Status Updates From A City of Bells (Torminster...

DNF-ing for now. Only 150 pages or so to go, but considering I started this last spring, I have no motivation to return to it. I’m not sure Elizabeth Goudge is for me. This one started out strong and delightful, but when a certain storyline entered, it quickly became not my cup of tea. Time will tell if I return to this one or read anymore Goudge.

I haven’t really gotten into this book yet. Maybe it’s partly because I just finished The Dean’s Watch, which is another book about a cathedral town. I generally do like Goudge a lot, so I do plan to finish it.

Books by Goudge are always such a delight. They are always so much *more* than their descriptions.

"He began by saying that people who make long speeches are a great nuisance. Then for ten minutes or longer, he explained why it is that they are a nuisance."

‘In my experience when people begin to read they go on. They begin because they think they ought to and they go on because they must. Yes. They find it widens life. We’re all greedy for life, you know, and our short span of existence can’t give us all that we hunger for, the time is too short and our capacity not large enough. But in books we experience all life vicariously.’

"There was not much warmth in the sun, though he was so bright and gay, and he seemed a little aloof from the earth that loved him, but at midday he unbent a little and graciously touched the frosted trees with his fingers so that each grey twig was strung with diamonds. Then he withdrew again, flinging as final largesse an orange glow like a veil over the roofs of the city..." (221).

"Henrietta always enjoyed Jocelyn's haphazard teas. Very strong tea out of a black pot, with heaps of sugar, was much nicer than the milk and water with a dash of tea only that she had at home, and nothing is nicer than a chocolate biscuit held in one hand and a ginger one in the other, with alternate bites taken of each" (187).

“Grandfather nodded and left [Henrietta], taking Hugh Anthony with him. There was something in Henrietta that he loved and respected, a power that she had of attuning herself to the things that are not seen” (174).

I am absolutely loving this re-read!

"My dear Jane, just as God sends corn to feed our bodies so He sends books to feed our minds, and the farmer and the bookseller who act as intermediaries are the most blessed among men."

The first chapter of this novel is an absolute bower of delights. I love this slow second read. It’s giving me room to savor the details.

Buddy read with Melissa in July and August!

Loving this book!

I find much comfort in the Cathedral of Torminster and its people. Such wonderful, fully-realized characters. Some will find this book old-fashioned, but it is what I love about it.

I love reading and re-reading Elizabeth Goudge. As a pre-teen & then a teen, her books, filled with poetry and prose from many sources, awakened in me a desire to track down many references & led me to more books and to my love for poetry. This book has much of the beautiful old Book of Common Prayer, echoes of which exist in the current 1, from which I read most days.

This is so slow-moving and gentle. I'm enjoying it, but it's making me read patiently instead of zipping through quickly the way I have been with some other books I've read lately. Probably a good thing, actually.

"The sight of perfection was like a gate that let one out into freedom, and if one could make small things so lovely then it seemed that one had not got to go very far or own very much to be free. 'I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space.' It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important but what one made."

"[the local dentist,] had an excellent moral character and there were doubtless great good in him professionally as well as morally, though Grandfather had not personally been able to test his capabilities because of having no teeth, but only the best dentist in England, Grandfather considered, was fit to touch the precious pearls upon which his beloved grandchildren relied for mastication."

"'Will you have skin, Hugh Anthony?' asked Grandmother, for she did not make the children eat milk-pudding-skin if they did not want to.
'No,' said Hugh Anthony shortly.
'No, what?' asked Grandmother, who was punctilious about 'thank you' being inserted in the proper place.
'No skin,' said Hugh Anthony."

"With his lovely eyes fixed on the altar and an expression of great spiritual beauty on his face he was wondering just when to blow the whistle. Should he accompany the last hymn on it or should he blow one shrill blast in the middle of the Dean's sermon? It was difficult to decide. He must, as Grandfather said one should, wait and be guided."

😲 Oh, no!!!! 🤣

"There was something flattering in the fact that an intelligent young man from London should think it worth his while to settle down among them and minister to their intellectual needs. It implied that he had the highest opinion of their mental powers and was grieved that residence so far from the Metropolis should debar them from the full exercise of the same."

"How can we help loving houses when they stand to us for so much," he said. "Warmth and protection and a means of expressing ourselves. You love a new house because it stands there waiting to be good to human beings and an old one because it has been."

"He [Grandfather] sat on the board, they told her later, though what the board was and why he sat on it they omitted to explain. Henrietta forever after had a mental vision of a see-saw and Grandfather sitting on one end of it with the Mayor, who was also on the board, on the other, and soaring to heaven and sinking again to earth with delighted chuckles." 😂

"'Our destiny is like a wind blowing,' said Grandfather. 'It carries us along. But now and again the wind seems to drop. We don't know what to do next. Then it may be that a blade of grass growing in the road beside us bends slightly. It is a tiny movement, slight as a whim, but enough to show us which way to take.'"

That trip to London and the dentist!! :P

"And now shall we have tea?" < this describes my life 😄

<3 The descriptions are literally gold...read Elizabeth Goudge if you haven't yet!!

This book is so charming, and has so many passages I would underline if it weren’t a library copy from 1938.

Grandmother was outraged...That she should live to see her own husband on the wrong side of a counter was really the last straw in a married life strewn with straws.

So often in his experience the moor miseries of life had been eased by the touch of humanity; would the great miseries, when they came, be eased by God’s touch? One would have to be old to know and the old, he had noticed, and not the young, were more often the men of faith.