Today It Reads

I read in a book that the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb “to think” in the impersonal third person: saying not “I think” but “it thinks” as we say “it rains.” There is thought in the universe—this is the constant from which we must set out every time.

Will I ever be able to say, “Today it writes,” just like “Today it rains,” “Today it is windy”? Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb “write” in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual.

And for the verb “to read”? Will we be able to say, “Today it reads” as we say “Today it rains”? If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to get beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, “I read, therefore it writes.”

-Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, 176.

(This makes my head spin...)

Ideo (Therefore)

On this day earth shall ring
With the song children sing
To the Son, Christ the King,
Born on earth to save us;
Him the Father gave us.
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

His the doom, ours the mirth,
When he came down to earth;
Bethlehem saw his birth;
Ox and ass, beside him,
From the cold would hide him.
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

God's bright star, o'er his head,
Wise men three to him led;
Kneel they low by his bed,
Lay their gifts before him,
Praise him and adore him.
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

On this day angels sing;
With their song earth shall ring,
Praising Christ, heaven's King,
Born on earth to save us;
Peace and love he gave us.
Ideo gloria in excelsis Deo!

-Piae Contiones

Serious Frivolity

People are losing the power to enjoy Christmas through identifying it with enjoyment. When once they lose sight of the old suggestion that it is all about something, they naturally fall into blank pauses of wondering what it is all about. To be told to rejoice on Christmas Day is reasonable and intelligible, if you understand the name, or even look at the word. To be told to rejoice on the twenty-fifth of December is like being told to rejoice at quarter-past eleven on Thursday week. You cannot suddenly be frivolous unless you believe there is a serious reason for being frivolous.

-G. K. Chesterton, "The New War on Christmas," G. K.'s Weekly, December 26, 1925, quoted in Advent and Christmas Wisdom from G. K. Chesterton, 50.

Poetry

...She thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

-Jane Austen, Persuasion, 74.

Calvinism

If God is to save souls, he must do so with people who for the most part fight tooth and nail against the process.

-Frederick Buechner, quoted in A Proper Scaring, Baumgartner.

Biography

My assumption is that the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.

- Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 56.

Rereading

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: But what can you do with a man who says he “has read” them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? Yet I think the test has a special application to the matter in hand. For excitement, in the sense defined above, is just what must disappear from a second reading. You cannot except at the first reading, be really curious about what happened...

The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can come only once) but for a certain ideal surprisingness...We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep are we at leisure to savor the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the “surprise” of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia...

-C. S. Lewis, “On Stories,” quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 454-455.

Eureka!

When we read the poem, or see the play or picture or hear the music, it is as though a light were turned on inside us. We say: “Ah! I recognize that! That is something which I obscurely felt to be going on in and about me, but I didn’t know what it was and couldn’t express it. But now that the artist has made its image—imaged it forth—for me, I can possess and take hold of it and make it my own, and turn it into a source of knowledge and strength.

-Dorothy Sayers, “Towards a Christian Aesthetic,” quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 234.

Paradise

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

-Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 232.

Review: The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken

I stumbled across this book last weekend, as I perused Wheaton's card catalog in search of lesser-known essays by some of my favorite authors (Buechner, Chesterton, O'Connor, etc...). This is a marvelous book, exploring literature as an art-form from a Christian perspective. I'm sorry I didn't have time to read it more thoroughly (alas, 500 pages or so), but I had a lovely browse, and copied out as many quotes as I could - many from Lewis, but a few from other sources too. Some are posted below, and there will be more over the next few days...

Lit Crit

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment...is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 137.

Books as Doors

Now there is a clear sense in which all reading whatever is an escape. It involves a temporary transference of the mind from our actual surroundings to things merely imagined or conceived. This happens when we read history or science no less than when we read fictions. All such escape is from the same thing; immediate, concrete actuality. The important question is what we escape to...

Escape, then, is common to many good and bad kinds of reading. By adding –ism to it, we suggest, I suppose, a confirmed habit of escaping too often, or for too long, or into the wrong things, or using escape as a substitute for action where action is appropriate, and thus neglecting real opportunities and evading real obligations. If so, we must judge each case on its merits. Escape is not necessarily joined to escapism.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 147.

Books as Windows

What then is the good of—what is even the defense for—occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist...? The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself...We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own...We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors...

Literary experience heals the wounds, without undermining the privilege, of individuality...In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

-C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 51, 52.

Granfalloon

Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, 90, 91.

Created in the Author's Image

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that should whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them...[Hence] as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

- John Milton, quoted in The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 12.

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Sun Tung Po’s.
“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”
is another one, or just
“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
“In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed to be Saying
My Woman is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem”

There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with headings like “Vortex on a String,”
“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.
No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And “Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors”
is a servant who shows me into the room
where a poet with a thin beard
is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine
whispering something about clouds and cold wind,
about sickness and the loss of friends

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
cross my legs like his, and listen.

-Billy Collins

Highs (West Coast Edition)

1. Squash soup
2. Street musicians performing Portobello Road at Pike Place Market
3. Exploring Seattle's science fiction museum in the company of 100s of actuaries
4. My first omelet, courtesy of John
5. POWELL'S!!!
6. Ethnic (Lithuanian, I think?) food
7. Introducing John and Christina to Speed Scrabble
8. Discussing Vocation, Art, and Theology into the wee hours

To Spade and Spade

Guillamet's courage is in the main the product of his honesty. But even this is not his fundamental quality. His moral greatness consists in his sense of responsibility. He knew that he was responsible for himself, for the mails, for the fulfillment of the hopes of his comrades. He was holding in his hands their sorrow and their joy. He was responsible for that new element which the living were constructing and in which he was a participant. Responsible, in as much as his work contributed to it, for the fate of those men.

...There is a tendency to class such men with toreadors and gamblers. People extol their contempt for death. But I would not give a fig for anybody's contempt for death. If its roots are not sunk deep in an acceptance of responsibility, this contempt for death is a sign either of an impoverished soul or of youthful extravagance.

I once knew a young suicide. I cannot remember what disappointment in love it was which induced him to send a bullet carefully into his heart. I have no notion what literary temptation he had succumbed to when he drew on a pair of white gloves before the shot. But I remember having felt, on learning of this sorry show, an impression not of nobility but of lack of dignity. So! Behind that attractive face, beneath that skull which should have been a treasure chest, there had been nothing, nothing at all. Unless it was the vision of some silly little girl indistinguishable from the rest.

And when I heard of this meagre destiny, I remembered the death of a man. He was a gardener, and he was speaking on his deathbed: “You know, I used to sweat sometimes when I was digging. My rheumatism would pull at my leg, and I would damn myself for a slave. And now, do you know, I’d like to spade and spade. It’s beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade. And besides, who is going to prune my trees when I am gone?”

That man was leaving behind him a fallow field, a fallow planet. He was bound by ties of love to all cultivable land and to all the trees of the earth. There was a generous man, a prodigal man, a nobleman! There was a man who, battling against death in the name of his Creation, could like Guillaumet be called a man of courage!

