Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs > Recent Status Updates

Maybe this IS the Great American Novel.. After 48 years, here I go again!

...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. And all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile...
Which of us has known our brother? Which of us has known his father’s heart?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary and bright cinder, lost!

A REAL LATE BLOOMER!
Here’s the great poet at the mature(?) age of 26. There’s some of the usual unflinching realism but none of the colourfully conflicted and radical images, because he had yet to BREAK AWAY from 19th century forms!

Love is Twain, it is not single,
Gold and silver mixed in one,
Passion ‘tis and pain which mingle
Glist’ring then for aye undone.

‘The source of Rilke’s Eternal Current is nothing other than... the blurred reflection of a mysterious improbability.’
YET THE GUY YOU DIS SAID THIS:
‘All of our enduring experiences pass through EVERYTHING - LIFE and DEATH. We must be intimately acquainted with BOTH.’ MUCH MORE PROFOUND THAN YOUR PHYSICS.

My new choice for light fiction after A Family Recipe... Miss Bunkle is a single young ingénue who has just completed a book of gossip about her neighbours! A hit 80-odd years ago... ‘Sam (the publisher’s aide) had been right about Chronicles of an English Village. It was not written by a genius, neither was it the babbling a of an imbecile(; but) a very clever man.’

Wonderful! Unputdownable now...

THE COLDER THE AIR:
We must admire her perfect aim,
this huntress of the winter air
whose level weapon needs no sight,
if it were not that everywhere
her game is sure, her shot is right.
The least of us could do the same.
***
The target-center in her eye
is equally her aim and will.

TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST ARE BOTH PERHAPS PRESENT IN TIME FUTURE (T.S. Eliot, LITTLE GIDDING). ‘So if I could take into account all of the details of the... state of the world, would the... flowing of time disappear? Yes. The difference between past and future vanishes...there can be no difference between past and future.’

When we reach our senior years, we VALUE our friends and family more - they are ‘special’ to us. But physicists disagree - ’The notion of PARTICULARITY’ is born at the moment we begin to see things in a blurred and approximate way... (it is) entropy’(!)

Simple, heartfelt consolation for the world-weary! ´Does it matter if in the dead of night you are nice and not nasty? Does it matter if when you do something wrong, you say sorry? Is there any memory of the Good Things we do? Some of you have ended serious relationships. When you said goodbye, you felt as if all was lost. BUT IT ISN’T LOST! It’s in the hands of the one who is the Conserver of Good Things!´

One evening, Nero Wolfe gets a call from Inspector Cramer of Homicide...

“Who’s paying you on the Orchard case?”
“No one,” Wolfe said curtly.
“No one? Then Goodwin drives your car up to Seventy-eighth Street just to test the tires?”
“It’s my car, Mr. Cramer, and I help pay for the streets.”

Wonderful. So directly written, but so compelling in its depiction of the gaping cultural gap between East and West! And the deftly drawn characterizations are so true to life.

I told the distinguished-looking doorman that my name was Archie Goodwin...
‘And? Anything else?’
I stretched out my neck to bring my mouth (beside) his ear:
‘Oatmeal.’
He said in a cultivated voice:
‘10B.’
‘Tell me,’ I responded, ‘about this password gag. Is it just since the murder...?’
He gave me an icy look and turned his back. I told his back:
‘That costs a nickel. I fully intended to give you a nickel.’

NAVIGATING THE SEA OF LIFE
Dr. Seuss For Adults

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
All alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you’ll be quite a lot.
And when you’re alone, there’s a
very good chance
You’ll meet things that scare you
right out of your pants...
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed!)

‘Do you want to know my theory on life?’ Maisie asked... ‘My theory is that the best, worst, happiest, scariest and most memorable moments are all connected. Those are the important times, good and bad. The rest is just filler.’

THERE IS PEACE IN THE SURGING PROW
On a winter morning you can feel how this earth
plunges ahead. Against the house walls
an air current smacks
out of hiding.
Surrounded by movement: the tent of calm,
and the secret helm in the migrating flock.
Out of the winter gloom
a tremolo rises
from hidden instruments. It is like standing
under summer’s high lime tree with the din
of ten thousand
insect wings above your head.

I’ve put this beautiful book on hiatus. While more seasoned GR readers my age (who love to reminisce) may rave about it, I’m still finding it hard to accept the premise that the old narrator (through no fault of his wife’s or his own) fell in love with his soulmate in a house of ill repute! After all, they were both tweenies at the time...

My wife finished this one and says she absolutely loved it. It’ll be one of the next ones I read...

The council offices were mayhem (after the second Nazi bombing of Bath). There were queues of people in varying states of emotion: distressed, dazed, demanding... (One) was incapable of speech, mute, helpless.

A great warm-hearted and compelling read! Nice, lighter fare for the fall season...

Adam is disabled. SEVERELY disabled. Yet the supernatural Light of Love in him served as a Lamp unto the Feet of the great Henri Nouwen in his final years, as he fought his own Devils of Darkness.

"Then he was so startled by a shout to him from the other room that he hit his teeth against the glass (of schnapps he was drinking after breakfast). 'The supervisor wants to see you!' a voice said. It was only the shout that startled him, a curt, abrupt, military shout.…(He) hurried into the next room. The two policemen… chased him back to his bedroom as if it were natural." Aeschylus meets the Keystone Cops!

Bright and breezy after Karon’s later dark novel The Company of Others.

What inadvertant evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows...
And Annie is one family’s Shadow!

Very, very spooky, but DEADLY serious! Williams, the Rosicrucian, stands apart from common writers in his mystical iconoclasm..

My wife and I gave up on the Scotland Street series when its maniacal convolutions of plots and characters proved too much for our settled sensibilities. But who knows - younger readers may love it. AND it’s hilarious! Dropped it at the 25% point.

Wonder is so wonderful I don't want to finish it. It hits my soft spot, alright!

Galloping suspense - can my agèd nerves take this one?