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I really like the story -- I think I'm going to reread Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a follow-up -- it's been a LONG time since I read Gatsby, and I want to compare themes. I feel I should reread Thoreau's Walden at the same time due to the refere...moreI really like the story -- I think I'm going to reread Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a follow-up -- it's been a LONG time since I read Gatsby, and I want to compare themes. I feel I should reread Thoreau's Walden at the same time due to the references.
To think about:
"It's a bit of cliche' to refer to someone as a chameleon: a person who can change his colors from environment to environment. In fact, not one in a million can do that. But there are tens of thousands of butterflies: men and women...with two dramatically different colorings--one which serves to attract and the other which serves to camouflage--and which can be switched at the instant with a flit of the wings." p. 117
"Really, is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations?" p. 127
"When a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane...she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger...One must be prepared to fight for one's simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements." p. 128
"I actually picked up Walden after you said you'd want to be marooned with it...at first I wasn't sure I was going to make it. Four hundred pages of a man alone in a cabin philosophizing on human history, trying to strip life to its essentials...In the end--I thought it was the greatest adventure of them all." p. 228
"Most people have more needs than wants. That's why they live the lives they do. But the world is run by those whose wants outstrip their needs." p. 259
"...the nature of life's distractions and enticements...the piecemeal progress of our hopes and ambitions commands our undivided attention, reshaping the ethereal into the tangible, and commitments into compromises." p. 324(less)
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" Sera wrote: "Laurie wrote: "Just started [image] last night and am half-way through -- a fast read."
Laurie, what do you think so far? I'm almost fini...moreSera wrote: "Laurie wrote: "Just started [image] last night and am half-way through -- a fast read."
Laurie, what do you think so far? I'm almost finished with it on audio and..."
I really like the story -- I think I'm going to reread Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as a follow-up -- it's been a LONG time since I read Gatsby, and I want to compare themes.(less)"
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"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
—
Thomas Merton
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Loving to read, I wanted to love this book -- this account of reading a book a day, but...and though I read the book in a day, I never felt fully immersed in the author's experience, I never felt that we shared a love for reading and books and the mi...moreLoving to read, I wanted to love this book -- this account of reading a book a day, but...and though I read the book in a day, I never felt fully immersed in the author's experience, I never felt that we shared a love for reading and books and the mirror and window views therein together. I imagine that this is partly due to the author's frequent expressions of grief over the loss of her sister. I can sympathize, but not empathize -- for which I am thankful, and I did stop reading at one point to call my sister and tell her I love her.
The other issue for me, though, is the author's desperate search in books for something I already have -- hope beyond what this life can give. When she lost her sister, she first engaged in a whirlwind of emotional and physical activity -- then came this decision to read a book a day, and just absorb whatever the books showed her about life, about herself, about her relationships. The conclusions she comes to are somewhat philosophical, but fall short of the assurances that my Christian world view provides me. I don't mean to sound arrogant in that -- and it is difficult to figure out how to word what I mean without sounding arrogant. It's just that I have known loss, and I have yelled out that life isn't fair -- yet, through my belief in a compassionate, gracious God who has a purpose for me beyond this life, I can move on without a desperate search to put meaning to the moving on.
Yes, I agree with the author when she states:
Words are witness to life: they record what has happened and they make it all real. Words create stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth."
In fact, that is why I chose to read this book today -- I am also reading The Christian Imagination, a series of essays on this very theme. But the following quote from one of those essays indicates why I could not completely connect with the author's experience as she read -- her view of life stopped short of the view I see when I read:
Because the human intellect is fallen, secular knowledge is always partial and in a state of change, and we are in constant need of God’s revelation—the Word of God—which alone is the ground of truth. (The Christian Imagination, ed Ryken, p.120).
I read, as C.S. Lewis once suggested, to know I'm not alone -- as did this author. But next to me when I read is not only a human author, a character whose life experiences, emotions, fears, strengths, weaknesses illuminate my own; next to me is also my God, my Lord, revealed to me as I read an author's work with the Truths of Scripture and what they tell me about life experiences, emotions, fears, strengths, weaknesses.
