Tag Archives: quotes

Les Misérables, Quotes from Part Two: Cosette

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May I say that I thoroughly enjoyed the wandering Waterloo section? I only knew the rudiments of this history and was happy to learn more details. The battle observations astonished me.

Ruins often acquire the dignity of monuments.

There is no logic in the flow of blood.

They rode steadily, menacingly, imperturbably,
the thunder of their horses resounding
in the intervals of musket and cannon-fire.
[The 3 syllable-4 syllable-5 syllable cadence of adverbs ignites me.]

A disintegrating army is like the thawing of a glacier,
a mindless, jostling commotion,
total disruption.

…to incarnate irony at the mouth of the grave,
staying erect when prostrate…

War has tragic splendours which we have not sought to conceal,
but it also has its especial squalors,
among which is the prompt stripping of the bodies of the dead.
The day following a battle always dawns on naked corpses.

She did all the work of the house, beds, rooms, washing and cooking;
she was the climate of the place, its fine and foul weather…

Darkness afflicts the soul.
Mankind needs light.
To be cut off from the day is to know a shrinking of the heart.
Where the eye sees darkness the spirit sees dismay.

…the haggard gleam of terror…

A doll is among the most pressing needs
as well as the most charming instincts of feminine childhood.
To care for it, adorn it, dress and undress it, give it lessons,
scold it a little, put it to bed and sing it to sleep,
pretend that the object is a living person—all the future of women resides in this.
Dreaming and murmuring, tending, cossetting, sewing small garments,
the child grows into girlhood,
from girlhood into womanhood,
from womanhood into wifehood,
and the first baby is the successor of the last doll.
A little girl without a doll is nearly as deprived
and quite as unnatural as a woman without a child.
So Cosette made her sword into a doll.

Like all children,
like the tendrils of a vine reaching for something to cling to,
she had looked for love,
but she had not found it.

Paris is a whirlpool in which all things can be lost,
sucked into that navel of the earth
like flotsam into the navel of the sea.

…this hubbub of little girls, sweeter than the humming of bees…

To appear at once troubled and controlled in moments of crisis
is the especial quality of certain characters and certain callings,
notably priests and members of religious communities.

Laughter is a sun that drives out winter from the human face.

 

 

Quotes from Part One: Fantine

Les Misérables, Quotes from Part One: Fantine

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It’s been three weeks since I’ve finished Les Misérables. It is so enormous, that I find myself intimidated. I decided to break my responses into bits. One post will be Great Quotes from the Boring Parts; another post on Words I Learned from Les Miz; another, perhaps, on Problems with Hugo’s Theology. After those, I might gird myself with courage and write my response to this masterpiece.

For now, however, I will just shower you with favorite quotes from Part One: Fantine. Read them and you may be drawn to the source. Or not.

…in the remaining time he (Monseigneur Myriel) worked. That is to say, he dug his garden or read and wrote, and for him both kinds of work bore the same name; both he called gardening. ‘The spirit is a garden,’ he said.  P. 33 [Garden, read and write: a life I could love]

The devil may visit us, but God lives here.  p.47 [a great distinction]

With the admirable delicacy of instinct they knew that some forms of solicitude can be an encumbrance. p. 48 [Isn’t this profound? And so true?]

There are men who dig for gold; he dug for compassion. p. 69 [Monseignor Bienvenu: my favorite character. Name means well + come]

The priest’s forgiveness was the most formidable assault he had ever sustained; p. 116 [forgiveness = assault: intriguing]

She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger. p.125

Gluttony punished the glutton. Indigestion was designed by God to impose morality on stomachs. p. 136 [Ouch!]

…with the chaste indecency of childhood, displayed a stretch of bare stomach. p. 145 [chaste indecency: another glorious paradox]

‘What’s your little girl’s name?’ ‘Cosette.’ In fact, it was Euphrasie, but the mother turned it into Cosette by the use of that touching alchemy of simple people which transforms Josef into Pepita and Françoise into Silette. It is a kind of linguistics which baffles the etymologist. We once knew a grandmother who contrived to turn Theodore into Gnon. p. 149 [Laugh out loud delight!]

