Tag Archives: quotes

Small Wonder

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The first Barbara Kingsolver I read, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, gave me respect for her writing and passion, even though our core beliefs don’t often align. Small Wonder is a collection of essays written in response to the 9/11 attacks. The first essay, written on 9/12/01, begins sorting out the implications of this changed world. She alternates between a wide-angled view of the world and a macro lens focusing on her closest relationships. The letters to her daughter and to her mother are tender, honest, and vulnerable. Kingsolver’s collection was like a sidewalk: broad expanses that didn’t resonate or where I disagree with her strongly (stridently?) stated premises…and then a little crack where we deeply agree.

My favorite essay, What Good Is a Story, reminded me of thoughts I’d been pondering from N.D. Wilson in this interview. And I nodded and murmured assent while I read The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don’t Let Him In. And her turns of phrase, like being flattered and flattened by any kind of male approval, made my heart sing.

On writing:

What makes writing good? That’s easy: the lyrical description, the arresting metaphor, the dialogue that falls so true on the ear it breaks the heart, the plot that winds up exactly where it should. 209

I love [fiction], strangely enough, for how true it is. If it can tell me something I maybe suspected, but never framed quite that way, or never before had sock me so divinely in the solar plexus, that was a story worth the read. 210

A good short story cannot be simply Lit Lite. It should pull off the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces. 211

The business of fiction is to probe the tender spots of an imperfect world, which is where I live, write, and read. 213

On television:

It’s fairly well documented that TV creates a net loss in contentment. 135

Anyone inclined toward chemical sedatives might first consider, seriously, turning off the TV. 141

 

The World According to Bertie

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Alexander McCall Smith, in The World According to Bertie gives us a sizable dose of our favorite six year old, Bertie Pollock. He is a precocious child who ‘wanted so much to be the average boy, but he knew that this would forever be beyond his reach.’ McCall Smith delivers more of his warm humor, cultural commentary, names of Scottish artists, and the lives of the familiar characters of his Edinburgh series. He is famous for his repeated adjectival phrases, such as the traditionally built woman, Mma Ramotswe.  In this book Matthew wears a distressed-oatmeal sweater and crushed-strawberry trousers. Never beige, Matthew’s distressed-oatmeal sweater appears with comedic frequency.

Bertie’s mummy Irene is laughable in all her pomposity: “It had to do with the idealisation of the female parental figure, or mother, to use the vernacular.”

What Miss Harmony faces in her job teaching: “Much had been forgotten, and the rest of the morning was devoted to the re-installation of vanished knowledge.”

Here are a few more quotes to sample:

We live in a culture of complaint
because everyone is always looking
for things to complain about.
It’s all tied in with the desire to
blame others for misfortune and
to get some form of compensation
into the bargain.

 

 

Exercise bicycles in gyms might be used, but this did not apply to those — the majority — bought for use in the home. They stood there, in mute affront to their owners, quite idle, before being moved to a spare room and ultimately to an attic. They there were recycled, which did not mean, in this case, that they had been cycled in the first place.

For light reading, and some laugh-aloud moments, I recommend The World According to Bertie.


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Unsuitable for Ladies

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My husband: What are you reading?

Me: Unsuitable for Ladies

Him: Why would you want to read something unsuitable for ladies?

Me: It’s not the content, it’s the title. It’s a travel anthology; travel used to be deemed unsuitable for ladies.

Him: Right.

 

Jane Robinson has given us a gift. She has read the works of 190 authors —all women—, extracted the good parts and formed them into a book called Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers. In it you will find remarkable stories by even more remarkable ladies. Extraordinary!

Robinson divides the book by the region traveled: Europe, Scandinavia, the Balkans, Middle East, Africa, Asia, India, Australasia, North and South America. Most of the writing is from the nineteenth century but the eighteenth and twentieth centuries are well represented. Her selections include better known travel writers —Karen Blixen, Dervla Murphy, Isabella Bird, Mary Morris and Frances Trollope— and many more who might be called obscure.

Funny! Lively descriptions and droll stories abound.