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, 39-40.

Take a Step

“Amid snow,” you told me, “a man loses his instinct of self-preservation. After two or three days of tramping, all you think about is sleep. I would long for it; but then I would say to myself, ‘If my wife still believes I am alive, she must believe that I am on my feet. The boys all think I am on my feet. They have faith in me. And I am a skunk if I don’t go on.’”

“...What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, 35, 38.

The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz is the fairy tale dehumbugged, and the good news it bears is the good news that hard and conscientious effort and a little help from our friends pay off in the end, and faith is its own reward. The most important thing to have faith in is ourselves, and that is also the chief magic. Insofar as they receive their hearts' desire, Dorothy and her friends, it is essentially a do-it-yourself operation, and the joy of it is not beyond the walls of the world but within the walls of the world. The book was published in the year 1900, and maybe it is not stretching things too far to say that in a way it foreshadows something of what became of the fairy tale of the Gospel in the century it ushered in. The magic and the mystery fade. Like the Emerald City, the city whose gates are pearl and whose walls are adorned with jasper and onyx and sapphire turns out to be too good to be true for all except those who see it through stained glass; and just as for Dorothy home is finally not the Land of Oz, where all things are possible, but Kansas, where never yet has a camel managed to squeeze through the eye of a needle, so for us home is not that country that Gideon and Barak, Samson and Jeptha, glimpsed from afar, but rather just home, just here, where there are few surprises...

[But] we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth...Neither the world we live in nor the world that lives in us can ever entirely be home again any more than it was home for Dorothy in the end either because in the Oz books that follow The Wizard, she keeps coming back again and again to Oz because Oz, not Kansas, is where her heart is, and the wizard turns out to be not a humbug but the greatest of all wizards after all.

-Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth, 95, 96, 97.

Recipe: Raw Cookie Dough

RECIPE INGREDIENTS:
1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. vanilla extract
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
4 to 6 tbsp. water

Cream together the butter and sugar in a large bowl. Stir in the flour, salt, vanilla and chips. Add the water, one tablespoon at a time, until you have reached a cookie dough consistency. Makes 2 cups.

-Hat tip Family Fun

Democracy

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

-G. K. Chesterton, hat tip Terry Teachout

Love Like the Movies

So you want to be in love like the movies
But in the movies they're not in love at all
And with a twinkle in their eyes
They're just saying their lines
So we can't be in love like the movies

Now in the movies they make it look so perfect
And in the background they're always playing the right song
And in the ending there's always a resolution
But real life is more than just two hours long

So you want to be in love like the movies
But in the movies they're not in love at all
And with a twinkle in their eyes
They're just saying their lines
So we can't be in love like the movies

Well you can freeze frame any moment from a movie
Or run the whole damn thing backwards from reel to reel
But I don't see one single solitary light technician
Or one single camera in this moonlit field

I don't want to be in love like the movies
Cause in the movies they're not in love at all
With a twinkle in their eyes
They're just saying their lines
So we can't be in love like the movies

-The Avett Brothers

The Democratic Contention

In honor of election day...

The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analagous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analagous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Logic

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “atleast—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see!’”

“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like!’”

“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe!’”

“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute...

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 65-66.

My Portion

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.”

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

-Psalm 16: 2, 5-6

I hear echos of these verses (and also below) in Augustine’s oft-quoted Confessions.

If I Get Murdered in the City

I discovered The Avett Brothers a couple days ago. I like the simplicity of their music...kind of folk-hillbilly-rock. This is an especially nice lyric:

If I get murdered in the city
Don't go revenging in my name
One person dead from such is plenty
No need to go get locked away



The video is nothing fancy - just a couple of guys playing the guitar and singing. But I've watched it four or five times anyway. I love all the close-ups, and the smiles on "I sure did get in lots of trouble" are great.

Weekend Highs

1. Going for a walk Sunday afternoon - such a beautiful Fall day!
2. Watching Lars and the Real Girl
3. Listening to The Avett Brothers

My Portion

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

-Psalm 73:25-26

Dark as Sea Urchins

The Captain's wife played the harp; she had very long arms, silvery as eels on those nights, and armpits as dark and mysterious as sea urchins; and the sounds of the harp was sweet and piercing, so sweet and piercing it was almost unbearable, and we were forced to let out long cries, not so much to accompany the music as to protect our hearing from it.

-Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, 7.

Climbing on the Moon

There were nights when the Moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the Moon missed a ducking in the sea by a hair's-breadth; well, let's say a few yards anyway. Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.

-Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, 3.

Special Glasses

I had to send away for them
because they are no available in any store.

They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun,

they filter out the harmful sight of you—
you on the approach,
you waiting at my bus stop,
you, face in the evening window.

Every morning I put them on
and step out the side door
whistling a melody of thanks to my nose
and ears for holding them in place, just so,

singing a song of gratitude
to the lens grinder at his heavy bench
and to the very lenses themselves
because they allow it all to come in, all but you.

How they know the difference
between the green hedges, the stone walls,
and you is beyond me,

yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain
do come in, as well as the postman waving
and the mother and daughter dogs next door,

and then there is the tea kettle
about to play its chord—
everything sailing right in but you, girl.

Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,
but not the mosquito,
and as water swirls down the drain,
but not the eggshell,
so the flowering trellis and the moon
pass through my special glasses,
but not you.

Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,
as I lay my special glasses on the night table,
pull the chain on the lamp,
and say a prayer—unlike the song—
that I will not see you in my dreams.

-Billy Collins, The Trouble with Poetry, 40-41.

Happy Endings

Gilly was crying now. She couldn’t help herself. “Trotter, it’s all wrong. Nothing turned out the way it’s supposed to.”

“How you mean supposed to? Life ain’t supposed to be nothing, ‘cept maybe tough.”

“But I always thought that when my mother came...”

“My sweet baby, ain’t no one ever told you yet? I reckon I thought you had all that figured out...All that stuff about happy endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death. Now that might or might not be happy, but either way, you ain’t ready to die, are you?...Sometimes in this world things come easy, and you tend to lean back and say, ‘Well, finally, happy ending. This is the way things is supposed to be.’ Like life owed you good things...And there is lots of good things, baby, Like you coming to be with us here this fall. That was a mighty good thing for me and William Ernest. But you just fool yourself if you expect good things all the time. They ain’t what’s regular—don’t nobody owe ‘em to you.”

“If life is so bad, how come you’re so happy?”

“Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?”

-Katherine Paterson, The Great Gilly Hopkins, 147-148.

Mooreeffoc

And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle.

-J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,” A Tolkien Miscellany, 129-130.

We Make Because We are Made

...To quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as “lies”...

“Dear Sir,” I said—“Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misued). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

...Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

-J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-stories,” A Tolkein Miscellany, 127.

