Life or Death Matter

#131
We never know we go,—when we are going
We jest and shut the door;
Fate following behind us bolts it,
And we accost no more.
Emily Dickinson

Thanks to my friend Mumbi for sending this photo
from the Ewing and Muriel Kauffman ~ Memorial Gardens
and for recommending a few of the titles below.
Without intending to follow a theme of any sort, I concluded this year's reading list with four narratives, all on the topic of terminal illness and impending death. Each of these authors was given an untimely diagnosis, which they all dealt with by determining to share their stories with others while they still had the time and health to do so. We are the richer for their determination to impart what mattered most to them when time was running short.

When Breath Becomes Air
by Paul Kalanithi (1977 - 2015)
with an "Epilogue" by his wife Lucy Kalanithi

"Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality . . . I began reading . . . anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality. I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. . . .

"And so it was literature that brought me back to life during this time. The monolithic uncertainty of my future was deadening; everywhere I turned the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action. I remember the moment when my overwhelming unease yielded, when that seemingly impassable sea of uncertainty parted. I woke up in pain [and recalled] . . . Samuel Beckett's seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate . . . 'I can't go on. I'll go on'" (149).

Somebody I Used to Know
by Wendy Mitchell (b. 1956)

"When I sat down with Gemma and Sarah to discuss my wishes, laying on the homemade afternoon tea to sweeten the mood, I was surprised to hear how different their thoughts were about what I might want. But I was able to tell them. Imagine the sadness and emotional distress this would have caused if we hadn't talked. Imagine the upset and disagreement if we hadn't talked. Imagine the distance it may have put between them if we hadn't talked. Imagine the sadness I would have caused in my death that I couldn't put right, if we hadn't talked.

"Guilt is hard to live with, but it exists to help us put things right while we still have the chance" (173).

The Last Lecture
by Randy Pausch (1960 - 2008)

"Many cancer patients say their illness gives them a new and deeper appreciation for life. Some even say they are grateful for their disease. I have no such gratitude for my cancer, although I'm certainly grateful for having advance notice of my death. In addition to allowing me to prepare my family for the future, that time gave me the chance to go to Carnegie Mellon and give my last lecture. In a sense, it allowed me to 'leave the field under my own power.'"

" . . . There's something else. As a high-tech guy, I never fully understood the artists and actors I've known and taught over the years. They would sometimes talk about the things inside them that 'needed to come out.' I thought that sounded self-indulgent. I should have been more empathetic. My hour on the stage had taught me something. (At least I was still learning!) I did have things inside me that desperately needed to come out. I didn't give the lecture just because I wanted to. I gave the lecture because I had to" (204 - 05).

Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned
the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart
by Carol Wall (1951 - 2014)
in memory of Giles Owita (d. 2008)
with an "Epilogue" by Carol's husband Dick Wall

"'Look under the tarps and choose a specimen you like' . . . Underneath, I found a sight whose quiet beauty took my breath away. In the shelter of the covered chairs and benches were a host of tiny seedlings, clearly thriving. They'd all been rescued ... I saw how all this while, beneath the unattractive surface, the gears of life had been turning, nature ticking beautifully along like the mesmerizing works of an expensive watch.

"Dr. Giles Owita's backyard rescue project had flourished despite illness and cold winds. Finding this felt like a Christmas morning discovery . . ." (239 - 40).

Giles & Carol Discuss Their Illnesses:
Giles: "Yes, we are doomed to constant vigilance."

Carol: "We have our own club. The downside is that it's a club no one wants to join. The upside is that we can talk about anything we want to, and no one can accuse us of being morbid. And it's oddly liberating. No one chides us about our weight or our triglycerides. There's no one to impress, and nothing else to be lost." (268)

Some Closing Thought from Dick Wall
"Something is going to get all of us. We will all die. Healing involves our response to this certainty -- our understanding of our place in the universe and our purpose in this life. Mister Owita resonates with so many people because Giles and Carol teach us that we are not defined by our afflictions -- we are to bear them with grace and dignity. We are to understand that 'the ground in winter, which looks awful . . . holds a thousand lovely secrets.' Giles and Carol teach us that, even in what seems like the hell of a final illness, 'every day brings something good'" (304).

**************

Previous Posts on the Same Topic
Two - Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
by Madeleine L'Engle (1918 - 2007)
in memory of Hugh Hale Franklin (1916 – 1986)

"Right now we must wait. The urologist is pleased . . . with Hugh's recovery, repeats that he is cautiously optimistic. But we do not know whether or not the sharks are still waiting to attack.

"They are" (212).