The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself… p. 162

He [Javert] possessed the conscience appropriate to his function, and his duties were his religion; he was a spy in the way that other men are priests.  p. 166 [a chilling comparison]

Curiosity is a form of gluttony: to see is to devour. p. 183 [Guilty as charged]

God moves the soul as He moves the oceans. p.213

 

November Reads

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Les Miserables  I’m on page 420/1232. Part of me (about 35%)  says Why, oh why have you not read this before? The greater part thinks it is splendid to have the exquisite joy of reading this for the first time while I’m in my fifties. A friend warned me about Waterloo; she got bogged down. But, you know, I really only know Waterloo by its name. To me it was exciting as reading Shaara on Gettysburg. This sentence describing the cavalry grabbed me for its onomatopoeia and the progression of 3-, 4-, and 5-syllable adverbs:

They rode steadily, menacingly, imperturbably, the thunder of their horses resounding in the intervals of musket and cannon-fire.

The Hobbit  I’m on Disc 3, listening to Rob Inglis’ superb reading of Tolkien’s classic. I laugh at my teenage self who didn’t care for the book after reading three pages. It was all so confusing: hobbits, Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf, seed cakes. I’m trying to wait until Curt is home so we can listen together. To have two such magnificent books going through my head is an embarrassment of riches.


Arrow of God I’ve read several excellent books on Africa, but they since they have all been from a colonial perspective, I read Chinua Achebe’s novel. It took me about 2/3 of the book to get into the story of a Nigerian village. An old priest struggles to keep the old culture in the midst of change.

He found it refreshing to be talking to a man who did not have the besetting sin of smugness, of taking himself too seriously. 103

 

The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children  I expected Katherine Paterson’s book to be a memoir. As in a narrative. Instead, it was a collection of speeches. Once I got over that disappointment, I found many quotes to copy into my journal. Paterson’s books make me uncomfortable; they aren’t nice happy books. Oh, but they are powerful: one made me hiccup-sob 15 minutes.

Books are not TV or, heaven help us, MTV or the Internet. I suppose it would be possible to write a book whose plot jumped around like a frog on pep pills, but that’s not what books are about. If that’s the kind of writing you want to do, I think you should be in a more hectic medium. Books are meant to be read slowly and digested. These days people don’t pray much or go to services of worship, they don’t commune with nature—why, they hardly go to a national park without a TV set, a laptop, and a cell phone. The book is almost the last refuge of reflection—the final outpost of wisdom. I want children to have the gifts that books can give, and I don’t believe they can get them from a book that attempts to imitate the frantic fragmentation of contemporary life. 55

 

Baby Island  I responded to Carol Ryrie Brink’s book here.

 

Trudel’s Siege A little know book by Louisa May Alcott. My review.

 

Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other Back in the 80’s, our telephone used to ring often throughout the day and evening. When we got overwhelmed with calls, we used to joke that it was time to move so our phone would quiet down. Lately, we get one, perhaps two calls a day. (Keep in mind that we only have a land line. Would it be different with a cell phone?)  Does this example resonate with you? It is just one of the things I’ve reflected on since I’ve read Sherry Turkle’s book. I didn’t connect with the first half of the book, an exploration of the role of robots as companions for the elderly and caregivers for the young. 

In the second part of the book, Turkle examines our increasing connectivity with each other online, but how oddly we are more alone than ever. I was struck with Turkle’s use of the word tethered to describe the pull and grip that technology has on us. I highly recommend this second half.

My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy—about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. And it has left me thinking about solitude—the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise, you will only know how to be lonely. 288

 

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Books for Brave Girls

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If children can keep their wits about them and are brave,
they can always help in some way, my dear.
We don’t have such dreadful wars now; but the
dear God knows we have troubles enough,
and need all our courage and faith to be patient
in times like these.

In Trudel’s Siege, a book written by Louisa May Alcott when she was sixteen (1848), sickness, poverty and hunger lay siege on Trudel’s family. Her father, a linen weaver, is too sick to work; her mother, a lacemaker, cannot work while she nurses her husband; the old Grootmoeder could only knit stockings to sell. Inspired by the story of the siege of Leiden, Trudel looks for ways she can get food for her family. She gives her precious kitty, Jan, to the baker’s family in exchange for bread, sausage and milk. She goes out looking for odd jobs she can do in exchange for food. 