Cheese and Crackers

The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but cheese cut up into contemptibly small pieces; and it is the awful fact that instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits [crackers]. Biscuits – to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides! Biscuits – to one who had proved anew for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread! I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he was that he should put asunder those whom Humanity had joined. I asked him if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.

-G. K. Chesterton, "Cheese"

Optimistic About Nothing

However, American culture is by nature more upbeat, more optimistic than European culture, more about opportunity than about our lost philosophical bearings, so it tends to think differently about our lost center. It is naturally more hopeful. It therefore stares not so much at the void as at the prospect of a Caribbean vacation, at the high-end catalogs, the upward move, and the new Lexus. Europeans might still see themselves in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Americans are more inclined to while away the time by watching something distracting or amusing. Maybe Seinfeld. This brilliantly acted television show was, by its own reckoning, a show about nothing. Beckett's world, too, was a world in which Nothing reigned. Here are two streets that end up at the same destination, one at a highbrow level and the other at, well, a lowbrow level. But Beckett's was nastier.

-David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant, 110.

The Case for the Ephemeral

The last indictment against this book is the worst of all. It is simply this: that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish. For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their nature accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it attacks. In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on which side we fought.

-G. K. Chesterton, "The Case for the Ephemeral"

Curious Link of the Day

Museum of Bad Art

Rain

I opened my eyes
And looked up at the rain,
And it dripped in my head
And poured into my brain,
So pardon the wild, crazy thing I just said—
I just ain't the same since there's rain in my head.

I walk kinda careful,
I turn around slow,
I can't run or jump
Cause I might overflow.
And all that I hear as I lie in my bed
Is the slishity-slosh of rain in my head.

-Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

Telling Secrets

It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about. Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell.

-Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets, 3.

Retreat Highs

1. Bioluminescence
2. Blindfold Pictionary, Zoom, Never-Have-I-Ever, Shuffle-Your-Buns
3. Beach devotions with Mike - meditating on 1 Peter 1:1-5
4. A VERY COLD dip in the ocean, followed by hot chicken soup for lunch
5. Coloring books and macaroni necklaces
6. Paper bag skits
7. Joey's benediction

Little Deaths

I've died several times since then, and it's getting to be routine. In fact, as I'm writing this I see another death hovering on the horizon. A big one. And I'm starting to feel like my father, with one crucial difference.

Though he claimed to have lived countless lives, each in a different body and at a different place and time, I boast of having lived about five or six lives in the same body. Sometimes even in the same place and at roughly the same time.

I just don't seem to get this reincarnation thing right. I've even returned to a place I once lived, seventeen years later, as a very different person, in an older, more vulnerable body. It would have been so much nicer to have returned with a new body, and a tougher heart.

There are many ways to die. One one kind is final, of course. But before that one pulls you under, many others come along, like waves at the shore.

-Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana, 375.

Sneezes

In honor of my head cold, may I direct your attention to five posts tagged with the word sneezes.

Highs (Looking on the Bright Side Edition)

1. A job I can do from home, in my pajamas
2. Sudafed Severe Cold Formula
3. Pink kleenex
4. A surfeit of library books
5. Tuesday night - starting to turn the corner!

Lows

1. I have a cold, and I think I'm going to die...

Weekend Highs

1. Making a heck of a lot (186?) of meatballs
2. Skyping Jessie first thing Saturday morning
3. Crashing Presbytery to hear David Wells
4. Walking in the woods - taking an unfamiliar trail, and finding my way back to civilization...eventually
5. Library books and Chinese food, a perfect pairing since South Windsor Public Library is just around the corner from Sun Sun, and it's always so nice to enjoy a meal with a good book
6. First SNAC meeting of the year, replete with new faces

Review: The Willoughbys, Lois Lowry

This is a book about four old-fashioned children, their nefarious parents, a not-really odious nanny, an affable infant, and a melancholy tycoon...among others. It’s tongue-in-cheek, reminiscent of Lemony Snickett’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I was taken aback by the cynical tone of the first few chapters. (When I first picked this up, I was searching for a Fairmont bedtime story...and a book in which the main characters ruthlessly abandon an infant seemed a bit too dark. Ruthlessly - hah!) But I’m happy to say there is redemption, and things end well for almost everyone. Except, perhaps, the parents. But they are nefarious, so it’s okay. SO, this was a fun read. And Lois Lowry is a great author. The end.

Adjectives

The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power...

-J. R. R. Tolkein, "On Fairy-Stories," A Tolkein Miscellany, 108.

When You Wake Up in the Morning...

Later on, when they had all said “Good-bye” and “Thank-you” to Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent.

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

“It’s the same thing,” he said.

-A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 159-160.

Rejection

Sometimes I daydream of having rejection slips made up for all sorts of things in life, like for moments when I sense a silly argument brewing with my lovely and mysterious spouse, and instead of foolishly trying to lay out my sensible points which have been skewed or miscommunicated, I simply hold up a card (BRIAN DOYLE REGRETS THAT HE IS UNABLE TO PURSUE THIS MATTER), or for when my children ask me to drive them half a block to the park (GET A GRIP), or when I am invited to a meeting at work I know will drone and moan for hours (I WOULD PREFER TO HAVE MY SPLEEN REMOVED WITH A BUTTER KNIFE), or for overpious sermons (GET A GRIP!), for oleaginous politicians and other mountebanks (IF YOU TELL ONE MORE LIE I WILL COME UP THERE AND PUMMEL YOU WITH A MAMMAL), etc.

On the other hand, what if my lovely and mysterious spouse issued me a rejection slip on the wind-whipped afternoon when I knelt, creaky even then, on a high hill over the wine-dark sea, and stammered would would would will will will you you marry me? What if she had leaned down (well, not quite leaned down, she’s the size of a heron) and handed me a lovely engraved card that said WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT WE CANNOT ACCEPT YOUR PROPOSAL, DESPITE ITS OBVIOUS MERITS? But she didn’t. She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn’t believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse. Anyway, there I was on my knees for a while, wondering if my lovely and mysterious paramour had actually said yes, while she railed and wailed into the wind, and finally I said, um, is that an affirmative? because my knees are killing me here, and she said, clearly, yes.

-Brian Doyle, "No", The Kenyon Review (hat tip Our Girl in Chicago)

A Very Long Sentence

In after-years [Piglet] liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; 1st Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.

-A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 145-146.

Metaphors Matter

I loved explosions. I loved them in war movies. I loved them off in the distance as I went to sleep. I loved them even more close up when we set off firecrackers.

I loved the sound of the match head on the rough side of the matchbox, the flare: so suddenly there. I loved the sight and the phosphorus smell of the burning match as it approached the fuse on the firecracker, as it transferred that living flame to it. And I loved the sight and smell of the fuse as it came alive and was consumed, eaten by time and fire.