"Is he dying? Today? I don't know. Modern medicine has made it less and less easy for us to predict the imminence of death. . . . Hugh is the victim of modern medicine . . .

"But what was the alternative? This treatment . . . has cured people. The older methods, such as radiation, were successful only in postponing death, not in killing this kind of cancer. Had he not been given the platinum, what kind of death would he have suffered? I don't know the answer to these questions. but because we have new ways of treating disease, we use them. . . . If we had to make all the choices agan, what would we choose?" (217 - 18)

Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction
by David Kuo (1968 – 2013)

Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death
Transformed My Life
by Eugene O'Kelly (1952 - 2005)


**************
Also recommended:

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande

How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter
by Sherwin B. Nuland

**************

Some favorite songs to go along with the above books.
I hope these links continue to work ~ videos & lyrics ~
definitely worth a watch, a listen, and a read:

Live Like You Were Dying
Tim McGraw

I Hope You Dance
Lee Ann Womack

How to Save a Life
The Fray

I Wanna See You Be Brave
Sara Bareilles

I Hope You Have the Time of Your Life
Green Day

We Are Young
Fun with Janelle Monae

I Just Want to Feel This Moment
Pitbull with Christina Aquilera

Photograph
Ed Sheeran

Books That Affect Us Like a Disaster

Reader in an Armchair
at Franz Kafka Square 1 ~ Prague, Czech Republic
in front of World of Kafka Exhibition

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
~ Franz Kafka ~

Thanks to my friend Igor Steinman for sharing this
impressive no - longer - banned - books monument,
on the The Bebelplatz in Berlin, along with several
other memorials to the shameful burning of books.

Detail of Girl Reading ~ San Francisco
(I think by George Lundeen)

Recommended Reading: Karel Čapek

Literature Only!

Some Excellent Advice from the Airline

An Excellent Book to Read While Traveling!

Bryson is always so knowledgeable that it's hard to pick the most informative anecdote and so hilarious that it's impossible to pick the funniest. The Road to Little Dribbling is no exception.

That being said, this passage is a favorite, not necessarily for wisdom or humor, but more for it's poetic loveliness. If there's one thing Bryson can do, it is to wax lyrical in praise of Britain, land that he loves:

"This is the most extraordinary thing about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places -- on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. You even see clumps of flowery life growing on the sides of abandoned warehouses and old viaducts. If all the humans in the UK vanished tomorrow, Britain would still be in flower. This is in complete contrast to American, where nature is wild and raw. You need flamethrowers to keep the weeds in check where I come from [Iowa]. Here is is just miles of accidental loveliness. It is really quite splendid." (72)
from
The Road to Little Dribbling:
Adventures of an American in Britain

Too Sad to Read?

Photo from Ideal Bookshelf ~ Jane Mount
A few months ago, Ben and I participated in a facebook forum on the issue of 10th graders being required to read The Kite Runner. The discussion was initiated by a parent who was concerned because her daughter was "crying and dry heaving because of it last night."

Ben's Response:

(1) From internet lore:
Q: Why are 15 year olds so angry?
A: Because humanity has an ugly side and around 15 is when you start to learn that.

(2) If she had waited until age 18 to read that scene would she have not found it emotionally wrecking? Why or why not? (If I were to read it again this morning to catch up real fast on this facebook conversation would I have (still) found it emotionally wrecking? Spoiler alert: yes)

(3) I think whether she's ready to read and think about that scene depends a lot on what guidance she'll have processing it. If her parents, her teachers, and her peers can help her channel her feelings of devastation into making her more empathetic and more able to imagine others complexly (as John Green likes to say) then she should read the book -- or I suppose should have read the book, it's innocence lost now. If there is no support and she turns bitter and angry, then that's a bad outcome. Statements like "15 is too young to read that book" strike me as lacking a bit too much in nuance.

(4) Paging Kitti Carriker, interested to hear her thoughts on this.

Thanks to Ben for paging me!
I appreciate that!

I was reminded first
of a previous blog post
and a favorite quotation:

"Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. . . . When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. . . . There is no act more wretched than stealing" (The Kite Runner, 17 - 18). ~ Khaled Hosseini

A reader's response to the quotation
took me somewhat by surprise:

Being forced to read the kite runner as a freshman in high school stole my kids innocence. How ironic.

To which I followed up:

Do you think reading Kite Runner should be postponed until college? Because of the sexual assault? I don't think Ben & Sam ever had it as assigned reading in highschool or college, though since that time, Ben has read it on his own (not sure about Sam). I have also read A Thousand Splendid Suns -- so much sorrow but also hope.

