Weepies

Noel and I are going out for a rare dinner-and-a-movie tonight, which will be followed when we get home by late Survivor finale and school lunch packing.  So I'll very quickly note that both of us spent part of the day wiping tears from our eyes -- me because of this story about an unlikely long-distance connection forged by a tornado disaster, from the Washington Post (reprinted in our local paper), and Noel because of the documentary Louder Than A Bomb, which caught him off guard with its portrait of a high school experience rarely caught on film these days, but whose kids in solidarity through a shared activity and talent was quite familiar to him.  What have you read or seen recently that has similarly moved you?

The tracks of my tears

On Saturday morning Noel lets me sleep late. But sometimes I don't use all that time for sleeping. This morning I woke up about half an hour after him and reached for the book I'm reading. I had gotten through all but about fifty pages the night before.

The review will be up on the A.V. Club in a couple of weeks, so I won't give you an extensive evaluation of Alice Hoffman's The Story Sisters. The reason I bring it up is because I lay in bed this morning and read the last few chapters through an almost constant stream of tears. I don't think I've cried that much over anything -- real life or artistic creation -- for two or three years.

Worse, I wasn't really crying about the events in the book. I was crying about the overall message they seemed to be conveying: unavoidable love for family coupled with the inability to control what happens to them. I couldn't dry my tears by reminding myself that it's fiction; I couldn't get any emotional distance whatsoever. Every separation and every hope of bittersweet reunion sent me off again.

A while back, a reader asked the A.V. Club staff what movies make us cry. My answer was -- what doesn't? Yet even as a confirmed weeper, the effect of this book was extraordinary. This wasn't just a welling up, a sniffle, something caught in my eye; tears were literally rolling down my cheeks and collecting at my jawline.

I confess that I don't find crying at movies or books particularly pleasurable, although it's memorable and affecting. I actually put off finishing this book because I knew that how wrenching it would be.

What's your experience with being moved to tears by pop culture or art? How do you respond when it happens, and how frequently does it happen?

Inside and out

A while back I wrote a post about the odd effect of having one's worldview skewed because of a book. (At least I think I did -- can't find it in the blog search just now.) And just a few months ago, prompted by a conversation with a colleague, I wrote about not feeling life I have an interior life that's different from my exterior behavior.

Today those two ideas collided while I traveled home. I finished reading Washington Square, and experienced again the sensation of a mind full of ideas and emotions while alone in a place where nobody else shares that experience. And I realized that this is an important recurring occasion when I do feel as if I have an interior life.

So all of a sudden, I remember what it's like to feel your self overflowing its shell -- the depths of the self invisible to outside observers. It's like having a secret. Something is happening to you that no one else can see. You want to live inside your memories or your fantasies. When a moment comes back to you with a rush of emotion, you have physical sensations -- your gut twisting, or your skin tingling. The power of the internal to overwhelm sensory experience is suddenly, undeniably evident.

It's a troubling sensation for me only because I've come to rely on my externally-focused self in order to get things done. When I'm in these reveries that are so rare these days, provoked by memory or artistry, I can't imagine resurfacing for ordinary tasks. But my interior journey passed the day of travel for me in a pleasant haze, and serves as a reminder of that adolescent sense that my self was bigger than anyone could know -- something I haven't felt, or at least noticed, in quite a while.