Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: book essays

  • Between Fatum and the Void: A Reading Note on Sana Goyal’s Review of Tice Cin’s Safe Spaces

    September 19, 2026

    Book III of The Aeneid tells of Aeneas and his Trojans sailing through life’s vicissitudes to reach the destined place, Italy. The voyage is perilous and circuitous; it is almost ridiculous that, even when they reach Sicily, Aeneas must detour yet again because obstacles keep preventing him from reaching Italy smoothly. But he knows that it is his fatum—his destiny, written by Fate and scripted by the Olympians. Thus, his voyage is never aimless, nor does he abandon himself to the force of fatalism or an existential vacuum.

    In the case of the nameless young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer in Safe Spaces by Tice Cin, the emptiness of an uprooted life in working-class London is existential: through her eyes, it becomes a void in the meaning of life. Told in the first person, her ballad moves through shifting perspectives, as though she were an alien songbird observing from a separate space. She moves through doorways, “walking past each one,” because she seems to feel that no one cares whether she is an artist from Cyprus whose first language is Turkish. She feels her presence as a songwriter and music producer in the streets of London is insignificant, or worse, invisible. One’s creative value, wrapped in attitudinal value, dims beneath an outward identity defined by culture and gender.

    In contrast to her comparison of memory to a messy laundry cupboard, memory, to me, is a messy pile of CDs and cassettes stored on the closet shelves: the first music I came to know, the favorites I could listen to a hundred times over, and the ones I can hardly believe I ever bought. But I don’t want to discard or sell them. And still, I haven’t decided what to do with them while I am listening to “Hunter” by Dido on my iPhone.

    The choice of personal pronouns can elegantly convey the author’s shift in perspective, diluting subjectivity with objectivity, and vice versa. I write to create, she writes to speak, and you write to express. We know that the different pronouns work in different ways.

    I haven’t read the book yet, and honestly, I don’t think it will be on my book list. From the review, the book seems written for peers of the author’s generation, and its narrator works in the music industry. (Yes, art has money too.) As a young immigrant girl, my concern was getting a job while going to school so that I could help support my family. The narrator does face financial precarity, but she doesn’t seem to carry the same familial pietas—the obligation to help support a family—that shaped my youth. I feel more akin to Aeneas navigating the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis than to the nameless young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer in London.

  • Thursday, September 17, 2026 – Reading Book III of the Aeneid by Virgil

    Aeneas is lost. He knows that he has a fate, but he doesn’t know what it is. He tries to find it in his own way, but circumstances do not allow him to do so. Everyone reminds him of his pietas: there are things far more important than life’s simple pleasures. He suffers, complains, misreads. Still, he sails.

    In Book III, we see Aeneas as a leader of his people, a refugee looking for a place where he is fated to land. At first, Aeneas and his father are unsure where their ancestors came from. Then, through the divine intervention that repeatedly directs Aeneas, they come to understand that Italy is the land of their ancestors. Therefore, Aeneas is returning to his ancestral land, which gives him a purpose for the voyage—his fatum, a reason to move away from his personal longings. In terms of logotherapy, such a purposeful voyage becomes a source of meaning in life, requiring him to sail through life’s vicissitudes between Scylla and Charybdis. So, ironically, such a purpose gives him the will to live and to confront the fate that has placed upon him the extraordinary burden of fulfilling pietas. Yet his voyage is never smooth, because fate makes it difficult for him to achieve his divine destiny; the suspense of the voyage makes his sacrifice, born from personal loss, all the more divine and glorious.

    My sense of Aeneas’s agony—that the gods do not favor him, given the hardships he must endure for the greater good—has not changed. In fact, the more I read about him, the more I begin to feel like him. Aeneas holds firm, trying to make his voyage as meaningful as possible. Fata viam invenient. The Fates will find a way. He is a reluctant warrior. He is the embodiment of humanity—imperfect, vulnerable, and beautiful.

  • Reading on A Review of the Aeneid, Translated by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, by Deborah Warren

    First, let me confess that I have not yet read the translation of The Aeneid by McGill and Wright. Maybe I will after I finish reading Robert Fagles’s translation. So, while it would be unfair for me to judge which translation better serves readers of the twenty-first century, I can say that Fagles’s translation of Virgil’s epic narrative of Aeneas reads like a prose poem to me, simply because its language and arrangement suit my taste.

    This essay is not for general readers but for readers with an academic background in Latin. Therefore, for general readers such as myself, its comparison of the original Latin with the English translations—in terms of metrical structures, the choice of words, and their juxtaposition—may not ring a bell. My interest in reading The Aeneid comes from a purely personal curiosity: I want to understand why Aeneas is the way he is, breaking the hearts of the women who loved him dearly. In that regard, Fagles’s translation chimes the bell of my heart and soul because his words are poetic and, at the same time, go straight to the heart. Take a look at these translations:

    Fagles:

    “Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate,
    he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,
    destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil.”

    Robert Fitzgerald:

    “I sing of warfare and a man at war.
    From the sea-coast of Troy in early days
    He came to Italy by destiny
    To our Lavinian shores,
    A fugitive, this captain . . .”

    McGill and Wright:

    “I sing of arms and of a man displaced
    by Fate, the first to leave the coast of Troy
    for Italy and its Lavinian shores.”

    Fagles’s version of “Wars and a man I sing . . .” clearly expresses Virgil’s intention to sing about a man destined to put duty before feeling. By placing the mainstay of The Aeneid—the fate of the man—at the beginning, Fagles conveys to his readers that Aeneas was not born to be a romantic figure, or even a heroic star, but to be a man torn between what he wants and what he must do.