Such a perfect way of thinking about those fuses, and also life. You begin at one end, and as you make your way forward, point by infinitesimal point, you give off sparks. And what you leave behind is charred, consumed, transformed. But that glorious voyage toward the end: poets never grow weary of trying to describe it. The end, or telos, as Aristotle or Aquinas would tell you, is the very reason for existence, the purpose of anything that exists. Our telos as humans, yours and mine, is to abide with God for eternity. The sparks on our way there, large and small, call them love. The telos of a fuse on a firecracker is a nice explosion. The sparks on the way there, call them love too.

On a really good day, I will fight to the death with anyone who tries to tell me that those sparks are not also love, fight with my bare hands or the jawbone of an ass or the broken stump of a sword. Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect ones.

-Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana, 64.

Preamble

If all the characters in this book are fictional, none of them knows it yet.

All resemblances to actual persons were preordained before the creation of the world. It matters little that the names don't always match.

All the incidents and dialogue come straight from God's imagination. As does the author himself. And the reader.

-Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana

Simile

I think we all want truth
But truth, it is just like cream
It will rise straight to the top
But not unless you stop stirring it up

-Jonny Rogers, "Jerusalem"

The Country

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time -

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

-Billy Collins

Heaps of Ert

...We have a large number of negative words—inept, disheveled, incorrigible, ruthless, unkempt—for which the positive form is missing. English would be richer if we could say admiringly of a tidy person, “She’s so sheveled,” or praise a capable person for being full of ept or an energetic one for having heaps of ert.

-Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue, 68.

Murder in the First Degree

Look, you can’t do things like that! Now, I don't know how I can explain this to you. But, it's not only against the law, its wrong! It's not a nice thing to do. People wouldn't understand. He wouldn't understand. What I mean is...Well...This is developing into a very bad habit!

-Mortimer Brewster in Arsenic and Old Lace

Rebelling Against Your Parents

[Gabriel Syme's] respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tender years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left—sanity.

-G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 22.

King Lear and the Apostle Paul

It is in First Corinthians that Paul also writes “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,” and the echoes of those words in King Lear are so striking that it is hard to believe that they were not consciously in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote it. Not only are the foolish wise in his play and the wise foolish, just as the weak are strong in it and the strong weak, but what seems to be nothing—a word that Lear and Cordelia, Edmund and Gloucester, and the Fool all play upon at some length—turns out to be something of surpassing importance, as it does when in answer to Lear’s “What can you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?” Cordelia’s “nothing” contains the whole richness and truth of her love contrasted with her sisters’ deceit. It is almost possible to think of Shakespeare as having written the entire play as a gloss on St. Paul, adding to it such other paradoxes of his own, as that it is the sane who are mad and the mad sane, just as it also the blind who see and the seeing who are blind.

-Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel, 137-138.

King Lear as Fairytale

The opening scene of [King Lear] has a fairytale quality about it, with the two wicked sisters and the one good one, as in Cinderella, and the richest treasure going to the one who gives the best speech as to the one who makes the right wish or opens the right casket, but it isn't long before Shakespeare turns all this on its head and the hope that they will all live happily ever after gets lost in nightmare. And yet, and yet, he seems to say, maybe life is like a fairy tale notwithstanding, if only in the sense that all disguises are stripped away in the end and all evil spells undone, so that even the Beast becomes beautiful when he discovers that Beauty loves him, and even the old king, with Beauty dead in his arms, finally becomes a human being, and the last word, like Albany's, is a word of mercy.

-Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel, 153-154.

Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight

Something familiar,
Something peculiar,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

Something appealing,
Something appalling,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

Nothing with kings, nothing with crowns;
Bring on the lovers, liars and clowns!

Old situations,
New complications,
Nothing portentous or polite;
Tragedy tomorrow,
Comedy tonight!

Something convulsive,
Something repulsive,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

Something aesthetic,
Something frenetic,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

Nothing with gods, nothing with fate;
Weighty affairs will just have to wait!

Nothing that's formal,
Nothing that's normal,
No recitations to recite;
Open up the curtain:
Comedy Tonight!

Something erratic,
Something dramatic,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

Frenzy and frolic,
Strictly symbolic,
Something for everyone:
A comedy tonight!

Something familiar,
Something peculiar,
Something for everybody:
Comedy tonight!

Something that's gaudy,
Something that's bawdy--
Something for everybawdy!
Comedy tonight!

Nothing that's grim.
Nothing that's Greek.
She plays Medea later this week.

Stunning surprises!
Cunning disguises!
Hundreds of actors out of sight!
Pantaloons and tunics!
Courtesans and eunuchs!
Funerals and chases!
Baritones and basses!
Panderers!
Philanderers!
Cupidity!
Timidity!
Mistakes!
Fakes!
Rhymes!
Crimes!
Tumblers!
Grumblers!
Bumblers!
Fumblers!

No royal curse, no Trojan horse,
And a happy ending, of course!
Goodness and badness,
Man in his madness--
This time it all turns out all right!
Tragedy tomorrow,
Comedy tonight!

-Stephen Sondheim, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

Pretty Good Jokes

Did you hear about the midget fortuneteller that escaped from prison? The newspaper headline read: "Small Medium at Large!"

Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh.

Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn't much, but the reception was excellent.

A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, "I'll serve you, but don't start anything."

A dyslexic man walks into a bra.

-Courtesy of Jonah Goldberg posting at The Corner

Me and Jiggs

Me and Jiggs staring at the ceiling
The stars above the radar range
Song from a station wagon laying foundations
On the shadows of overpassing planes
I'm feeling good, at seven o'clock
We're gonna drive across the county line
And find Saturday night like an orphan child
That the good days left behind

And I'm not sure we can make it stay
Sun's going down and it's another day

Me and my friends sitting in the park
Drinking beer underneath the trees
Lying on your back as the sun goes down,
You know it's perfect cause you've gotta leave
On a Saturday night in a town like this
I forget all my songs about trains
A bar with a jukebox and you on my arm
Heaven and earth are pretty much the same

And I'm not sure we can make it stay
Sun's going down and its the end of the day

Later on sitting on the porch
Talking like the night could last all night
Like we are all half crazy
And all at least half alright
Sitting on the porch singing Townes Van Zandt
Play guitar to burn off the hours
Till we climb the fences at the edge of town
And paint our names on the water towers

And I'm not sure we can make them stay
Sun's going down at the end of the day

-Josh Ritter

A Hymn to God the Father

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which is my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive those sins through which I run
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin by which I've won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by thy self, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore!
And, having done that, thou hast done,
I fear no more.

-John Donne

Morning

Bathroom Humor

I reached my peak as a bathroom humorist in The 2000-Pound Goldfish. The goldfish has been flushed down the toilet, into the sewer, where it comes to weigh two thousand pounds and has slurped five or six people to death. The soldiers are marching into the sewer to kill Bubbles, and Warren gets the idea that if everyone in the city flushed their toilets at, say, ten o'clock, the floodgates would open and Bubbles would be swept out to sea “where she could live the rest of her life in peace and harmony.” This is the section I read aloud to kids, and at this point, some intellectual type raises his hand and says, “Mrs. Byers, goldfish can't live in salt water.” I say, “Listen, I'm the boss of this book, and if I want Bubbles to live in salt water, Bubbles will live in salt water.”

