Tag Archives: quotes

Flying with Madeleine

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My carry on luggage was heavy because I couldn’t determine the reading mood I’d be in as I traveled across the country, and came prepared for every eventuality.  I settled into the second Crosswicks Journal book by Madeleine L’Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother.  (It’s on my summer reading challenge list, btw)

This sensitive book about her mother’s stay with the family the last summer of her life both captured and held me.  I gladly let people stand in the hot aisles and clammer towards the airplane exit. Time to read a few more pages. Both flights I sat in close proximity to families with young children.  I was so glad, because their chatter and occasional yelps don’t bother me and I could give them space to work through stuff with the kids without dealing with nasty glares and looks. I’ve learned to tune out sounds and distractions when I read. 

I silently hurrahed when I read L’Engle’s words: “death is the enemy and I hate it.”  I underlined with my pencil, shaky lines to match the air pockets we flew through. I commiserated when she agonized about her ability to keep the promise to her mother that she would never put her in a “home”. I chuckled when she ranted about funeral “homes”.  I paused and looked out the window, not really seeing the checkerboard ground below, but needing time to process the words. 

Oh …. Madeleine!! You have such an ability to think and to bring those thoughts to ink and paper.  I’ll gladly fly with you as my companion.

Both life and death are present for me in the house this summer.  I look at Mother, and think that if I am to reflect on the eventual death of her body, of all bodies, in a way that is not destructive, I must never lose sight of those other deaths which precede the final, physical death, the deaths over which we have some freedom; the death of self-will, self-indulgence, self-deception, all those self-devices which instead of making us more fully alive, make us less. 

A Small Victory

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I just taught myself something new!  Wahoo!!!  Among other frustrations with Xanga, I’ve been unhappy with my sidebar.  My booklog in the “Interests” category has limited space which has required many edits.  I would prefer to include author’s names but space doesn’t allow that. 

I wanted the list to be easier to read – one book per line.  But the text was always wrapping.  When my son was home on spring break I wheedled an book on HTML out of his stack of books to sell on Amazon.  It’s been sitting, collecting dust until this morning.  Scanning the table of contents I found “Creating a Line Break” on page 70.  The code, if you care, is  “<br />”.  I have aspirations of learning HTML – my brother in-law, a software programmer has agreed to teach me on my upcoming visit.

The joy of life is made up of obscure and seemingly mundane victories that give us our own small satisfactions.                  Billy Joel

Any small victories in your life today?

Courtesy

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We must choose to be courteous, and develop the discipline of courtesy each day. 

We do not  stumble into being a gentleman or lady. 

The home that has no time for courtesy will always have time for rudeness. 

The home that does not take time for compliments will always have time for complaints. 

The home that has no time for smiles will always have time for frowns. 

And the home that has not time for sweet, loving words will always find time for harsh, critical words.                                                           Morris Chalfant

The picture shows my husband and his sister on their grandpa’s lap.  They loved climbing over him and playing with him.  Recently Curt said, “I can still smell my Grandpa – a mixture of sweat, pipe tobacco, aftershave and pasture.”

Relinquishment

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This
fancy word for letting go has been floating through my thoughts.  There are
times when we are called to let go of certain dreams, certain people, or certain
substances.  In my experience there has always been a protracted struggle
between what I will and what I
want.  My knuckles are white from
the death grip that is holding tight.  And when my heart changes, release comes
slowly, one finger joint at a time.  When the hand is empty and I’ve
finally relinquished that “something” I’m so surprised at all the plusses.  The muscles
that were weary from clenching are relaxed.  The hand that was dedicated to
grasping is now available for a thousand other occupations.  There is a move
away from tension towards tranquility.  

 Elisabeth Elliot wrote (I
substituted ** for certain words to broaden the application): “Fred had prayed that God would help him
to be willing to relinquish **.  He did not want to relinquish **, but he willed
to be made willing.  Although the conflict lasted for six months, he was indeed
helped.”  That phrase, willed
to be made willing, could provide food for many mental meals.  I have
seen a small measure of relinquishment lately in my life, and for that I
gratefully give God thanks.

Book Quote

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As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.  And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. 
                                  ~   Ursula K. Le Guin

I used to play the cello and it remains my favorite instrument.  I’ve verrry excited that I will see the great cellist YoYo Ma in concert in two 1/2 weeks.  Le Guin’s connecting reading with playing the cello is brilliant.  What are you reading this month?

Summer Reading Sampler

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Here’s a few lovely little bits from my reading:

From Every Little Thing by James Herriot

Siegfried’s words at the beginning of our partnership came back to me. “Our profession offers unparalleled opportunities for making a chump of yourself.”

From The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, on Temptation

Don’t underestimate the power of a temptation.  Don’t overestimate your power to resist temptation…Yes, temptations are often useful, whether they come in small packages or large.  But how can this be?  They bring us low, purge, scourge, and school us in the fire; that’s to say, they scare the living daylights out of us.

We do have some success in the fight.  But as one temptation or tribulation is dispatched, another soon takes its place.  Many seek to flee temptation altogether.  Alas, the escape route is clogged, and the refugee is destined to succomb!

Advancing to the rear, then, isn’t the answer.  We can’t hope to conquer that way.  But through spiritual cunning–that’s to say, through Patience and True Humility–we become the stronger, and the tempters have to try harder.