    Through Fagles, we hear Virgil sing of Aeneas, a demigod and an excellent soldier: the embodiment of the Roman ideal, whose pietas and gravitas signify personal virtue as well as martial prowess. But Virgil was not a soldier; he was a poet. Bernard Knox, however—the classicist who wrote the introduction to Fagles’s translation—brings the crack of a horsewhip to it. A former U.S. Army captain and World War II veteran, Knox had literally followed in the footsteps of Antony and Octavian during the Italian campaign. He must have carried Euterpe and Calliope with him—the Muses who had also stood behind Virgil thousands of moons before.

  • The Aeneid — Book I Reading Note

    Version 1.0.0

    Book I begins in the middle of Aeneas’s journey to his fated destination of Italy. Virgil seems to sympathize with the man who surrenders his personal feelings to the public duty of building a new Troy, as arranged by the Fates. Gods can interfere but cannot change his fate. It’s a case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—but who is Zarathustra here? Aeneas, or Virgil speaking through him?

    If it’s Aeneas who speaks, then he does so through Virgil as his advocate for the glory of fulfilling pietas with gravitas. Cupid is not for him, but for Dido, who became enamored with a man whose vulnerability was braided with virility, clothed in beauty. Then Juno’s absurdly violent rage against the Trojan general, who laments his fate, forces him to wander across the seas through the vicissitudes of gain and loss, loss and gain. But that doesn’t mean Aeneas is a man of steel, because when Venus appears to him in disguise as a wanderer, he rebukes her for behaving like an immortal rather than a mother, even when she is trying to help her son.

    Book I presents Aeneas as a man who agonizes over the conflict between his desire and pietas, born of a mortal father and an immortal mother. It is the dual nature of man: physical and spiritual. This could later be applied to the Christian teaching that the will is strong, but the flesh is weak. In Virgil’s view—his imagination still cloaked in the Republican toga, albeit under Emperor Augustus—Aeneas was the model Roman man and soldier who placed honor and valor before beauty and love. He was Virgil’s kind of man, one who would build the grandeur of Rome.

    Book I ends with a scene in which Dido, the queen of Carthage—Juno’s beloved land—is infatuated with Aeneas after Cupid sprinkles powdered amour upon her. This is Venus’s machination to secure protection and refuge for Aeneas and the Trojans. Would this be a plot of Fate too? Then, does it mean that Venus is also a gambit in Fate’s chess? Then, what is the meaning of living a life in the mirage of hope?

  • On Reading “Student of Desire” — Adelle Waldman

    Saturday, August 22, 2026

    “Can intellectual recognition itself become desire?”

    Will an intellectual man fall in love with a woman of equal or greater intelligence? The question has become so entangled with sexism that it seems to invite textbook answers such as, “Beauty is only skin-deep.” But this is not about feminism or social activism. It is an intimate question: “Can you love me even if I am smart but not so pretty?” Waldman’s disappointmentpromptss her to ask about her existential value as a woman, not merely as a writer or intellectual, because the personal stakes are toohighg to ignore.

    Seeing her ex-boyfriend with a beautiful woman is painful enough to prick the pride of an intellectual woman who is supposed to believe that real love resides not in looks but in the mind. Or so it seems. Waldman extends the existential question into the erotic hedonism of The Professor of Desire, whose protagonist seems to vacillate between a whore and a virgin but never reconciles himself to the truth, always yielding to the pleasures of the senses. While I understand Waldman’s disappointment at seeing a smart man fall for a bimbo, she seems to explain his gorgeous new girlfriend as the result of animal instinct: Eros alone, without marrying Eros to Psyche.

    Call it the male subconscious urge to prove sexual prowess. Or immaturity. To me, a man’s intelligence or cultural refinement does not necessarily equate to his moral fitness. Think of the ancient Greek symposium and its beautiful and intelligent courtesans. Men, I think, are often more readily stimulated by the visual than women are. I remember reading that Updike had a voracious sexual appetite and engaged in sexual excesses. And that’s not the end. Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe—even though she was herself intelligent, read books, and took literature classes at night—and his novella Plain Girl: A Life tell us that intellect does not necessarily determine physical attraction. After all, the plain girl finds her soulmate in a blind musician who loves her not with his eyes but with his mind.

    I know how Waldman felt when she saw him with such a beautiful woman. I think Waldman wants to believe that she is right: that a woman’s intellect can stand equal to beauty—par pari. I think Shakespeare is great because he recognized this human nature in everyone, including the rivalries of love:

    “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
    And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

    But remember: Cupid is blindfolded. He does not know whom his arrow will strike.

  • On Reading “The Thorn in the Flesh”

    Reading Day — Thursday, August 20, 2026
    On D. H. Lawrence’s “The Thorn in the Flesh”

    Lawrence must have hated the military. Well, more exactly, the rigid discipline used to tame the naturally untamed. It is against nature, against free will: the controlled mindset that conditions you to believe that if you fail, you are a loser to be put in the pillory. Not a man. Not man enough.

    Is that really so? Lawrence asks. No. A man is a man when he witnesses his desire being reciprocated in the body of his lover. Virility is true manhood because it requires no weapon of killing.

    The young German soldier in this story recovered his lost confidence through sensual passion, which collapsed the wall between institutional dehumanization and being fully alive. Naked with his lover, the soldier felt no shame in wanting and loving her. The erection of sexual passion restored physical vulnerability.

    We know Lawrence for his controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover. So, it may be convenient to call him a sensationalist whose agenda was to challenge religious doctrine and restrictive social norms. Instead, he was a writer who stood at the heart of humanity and showed us the beauty of being human in the expression of passion, in wanting and being wanted.

    The Thorn in the Flesh is Lawrence’s version of Dostoevsky’s “Only beauty can save the world.”

    — Stephanie Joori Suh