicated in words. I am trying to bring that into my own writing as I work on short stories this term, but it’s so hard. I’m trying to bring that into my interactions with others, and that is an equal if not greater challenge.

I read “The Dead” this week– or rather, reread it, as I’d read it once before in high school, and thought it overrated– and the ending nearly brought me to tears. I couldn’t say exactly what it was; the distance between each of the characters, maybe, the way that they continually missed each other, missed the signs each was trying to send, found themselves feeling the right thing at the wrong time. And that last line: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Damn. Just the sound– read it aloud and the sound of it (saying nothing for the literal meaning of the words), the repetition of those “s” and “f” sounds creating a background of “fffssss,” like snow falling, holds its feeling.

For my essay, I’m tying “The Dead” back to the work I did with Heidegger and phenomenology last term: the idea of “death” or “demise” as not a literal death, but rather

“the experience of existential world collapse that occurs when we confront the ineliminable anxiety that… emerges from the uncanny fact that there is nothing about the structure of the self that can tell us what specifically to do with our lives” (Iain Thompson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time”).

That is a lot of words, but basically it’s the idea that being is inherently tied to non-being; we live in a world of possibilities, and the fulfillment of one possibility (by choice or otherwise) is necessarily the nullification of the others (multiverse theory might beg to differ, but I’m not going to go there). To recognize this, and to recognize that there may be no reason for one possibility over the others, is for Heidegger a sort of “death.” Yet it is this “death” which he believes allows one to live authentically, to be in touch with oneself and one’s place among the world, among others.

I really don’t have a great way to end this post. Funnily enough, we’ve laughed a lot today– more than I’ve laughed in a long time. I think maybe laughter is one of the parts of loss that I didn’t really understand. At least not in words.

So I’m going to end, as I often do, with a song. This one starts with laughter, and (like “The Dead”) isn’t quite the kind of “Death” you think it will be:

“What’s the difference between my love or scheme? The difference in what you say or mean? What do you mean you don’t really know?”

Full lyrics: http://genius.com/Made-in-heights-death-lyrics