As to the state of the roads, no language can do justice to their execrableness…
   ~ Isabella Romer in The Rhone, the Darro, and the Guadalquivir, 1843

Our next suffering was supper, and here again we excited our hostess’s ire by ordering eggs in the shell, as the only incorruptible kind of food, instead of sharing the greasy liquid and nameless ragouts…
   ~ Mrs. Dalkeith Holmes, A Ride on Horseback to Florence, 1842

It is difficult for some people to connect tragedy and fleas together, but I am not one of those fortunate people. Experientia docet. At first, only two or three began to roam stealthily over my defenceless limbs, these were evidently the vanguard sent on to reconnoiter. Being very sleepy, I gave several vicious rubs and pinches at haphazard and pretended that so few did not signify. There was a pause in their evolutions and I —silly mortal!— drowsily rejoiced in the idea that they did not consider my blood ‘sacred’ enough for their depraved tastes, and had therefore retired in search of ‘pastures new’. This illusion was a short lived one, however. They had merely gone to fetch ‘their sisters, their cousins, whom they reckoned up by dozens and their aunts’ to join the feast and take part in the races. Up and down, round and round, they careered, taking nips now and again in a playful sort of way.
   ~ Ellen Browning, A Girl’s Wanderings in Hungary, 1896  [this story takes three pages and had me gasping for air]

My hotel was called The Lotus Hotel, but with the usual disregard in the placing of vowels, the key ring was stamped ‘Louts Hotel’.
   ~ Julie Emerson, Reflections in the Nile, 1986

Really there is everything in this volume: pleasant breezes, honor among Albanians, “short” skirts that clear the ankles, how to eat locusts, the horror of a sati, moonlight baths, siege survival techniques, leech removal techniques, an avalanche, irksome monotony, nose-pressing salutations, privations, coffee, malaria, rain, kindness, grief.

A thorough source acknowledgment and index make this work a perfect springboard for other travel books. Armchair travelers will want to read this book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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A Green Journey

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It has been six months since I’ve read Jon Hassler’s charming book, A Green Journey. I had never heard of Jon Hassler, nor of his Staggerford books, before I read the review my friend Hope wrote. I’m so thankful she placed A Green Journey in my view. I gulped it down in one sitting, but the people in the book lived with me long after I finished the last page.

Agatha McGee is 64, a sixth grade teacher at a Catholic school in Minnesota, an intelligent woman with drive and resourcefulness. Ah, yes: and she is a spinster. She has high standards, strong opinions, and a good heart. What she cares about the most are the holy traditions of her faith. It was not too much to say that Agatha loved the Church of her girlhood above everything else in the world. The Church had been her primary conveyance through life.   

Agatha’s neighbor Lillian Kite was honest, simplehearted and enviably placid. Nevertheless, it was a mind spongy with sentiment and empty of logic…. Agatha’s young friend, Janet Raft, a single mom, makes bad choices in men. It saddened [Agatha] to think of all the daughters of weak fathers she had known who hadn’t been satisfied until they became the wives of weak husbands.  [Sidenote: it wasn’t until this morning that the significance of Lillian’s and Janet’s last names struck me.] Dick Baker is Agatha’s bishop, a progressive churchman who values Agatha McGee even though they often land on opposing sides.

You should have seen our cathedral before [the bishop] went in with his wrecking tools. Granted, it was overdecorated, but now it looks like a warehouse. Without the wares. Absolutely unadorned. A Puritan meetinghouse. We’re witnessing the successful completion of the Reformation, James, five hundred years after Luther.

James, mentioned above, is a teacher in Ireland and Agatha’s correspondent. Agatha “met” James in the Letters column of The Fortress, a magazine for like-minded Catholics. The letters between James and Agatha are the jewels of the book. An ocean apart but kindred in heart, the two lonely friends expose their deepest feelings and thoughts. They write about their lives, the people around them, their loves, their fears.  It is not often that you can read a love story between two older people who have never before known love.

An opportunity to travel to Ireland comes; Agatha goes, wanting to meet James. Although she flies with a local tour group, once in Ireland she makes her way on her own. To be honest, Lillian, I’ve always wanted more out of life than is given to groups. James is a real person, and the time they share together is precious. Will they get married?

