As for books…
More of a re-discovery, really. “La Casa de Bernarda Alba” by Federico García Lorca. I played María Josefa in our High School’s production. Once in college, mired by way too many “Intro to–” textbooks, I jumped up to the challenge to replay the character during a García Lorca festival. It was a nice break from the endless drone of schedules and introductions.

I had the opportunity to take an amazing class called “Gender, Sexuality, and Love in Japanese Literature” while I was at the University of Kansas for my undergrad. It was really eye-opening to see that concepts/emotions we often take for granted as “universal” are not, and to see how those ideas evolve over time. Also pre-modern Japan was definitely not prudish…(bonus) :)

Poor Marie Antoinette. It’s easy to make fun of her stereotype, but realistically speaking she was a decent woman who had a lot of strange and extreme demands put upon her almost from birth, and who managed to maintain her position in very rough political seas for far longer than her detractors would have thought possible.

The book was assigned as part of my readings in Roman history, and I forget at this late date the exact class, but I sat down with the Meditations expecting dusty insights of a misfit Emperor stuck fighting barbarians in the Godsforsaken wilderness… and instead encountered resonance. Stoicism was not a new concept; the ideal of self-denial of Zeno and how they differed from the sybaritic embrace of life’s comforts by the Epicureans I had known since high school days. Aurelius, however, sitting alone and writing to reinforce his own thoughts on meeting life on Roman terms, did not so much reach me as he reached out and shook me.

I couldn’t complete the book for class. Fortunately it didn’t affect my grade. I could not tell even my professor how the Meditations had shaken me. I did, however, bring it home to my mother, and asked her to read it. She had much the same reaction I did. She was a child of the Depression, and self-denial had been pretty much enforced by the times, but the ideas of Aurelius struck her, too, as resonant. She told me that she could hear her father say the very same things to her, only in the original Polish.

The Meditations didn’t change me. They didn’t confront me with new truth which I was forced to acknowledge. It was more like they confirmed me. I had led, am living, a Stoic life, but had not encountered anyone else who had struggled to master the idea or the consequences as Aurelius had. This road was no longer empty. This life was no longer singular. There was more to it than just me, and that was a great comfort. A beacon shining above the wavetops on a dark and pointless sea. Suddenly there was proportion, scale, meaning, understanding.

To this day I have not read the whole of the Meditations. It remains by my bedside as a sort of tonic and help, to which I turn when weary, confounded by events or people, and need my bearings. Aurelius’s efforts to make Stoicism comprehensible, Roman and proper, to himself now do the same for me. I know no others who are so strongly affected by the book, but then, I imagine Stoics are not too numerous in these Epicureanized days. It matters not. I know who and where I am; the tumult shall pass me by as it has before, and I shall remain.

I knew this, with less certainty, before the Meditations, but since discovering them I am more sure. More steady. More Stoic, if you will. More importantly, I am more myself.

And of course, I kept all my old school texts of how to draw the human anatomy.