Gary Gauthier's Blog, page 8

The Infinite Goodness of the Creator

Your loss is so terrible that I can only explain it to myself as a special providence of God who, loving you, wishes to try you and your excellent mother. Oh, my friend! Religion, and religion alone, can—I will not say comfort us—but save us from despair. Religion alone can explain to us what without its help man cannot comprehend: why, for what cause, kind and noble beings able to find happiness in life—not merely harming no one but necessary to the happiness of others—are called away to God, while cruel, useless, harmful persons, or such as are a burden to themselves and to others, are left living.

The first death I saw, and one I shall never forget—that of my dear sister-in-law—left that impression on me. Just as you ask destiny why your splendid brother had to die, so I asked why that angel Lise, who not only never wronged anyone, but in whose soul there were never any unkind thoughts, had to die. And what do you think, dear friend? Five years have passed since then, and already I, with my petty understanding, begin to see clearly why she had to die, and in what way that death was but an expression of the infinite goodness of the Creator, whose every action, though generally incomprehensible to us, is but a manifestation of His infinite love for His creatures.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Painting:

Standing at the Crossroads by Jess Witkins

It's been a week of life lessons. I'm hoping Gary won't mind my commandeering of his blog to share one of them with you. But should you miss the eloquence of what I imagine to be his soothing baritone voice, you can find him safe and sound at Jenny Hansen's blog. It's another edition of the Life List Club and we're hoping you'll join us on our tales of inspiration and honest mistakes. Share with us your own, we all love hanging out in the comment boxes, so please feel free to chat and know you've got support from us!

This past week I've been on the last of my remaining vacation days for the fiscal calendar. I had hoped the time off would result in incredibly productive writing time. I mean I intended 8 hour days of writing non-stop, complete chapters coming to fruition! Well, if I wanted that to happen, I shouldn't have gone home.

What I should've done is found a little corner in the library and hid out with my laptop, a can of Pringles, a water bottle, and my gloves with rubber on the fingers so I can type and still keep warm when they turn the heat off for the night!


Shhh!  I'm doing research!
Instead, my time was otherwise spent with family activities. And you know what, I don't often see my family, so I think it's ok. I attended my 3 year old niece's princess-themed birthday party, Church service with my dad, helped babysit my niece for a day, took mom out for coffee and a movie, and forgive me, used my spare time to take a bath. I LOVE BATHS! And at my house, I live with all boys, so I will not set a TOE in that tub!

Ok, back to the life lessons! I promise I learned more than what a properly clean bathroom looks like. Honestly, I feel like this whole week has been one of those times when life sends you sign after sign after sign alerting you to the direction and path your life is on. First, it was dealing with my newly damaged car and rearranging when I can take it in to the garage to get it fixed, cause I had to drive it home first and it felt like a long 3 hours with no cruise control and all the bigger cars sloshing muddy snow in my windshield. Then it was the pastor's lesson in Church with my Dad, on how can we demonstrate audacious faith in times of difficulty? Then it was watching a toddler for a day, which was fun, but completely wiped me out. And I took the drives around town with my parents as a chance to ask them what the hardest things they had overcome in their lives were. The main message I kept hearing was this: crossroads. Everyone has them, and it's not always easy to know the next step.

Whether it's looking at your finances with eyes of disbelief, or finding yourself craving something more in life but unsure of how to proceed, or teaching a toddler good manners from bad, or hearing for the first time how the harsh realities of a marriage, a parent dying, and an illness can all alter your life. Yes, I was learning a lot.

I haven't yet shaped all these lessons into a resulting answer for my life, but I can feel it coming. I am at a crossroads. I have sat idle too long waiting for life to happen, and pretty soon I'll be making tough, but necessary decisions about the direction my life should head.

What have you learned this week? What crossroads are you facing in your life right now? I know this year would be even more difficult for me without the encouraging voices of the LLC members cheering me on. Who's keeping you accountable? Are you like me and realize you need help? Then I'll see you in the comments, friend!