There follows a seven-page countdown in which the announcer is entreating listeners to flush their toilets. “It's five minutes to ten. If you have more than one bathroom, get a neighbor to come flush with you.” “It’s four minutes to ten, open your windows, yell ‘Flush!’ to the people in the streets below.” It takes two pages to get everyone in their bathrooms, and the final countdown is “Five-four-three-two-one-FLUSH!” and if I read this correctly, I never have to actually say the word flush, because the entire school will make the sound of a toilet flushing. It may not sound thrilling to you to hear two hundred kids flushing like toilets, but it has never failed to move me.

-Betsy Byars, "Taking Humor Seriously," The Zena Sutherland Lectures, 216-217.

Childish Things

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," 34.

Awakening

Here we are now with the falling sky and the rain,
We're awakening
Here we are now with the desperate youth in pain,
We're awakening
Maybe it's called ambition, but you've been talking in your sleep
About a dream
We're awakening

-Switchfoot

Weekend Highs

1. Stargazing with Emily, Oliver, Sami, and Weez - shooting stars and moth attacks
2. FINISHING the Fairmont slideshow (always an epic struggle)
3. Final Fairmont debrief, report back, and picnic
4. Gaping at fabulous clouds and later, another beautiful starry sky - and almost driving off the road as a result
5. Arts Fellowship
6. Driving with Sam
7. New music - Jon Foreman, Ingrid Michaelson

Fairmont Highs

1. French braids
2. Bunkbed debriefs with Leta
3. Prayer chair with Sami
4. Sharing blue licorice and matzo
5. Dear Yous
6. Purple car!
7. Weez's smelly note
8. The Falcon, Blue Denver, Whimsy, Pilgrim Tribute Cruiser, and Blitzen
9. Driving Harrison, Joe, Caleb, and Tim
10. "Waiting for the A Train" with Oliver
11. Albuquerque
12. Snow
13. Seeing Carol and Pat off
14. Polly
15. Sunset on the way home from Dairy Cream Corner
16. Pizza Hut doxology
17. Avon and Edward
18. Are you getting enough water?
19. John Lyoch
20. Chelsea's shirt
21. Car Talk
22. No Dippin Dots!
23. Spaghetti lunch
24. Uncles and nephews
25. Pink Tux to the Prom
26. Oh deer!

Discovering England

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas...There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?...What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 9-10.

A Magic Castle

“The tables and chairs,” said Avon, “are just the way I like them. Even the pictures on the wall are to my fancy. Oh, Edward, someone has gone to a great deal of trouble...”

Suddenly, Avon felt very happy. “Just think,” he said, “to go on a long trip, to comes so far from where you live, and then—then to come upon a magic castle which has all the comforts of home. Oh, Edward, this has been the most exciting adventure of all. I believe I am happy at last.”

-Avi, The End of the Beginning, 128, 131.

Lost Causes

You don't throw away a whole life just 'cause it's banged up a little.

-Seabiscuit (quoted by Charles Garland, preaching in Fairmont, WV on 7/25/2008)

Visiting Paris

The thing is, Adam, time travel is like visiting Paris. You can't just read the guide book. You've got to throw yourself in, eat the food, use the wrong verbs, get charged double and end up kissing complete strangers—or is that just me? Stop asking questions. Go and do it!

-Doctor Who (quoted by Charles Garland, preaching in Fairmont, WV on 7/24/2008)

Edification/Demolition

Every time you meet another human being you have the opportunity. It’s a chance at holiness. For you will do one of two things, then. Either you will build him up, or you will tear him down. Either you will acknowledge that he is, or you will make him sorry that he is—sorry, at least, that he is there, in front of you. You will create, or you will destroy. And the things you dignify or deny are God’s own property. They are made, each one of them, in his own image.

There are no useless, minor meetings. There are no dead-end jobs. There are no pointless lives. Swallow your sorrows, forget your grievances, and all the hurt your poor life has sustained. Turn your face truly to the human before you and let her, for one pure moment, shine. Think her important, and then she will suspect that she is fashioned of God.

How do you say Hello? Or do you say Hello?

How do you greet the strangers? Or do you greet them?

Are you so proud as to burden your customer, your client, your neighbor, your child with your tribulation? Even by attitude? Even by crabbiness, anger, or gloom?

Demolition!

Or do you look them in the eye and grant them peace?

-Walter Wangerin, Ragman, and Other Cries of Faith, 129-130.

Stories are Light

Do you remember when Despereaux was in the dungeon, cupped in Gregory the jailer’s hand, whispering a story in the old man’s ear?

I would like it very much if you thought of me as a mouse telling you a story, this story, with the whole of my heart, whispering it in your ear in order to save myself from the darkness, and to save you from the darkness, too.

“Stories are light,” Gregory the jailer told Despereaux.

Reader, I hope you have found some light here.

-Katie DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux, Coda.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness, reader, is, I think, something very much like hope and love, a powerful, wonderful thing.

And a ridiculous thing too.

Isn't it ridiculous, after all, to think a son could forgive his father for beating the drum that sent him to his death? Isn't it ridiculous to think that a mouse could ever forgive anyone for such perfidy?

But still, here are the words Despereaux Tilling spoke to his father. He said, "I forgive you, Pa."

And he said those words because he sensed that it was the only way to save his own heart, to stop it from breaking in two. Despereaux, reader, spoke those words to save himself.

-Katie DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux, 207-208.

Dipped in Story

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’. The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.

-C. S. Lewis, “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” On Stories, 90.

Kid Lit

The truth is...that [fairy tales] are now associated with children because they are out of fashion with adults; have in fact retired to the nursery as old furniture used to retire there, not because the children had begun to like it but because their elders had ceased to like it.

...Am I to patronise sleep because children sleep sound? Or honey because children like it?

-C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said,” On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, 47.

1 John 2:1

Behold, of what country is the love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.

-literal translation by James Boice, The Epistles of John, 79.

Leaf by Niggle

He was a painter by nature. In a minor way, of course; still, a Leaf by Niggle has a charm of its own. He took a great deal of pains with leaves, just for their own sake.

-J. R. R. Tolkien, Leaf ny Niggle

Dancing

-Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)

Highs

I think I passed!!!

Already and Not Yet

Beneath [my] face I am a family plot. All the people I have ever been are buried there—the bouncing boy, his mother's pride; the pimply boy and secret sensualist; the reluctant infantryman; the beholder at dawn through hospital plate-glass of his first-born child...And buried in me too are all the people I have not been yet but might be someday—the Boston Strangler and St. John of the Cross, Heliogabulus and Dagwood Bumstead, Judas Iscariot and Robin Hood and Little Nell, all the lives I have not yet lived like promises not yet kept, dreams waiting for or dreading the possibility of being dreamed.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 14-15.