Further notes from my conversation with Ben about the
earliest books that broke our hearts and left us weeping:

Short Stories by Flannery O'Connor
"A Good Man is Hard to Find"
"Good Country People"
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway
"God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen"
"In Another Country"

Louanne Ferris
I'm Done Crying: The Making of A Nurse

Lillian Roth
I'll Cry Tomorrow

Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange

Truman Capote
In Cold Blood

William Golding
Lord of the Flies

Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge

Ken Keasey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird

Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago

Robert Newton Peck
A Day No Pigs Would Die

Ayn Rand
We the Living

And at an even earlier age:
The Steadfast Tin Soldier
The Little Prince
Harry Potter IV: Goblet of Fire

1. Ben -- others that I overlooked?

2. Additional heart - breaking, eye - opening books.

3. Advice from George Bernard Shaw:
"You have learned something.
That always feels at first
as if you have lost something."

Does Nanny Have a Line?

Rebecca & Kitti
A week ago, my friend and fellow English teacher, Rebecca Saulsbury Bravard, called me out on facebook;

and more recently my friend Clare Coleman:

"I have accepted a challenge to post seven books that I love, one book per day, no exceptions, no reviews, just covers. Each day I may ask a friend to take up the challenge. Let's promote literacy and a book list. Today, I nominate Kitti Carriker."

So, here are mine. Seven novels (published 1996 - 2003*) in that rare category of books on my shelf -- life being so short and all -- that I have loved enough to read and re-read more than once. These seven titles are bound together, in my mind, because of their struggling contemporary heroines, whose great one - liners continually speak straight to my heart.

For example:
I mean, do you have a line?
Is there a line they could cross?

*****

It's so over the line.

Oh, does Nan have a line?

Yes, I have a line!

(133, 224 - 25)

*date of publication
& links to previous blog posts:

1996 ~ Bridget Jones's Diary
1999 ~ Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Helen Fielding

2001 ~ Do Try to Speak as We Do, Marjorie Leet Ford
2001 ~ High Maintenance, Jennifer Belle
2002 ~ The Nanny Diaries, Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus
2002 ~ A Perfect Arrangement, Suzanne Berne
2003 ~ Dogs of Babel, Carolyn Parkhurst

To Assume My Humanity

Enfant écrivant (1870) ~ Henriette Browne (1829 - 1901)
Alternately entitled: A Girl Writing; The Pet Goldfinch

**************************

From youth to age we turn to books
in search of our true selves . . .


"When you were young
And your heart was an open book
You used to say live and let live
You know you did
You know you did
You know you did
But if this ever changin' world
In which we live in
Makes you give in and cry
Say live and let die . . ."
~ Paul & Linda McCartney ~


"When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep . . ."
~ William Butler Yeats ~


**************************

Steve Almond: "Literature exists to help people know themselves. . . . What I want to argue in this peculiar pint-sized ode is that our favorite novels aren't just books. They are manuals for living. We surrender ourselves to them for the pleasures they provide, and for the lessons they impart" (9, 15, emphasis added).

From his essay:
William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life
[Recommended by Ned; see also Stoner; and Victoria]


Madeleine L'Engle: "Journal entries for those days were earnest. I was reading as many letters of the great wrtiers as I could get hold of, and copying out the things that touched me closely. . . . Chekhov . . . Thoreau . . . Plato . . . Slowly I was learning who I was and who I wanted to be with the help of the great ones who had gone before me" (39 - 41, emphasis added).

From her autobiography:
Two - Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage


Marilynne Robinson: "Why do we need to read poetry? . . . Read it and you'll know why. If you still don't know, read it again. And again. Some of them took the things she said to heart, as she had done once when they were said to her. She was helping them to assume their humanity" (21, emphasis added).

From her novel
Home

**************************
So I asked myself: Who were the poets who helped me "assume my humanity"? Which "great ones" had paved the way? When did this process begin and with what authors?

For teen - age booksworms, particularly girls, a typical and time - honored answer might be Jane Austen, or the Bronte sisters. For me, however, it was Taylor Caldwell and Lloyd C. Douglas. Literary or not, these were the authors who inspired a summertime (1970 or so) quest to read if not their complete works, at least all that I could see on the library shelf.

Around the same time, my appreciation of poetry was kindled not by any one matchless poet but by the editor Ted Malone who introduced the selections in his anthology so tenderly that my heart was ready to honor each poem before I even read it. Next (1974 - 1980) came the early soul - searching and consciousness - raising poems of Naomi Shihab Nye; and eventually I gathered "who I was and who I wanted to be" from Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Marge Piercy, Walt Whitman, Ernest ~ Sandeen (please see comment below).