Interestingly, the author speaks of Christian Truth -- but only as another story she enjoyed as a child, only as the Christmas Story, whose images "moved" her and lead her to "go outside and look for a huge star in the night sky." She says that looking for the star became her "own private Christmas ritual, my own search for peace." I almost cried when I read that -- so close, but the peace isn't in the star -- the peace is in the One announced by the star, the One who walked on the earth, experiencing those emotions, those fears, those strengths, those weaknesses we all experience and Who then lifts us up above those experiences into His peace. So close. I wish I could meet Nina Sankovitch and show her the star she looked for -- He's right here.
Moments of connection did take place -- like here, when the author is recalling a trip with her young sons. As a mom of two sons, now moving out on their own, I understand and know what she is feeling when she wonders,
I knew I would never forget this moment shared with my son. But would he remember? Years ahead, falls ahead, would his senses tense to the same pitch of cold, light, and smell, and would he know the same exhilaration of waiting for the end of day? I wanted him to feel me then as he did now in my lap, my love a flicker of recognition felt in a future where I might be far away, a bit of warmth against the cold falling fast. (p 65)
I must thank the author for the tidbits of books reviews found in the pages. I have added several books to my to-read list as a result of her references.(less)
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"Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."
—
Ezra Pound
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Key Quotes:
It is evident on every page of his writings that Augustine was impacted for the good by his classical reading in spite of his cynical teachers and his own scruples, and sometimes he is not unaware of it. The pagan Cicero’s Hortensius was...moreKey Quotes:
It is evident on every page of his writings that Augustine was impacted for the good by his classical reading in spite of his cynical teachers and his own scruples, and sometimes he is not unaware of it. The pagan Cicero’s Hortensius was a major influence leading to his conversion to Christ. It “quite altered my affection, turned my prayers to thyself, O Lord, and made me have clean other purposes and desires.” It has this effect, he interestingly notes, because he made use of it not to “sharpen his tongue” but “for the matter of it” (109f). He had then, moments in which he recognized something in literature which the abuses that also exist ought not to deter us from seeking. (p. 5).
We “cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race” (Hughes 728). Spenser’s Guyon is a positive role model of uncloistered virtue who makes his authors a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas. Thus Sidney’s poet defeats the philosopher and the theologian. But even when a text promotes error, discernment is better than blindness, and “books promiscuously read” can help prepare us for life. If they do not, the fault lies not in the book but in the reader.(p. 14).
Christian art is defined by the one in whom it exists and by the spirit from which it issues: one says “Christian art” or the “art of a Christian,” as one says … the “art of man.” It is the art of redeemed humanity. It is planted in the Christian soul, by the side of the running waters, under the sky of the theological virtues, amidst the breezes of the seven gifts of the Spirit. It is natural that it should bear Christian fruit. (p. 53).
The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says “look at that” and points. —C. S. Lewis, The Personal Heresy (p. 56).
Abelard raised a very foolish question when he asked: “What has Horace to do with the Psalter, Virgil with the Gospel, Cicero with the Apostle?” The answer is simply that Horace, Virgil, and Cicero clarify the human situation to which the salvation of God is addressed through Psalter, Gospel, and Apostle. —Roland M. Frye, Perspective on Man: Literature and the Christian Tradition (p. 56).
The young especially must be helped to take responsibility for what they glimpse—hints of beauty, visions of the future germinating in the present. And they must be pushed to project these insights in their own words and images for others to share. This does not mean applauding any and all of their dadaist flings. It means rather helping them to focus what they see. It means inciting them to clarify their own response to the world. It means helping them deal with their fears and destructive instincts, in order to discover their own capacity to insert themselves joyfully into the world—to give thanks for it—to participate in its transformation. It also means helping them acquire the vocabulary, visual and verbal, the basic disciplines and techniques, which make imaging possible. (p. 74).
