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.