Summer Solstice
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on with the fun – i am back to hurried writing, enjoying it while ive got free time and getting responses from friends in flips-land, im telling you, this is the best part of my day, after being poo-pooed and strained by patients. in my working hours, i lift people while keeping my temper down – oh boy – keeping my temper is the hardest to do – especially with the types of patients i have – sometimes it just gets into me – imagine treating retired new yorkers. theres a joke in florida that when “i retire, im gonna settle in manhattan and drive really slow and be nice to everybody.”
talking about retired men and women, nick joaquin( im sure) is retired now and has probably mellowed a bit. but there was a time
it is said you never submit mediocre writing to nick joaquin, if you do, hed tear your paper and soul apart.
teodoro locsin calls him the first literary artist of the philippines; no filipino now writing matches his stories in power and beauty… and when i imagine nick joaquin, i see a fatherly figure sitting quietly in a corner enjoying beer with hemingway and you DO NOT approach him unless youve got an important thing to say. i hope im wrong with my impression of joaquin but you cant blame people like me who never have seen him, I see his picture alright but gawd, in person he is more aloof than greta garbo, which prods me to ask sometimes, is he still around? he is no better than the poet jose garcia villa who never stayed around while the town clamored for his presence. or maybe I was the one who wasnt around.
but this i can tell – after i read nick joaquin during my highschool, i knew i wanted to become a writer. it was in his short stories i learned a parasol is a type of umbrella.
years have passed and i found that i couldnt and i wouldnt be able to write like him; the only thing i could do now is to write a review like this one; nick joaquins writing requires a lot of painstaking hours because he is after pure beauty and for him to achieve ultimate beauty he must penetrate the ultimate evil in ones soul, the ultimate nakedness of ones desires, the most freightening emotions in the deepest crevices of ones heart. and all these are found in the summer solstice