No one needs padding from reality; we must learn early to see both its reflected glory and its ultimate inability to fit our wishes. We must learn early to seek God within the wounds that reality inflicts. There is indeed no better educator of the imagination than Job, since he ended up “seeing” God! The healthy imagination, rooted in contrition, is fully open to painful change; it is always ready to accept the new, however dazzling to human eyes. (p. 75).
“O man,” says St. Irenaeus of Lyons, it is not you who make God, but rather God who makes you. Wait patiently for the hand of your Artist, who makes all things at the proper time. Present him with a heart that is supple and docile, preserve the imprint that this artist has given you, protect in yourself the Water that comes from Him, without which you will harden and lose the trace of his fingers. In preserving the modeling, you will mount up toward perfection, for the art of God will cover what in you is only clay. His hands have fashioned in you your very substance; he will adorn you with gold and silver, inside and out, and the King himself will be captured by your beauty. (Against Heresies, IV, 39, 2) The highest role of human imagination is humble cooperation with this modeling of our own face by God Himself. Thank heavens, education of the Christian imagination is, first and foremost, in His hands. (p. 79).
Our own creation of beautiful things links us with our Creator. God was the first Quilter of prairies, the primal Painter (night skies, ferns, thunderheads, snow on cedars), the archetypal metal Sculptor (mountain ranges, icebergs), the Composer who heard the whales’ strange, sonorous clickings and songs in his head long before there were whales to sound them, the Playwright who plotted the sweeping drama of Creation, Incarnation, Redemption, the Poet whose Word said it all. God made us human beings in his image; we participate in creative intelligence, giftedness, originality. We each have the faculty of imagination deep within us, waiting, like a seed, to be watered and fertilized. Imagination gives us pictures by which to see things the way they can be, or the way they are, underneath. The prairie woman, hemmed into her sod house with her small children by months of sub-zero cold and snow, used her imagination redemptively. Around the traditional quilt patterns—double stars, wedding rings—her imagination pieced in the exuberant flowers and leaves that redeemed the long winter, that brought her soul back to life. She created beauty and richness from the ordinary stuff, even the castoffs, of her life. (p. 90).
Where linear, logical thinking may produce prose with a specific function—information or historical record or critical analysis or entertainment or instruction or narrative—poetry and art select and reflect on a small slice of human experience and lay it out there, a gift to anyone who is willing to look at it, savor it, and enter into the artist’s experience. The poet communicates experience in images and forms so precisely tailored, so personal, so multileveled that the insights go far beyond bare facts or mere usefulness. (p. 93).
Often, in the process of writing an article or a poem or an essay, I find myself “stuck,” confused, or unable to know in which direction the writing wants to go. That’s when I cry “Help!” and ask the Holy Spirit to guide my listening, my thinking, my creating, into channels that will bring me to the heart of truth for the work. I become a servant of the word, rather than its controller. And listening obedience, rather than preplanning, becomes my modus operandi. (p. 95).
We tend to think of our Creator in terms of the infinitely large, a deity of cosmic and supercosmic proportions. But not only do we have a God who creates mountains, oceans, planets, galaxies, universes. For our God, even the smallest details are significant, details like a mustard seed, a single pearl, a sparrow, a hair on a human head, an olive leaf in a dove’s mouth, drops of blood on a doorframe, a coin in the mouth of a fish. (p. 96).
Because the human intellect is fallen, secular knowledge is always partial and in a state of change, and we are in constant need of God’s revelation—the Word of God—which alone is the ground of truth. (p.120).
We enjoy the beauty of a sonnet or the artistry of an epic or the fictional inventiveness of a novel, we are enjoying a quality of which God is the ultimate source and performing an act similar to God’s enjoyment of his own creation. The way to show gratitude for a gift is to enjoy it. Literature and art are God’s gifts to the human race. One of the liberating effects of letting ourselves “go” as we enjoy literature is to realize that we can partly affirm the value of literature whose content or worldview we dislike. If God is the ultimate source of all beauty and artistry, then the artistic dimension of literature is the point at which Christians can be unreserved in their enthusiasm for the works of non-Christian writers. John Milton gradually came to deplore the ethical viewpoint of pagan authors, but he noted that “their art I still applauded” (Apology for Smectymnuus). Werner Jaeger, in his book on the classical tradition, claimed that “it was the Christians who finally taught men to appraise poetry by a purely aesthetic standard—a standard which enabled them to reject most of the moral and religious teaching of the classical poets as false and ungodly, while accepting the formal elements in their work as instructive and aesthetically delightful.” (p. 151).