Staggerford—like Mitford, Lake Wobegon, and Port William—is a place worth exploring. In A Green Journey you get a bit of County Kildare as a bonus.

 

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Love Over Scotland

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Alexander McCall Smith’s Love Over Scotland is a supremely satisfying read. It is amusing, but not vapid. The characters are so well-drawn that I could see them, hear their voices; I felt like I knew them. I believe I do know a few of them, real people who inhabit my life, though I do not reside in Edinburgh. 

Written as serial novels in The Scotsman newspaper, the 44 Scotland Street series wanders around the residents of Edinburgh, picking up the thread of a character’s story for a chapter or two, taking up another, and occasionally twisting some stories together. McCall Smith’s social commentary, as fleshed out in the lives of Angus, Domenica, Pat, Matthew, Bertie, Irene, Stuart, and Antonia, is what delights me. Social customs, art, architecture, music, literature, education, interpersonal relationships, and parenting are all noticed and are remarked.

Angus was not one to put off the opening of mail, a habit which he had heard was extremely common.

Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never had it embedded in their minds.

The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalisation, the spreading under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place.

Above all, Alexander McCall Smith, has a cheerful humor which permeates his writing.

[Law enforcers] make an effort. They announced the hanging of a couple of pirates a few years ago, but nobody thought they were really hanged. Maybe just suspended.

He pokes fun at Irene, the opinionated, domineering mom to young Bertie, practically a genius. Poor Irene! Even poorer Bertie! We all root for him, hoping he’ll escape from her clutches. My favorite section of this book is when Bertie finds himself in Paris, unaccompanied, calls himself Bertie-Pierre, and attends the lecture of a deconstructionist at the Sorbonne. In one simple question, Bertie deconstructs the deconstructionist. 

  

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In the Company of Others

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There’s never any privacy, really, in keeping an inn,
even when one lies in one’s own bed.
Personal life and possessions are so blended into the business,
there’s no telling where one stops and the other begins.
One is ever in the company of others.
But it’s what we love, of course, and one pays a price always for what is loved.

 

In Jan Karon’s second Father Tim novel, In the Company of Others, Tim and Cynthia Kavanagh take a long-anticipated trip to County Sligo, Ireland. Cynthia’s fractured ankle is re-injured in Ireland; instead of touring the country, they explore people —relationships— as they remain ensconced at Broughadoon, a fishing lodge on the shores of Lough Arrow. The unexpected delay allows Father Tim and Cynthia — each in their unique way — to become connected in an intimate way to the cast of Irish characters.  In down times, they read the 1862 journal of a Philadelphia-trained doctor, Fintan O’Donnell. The journal provides a story within a story.

Karon two main themes are redemption and connection. Father Tim’s reluctance to leave home, for example:

He was not a man to part easily with home, from his dog,
from his now legally adopted son, Dooley, who was
twenty-one going on forty-five. Such things need
watchful tending, like a cook fire. One mustn’t go
long away from connections lest something fragile die out.
 One could not fetch that particular fire from neighbors. 19 

Mitford lovers will recognize Karon’s motifs: simple pleasures — reciting poetry, reading books, walks and jogs —; life with diabetes; tortured souls; cackling laughter; and reconciliation. There’s a bit of mystery too. I almost choked with laughter when Cynthia said, I wish I’d read more P.D. James.

Jan Karon’s prose reminds me of Celtic music: a lilting tune, an unexpected chord, some rhythmic change-ups. There is nothing quite so satisfying as the perfect word, a fluent phrase, a metaphor that makes you gape in admiration:

A goulash of gear… 68
gormless (= stupid, dull)
gobsmacked (= astounded)
In terms of never giving up, this was a very Churchillian dog. 83
Bella Flaherty was fenced by a thicket of nettles… 235
…the chiaroscuro of moldering plaster
…a hat rack of ball caps embalmed in dust
…took [dinner] in their room, withered as weeds

Cynthia sat reading amid a wave of books
washed onto the shore of the duvet. He was
stashed in the wing chair, imbibing his own pleasures. 213

The buzz of the bee marked the runes of his prayer. 323

I found Fintan O’Donnell’s journal tedious: more characters to keep straight, a parallel plot to track. My respect for Jan Karon kept me reading, though I was tempted to skip it. It was a good decision. Fintan’s story was tied together in a beautiful way that brought me to tears.

