Renascence
In An Unquiet Mind , Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison wrote she once had been making several copies of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem Renascence . It isn't clear whether Dr. Jamison was copying by hand or machine, but the idea stuck. Two years after reading her book, I finally copied the poem myself. It took just under two hours of handwriting. I have read few poems myself, but whenever I had a chance to memorize a good poem, it invariably had something to do with the theme of rebirth and rediscovering of self. There is something deeply personal about these poems, something that I yearn to experience intimately but fail to achieve in most activities hitherto. It is true that for the first 23 years of my life, death was a fashionable idea—but one out of my power. Life was foreclosed the moment my childhood memory started; it was not one of color, not one of black and white, but one of gray. A numbness, where even the idea of ceasing to exist became too much of an effort. I did not know ...