I can hear modern objections to this story: Why isn’t this girl in school? No child should have the burden of providing for the family! Where were social services?

I actually find the self-reliance, tempered with faith in God’s provision, very refreshing. So it’s a twinge too earnest. Trudel struggles with her sacrifices…for one minute. Such selflessness is usually only found in books. But Trudel’s satisfaction—her compensation—comes as she sees her parents and grandmother’s hunger abated. Alcott improves with age: who can forget Jo March’s satisfaction/sorrow when she sells her hair?

 

Carol Ryrie Brink’s book Baby Island (1937) could be Robinson Crusoe: the Young Mommy Edition. I found the Foreword essential for a modern reader to get this book.

When I was a small girl, it was the fashion in our circle
to borrow the neighbors’ babies. I myself was never a
very accomplished nursemaid, although I had many happy
hours pushing the perambulator of a young cousin; but
some of my friends had a positive genius for taking care
of and amusing babies. They never thought of receiving
pay for this delightful pastime. Minding a baby was its own reward.

When the ocean liner is sinking, twelve year old Mary Wallace’s first thought is to save the babies she has made friends with. She wakes her sister Jean, ten, and they find the twin toddlers and three-month old baby unattended. After scooping them up and getting in a lifeboat, a father gives them another toddler to hold while he returns for his wife. Suddenly they are cast off and adrift on the ocean.  

Mary is certain they will reach a little island.

Why the public library at home is just full of books about
shipwrecked people who landed on tropical islands. And
did you ever see a book written by a person who was
drowned at sea? I never did.

Whenever Jean gives way to tears, Mary rallies the troops:

Remember who you are.
Remember you are a Wallace.
Sing ‘Scots, Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled!’
and you’ll be all right.

The supplies, especially the canned milk, in the lifeboat sustain them until they land on a island. They build a shelter, find more food, build a pram and a playpen, while the baby gets a tooth, the toddler learns to walk and the twins start talking. They learn very practical knowledge of tides, “more today than I ever learned in school.” Mr. Peterkin, an old curmudgeon, lives on the other side of the island with his goat and parrot. 

It’s a whimsical book. Diapers—the need for or the stink or the cleaning of—are never mentioned. And yet I find parts of it plausible. When I was twelve, another twelve-year-old and I ran a day care center for the counselors’ kids at a summer camp. I marvel now to think of the responsibility we had, but at the end of the week all was well. 

What I loved about this book was the way Mary Wallace thought of the needs of others and how that kept her occupied and how her occupation kept her form sniffling and whining. Carol Ryrie Brink writes that her grandmother is in every book. Caddie Woodlawn is based on her grandmother’s childhood, but the spunk and resourcefulness of Mary Wallace is another clear reflection.

It strikes me that in both titles the girls are fortified by stories from books.  We must never stop reading good stories to our kids.

 

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October Reads

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Picadilly Jim  (1917)  P. G. Wodehouse’s descriptions delight: a comfortable stoutness, a face that had been “edited and re-edited” by a boxing career, affected imitation geniuses, the art of raising eyebrows, dazzled by the glamour of incivility. And my favorite from this book: 

…her mouth had the coldly forbidding look of the closed door of a subway express when you have just missed the train. It bade you keep your distance on pain of injury. 

I first met Ogden Ford, “a fourteen-year-old boy of a singularly unloveable type”, in The Little Nugget; the kidnappers are ready at the end of the book to pay the family to take this son of a millionaire back. In Picadilly Jim there is another scheme by family members to get him kidnapped again. The main character pretends to be someone else who is pretending to be himself. Five stars, pure joy.

 

Moby Dick  (1851)  I read my husband to sleep every night with Herman Melville’s classic, in preparation for seeing Jake Heggie’s opera, Moby Dick, in San Francisco. We have officially abandoned Moby as a read aloud together. I plan to continue reading about cetology, or study of whales, and the story of Ahab’s vengeance.   I keep thinking this is a re-read, but I can’t be sure. There are gems, but the pace is slow.