At the core, however, the relationship between Tim and Cynthia is what delights me. In Home to Holly Springs, the first Father Tim novel, because Tim takes a solitary journey to face his past, his marriage to Cynthia gets only brief mentions. Happily, the interplay in this happy marriage of two flawed individuals gets front seat in the Ireland book. When their travel plans are stalled, their perspective is refreshing:

We’ll never have this time again,
it’s come to us as a gift,
maybe we don’t know how to open it.

They are comfortable together, but comfortable apart, too.  I love Cynthia’s daily benediction to Tim, Go and be as the butterfly. Their mutual love, concern, as demonstrated in small ways, makes this a book worth reading. I’m still ruminating over a remark of Tim’s, A pet occupation of the Enemy is to distance us from intimacy.          

Adoption

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‘How would you [make orphanages useless]?’

‘I would merely enlighten the hearts of childless people as to their privileges.’

‘Which are?’

‘To be fathers and mothers to the fatherless and motherless.’

‘I have often wondered why more of them did not adopt children. Why don’t they?’

‘For various reasons which a real of child nature would blow to the winds — all comprised in this, that such a child would not be their own child. As if ever a child could be their own! That a child is God’s is of rather more consequence than whether it is born of this or that couple. Their hearts would surely be glad when they went into heaven to have the angels of the little ones that always behold the face of their Father coming round them, though they were not exactly their father and mother.’

~ George MacDonald in Robert Falconer

 

Palimpsest

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Our beloved Latin teacher gave us so much more than Latin lessons. His knowledge base was so great that art, music, cultural analysis, poetry and word-perfect quotes co-mingled with Latin grammar and vocabulary. But the words. Oh, the words. Inevitably, in dulcet tones, he prefaced his remarks, “Now here’s a word you will need to know.” And I, silly girl who thought she had, ahem, an advanced vocabulary, would hear him pronounce a word I had never read, heard, seen, smelt or tasted.  Never ever.

It’s a wonder my eyes don’t permanently face backward, with all the mental eye-rolling I performed.  Hah! How could it be such an important word? I’ve never even heard of it!  Ah, the arrogance, the pure high-octane arrogance. <blushes>

You know what would follow: that word would crop up here, there and everywhere within days and weeks of my learning it.  But now I owned that word. It was mine.

And to this day it is a sweet delight to read a word taught to me by my beloved Latin scholar.

Palimpsest is one of those words. It means ‘a manuscript on which two or more successive texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next.’  Imagine a monk in a scriptorium with no skins to write on, but a vast library close by. He finds something he believes is obscure, scrapes the hide, and carries on with his copying.

Last night I found my old friend palimpsest in relation to a DOG (!) in Alexander McCall Smith’s novel Love Over Scotland.

…Cyril [Angus’s dog] was rapidly diverted from this agreeable fantasy to the real world of smells for a dog, and Drummond Place, though familiar territory, was rich in possibilities; each passer-by left a trail that spoke to where he had been and what he had been doing — a whole history might lie on the pavement, like song-lines across the Australian Outback, detectable only to those with the necessary nose. Other smells were like a palimpsest: odour laid upon odour, smells that could be peeled off to reveal the whiff below.

 

 

Unbroken

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Even though I knew that Louis Zamperini survived insupportable agonies (this can’t be considered a spoiler: the word survival is in the subtitle), Laura Hillenbrand’s taut pacing of the narrative created and sustained tension as I read along. When I came to the point where—after having been officially declared dead then later confirmed alive, the war having been concluded, his fragile health jacked up above survival levels—Zamperini is escorted home by his brother Pete, the dam of my emotions gave way; spasms of sobs shook my frame.

Over Long Beach, they sank back into the rain and landed. There, bursting from army cars, were their father and mother, and Sylvia and Virginia. The moment the plane stopped, Louie jumped down, ran to his sobbing mother, and folded himself into her. “Cara mamma mia,” he whispered. It was a long time before they let go.