Reading is not only a pleasure in itself, with its concomitants of stillness, quietness and forgetfulness of self, but in what we read many of our other comforts are present with us. —ELIZABETH GOUDGE, A Book of Comfort (p. 151).
The novelist doesn’t write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, a total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage he sees it not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future. Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe. One reason a great deal of our contemporary fiction is humorless is because so many of these writers are relativists and have to be continually justifying the actions of their characters on a sliding scale of values. (p. 168).
Stories are sometimes most effectively told by limiting the scope of the tale. Although young writers often attempt to make their work appear universal by offering generic time and place settings, it takes a writer who is an experienced student of literature to discover, as James Joyce did in his works set in Ireland, that the universal is best expressed when grounded in the particular. (p. 192).
Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. — Conversations with Walker Percy Ed. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985 (p. 194).
Ryken, Leland (2011-12-07). The Christian Imagination: The Practice of Faith in Literature and Writing. Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.(less)
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" I just finished [image], by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. This captivating novel touches on issues surrounding the foster care system, but only as indirectly. ...moreI just finished [image], by Vanessa Diffenbaugh. This captivating novel touches on issues surrounding the foster care system, but only as indirectly. More significantly, the novel grabs the issues of family, roots, belonging, pushing away, forgiveness, and healing -- all while exploring the meanings of living things, both flowers and people, both literally and symbolically. I especially encourage readers to read the author's note at the end of the novel, and to visit http://camellianetwork.org/ , the site that she created in order to raise awareness and support for youth as they transition at the age of 18 from foster care to living independently.(less)"
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How many are lost in the system -- emancipated at 18 with no where to go -- homeless? This captivating novel touches on issues surrounding the foster care system, but only as indirectly. More significantly, the novel grabs the issues of family, roots...moreHow many are lost in the system -- emancipated at 18 with no where to go -- homeless? This captivating novel touches on issues surrounding the foster care system, but only as indirectly. More significantly, the novel grabs the issues of family, roots, belonging, pushing away, forgiveness, and healing -- all while exploring the meanings of living things, both flowers and people, both literally and symbolically. For example, when Grant, a key character notes that "moss grows without roots," he alludes to both the plant and characters, based on the symbolic meaning of moss. I especially encourage readers to read the author's note at the end of the novel, and to visit http://camellianetwork.org/ , the site that she created in order to raise awareness and support for youth as they transition at the age of 18 from foster care to living independently.(less)
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Fascinating. Read this book with Google Search Images open -- I found myself frequently looking up images not only by N.C. Wyeth, but also by Howard Pyle, Henriette Wyeth, Peter Hurd, and of course, Andrew Wyeth.
Interesting: "Comparing Henriette wi...moreFascinating. Read this book with Google Search Images open -- I found myself frequently looking up images not only by N.C. Wyeth, but also by Howard Pyle, Henriette Wyeth, Peter Hurd, and of course, Andrew Wyeth.
Interesting: "Comparing Henriette with Andy, N.C had predicted as recently as 1927 that while Henriette would become the family's great painter, Andy, then ten, would 'probably end up as a farmer.'" - pg 316
Wyeth would state publically that "the unfolding of all the younger members of the family is a glorious episode of my life." Privately, though, he acknowledged that "as a group the family 'have got something and that there is a real promise of sound achievement -- of MAJOR achievement in the offing,'" but worried that he had not yet arrived, as he still hoped to paint a "big work" and prove himself "as a painter of something other than illustrations." - pg 354(less)
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Laurie said:
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