Moonbeams

Moonlight be a friend tonight
We're all wrecked up on these dreams
Holding on a bit too tight
I've got splinters from these moonbeams
If it seems we're falling down
If it seems we're falling through
Darlin' you know that is nothing
Darlin' you know that is nothing new

-Bill Mallonee, "You Know That (is Nothing New)"

Highs

An unusually fine weekend for games...
1. 4-Square (mentioned below)*
2. In a Pickle**
3. Apples to Apples
4. Throwing frisbees at Elias, Ben, Ben and Bill***
5. This is a Thing**
6. SNAP**
7. Excuse Me - What Are You Doing?**

*Haven't played since 6th grade!
**Entirely new to me!
***Not technically a game, but satisfying nonetheless

Highs

1. Playing loud, summery music in the car
2. 4-square
3. Driveway chalk drawings
4. Venn diagrams

Systems of Local Transport

Other people remember liking boats, cars, trains, or planes when they were children—and I liked them too—but I was more interested in systems of local transport: airport luggage-handling systems (those overlapping new moons of hard rubber that allowed the moving track to turn a corner, neatly drawing its freight of compressed clothing with it; and the fringe of rubber strips that marked the transition between the bright inside world of baggage claim and the outside world of low-clearance vehicles and men in blue outfits); supermarket checkout conveyor belts, turned on and off like sewing machines by a foot pedal, with a seam like a zipper that kept reappearing; and supermarket roller coasters made of rows of vertical rollers arranged in a U curve over which the gray plastic numbered containers that held your bagged and paid-for groceries would slide out a flapped gateway to the outside; milk-bottling machines we saw on field trips that hurried the queueing bottles on curved tracks with rubber-edged side-rollers toward the machine that socked milk into them and clamped them with a paper cap; marble chutes; Olympic luge and bobsled tracks; the hanger-management systems at the dry cleaner’s—sinuous circles of rustling plastics (NOT A TOY! NOT A TOY! NOT A TOY!) and dimly visible clothing that looped from the customer counter way back to the pressing machines in the rear of the store fanning sideways as they slalomed around old men at antique sewing machines who were making sense of the heap of random pairs of pants pinned with little notes; laundry lines that cranked clothes over empty space and cranked them back in when laundry was dry; the barbecue-chicken display at Woolworth’s that rotated whole orange-golden chickens on pivoting skewers; and the rotating Timex watch displays, each watch box open like a claim; the cylindrical roller-cookers on which hot dogs slowly turned in the opposite direction to the rollers, blistering; gears that (as my father explained it) in their greased intersection modified forces and sent them on their way. The escalator shared qualities with all of these systems, with one difference: it was the only one I could get on and ride.

-Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine, 35-36.

Sometimes by Step

Sometimes the night was beautiful
Sometimes the sky was so far away
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close
You could touch it but your heart would break
Sometimes the morning came too soon
Sometimes the day could be so hot
There was so much work left to do
But so much you'd already done

Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me
He was a stranger in this land
And I am that, no less than he
And on this road to righteousness
Sometimes the climb can be so steep
I may falter in my steps
But never beyond your reach

Oh God, you are my God
And I will ever praise you
I will seek you in the morning
And I will learn to walk in your ways
And step by step you'll lead me
And I will follow you all of my days

-Rich Mullins and Beaker

The Mice Sneezed!

But no sooner had he finished speaking than all the Mice turned round at once, and sneezed at him in an appalling and vindictive manner, (and it is impossible to imagine a more scroobious and unpleasant sound than that caused by the simultaneous sneezing of many millions of angry Mice)...

-Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, 98.

Life Together

The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 19.

Echolocation

“I find my way around as the bats do—echolocation. I am the next stage in evolution. I shriek and listen to hear the contours of objects. I caress the world with my voice. It is a quaint and frivolous habit that shall one day prove to be mankind’s salvation.”

-M. T. Anderson, The Clue of the Linoleum Ledhosen, 56.

Batty

The baby bat
Screamed out in fright,
"Turn on the dark,
I'm afraid of the light."

-Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

Connectors

When [Lois] Weisberg looks out at the world or Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don't see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don't look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven't seen in sixty-five years, Lois and Roger like them all.

-Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, 53.

Highs

Beachreading:
1. The Face of the Stranger, Anne Perry
2. The Children of Green Knowe, L.M. Boston
3. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
4. Inkheart, Cornelia Funke

Post-beachreading (books that accompanied me to the Cape, but didn't get read...yet):
5. The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin, Stanley L. Jaki
6. Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
7. Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Wrinkles

His great-grandmother was sitting by a huge open fireplace where logs and peat were burning. The room smelled of woods and wood-smoke. He forgot about her being frighteningly old. She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.

-L. M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe, 11.

Highs

I'm going to the beach today...Will return on Sunday!

Come Unto Me

Come unto me. Come unto me, you say. All right then, dear my Lord. I will try in my own absurd way...For who am I? I know only that heel and toe, memory and metatarsal, I am everything that turns, all of a piece, unthinking, at the sound of my name. Am where my feet take me. Buechner. Come unto me, you say. I, Buechner, all of me, unknowing and finally unknowable even to myself, turn. O Lord and lover, I come if I can to you down through the litter of any day, through sleeping and waking and eating and saying goodbye and going away and coming back again. Laboring and laden with endless histories heavy on my back.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 28-29.

Accustomed to My Face

I have grown accustomed to my face and so have my family and friends. If it does not have in it the power of certain rare faces to rejoice the hearts of all who behold it, under the right circumstances it can moderately rejoice two or three selected faces. It also, as far as I know, causes no one anywhere to be afraid or to despair. I see things in my face that I wish were not there. I see things in my face that I am content to see there. There are times when I see it almost as a stranger's face. But all in all, it is a face that has served me well enough over the years and that I can live with.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 26.

Goodnight Moon #7

What do you want, Mary? What do you want? You–you want the moon? Just say the word, and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.

-Jimmy Stewart, It's a Wonderful Life

Goodnight Moon #6

The moon belongs to everyone,
The best things in life are free.
The stars belong to everyone,
They gleam there for you and me.

-Buddy De Sylia and Lew Brown

Goodnight Moon #5

Honorable Moon, I look to you,
Honorable Moon, as lovers do.

-Ira Gershwin

Goodnight Moon #4

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silvery shoon.

-Walter De La Mare

Highs

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Goodnight Moon #3

Your silvery beams
Will bring love dreams,
We'll be cuddling soon,
By the light of the silvery moon.

-Edward Madden

Goodnight Moon #2

Night and Day, you are the one
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.

-Cole Porter

Goodnight Moon #1

There's a long, long trail awinding into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing and a white moon beams.

-Stoddard King

Highs

1. Outdoor Game Day...bizarre team building games and softball/ultimate. Such a delight watching folks play together. And totally amazing watching groups do origami. With a blanket they happen to be standing on.

