Merry Christmas!!!

O ye beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow;
Look now, for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
Oh rest beside the weary road
And hear the angels sing.

-Edward Hamilton Sears, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear"

Courageous Love

Gertrude, it is not the perfect, but rather the imperfect who have need of love...it takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it. And even more courage to see it in the one you love.

-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Looking vs Seeing

To look at a thing is quite different from seeing a thing, and one does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

-Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Better to Receive Than Give?

We prefer to think of ourselves as givers - powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are. Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to demonstrate that we - with our power, generosity, competence and capabilities - had little to do with God's work in Jesus. God wanted to do something for us so strange, so utterly beyond the bounds of human imagination, so foreign to human projection, that God had to resort to angels, pregnant virgins, and stars in the sky to get it done. We didn't think of it, understand it or approve it. All we could do, at Bethlehem, was receive it. A gift from a God we hardly even knew.

- William Willimon, "The God We Hardly Knew"

Marmalade

"Perhaps it's a sticky ceremony, Mrs. Bird," said Paddington hopefully. -Michael Bond, Paddington Marches On, 26.

Muppet Bohemian Rhapsody

A Sackful of Squirrels

Two figures in particular seemed ill-matched. One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; even muffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affronted heron.

The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate. If you picked a number at random, he was probably a little older than that, but--well, it was impossible to tell.

-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 12-13.

Girls

It's no good. You may treat girls as well as you like, and give them every comfort and luxury, and play fair just as if they were boys, but there is something unmanly about the best of girls. They go silly, like milk goes sour, without any warning.

-E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods, 246.

Divine Discontent

But it is wonderful how soon you get used to things, even the things you want most. Our watches, for instance. We wanted them frightfully; but when I had mine a week or two, after the mainspring got broken and was repaired at Bennett's in the village, I hardly cared to look at the works at all, and it did not make me feel happy in my heart any more, though, of course, I should have been very unhappy if it had been taken away from me. And the same with new clothes and nice dinners and having enough of everything. You soon get used to it all, and it does not make you extra happy, although, if you had it all taken away, you would be very dejected. (That is a good word, and one I have never used before.) You get used to everything, as I said, and then you want something more. Father says this is what people mean by the deceitfulness of riches; but Albert's uncle says it is the spirit of progress, and Mrs Leslie said some people called it 'divine discontent'. Oswald asked them all what they thought one Sunday at dinner. Uncle said it was rot, and what we wanted was bread and water and a licking; but he meant it for a joke. This was in the Easter holidays.

-E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods, 3-4.

Fashion

No human being would willingly wear pants that zipped off at the knee—no normal human being—unless they had rocket-thrusters in place of their detachable feet.

-M. T. Anderson, Jasper Dash and the Flame Pits of Delaware, 377.

Pluck the Day

But here's the thing. Horace didn't say that. "Carpe diem" doesn't mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. "Carpe diem" means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things—so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.

-Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, 127.

USB Cables

I looked at the USB cables dangling there, and I laughed pityingly at them, and I thought, Whoever designed the connector of the USB cable was a man who despised the human race, because you can't tell which way to turn it and you waste minutes of your tiny day, crouched, grunting, trying the half-blocked connector one way and the next. -Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, 121.

Mermaids in the Plumbing

I know a boy (we’ll call him Horbert, though that isn’t his name, thank goodness), and for years he lived in a house where the bathtub had a magical drainpipe that led straight to the lost city of Atlantis! But Horbert was always in such a hurry to get where he was going that he never lingered in the bath. Whenever he got really filthy, and his mother nagged him to wash, he just jumped in and briefly splashed at himself. Then he’d spring right from the tub, and out the door he’d fly, afraid that his older brother Noah was beating his high score on Super-Space-Zombie-4000, his very favorite video game. Though mermaids sang in the plumbing, he never heard their call.

-Laurel Snyder, Any Which Wall, 1-2.

Gospel

You think the Gospel—Christianity—is something you’ve committed to, and you haven’t been consistent. The Gospel isn’t a promise you make to God; it’s a promise He makes to you.

-Joey Pensak, from my retreat notes

Purchasing Grace

...Still I feel the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God that I may contribute something, so that he will have to give me his grace in exchange for my holiness.

-Martin Luther

Ballpoint and Bananas

Did you ever write on a banana with a ballpoint pen? It is a unique experience and one you will want to repeat.