 

Kitchen Sonnets and Lyrics of Domesticity (1931)  Ethel Romig Fuller, poetry editor for The Oregonian and Oregon’s third poet laureate, writes poetry that glorifies the common things of life. She sees cleaning as creating beauty. Fuller sees poetry in hanging the wash on a clothesline, beauty in canning, tidied calm in ironing, and a happy heart in washing windows.  She glorifies the common stuff of life.  A Song of Home speaks of happy hearts and tallying every blessing.  While a few of the poems made my modern head wince, overall I was inspired to devour those dust bunnies in the corners and love the blessing of making a home beautiful.

Are petitions less fervent, if one only asks
As one works, for strength for finishing tasks?

 

Skylines (1952) Ethel Romig Fuller — The poet turns her eye to nature: the rivers, the mountains, the sea, the seasons of life in the Pacific Northwest. Infused with joy and sorrow, she writes of the surgery of grief, a fugutive beauty, of “binning” the summer. 

Sea

Sea is a great hunger pressed
To a full white mother breast,
Where it ravens till the tide
Of appetite is satisfied;
Where it slumbers till the shore
Aches with plenitude once more.

 

Spot the Book Title (2007) Simon Drew — A Collection of Cryptic Nonsense and Pointless Hidden Meanings. A fun puzzle book, so visual that it is hard to describe using only words. Here’s an example under “The Plays of Williams Shakespeare”:  comma + pot of tea + o + carousel + oars.   There is no page at the end of the book with answers. If you must have a puzzle solved, you send a check to Drew’s charity. He explains, “This is not a payment: it is a fine for giving up.” 

My Reading Life (2010) Pat Conroy — He reads, he writes, he journals, he talks, he listens. From the time I could talk I took an immense pleasure in running down words, shagging them like fly balls in some spacious field.  He honors the mother who hungered for art, for illumination, for some path to lead her to a shining way to call her own. She lit signal fires in the hills for her son to feel and follow. 

I think I like Pat Conroy because we share the same writing weaknesses: sentimental, often disastrously so; I was over-dramatic, showy with adjectives, safe with form, weak on verbs, over-reliant on adverbs. I love his love for words, but ache at the estrangement that still exists in his personal life. One side of me would love to read 200 pages a day like he does, but I would have to isolate myself from people—more than I already do— in order to achieve that goal. 

A Chain of Hands (1993, posthumously), Carol Ryrie Brink — Ironic, on the last day of Daylight Savings Time, with the gripes about the change, to read this phrase: day-by-day satisfaction of daylight and dark. This book only makes sense if you have read several other CRB titles first.

 

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (2008) Maggie Jackson  The premise of this book is simple. The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention — the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Jackson writes about a culture of skimming, new ways to disconnect from others, attention splicing, the dangers of multitasking, detachment, untethering, outsourcing memory to gadgets. The structure of the book did not make sense to me, but I found much to ponder.

 

The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (2011)  David Mamet — Conversions fascinate me. “I used to think…” is my favorite dinner party prompt. Mamet, former voice of Liberals, becomes the voice of Conservatives. The chapters don’t appear to build on one another; it feels like reading a collection of essays. Mamet’s Judaism informs his perspective and sits under every page of the book. He is blunt, articulate, and controversial. And he quotes Anthony Trollope.

My interest in politics began when I noticed that I acted differently than I spoke, that I had seen ‘the government’ commit sixty years of fairly unrelieved and catastrophic error nationally and internationally, that I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery they produced…

 

Murder Your Darlings

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I’m reading and thoroughly enjoying, in dribs and drabs, Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret … With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory. This section made me snort in laughter.

In his book On the Art of Writing (1916), Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, an eminent critic, anthologist, and adventure novelist, handed down a guideline for writers that people are still handing down. Usually people attribute it to Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Noël Coward, W.H. Auden, Oscar Wilde, or someone else whose fame has lasted longer than Sir Arthur’s. Here is that guideline in its original form: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press: Murder your darlings.”

[…] What generations have taken from his admonitions, though, is that we writers should root out our own self-indulgent bits, the vivid turns of phrase that call attention to themselves instead of advancing the narrative for…you. The reader. […]

Yes, well. Sir Arthur’s pen name was Q. Some frills trimmed there. But don’t you suspect that after rejecting Kill your pets as too mean and Eliminate your sweeties as ambiguous, and then hitting, bingo, upon Murder your darlings—don’t you suspect that he thought to himself, Q, you are cooking?