Highs

Books I'm taking with me on vacation:
1. The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
2. An Assembly Such as This (A Novel of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman), Pamela Aidan
3. Eggs, Jerry Spinelli
4. The Chosen, Chaim Potok

And, too bulky for vacation, but waiting when I return:
5. Inkheart, Cornelia Funke

A Bit of Hoovering

It was eight o’clock on a warm May morning. Mr. Brown was in the bathroom singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Mrs. Brown was in the kitchen mixing homemade muesli and chopping bananas for breakfast. Ten-year-old Betsy was brushing her hair while revising for a French test. Nine-year-old Brian was watching an item on TV about Cruft’s Dog Show. Baby Brown was upstairs in his cot.

The family gathered in the kitchen and sat down to breakfast. Mr. Brown mentioned a big financial deal he was handling at the bank; he was the Assistant Manager. Betsy spoke enthusiastically of her French test, in which she was expecting to do well. Brian apologized for the state of his room and said he would tidy it up after school. Mrs. Brown nodded amiably but otherwise said little. She was looking forward to a having the house to herself and getting on with a bit of hoovering.

Silence. Immobility. Shock.

‘Hang on a minute.’ Mrs. Brown lowered her spoon. ‘What’s all this? “Looking forward to a bit of hoovering”?’ A puzzled frown. ‘I hate hoovering.’

‘I hate muesli, come to that,’ said Mr. Brown, staring perplexedly into his bowl.

‘Me, too!’ cried Brian.

‘And I hate French!’ Betsy yelled.

Silence again as the Browns considered their unusual situation.

Mrs. Brown said, ‘Who writes this rubbish?’

-Allan Ahlberg, The Better Brown Stories, 2-3.

When the Ship Comes In

Oh the time will come up when the wind will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathing
Like a stillness in the wind 'fore the hurricane begins
The hour that the ship comes in
Oh the seas will split and the ship will hit
And the sand on the shoreline will be shaking
And the tide will sound and the waves will pound
And the morning will be breaking

Oh the fishes will laugh as they swim out of the path
And the seagulls, they'll be smiling
And the rocks on the sand will proudly stand
The hour that the ship comes in
And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they're spoken
For the chains of the sea will have busted in the night
And be buried on the bottom of the ocean

Oh a song will lift as the mains'l shifts
And the boat drifts onto the shoreline
And the sun will respect every face on the deck
The hour that the ship comes in
And the sands will roll out a carpet of gold
For your weary toes to be a-touching
And the ship's wise men will remind you once again
That the whole wide world is watching

Oh the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreaming
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal and they'll know that it's for real
The hour that the ship comes in
And they'll raise their hands saying we'll meet all your demands
But we'll shout from the bow, your days are numbered
And like Pharaoh's tribe they'll be drowned in the tide
And like Goliath they'll be conquered

-Bob Dylan

Waiting

Right here's beauty like I have never known
And I'm carefully placed here, not some cast-away
But I'm weary and aching for my home
And I'm waiting for my day

-Jason Harrod, "Waiting For My Day"

Vocation

In nothing has Church so lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

-Dorothy Sayers, Why Work?

Hidden Things

“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well...”

-Antoine De Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, 75.

All the Way My Savior Leads Me

All the way my Savior leads me;
What have I to ask beside?
Can I doubt his tender mercy,
Who through life has been my guide?
Heavenly peace, divinest comfort,
Here by faith in him to dwell;
For I know, whate'er befall me,
Jesus doeth all things well.

All the way my Savior leads me,
Cheers each winding path I tread,
Gives me grace for ev'ry trial,
Feeds me with the living bread.
Though my weary steps may falter,
And my soul athirst may be,
Gushing from the rock before me,
Lo, a spring of joy I see!

All the way my Savior leads me—
O the fullness of his love!
Perfect rest to me is promised
In my Father's house above:
When my spirit, clothed, immortal,
Wings its flight to realms of day,
This my song through endless ages:
Jesus led me all the way.

-Fanny Crosby

The Lanyard

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

-Billy Collins, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems

Highs

1. GPS
2. Peripatetic studying
3. Long John Silvers
4. Fairmont reunions
5. BHUP reunions
6. Perry Mason
7. Coming home!

Work

Most of the world's work is done by people who are not feeling very well.

-Winston Churchill (?)

Nevertheless

When my soul was embittered
When I was pricked in heart
I was brutish and ignorant;
I was like a beast toward you.

Nevertheless I am continually with you;
You hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire beside you.
My flesh and my heart may fail
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

For behold, those who are far from you shall perish;
you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.
But for me it is good to be near God;
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
that I may tell of all your works.

-Psalm 73

Real World

Even though my first heroes were bus drivers
My first dream was to become a professional athlete.
And I would have been, and I could have been,
If my body had every developed beyond the larval stage.
But it didn't, of course, and so here I am
Doin what I'm doin because
Doin what I'm doin doesn't require a lot of
Physical or intellectual capabilities.
You just get up here and you do it,
And you hope you get away with it...

-Marques Bovre, "Real World"

Whan that Aprill

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

-Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue

Our World Belongs to God

1. As followers of Jesus Christ,
living in this world—
which some seek to control,
but which others view with despair—
we declare with joy and trust:
Our world belongs to God!

4. Our world has fallen into sin;
but rebellion and sin can never dethrone God.
He does not abandon the work of his hand;
the heavens still declare his glory.
He preserves his world,
sending seasons, sun, and rain,
upholding his creatures,
renewing the earth,
directing all things to their purpose.
He promised a Savior;
now the whole creation groans
in the birth pangs of a new creation.

5. God holds this world
in sovereign love.
He kept his promise,
sending Jesus into the world.
He poured out his Spirit
and broadcast the news
that sinners who repent and believe in Jesus
can live
and breathe
and move again
as members of the family of God.

6. We rejoice in the goodness of God,
renounce the works of darkness,
and dedicate ourselves to holy living.
As covenant partners,
called to faithful obedience,
and set free for joyful praise,
we offer our hearts and lives
to do God's work in his world.
With tempered impatience, eager to see injustice ended,
we expect the Day of the Lord.
And we are confident
that the light which shines in the present darkness
will fill the earth when Christ appears.

Come, Lord Jesus!
Our world belongs to you.

-Our World Belongs to God (a contemporary testimony of the CRC)

Transparent Tape

Many have extolled the virtues of cellophane, but few have eulogized transparent tape. Clear tape is an excellent way to laminate, for instance, a pair of Bill Peabody earrings.

-Joy Sikorski, How to Draw a Radish, 72.