-Joy Sikorski, How to Draw a Radish, 147.

Hippos on Holiday

is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I should be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?

-Billy Collins, Ballistics, 42.

Despair

So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.

Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.

I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
these shadows and empty cupboards?

Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,

Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces, Ye-Hah.

-Billy Collins, Ballistics, 89.

Now, Now and Now and Now

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

-Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, 148.

A Better Place

Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned form his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no “better place” than this, not in this world.

-Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, 83.

Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

-G. K. Chesterton, epigraph from Neil Gaiman's Coraline

Handle With Care

What you don’t hold you can’t spill.

-Van Reid, Mollie Peer, 205.

Fragile Things

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

-Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things, xii.

Advice

Never trust a man without a chin.

-Rex Stout, Over My Dead Body

Rancor

Confound it, rancor is a pimple on the brain.

-Rex Stout, Eeny Meeny Murder Moe

A Prayer

O Lord our God, grant us grace to desire you with a whole heart, so that desiring you we may seek and find you; and so finding you, may love you; and loving you, may hate those sins that separate us from you, for the sake of Jesus Christ.

-Anselm

It Always Rains on Good Friday

It always rains Good Friday...Always has, as long as I remember. Good Friday is a moody day...But on Easter the sun always shines. That’s the truth.

-Walter Wangerin, The Orphean Passages, 93.

In Defense of Novels

[F]or I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it.

-Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 25.

Walking Without Purpose

In Maycomb, if one went for a walk with no definite purpose in mind, it was correct to believe one’s mind incapable of definite purpose.

-Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 169-170.

Suddenly Five Years Old

I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

-Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There, 36.

Long-Range Planning

In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won’t happen.

-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie, 777.

Giving Directions

The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.

-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 771.

Psalm 119

I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free.

-Psalm 119:32 (NIV)

Redemption in Creation

And so, when Scripture declares, God said, “Let there be...,” we may understand this as an immaterial utterance of God in His eternal Word, as the Word recalls His imperfect creature to Himself, so that it may not be formless but may be formed according to the various works of creation which He produces in due order.

-Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book 1, Chapter 4, Paragraph 9.

A Story is Not a Life

A story, I see, is not a life. A story must follow a line; the telling must begin and end. A life, on the contrary, would be impossible to fix in time, for it does not begin within itself, and it does not end.

-Wendell Berry, A World Lost, 149.

Pigs is Pigs

A peasant who merely says, “I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs,” is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs.

-G. K. Chesterton, "Logic and Lawn Tennis"

Memories

My memories of Uncle Andrew are thus an accumulation of little pictures and episodes, isolated from one another, unbegun and unended. They are vividly colored, clear in outline, and spare, as if they belong to an early age of the world when there were not too many details. Each is like the illuminated capital of a page I cannot read, for in my memory there is no tissue of connection or interpretation. As a child, I either was interested or I was not; I either understood or I did not. Mostly, even when I was interested, I did not understand. I had perhaps no inclination to explain my elders to myself...Perhaps it was from thinking about [Uncle Andrew] after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us everyday, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.

-Wendell Berry, A World Lost, 61-62.

Weird Noises

This island is always full of weird noises...There’s been times I’ve woken up in the middle of the night when there wasn’t a breath of air stirring and could have sworn I heard fiddles or somebody plucking on a harp or God only knows what. But I’m used to it.

-Frederick Buechner, The Storm, 182.

Wild Strawberries

Are Wild Strawberries really wild? Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child?

-Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic, 66.

Whether Thou Readest or Writest

Whether thou readest or writest, whether thou watchest or sleepest, let the voice of love [to Christ] sound in thine ears; let this trumpet stir up thy soul: being overpowered with this love, seek Him on thy bed whom thy soul desireth and longeth for.

-Saint Jerome, quoted by my brother on my answering machine

Both, Both, My Girl

Both, both, my girl: By foul play, as thou say’st, were we heaved thence, But blessedly holp hither.

-William Shakespeare,The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2.


He had first appeared in print when, to his surprise, The New Yorker accepted one of his stories while he was still in his twenties and then maybe five or six others over the next few years. They were ironic, graceful little glimpses of people falling in and out of love in Manhattan, where he had often fallen in and out of love himself, and their style was spare, translucent, wistful. Eventually a collection of them was published under the title Both, Both, My Girl, from Prospero’s answer to Miranda when she asks him if it was by blessed means or foul that they were washed up on their enchanted island. “Both, both is what all those stories are about,” he told his wife at the time. “It is also the story of my life.”