Bio: Jess Witkins claims the title Perseverance Expert. She grew up in a small Wisconsin town as the much younger youngest sibling of four, she's witnessed the paranormal, jumped out of a plane, worked in retail, traveled to exotic locations like Italy, Ireland, and Shipshewana, Indiana, and she's eaten bologna and lived to tell about it! She deals with it all and writes about it! Come along on her midwest adventures; Witkins promises to keep it honest and entertaining. Go ahead, SUBSCRIBE, you know you want to. 
Follow Jess Witkins on Twitter: @jesswitkins

The Conception of the Infinitely Small

There is a well known, so-called sophism of the ancients, that Achilles could never catch up with a tortoise he was following, in spite of the fact that he traveled ten times as fast as the tortoise. By the time Achilles has covered the distance that separated him from the tortoise, the tortoise has covered one tenth of that distance ahead of him: when Achilles has covered that tenth, the tortoise has covered another one hundredth, and so on forever. This problem seemed to the ancients insoluble. The absurd answer (that Achilles could never overtake the tortoise) resulted from this: that motion was arbitrarily divided into discontinuous elements, whereas the motion both of Achilles and of the tortoise was continuous.

A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small can now yield solutions in other more complex problems of motion which used to appear insoluble.

This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing with problems of motion admits the conception of the infinitely small, and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity) and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot avoid when it deals with separate elements of motion instead of examining continuous motion.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Painting: Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, Achilles at the court of Lycomedes (1746)

Sophism: Noun; An argument apparently correct in form but actually invalid; especially, such an argument used to deceive.

Unselfish and Self-Sacrificing Love

From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.

This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat

Poster: Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923)

Gossamer: adj; flimsy, insubstantial, like the texture of cobwebs

A Pavilion Among the Clouds

When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman.

The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the combination of grandeur and grace that no other species of adornment can achieve; and as they fell from the ceiling to the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all angles and straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene from infinite space. For aught Georgiana knew, it might be a pavilion among the clouds.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: "The Birthmark," Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories

Painting: William Adolphe Bouguereau Return of Spring (1886)

Recondite: adj; 1) Requiring a high degree of scholarship or specialized knowledge; 2) Difficult for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend.

I Stood in Ignorance on the Shore

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Painting: John William Waterhouse, Ophelia (1910)

Unfathomable: adj; 1) Too deep to be measured; 2) Impossible to understand for being mysterious or complicated.

Walking the Walk by Lara Schiffbauer

Today is LLC Friday and I am pleased to host Lara Schiffbauer, the newest member of the Life List Club. Visit me at David Walker's Blog where, in an open letter, I make a modest proposal for traditional publishers. But first, please join me in welcoming Lara.



Discipline, Planning and Work. Eeew…

Our imagination gives birth to our dreams. It allows us to re-experience our past, and decide the direction of our future.

Not only that, but our imagination works the same way when we write. It allows us to call upon our past experiences and weave them into alternate realities also known as stories. It lets us conceptualize how others may be feeling in any given situation, or what sensory experiences we might have in situations we have never experienced.

As writers, we really like that imagination stuff. There is a creative rush in stringing our experiences on paper, knitting them together with ink, and ending up with a new individual in a new world that could only have come from the recesses of our minds.

It is easy to get stuck in the daydreaming part of ourselves, talking the talk. It's the fun part.

The unfortunate truth is that if we don't walk the walk, we aren't going to go anywhere with reaching our dreams.

That is where discipline, planning and work come into play.

Goal setting is a part of planning. It is taking a look at the dream (where we want to go) and coming up with a series of steps to get there. Goal setting is moving our dreams from the left side of our brain into the right side.

After we set goals, though, we still have to see them through. We have to have self-discipline.

My experience with self-discipline is rather iffy. I married a man who was incredibly disciplined. I hoped it would wear off on me. Discipline by osmosis.

The reality is that, apparently, chaos is a stronger force than discipline. The poor guy was doomed from the day we got married, and I didn't have an easy fix. I had to learn to monitor myself, and hold myself accountable to meeting my goals and finishing my projects. My husband had to go to self-discipline rehab.
Yes, it is work. It isn't always fun and sometimes includes sacrifice. But, if we want to give our dreams their best chance at becoming reality, it is work worth doing.

