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!