-Frederick Buechner,The Storm, 4.

Imagination

The trouble is I have always been able to imagine almost anything. It has been my downfall.

-Frederick Buechner, The Storm, 4.

Dear commonplacers: I'm experimenting with a new blog format over at tumblr. Stop by and let me know what you think!

Domesticated Despair

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

-Flannery O'Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” The Christian Imagination, 162.

February

In February it will be
My snowman's anniversary
with cake for him and soup for me!
Happy once
happy twice
happy chicken soup with rice.

-Maurice Sendak

January

In January it's so nice
while slipping on the sliding ice
to sip hot chicken soup with rice.
Sipping once
sipping twice
sipping chicken soup with rice.

-Maurice Sendak

Settling for Less

The great sin of most of the stories of popular culture—in film, television, novels, and the like—is not that they are violent or obscene or godless, but that they waste our time. Since I can hear only so many stories in my life, why settle for anything less than the best ones?

-Daniel Taylor, "In Praise of Stories," The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 417.

Nature vs History

The uniqueness of human beings, in the created order, is that we live simultaneously in nature (the realm of involuntary and repetitive acts) and history (the realm in which we make choices, and experience and reflect upon the consequences of those choices). Other living things—plants and other animals—live in nature only; angels, perhaps, only in history. To have this double inheritance is our challenge, our pain, but also our glory.

-Alan Jacobs, "The Poet's Prose," Books & Culture Jan/Feb 2009, 39.

Review: Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry

I saved this review for last because it was, by far, the best of my library books. I already wrote up a description for a friend, so I am going to cut and paste from the email I sent to her (with just a little editing)...

Jayber Crow is the fictional autobiography of Jonah (Jayber) Crow. He's born in the teens, and is looking back on his life as an old man in the eighties. He spends most of his life in a small town in Kentucky, and a good part of the book is about that small town and the people who live in it. It's a gentle book, and the characters are painted with grace and warmth, and that's what I liked best. There were several places where I laughed out loud. But there are profound passages too, some of which I've already quoted in my blog. It seems like a good book for someone making life decisions, or for someone who is just interested in vocation (like me).

Vocation, and the role of individual choice (self-determination?) is one of Berry's themes. He is also critical of many of the cultural changes that occurred over the course of the twentieth century, and this book mourns the passing of rural farming communities. I have a harder time embracing this theme—I tend to think that that the state of the world is neither improving nor disintegrating, just carrying on much the same as always. But Berry challenges that assumption, and perhaps it ought to be challenged. I disdain cultural relativism, and it strikes me now that I'm just expressing a sort of temporal relativism. Perhaps some ages are darker than others. And while nostalgia can be a bit of a sickness, it is appropriate to name and mourn what's lost.

I'll leave it at that, except to say that this book reminded me a bit of both Our Town and Theophilus North—so I guess Berry's prose has a Thornton Wilderish quality. A fine book. Check it out!

Review: Archer's Goon, Diana Wynne Jones

I don't know what to say about this book. I borrowed it from the library because the library didn't have Howl's Moving Castle (by the same author), recommended by a friend. The title (Archer's Goon?!), cover art, and plot synopsis are all completely unappealing. But the story is riveting. Clever contemporary fantasy.

Review: The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, Jeanne Birdsall

Well, I liked this too. This is the second book about the Penderwicks, four little girls, their widowed dad, and Hound. These books belong to the family subgenre of children's lit—like E. Nesbit's Bastable family stories and Eleanor Estes' Moffats. Birdsall sets her books in contemporary times, but apart from a few unimportant details, they might as well be set in the 50s or 20s. There are lots of strong female characters—but the same can be said of Roller Skates (copyright 1936) so I'm not sure that makes this an especially modern book.

I suppose the reason why these books don't seem to belong to the modern world is that there isn't much grit (conflict and sadness yes, but no Sin). In The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, Daddy dates, Rosalind gets mad at a boy, Jane and Skye swap homework assignments, and Batty spies on a mysterious stranger. By the end of the book, everything resolves neatly. But the resolution is satisfying—like a Shakespearean comedy where everyone ends up married to the right person. A cozy book, good for reading in bed.