 

Satisfaction of Daylight and Dark

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She worked hard
and managed her life
with dignity and good humor.
What did she get out of it?
A step-by-step and day-by-day satisfaction of daylight and dark,
of turning seasons,
of gardens and flowers and friendly animals,
of sharp knives and clocks that were on time,
of well-baked bread
and a properly stuffed and roasted chicken,
of rich memories of a happy childhood.

 

Carol Ryrie Brink describes her Gram, who, she says “has crept into nearly every book that I have written. Sometimes she is the chief character, sometimes she has a minor part; sometimes she is young, sometimes she is old.” I have enjoyed getting to know Carol’s Gram, whom I first met in the delightful Wisconsin frontier book, Caddie Woodlawn. If you love Laura Ingalls Wilder, you will love Caddie Woodlawn. With a picture of Gram in my head, I’m eager to re-read the story of her childhood.   

The quote above comes from A Chain of Hands, Brink’s final book, published posthumously. This book is a series of vignettes about the hands that touched and transformed Carol Ryrie Brink’s life.

What strikes me about Gram, is that her granddaughter could write this about a woman who had experienced a truck-load of tragedy. Her husband had been murdered “just after he had let his insurance policy lapse.” She lost five children in their infancy. Her daughter (Carol Ryrie Brink’s mother) killed herself after a bad second marriage. She raised or partly raised three grandchildren. Yes, this is Caddie Woodlawn’s life!

…but it was impossible to live with her
and not be infected with some of
her honor
and justice
and good humor.

 

55 Quotes I’ve Gathered Over the Years

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About 15 years ago I started keeping a commonplace book, copying favorite
poems, quotes, sentences, phrases, and words into a journal, making a
personal anthology of my reading life.

Here are selections from a few of my journals, a slice of delight.

More 55 lists here.

 

1.  Love is friendship set to music.
— Anon

 

2.  Encourage one another.
— Donna Boucher

 

3.  Be always coming home.
—  Ursula Le Guin

 

4.  You can’t get a cup of tea big enough
or a book long enough to suit me.
— C. S. Lewis

 

5.  Fair is where you take the hogs in August.
— Anon

 

6.  When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable.
There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
— Victor Hugo

7.  If you can walk, you can dance.
If you can talk, you can sing.
— Zimbabwe proverb

 

8.  The idle man does not know what it is
to enjoy rest.
— Albert Einstein

 

9.  God will not guide us into an intolerable scramble
of panting feverishness.
— Thomas Kelly

 

10.  The other reason that I make music is to celebrate
the certainty of the Lord, since there is no other way
I can understand the contradictions and confusions
that surround me. 
— Septimus Harding in The Warden, by Anthony Trollope

 

11.  Not what we say about our blessings,
but how we use them, is the true measure
of our thanksgivings.
— W. T. Purkiser

 

12.  History is a vast early warning system.
— Norman Cousins

 

13.  Invest yourself in everything you do.
There’s fun being serious.
—  Wynton Marsalis

 

14.  Calm sinning leads to catastrophic suffering.
—  Terry Tollefson

 

15.  If you try to make something idiot-proof,
the world comes up with a better idiot.
—  Jack Van Deventer

 

16.  Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances
we know to be desperate.
—  G. K. Chesterton

 

17.  We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
—  Aristotle

 

18.  I am practicing the art of grabbing minutes,
perhaps the single most important art the
homeschooling mom can develop.
—  Cindy Rollins

 

19.  The most wasted of all days
is one without laughter.
—  e.e. cumings

 

20.  Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal
hanging on of an uncompleted task.
—  William James

 

21.  Though no one can go back and make a brand new start,
anyone can start from now on and make a brand new ending.
—  Carl Bard

 

22.  Never get into a rut. You cannot afford to do a thing poorly.
You are more injured in shirking your work or half-doing a job
than the person for whom you are working.
—  Booker T. Washington

 

23.  Your absence has gone through me
like a thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—  W. S. Merwin

 

24.  Never, never, never give up.
—  Winston Churchill

 

25.  Sit loosely in the saddle of life.
—  Robert Louis Stevenson

 

26.  There’s nothing remarkable about it.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time
and the instrument plays itself.
—  J. S. Bach

 