When I asked Gerry about the idea of assuming one's humanity through literature, he named Charles Dickens and George Orwell. Unlike Gerry, who answered with no hesitation whatsoever, I confess to a few moments of consternation before settling on Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf as the classic reading - list authors who most significantly provide pleasure, impart wisdom, and profoundly impact my way of understanding the world around me and the world inside my head.

A couple of summer's ago, my friend Don Lynam suggested that we all share our "list of books that have survived multiple purges." So many people posted so many intriguing titles, ranging from classics tried and true to others lesser known, with a generous sprinkling of curious, eccentric, and unique choices! Each item, thoughtfully chosen, had undoubtedly aided the various contributors in the assumption of their humanity.

The titles on my personal list overlapped with many already included in Don's survey, so I added only two: my all - time favorite The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov; and, on Gerry's behalf, Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen.

**************************
In closing, here are a few life - changing, mostly non-fiction "manuals for living" that would survive any purge of mine. If you are in search of life coach advice, try delving into -- or even just skimming -- nearly anything written by . . .

Brian Andreas - poetic cartoonist
Bill Bryson
Paul Collins - Not Even Wrong
Joan Didion - "On Keeping a Notebook" ~ "On Self - Respect" ~
"In Bed: On Migraines"
Andrea Dworkin
Marilyn French - The Women's Room
Stephen Jay Gould
Anne Lamott ~ Turning 60 / 61
Alan Parsons - lyricist
Leonard Shlain - The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
Sarah Vowell
Barbara G. Walker - The Skeptical Feminist: Discovering the Virgin, Mother, and Crone

And three plays:
The Fantasticks
Our Town ~ "The Least Important Day"
Stop the World -- I Want to Get Off

From the Desk Of

What the painting looks like with its
"expansive background" ~ hanging on the wall
at The National Museum for Women in the Arts

*******************

From A Gentleman in Moscow
By American novelist Amor Towles (b 1964)

“A king fortifies himself with a castle,” observed the Count, “a gentleman [or a scholar] with a desk.”

The Count ran his hand across the desk's dimpled surface.

How many of the Grand Duke's words did those faint indentations reflect? Here over forty years had been written concise instructions to caretakers; persuasive arguments to statesmen; exquisite counsel to friends. In other words, it was a desk to be reckoned with. (12, 18)

*******************

P.S.
For more on the Readerly / Writerly Life
see my current posts

From the Desk of Ernest Hemingway:
"But never feel as good as while writing."

&

From the Desk of Simone de Beauvoir:
On the Side of Happiness

@ The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony

"You know she likes that, right?"

Thanks (& Happy Birthday)
to my twin brother Bruce
& his friend Stefanie for sending this one along!

"Never Try to Punish a Bookworm"

This tee-shirt reminds me of an anecdote told by the author Alice Hoffman about how she decided to be a writer. One day in Junior High, she got in trouble passing notes at school, so to punish her, the teacher intercepted the note and read aloud everything that she had written to her friend.

But instead of feeling embarrassed, Hoffman thought, "Wow, this is pretty cool to have all these people listening to what I just wrote!" After that, she said, there was no stopping her!

from her lecture at "Wordstock" 2016
Portland (Oregon) Book Festival

************************

My brother says it reminds him
of an experience with his two daughters:

My older, Anna Mary, was misbehaving.
I don't recall what she did that provoked my ire,
but I sent her to her room.

My younger, Sara Beth, was standing there.
She looked at me rolled her eyes in disgust.
"What?" I asked.
To which Sara Beth replied,
"You know she likes that, right?"

************************

Reader's Paradise ~ Aimee Stewart

Asking For A Friend

From Working Girl ~ The Movie ~ The Song

Getting back to a friend a few months after being
asked for my thoughts on a syllabus for teaching
a literature course on the theme of "Women & Work:
Just so you don't think I've been slacking off, I have been going around and around in my head trying to come up with something dealing with work issues and women's issues. I have not found the perfect solution. Everything I think of has a flaw, but I thought that just mentioning some of them to you might help you think of something else that would work.

First I thought of Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1853), then, jumping up to the 20th Century, Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, both of which deal with work issues but have male narrators and very few women characters of any kind.

Then I thought of Moo by Jane Smiley, which is hilarious and fast and has several good women characters and deals with work -- but the work is academe, which is such a strange genre all of its own (i.e., novels about English departments; e.g., Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Stoner) that I don't know if it would work. But it does focus on some other departments as well (agriculture!) and deals with management and strategy issues -- but again all about the politics of running a university -- such a non-representative work world and probably not the area your students will specialize in. I don't know.