Same Thing, Every Spring

Dan, go get your jacket
It's still a little cold outside
And don't play in mud, you'll track it
And I just cleaned inside
Momma don't need a coat, he yells
As he heads down to the game
Where the field is dressed seductively
In puddles of old rain
Same thing, every Spring

All kinds of life is sproutin
Flyin round, some getting scarfed
Like mommas having babies
And their heads are popping off
Well Nate taught that to Sally
Who then taught it to Nadine
Who couldn't quite get the hang
Of poppin em off real nice and clean
Same thing, every Spring

It's time to open up the shed
Wake the hibernating bears
Old grizzly and old kodiak
Are a couple of our John Deers
It's time to plant the seeds
But the garden dirt's too hard
We'll have to borrow Andy's tiller
Ours got rusted in the yard
Same thing, every Spring

Well April has it's showers
So May has buttercups
And the birds sing every morning
That the earth is warming up
So we gather all the sweaters
All the mittens and the coats
Don't open til October
On the box somebody wrote
Same thing, every Spring

No matter how we try
To live our lives beyond the same
We'll always have the dandelions
And the puddles of old rain
Well me I kind of like the thought
There's really nothing wrong
So winter won't you join with me
A few bars of this old song
Same thing every Spring

-Ticklepenny Corner

Highs

1. Walking
2. Studying outside
3. Sunburn!

Naking

The word naked was originally a past participle; the naked man was the man who had undergone a process of naking, that is, of stripping or peeling (you used the verb of nuts and fruit). Time out of mind the naked man has seemed to our ancestors not the natural but the abnormal man; not the man who has abstained from dressing but the man who has been for some reason undressed.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 104.

Charity

But [Charity], though a sort of love we need, is not the sort we want. We want to be loved for our cleverness, beauty, generosity, fairness, usefulness. The first hint that anyone is offering us the highest love of all is a terrible shock. This is so well recognized that spiteful people will pretend to be loving us with Charity precisely because they know that it will wound us...

We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it. Only the lovable can be naturally loved. You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times—and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit—they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 132-133.

No Safe Investment

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 121.

Be Mirry!

Man, pleis thy makar and be mirry,
And sett not by this warld a chirry.

[Man, please thy Maker, and be merry,
And give not for this world a cherry.]

-William Dunbar, quoted by C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 90.

The Secret Master of Ceremonies

...A few more years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raise or not raise at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 89-90.

Grieving

But we do not want you to uniformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope...

-1 Thessalonians 4:13

Not the Way It's Supposed to Be

In the film Grand Canyon, an immigration attorney breaks out of a traffic jam and attempts to bypass it. His route takes him along streets that seem progressively darker and more deserted. Then the predictible Bonfire of the Vanities nightmare: his expensive car stalls on one of those alarming streets whose teenage guardians favor expensive guns and sneakers. The attorney does manage to phone for a tow truck, but before it arrives, five young street toughs surround his disabled car and threaten him with considerable bodily harm. Then, just in time, the tow truck shows up and its driver—an earnest, genial man—begins to hook up to the disabled car. The toughs protest: the truck driver is interrupting their meal. So the driver takes the leader of the group aside and attempts a five-sentence introduction to metaphysics: “Man,” he says, “the world ain’t supposed to work like this. Maybe you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s supposed to be. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without askin’ you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you rippin’ him off. Everything’s supposed to be different than what it is here.”

-Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, 7.

Marvels

Lily believed that the world was a wonderful and magical place. She believed that if you watched carefully enough, you could find miracles anywhere. The town's baseball team had a secret handshake that went back to the time of the settlers. A professor down the street had a skeleton hanging in his vestibule. Behind the dry cleaner, some ladies held newt races. There were interesting things like this everywhere, waiting to be noticed. Though Lily thought that she herself was too quiet and too boring to ever do anything interesting, she believed that if she just was watchful enough and silent enough—so silent that no one could even tell she existed—she would eventually see marvels.

-M. T. Anderson, Whales On Stilts, 2.

Happy Thursday

Happy Thursday to you,
Happy Thursday to you,
Happy Thursday, dear Alice,
Happy Thursday to you.

“Who is Alice?” asked Mother.

“Alice is somebody that nobody can see,” said Frances. “And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her.”

“Today is Friday,” said Mother.

“It is Thursday for Alice,” said Frances.

-Russell Hoban, A Birthday for Frances, 5-6.

Tidying Up

[Mrs. Darling] does not often go out to dinner, preferring when the children are in bed to sit beside them tidying up their minds, just as if they were drawers. If Wendy and the boys could keep awake they might see her repacking into their proper places the many articles of the mind that have strayed during the day, lingering humorously over some of their contents, wondering were on earth they picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When they wake in the morning the naughtinesses with which they went to bed are not, alas, blown away, but they are placed in the bottom of the drawer; and on the top, beautifully aired, are their prettier thoughts ready for the new day.

-J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up, Act I.

The Size of Thoughts

Each thought has a size, and most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine, or a cigarette lighter, or those tubes of toothpaste that, by mingling several hidden pastes and gels, create a pleasantly striped product. Once in a while, a thought may come up that seems, in its woolly, ranked composure, roughly the size of one's hall closet. But a really large thought, a thought in the presence of which whole urban centers would rise to their feet, and cry out with expressions of gratefulness and kinship; a thought with grandeur, and drenching, barrel-scorning cataracts, and detonations of fist-clenched hope, and hundreds of cellos; a thought that can tear phone books in half, and rap on the iron nodes of experience until every blue girder rings; a thought that may one day pack everything noble and good into its briefcase, elbow past the curators of purposelessness, travel overnight toward Truth, and shake it by the indifferent marble shoulders until it finally whispers its cool assent—this is the size of thought worth thinking about.

-Nicholson Baker, The Size of Thoughts, 10.

Incarnation

The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there gaping.

Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. “It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go,” she said. “I don’t find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world.”

The old man didn’t seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. “The Transfiguration,” he murmured.

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Guizac didn’t have to come here in the first place,” she said, giving him a hard look.

The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.

“He didn’t have to come in the first place,” she repeated, emphasizing each word.

The old man smiled absently. “He came to redeem us,” he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.

-Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person”

Every Little Piece

Dragon whiskers, dragon toes
A dragon tooth and a dragon nose

Every little piece, every little piece
We could make a million
By slicing him, dicing him
Hoagy, we could sell
Every little shell
There's enough of him to go around
Money, money, money by the pound

Every little piece, every little piece
I can take a scissor
And clip him up, rip him up
Every little part
Is a work of art
Think of what a dragon heart would bring
Wrapped up in a ribbon and a string

Dragon liver can cure a cold
Dragon powder grows hair
With dragon blood you'll never grow old
Every item is covered with gold
Every item is covered with gold!

Every little piece, every little piece
Dragon you're my wagon
To destiny, you're the key
Every little shred
Moving me ahead
Every dream of mine will be fulfilled
What a dragon business we can build

Dragon cartilage keeps you thin
Dragon fat is for burns
A dragon tear will clear up your skin
Watch the profits come rolling in
Watch the profits come rolling in!

Every little piece, every little crease
All lead me to the dragon
I'll buy him up, tie him up
Drag him from the cave
Show him that I'm brave
I'll bind him up, grind him up
Lop him up, chop him up
Can't you hear that jingle, jangle sound?
It's money, money, money by the pound!

-Pete's Dragon