27.  Plan as if you will live a short time
and live as if you will be here another twenty or thirty years.
—  Ken Weddle

 

28.  Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a
friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
—  Oscar Wilde

 

 

29.  A good theology will invariably produce a good meal.
—  Anon

 

30.  Every load of laundry starts with a choice.
You can make it a chore, approaching it with dread,
performing it grudgingly. Or you can choose to
take pleasure in the act of caring for yourself and your family.
—  Monica Nassif

 

31.  We labor under the tyranny of perfect heroes.
—  Gary Barber

 

32.  Eating has always been important to me,
because the focal point of the day is the dinner table,
a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.
The dinner hour is a sacramental time for me,
a time for gratitude for whoever is gathered
around the table, for the food, for our being
part of the greater story of creation.
—  Madeline L’Engle

 

33.  For a second, the woman’s heart quailed before the
fresh difficulties, but she forgot self at the look in her
husband’s face. Her quiet reply, “We will wait, for God
is in the waiting,” filled him with courage again.
—  Eric P. Kelly

 

34.  I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.
—  P. D. James

 

35.  A perfect day should be recorded.
It can’t be relived except in memory but it can
be celebrated and remembered with gratitude.
—  P. D. James

 

36.  Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.
—  Pearl Buck

 

37.  Life itself is the proper binge.
—  Julia Child

 

38.  A phone call to say I’m thinking of you yields benefits
all out of proportion to the time investment.
—  Andree Seu

 

39.  Maybe I’m a Luddite because I feel sorry for children
who read “Goodnight Moon” on a phone.
—  Dan Newman

 

40.  Give me a man who sings at his work.
—  Thomas Carlyle

 

41.  A mother’s happiness is like a beacon,
lighting up the future but reflected also on the past
in the guise of fond memories.
—  Honore De Balzac

 

42.  To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born
is to remain always a child.
—  Cicero

 

43.  Children are durable
and don’t necessarily wilt under adversity,
just as our children don’t necessarily
thrive under luxury and comfort.
—  Garrison Keillor

 

44.  Get off your attitude.
—  Terry Tollefson

 

45.  Only by God’s grace is a promise sure.
— heard at a wedding

 

46.  A small daily task, if it be really daily,
will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
— Anthony Trollope

 

47.  Good prose is economical.
—  PSAT prep book

 

48.  Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with
a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
— Jeremy Taylor

 

49.  A man who does a good job is OK by me.
— Abraham Lincoln

 

50.  He who would not be frustrate of his hope
to write well ought himself to be a true poem.
— John Milton

 

51.  Really cool things happen on the brink of disaster.
— Bob Jensen, local potter

 

52.  Putting other people before our own tidy plans
is a reality that needs to be observed by the next generation.
— Edith Schaeffer

 

53.  Good humor makes all things tolerable.
— Henry Ward Beecher

 

54.  Never think because you cannot write a letter easily,
that it is better not to write at all. The most awkward
not imaginable is better than none.
— Emily Post

 

55.  What people truly crave is appreciation.
— William James

 

Two Are Better Than One

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I haven’t read your novel, but I can imagine what it’s like.
I think it is an excellent exercise in the use of your imaginations.
I’m pleased with you for writing it.
But now you must begin to look around you here at home.
Use all of your senses to find out what kind of a place you are living in.
Ask yourself how it smells, how it tastes, how it sounds,
as well as how it looks.
Then someday when you wish to write real books,
you will put your real experiences into them.
You will not need to go to imaginary countries half the world away
for your material. Perhaps someday you will even write
about this very year in your lives in Idaho. 180

My friend Noel and I were sitting in her van, waiting for the key to a building. As we chatted, she looked straight ahead and said, “Carol Ryrie Brink grew up in that house. You know the author of Caddie Woodlawn?” My eyes widened as I nodded. At one time I loved Caddie Woodlawn more than Laura Ingalls. “She wrote several adult novels about the early days of Moscow,” Noel continued. “You might like them.”  I put the titles on my wishlist and waited. This summer I am on a Carol Ryrie Brink reading streak. Before I began her trilogy about Moscow, ID, I read a little-known children’s book.