Review: Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat, Lynne Jonell

I liked this book. Not one of the great works of children's lit, but fun and whimsical and a pretty good story. Also, charming artwork by Jonathan Bean—when you flip the pages, a rat tumbles out of a tree and down the page. Emmy is a good little girl in the clutches of a nasty nanny. She befriends a talking rat with special powers—his bite makes people shrink. There are actually a lot of rodents with special powers in this book, but it's not The Secret of Nimh. The rodents are winsome, but Emmy is the character you care about. This is a pleasant book. Even though Emmy's nanny (Miss Barmy) is fairly despicable, she isn't really frightening—Emmy and her friends always seem to have the upper hand, and it's hard to imagine the story ending unhappily. But the ending is still pretty satisfying and not entirely predictable.

Review: Maisie Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear

Two weeks ago, I took a stack of books out of the library; now that I'm through most of the them, I thought it would be fun to write short reviews. So, from bottom to top...

Maisie Dobbs is the first in a series of historical mysteries, set in London in the earlyish part of the 20th century. I had great hopes for Maisie. But alas, she's less a woman of her time, and more a 21st century independent working woman with a very contemporary worldview, plunked down in the 30s. Maisie solves the mystery by being empathetic in a creepy new agey way and by making a bunch of phone calls that the reader isn't told about until the final chapter. Much of the book is taken up with Maisie's backstory, particularly her service during WWI as a nurse and her ill-fated romance with a surgeon. An engaging enough book, and it was interesting to think more about what it must have been like to live through WWI. But I don't really like Maisie enough to read any more in this series.

Carried Along...

I can't look back from where I am now and feel that I have been very much in charge of my life. Certainly I have lived on the edge of the Port William community, and I am farther than ever out on the edge of it now. But I feel that I have lived on the edge even of my own life. I have made plans enough, but I see now that I have never lived by plan. Any more than if I had been a bystander watching me live my life, I don't feel that I ever have been quite sure what was going on. Nearly everything that has happened to me has happened by surprise. All the important things have happened by surprise. And whatever has been happening usually has already happened before I have had time to expect it. The world doesn't stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have only been on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 322.

Sermons

In general, I weathered even the worst sermons pretty well. They had the great virtue of causing my mind to wander. Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 162

Wandering

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line—starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past apppropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 133.

Waking Up

I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it. It may be that a bevy of beautiful maidens in pure silk yellow very sheer gowns, barefooted, singing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning and scattering rose petals over me would do the trick, but I'd have to try it.

-Rex Stout’s character Archie Goodwin (hat tip Terry Teachout)

The Prodigal Father

The Prodigal Son goes off with his inheritance and blows the whole pile on liquor and sex and fancy clothes until finally he doesn’t have two cents left to rub together and has to go to work or starve to death. He gets a job on a pig farm and keeps at it long enough to observe that the pigs are getting a better deal than he is and then decides to go home. There is nothing edifying about his decision. There is no indication that he realizes he’s made an ass of himself and broken his old man’s heart, no indication that he thinks of his old man as anything more than a meal ticket. There is no sign that he is sorry for what he’s done or that he’s resolved to make amends somehow and do better next time. He decides to go home for the simple reason that he knows he always got three squares a day at home, and for a man who is in danger of starving to death, that is reason enough. So he sets out on the return trip and on the way rehearses the speech he hopes will soften the old man’s heart enough so that at least he won’t slam the door in his face. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” ...And just about the time he thinks he has it down, the old man spots him coming around the corner below the tennis court and starts sprinting down the drive like a maniac. Before the boy has time to get so much as the first word out, the old man throws his arms around him and all but knocks him off his feet with the tears and whiskers and incredulous laughter of his welcome.

-Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth, 66-67.

Highs

1. Six library books
2. Several hours of Burn Notice on DVD
3. A new skein of 'Fisherman's Wool' yarn for crocheting scarves
4. An impending snowstorm!

Anthologies

And so of the making of books there is no end, and of the making of anthologies there seems particularly to be no end because we are all anthologists. The collection and hoarding of bits and pieces is basic to all animals, from the squirrel with his nuts...to the anthologist with his oddments stored up in his memory...Anthology-making is therefore essentially selfish, like self-preservation...with the advantage of literature over nuts that it can be shared without personal loss to the hoarder.

-Elizabeth Goudge, preface to A Book of Comfort, quoted by Leland Ryken in his preface to The Christian Imagination