From Temperament by Stuart Isacoff

Below is a picture of a keyboard designed with 27 keys to the octave from Martin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle. Isn’t it wild? Dividing the octave into 12 equal steps is a relatively new thing.  If you would like to hear how some music sounded before equal temperament you can listen here. More info on the book is here. 

I can’t find the reference, but I recall that the organ built in Spurgeon’s church in London was built with multiple keys, similar to the pciture below.

My favorite quote from this book is from dear Martin Luther.

Luther had praised the music of complexity, in which nature is “sharpened and polished by art.”  In its intricacy, he wrote in 1538, “one begins to see with amazement the great and perfect wisdom of God in His wonderful work of music, where one voice takes a simple part, and around it sing three, four, or five other voices, leaping, springing round about, marvelously gracing the simple part, like a square dance in heaven… He who does not find this an inexpressible miracle of the Lord is truly a clod, and is not worthy to be considered a man.”



What’s An Austen Reader Supposed To Do?

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Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

So you love Jane Austen.  You’ve read all her novels and plan to re-read them with great pleasure the rest of your days.  When you come to the end of Austen, you always have an appetite for…more!  You start in with the Brontes and read through their works.  This is a good thing.  There are many, many good books in different genres, true.  But there are times you want a nice cup of tea and a little touch of Britain in the night. 

It was because Anthony Trollope’s name was said in the same sentence as Austen’s, and from a friend I trust, that I decided to go exploring.  I’ve only read one book (audio book), so I’m no Trollope expert.  But–BUT– I thoroughly enjoyed An Old Man’s Love, which was unfortunately the extent of our rural library’s Trollope collection.  This work seems a little obscure: Frank Magill’s Cyclopedia of World Authors didn’t list the title among Trollope’s principal works.

An Old Man’s Love was a sweet romance, a lovely love story.  Here’s the gist: A young woman, Mary Lawrie (20 something), is left orphaned.  A friend of her father’s, the 50 year old bachelor, William Whittlestaff decides to take her in and provide for her.   He  falls in love with her and asks her to marry him.  She hesitates and acknowledges to him that her heart is with a young man, John Gordon, from whom she has not heard a word in three years, and with whom no words of love were ever exchanged.  Whittlestaff presses Mary, confident that her infatuation was a childish one and sure that he can give her a good life.  She reluctantly agrees and decides to do her duty to the man who has been so kind to her, a man for whom she has genuine affection. Within hours of giving her promise to marry Whittlestaff, John Gordon, home from the diamond mines, knocks on the door asking for Mary.

The ensuing conflict between Mary’s love for Gordon and her promise given to Whittlestaff occupies the rest of the book. A promise is a promise! Trollope portrays so accurately that inner impulse to be a martyr  that seems so noble at night, but sticks like a bone in the throat in the daylight. Hearing the tale unfold was like riding a see-saw; it was impossible to guess how it would come out.  Each man is so certain that it would be in Mary’s best interest to be with himself. There are two Dickensian characters, the housekeeper and the vicar, which add comic relief to the drama.
 
From An Old Man’s Love:  “Here he was wont to sit and read his Horace.  And think of the affairs of the world as Horace depicted them.  Many a morsel of wisdom he had here made his own.  And to then endeavor to think whether the wisdom had in truth been taken home by the poet to his own bosom, or had only been a glitter of the intellect, never appropriated for any useful purpose.”

“A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos.”  Anthony Trollope

“His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual.” Henry James on Anthony Trollope.

It isn’t the satisfying protein of Austen, but we still need some carbs in our life, and Trollope is a good carb.

Distracted, Again (But It Sure Was Fun)

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DH and I went on a mega shopping trip yesterday in a larger city two 1/2 hours away.  We go to Costco and get 3-month supplies of detergent, feta cheese, olive oil, etc.  The book table always draws me in and the latest Mma Romatswe book beckoned!  Blue Shoes and Happiness.  I  so much enjoy these stories of Botswana – the culture, the simplicity, the humor, human nature.  IMHO, Blue Shoes isn’t up to par with some of the earlier books.  I’m getting weary of the apprentices’ immaturity, and a certain je n’est sais quoi is missing.

However, it’s still worth a couple of belly laughs:

But he could not put to the back of his mind the extraordinary news which Mma Ramotswe had so casually imparted to him and which he would breathlessly pass on to Mma Makutsi the moment he saw her.  It was news of the very greatest import: if Mma Ramotswe, stern and articulate defender of the rights of the fuller-figured as she was, could contemplate going on a diet, then what would happen to the ranks of the traditionally built?  They would be thinned, he decided.

Working Out With Willa Cather

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The Song of the Lark is the story of a musically gifted young girl.  She is on vacation near Flagstaff, AZ after a grueling year of studying voice in Chicago. She spends time alone in the Cliff-Dwellers’ ruins.

She could lie there hour after hour in the sun and listen to the strident whirr of the big locusts, and to the light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps. All her life she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had been trying to catch up.  Now, she reflected, as she drew herself out long upon the rugs, it was as if she were waiting for something to catch up with her.  She had got to a place where she was out of the stream of meaningless activity and undirected effort.

A few pages later Thea finds fragments of pottery and reflects on the role of water and pottery in the lives of the women who once lived there.  “Their pottery was their most direct appeal to water, the envelope and sheath of the precious element itself.”

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still.  The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself–life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars.  In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion.  In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

I am enjoying this book immensely.  It is not a breeze through book.  I read it pensively, and often lift my head and just think about the words.  I come home from working out and want to read on, but I restrict this book to the elliptical machine.  It keeps me going back!!