Two are Better Than One is a superb story for girls in that delicate time between dolls and bras.  Chrystal Reese and Cordelia Lark live a few blocks apart in the early 1900’s. Chrys is alone with her aunt and grandmother in a quiet house. Cordy lives with her dad and mom and four older brothers in a bustling house. When they aren’t playing with dolls, or going to Dorcas Club meetings, or exclaiming “Swellissimus!”, Chrys and Cordy decide to write a novel—by taking turns writing a chapter— about two dolls: The Romantical Perils of Lester and Lynette. This novel, included in the book with its juvenile spelling and construction gave me the loudest horse laugh:

“Lester!” screamed Lynette, trying hard not to swoon,
“You have come in the very niche of time.” 85

Miss Hickenlooper, a new teacher, is a problem. She doesn’t understand them, even confiscates the miniature dolls. The girls nourish their grievance by writing a hate poem. She discovers the poem, the girls see the hurt they’ve afflicted. This section has stuck with me weeks after I finished the book. Here a few snippets from that scene:

All along they had thought of Miss Hickenlooper as their enemy,
a comical one to be sure, but an enemy nevertheless.
And now she seemed to be not an enemy or even a villain
but just a person who had been mocked and hurt
by a couple of girls. 52

 
…we didn’t mean it for hate.
We thought it was—well, sort of funny.
It made us feel better.
We didn’t think about how you would feel. 53

The girls go to some parties and begin to neglect the dolls. They serve punch at a college dance. The novel gets finished and Chrys and Cordy decide to stage a wedding for the dolls. This back and forth between the little girl and the almost grown-up mimics the conflict I’ve witnessed in adolescent girls. 

As I get to know Carol Ryrie Brink, I see many autobiographical elements in this sweet story of friendship. The dedication is “…for Charlotte. She, better than anyone else, will be able to sift through all the make-believe and find the grains of truth.”  Like dear Laura Ingalls, the story of Chrys and Cordy harks back to a time when a girl had to learn how “to keep herself happy and amused.” 

 

China Road & City of Tranquil Light

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One blessing of living in the age of interwebs is that it is much easier to communicate directly with an author. After I finished Bo Caldwell”s exquisite City of Tranquil Light, I found her Facebook page and thanked her for her transformational book. And she graciously replied! This morning, after I finished reading Rob Gifford’s eye-opening book China Road, I sniffed around and found a podcast of Gifford in which he reads segments of his books.  [Addendum: even better is this 7 part series On the Road in China.]

Two of my favorite genres are travel memoirs and historical fiction. China Road takes us west from Shanghai to Kazakhstan along the 3,000-mile-highway, Route 312 in the twenty-first century. City of Tranquil Light tells the story of Will and Katherine, who move to northern China as Mennonite missionaries in 1906.

Gifford’s book put a face on China. It was the first book I’ve read about China that didn’t read/feel foreign, where the I thought of the subjects he interviewed first as people, then Chinese. Gifford created a thirst in me to know more about China; his list of recommended books has weighted down my to be read (TBR) list. His prose and style reminded me of Colin Thubron’s  The Lost Heart of Asia.  William Kirby writes, “If there is one book to read before you visit China, it is China Road.”

Bo Caldwell’s lyrical writing took me apart and put me back together again. The story is inspired by her maternal grandparents, missionaries who adopted China as their homeland. Caldwell effectively alternates the telling of the story between Will’s reminiscences at the end of his life and Katherine’s contemporary journal entries. I thought, when I finished Eric Metaxus’ Bonhoeffer in January, that it would be my favorite book of 2012. But City of Tranquil Light at least is tied for first, and is clearly my favorite fiction of 2012, thus far. Reading Bo Caldwell is like reading Wendell Berry, a lofty compliment.

Missionaries have gotten a bad rap in most books published in the last twenty years. It was refreshing to read, in both titles, winsome accounts of missionaries. Rob Gifford calls James Hudson Taylor one of his childhood heroes. He also introduced me to Mildred Cable and Francesca French, two stalwart middle-aged English women who tramped across the Gobi Desert and wrote “one of the great China travel books.”  Bo Caldwell makes you love her main characters. I want to find an elderly man in an assisted living home in Claremont, CA, put my hand on his arm, and say, “Tell me your story.”

Two highly excellent books that are guaranteed to raise your interest in China.