Unbroken is the story of a series of rescues in Louie Zamperini’s life: how running rescued him from a mutinous youth careening with crime, the rescue from 47 days on a raft, how he was rescued from sadistic focus of a brutal war criminal, and the ultimate rescue of a tortured post-war veteran. 

Zamperini’s story is worthy of an epic poem of Homerian proportions. Hillenbrand’s prose, however, is magnificent. Here are a few of her phrases which delighted my ear:

a festival of rapid-fire diarrhea

(prisoners) gathered in drifts against the buildings

this warren of captive men

men’s bodies slowly winnowed

the sea began to arch its back under the raft

a laughing equanimity

Resilience is hard to detect in a body well nourished, well rested, and well kept. Resilience needs adversity, agony, and misery to have something to rebound from. Zamperini’s story is replete with deprivation, danger and destruction. Sharks, both human and piscine, seek to devour him. He offers bodily resistance as long as he is able. His indomitable spirit resists when his body is incapable.  

In the midst of despair in an inflated raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, there is a day so exquisitely described which completely changed my idea about the doldrums.

It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky, whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. When a fish broke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men with absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stillness.

For a while they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren’t hungry or thirsty. There were unaware of the approach of death.

As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation in color, their slide through the sea…Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.

Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.

Louis Zamperini’s story continues to the present (he is still alive and recently spoke at my friend’s church). It’s easier to end a book when the subject has died; there is a clearly defined finish. When the main character is still alive it takes more skill to bring the story to a conclusion. Laura Hillenbrand wraps this remarkable man’s story with one final scene. The significance of it escaped me at first. I went back and reread a paragraph. Oh!  Again, emotions pressed down hard to the overflowing point. The beauty, the profound and glorious beauty of this scene was the satin ribbon that tied this story together into a perfect bow. The final sentence undid me.

 

 

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Words, Words, Words

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The request to swap Margaret Ernst’s charming book In a Word put me into a panic. I loved this book and didn’t agree with my former self who had decided to list it on Paperbackswap. But I resolved to be brave, and also to quickly read it through—one more time—before I sent it off.

The flow of language, the roots of words, the vicissitudes of meaning: I find all these fascinating.

The ability to see the secrets behind the letters of words, their nuances, their humble beginnings, is one compelling reason to study a foreign language.

Companion is one of my favorite words. It comes from the Latin com (together) + panis (bread).  Thus, a companion is a person you share meals with. I know it. I love it. But I didn’t know that pantry is a place where bread was made or kept.

I could bore you with a list of stuff I learned. I could tell you that mistletoe is from an Old German word for dung, because it was believed that the plant grew from bird droppings.  I could go on with the word vogue which means to sail forth and comes from the swaying motion of a ship. Your eyelids could close listening to how calm comes from the Greek, burning heat, and how gossamer literally means goose summer. You could nod off to my voice noticing the relationship between climate, from the Greek word slope, and climax, from the Greek word ladder.  Then you would bolt upright in shock when you heard the origin of the word testify, and how the King James Version euphemistically says that an oath is taken by placing the hand on the thigh.

Let’s just stop one minute and focus.

Focus – straight over from the Latin meaning hearth, fireplace. I quote Margaret Ernst: In the days before we became nomads in the apartment-house era, the hearth was the focus of the home and home life. Now, like poor photography, we are out of focus. The word was first used in a mathematical sense in 1604 by Kepler, who likened the focus of a curve to the burning-point of a lens.

There are online sources to give you a joyful understanding of words.  Douglas Harper writes:

Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant 600 or 2,000 years ago. Think of it as looking at pictures of your friends’ parents when they were your age. People will continue to use words as they will, finding wider meanings for old words and coining new ones to fit new situations. In fact, this list is a testimony to that process.

One advantage print books have over online resources is that they are easy to browse. This is a perfect, ahem, bathroom book, given you are one that keeps books in bathrooms. Perhaps it is a perfect bedside book, one you can spend a few pages with before sleep. Although this is a fun little book, it is not nearly as extensive as the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.