What has been your experience with moving your dreams from the left side of your brain to the right side? Is it easy to make that switch, or difficult?

Lara Schiffbauer writes contemporary fantasy and general fiction, and has been lucky enough to see some of her short stories published. By day she works as a school social worker in an elementary school and at night juggles writing, playing with her two adorable little boys, and doing everything else that has to get done in a day. You can find her blogging at motivationforcreation, or tweeting at @LASbauer.

My Love Grip on the Comma

In early texts there was no punctuation, just letters, one after another . . .

If I lived a past life, I'm certain that, in it, I was one of those readers of early texts busy inserting my own punctuation wherever I felt it enhanced the telling of the story.

I still do it. Worse, most times I am completely unaware of the number of commas on my own written page. They hide from me, chameleon-like, knowing if I can't see them, I can't remove them.

Even when I try to limit the use of my precious commas, I still over-insert them. Forget "word count" devices, someone needs to invent "comma count" software for the dramatic reader in all of us—okay, in me—who thrives on pregnant pauses.

Love those, as often as possible.

So, I ask you, if I relinquish my love grip on the comma, what will happen to me? Will I find myself making goo-goo eyes at the semi-colon (oh, please, no) or suddenly writing very short, plain sentences (anything but that) or…?

As you can see, I can't change my punctuating ways—the risk of the unknown is far too great.

Here, in this moment, I publicly declare that I shall continue my love affair with that magic, breath-stopping, transformational little mark, the comma.

And, together, we will live happily ever after on the e-pages of romantic thrillers on Kindles, Nooks, iBooks, Kobo, Smashwords, iPads, PCs, and smart phone screens everywhere.

Ashley Barron, Comma Chameleon

Painting: William Adolphe Bouguereau, The Difficult Lesson (1884)

What Makes London so Magical

It's very hard to explain what you miss about London, until you're in this particular position, like I am, counting down the hours to return. When I'm there, sometimes I wonder why I'm bothering; I obviously can't afford to keep up with London, I mean next to nothing in the eyes of the big city, and, as a lot of my friends have found out, even if I did work full time I would still not really have enough money to enjoy life here. I've been thinking for a long time about the practical choices, and am facing them now, and am filled with heartache at the idea of quitting the city.

What makes London so magical is, in a way, it's overwhelming humanity despite the harshness. The fact that some of the greatest minds in the world flock to it. The fact that you can pay a fiver to go upstairs in a pub and witness some of the finest storytelling of your life. The ability to go see some of the most important artifcacts in the world for free in the museums. The walks, oh God, the walks. Nothing for me beats getting lost in London. Turning the corner into what seems like another world. The only thing that excludes me is money, but I don't feel that as harshly as when I return home.

Rae Leaver, Returning to London

Painting: William Lionel Wyllie, Houses of Parliament (1901)

The Art of Reading, Then and Now

The cover-to-cover deep reading that was typical of my generation when we were students is now almost extinct, and instead you've got superficial reading: reading snippets and tweets and cutting texts up into tiny units that really prevent any appreciation of the whole sweep of a text. I have one half-answer to that, which isn't adequate but I think deserves consideration. And that is, first of all, that this cover-to-cover deep reading shouldn't be exaggerated as something that occurred in the past. We have learned a lot about the history of reading, which is one of the aspects of the history of books that we're trying to develop, and one thing we have learned is that, for example, sixteenth-century humanists rarely read a book from cover to cover. They were reading what we today would call 'snippets', or even 'tweets', they were taking - . . .

They were taking short passages out, copying them into Commonplace Books, and using those passages for various purposes, often rhetorical battles at court by their patrons, or what ever it was. But this was not reading in the way that we like to imagine it. Now, of course, deep reading also did take place. I'm not denying that for a minute. But I'm not sure that we can assume that it was typical.

Professor Robert Darnton, Harvard University

Painting: Teodor Axentowicz (1859 - 1938)

Thanks to Jane Friedman for pointing me to Darnton's interview