Then I thought of Anna Quindlen's great essay collections (Living Out Loud; Thinking Out Loud); you know I'm a fan -- for the most part. Of course, they're not fiction; however, you do get a good sense of her life as a woman and a working parent. In the same category is a book of essays that I'd recommend to you anyway, just for yourself (or your book group): How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulic. This is a book (very swift to read) to open your eyes and break your heart. She devotes a lot of coverage to her work as a journalist and occasional parenting conflicts with her teenage daughter.

There's Ellen Foster, but perhaps too young. An admirable girl, learning how to manage money and household accounts, but no real work experience as yet.

A novel I loved from my Ph.D. reading list is Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age (1977), which deals with commercial / business architecture and the use of public space (and other things, like emotional isolation, the banality of evil, and the lack of moral center in the late 20th Century, hence the "ice age"). Unfortunately, it doesn't focus much on women's issues, though it does contain female characters, a runaway daughter, a pregnant homeless woman, and the like, and it does make you think about the connection between inside work space (say, the offices of these architectural firms) and the workability of what's actually created for everyday use -- concrete islands where pedestrians are stranded, foul underground walkways, etc. More recent is The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, but it paints such a bleak picture of work (and marriage and parenting).

As you can see, none of these are quite right, but I will keep thinking and try to write more soon. I'm getting tired and still have to go downstairs and wash the pots and pans. #Fun #SkulleryMaid #maidofallwork

Small Great Things

Speaking of what to read during a snowstorm, that's kind of how Jodi Picoult's novel, Small Great Things made its way onto my reading list.

Picoult's novel was the monthly selection for the book group of my sister's husband's sister. Got that? In the middle of February, my sister Di and her husband Tom were headed up to Minnesota (from Missouri) to visit Tom's sister Linda, the one reading Small Great Things for her book group, that was scheduled to meet the weekend of my sister's visit. Di had read the novel in preparation for accompanying Linda to the book meeting as a guest, but Mother Nature intervened with much more snow than expected, and the book club was cancelled.

When Di group told me and our older sister Peg about the cancellation, Peg and I were immediately inspired to read the novel for solidarity. It's not often that we are all reading the same thing at the same time, and Small Great Things provided the perfect opportunity. Peg found a nice hardback on sale, and I got a used bargain paperback, and before we knew it we were halfway through. I took it to San Francisco to read on the plane and could hardly put it down!

No sooner had I finished, than my daughter - in - law Cathleen said, "I need a book to read, do you have any ideas for me?" "As a matter of fact, yes I do!" And I passed on my opy of Small Great Things, making Cathleen an honorary member of our virtual Book Club!

Di recommended this book at the perfect time because for weeks afterward, it seemed to keep coming up one way or another in our thoughts and in our conversation. For example:

1. Not long after finishing the novel, I went with Gerry to his allergy appointment, and the nurse doing the pinprick testing told us that she used to be a Labor & Delivery nurse, but after fifteen years she transferred over to allergy. She said -- without my having said anything about Small Great Things -- "Labor & delivery could be very stressful with a lot of sadness. I needed a break from that." So I told her that I just finished a book in which the main character Ruth was a L & D nurse who said the same thing!

Later that day, Gerry was telling me about a family he knew when he was growing up in England that had one British parent and one Indian parent, and the four children had varying degrees of skin pigmentation from dark to light. Gerry said, "It would be an interesting sociological study to see how this impacted them, growing up in England."

I said, "Hey -- guess what? That's another theme in the novel that Di, Peg, and I just read. The two African American sisters, Ruth and Rachel are treated / perceived differently because one has darker skin than the other."

2. Around the same time, in a family group text, my sons were swapping articles back and forth on the merits of Affirmative Action and related programs for helping historically disadvantaged groups get a level playing field in the economy. Conveniently, I was able to chime in with all the new perspectives that I gained from Small Great Things: you can't just change the law and fix the problem in one generation; it requires generations of consciousness raising.

3. I happened to come across this good talk from Trevor Noah that reminds me of some of the later discussions in Small Great Things.

4. In the novel, Jodi Picoult uses the metaphor of perpetually catching the babies being thrown out of the window (449), but I have always heard it as the parable of pulling the babies out of the river -- and wrote about it as such, not so long ago. Here's my version; and here's hers:

“'I feel like I've been standing underneath an open window, just as a baby gets tossed out. I grab the baby, right, because who wouldn't? But then another baby gets tossed out, so I pass the baby to someone else, and I make the catch. This keeps happening. And before you know it there are a whole bunch of people who are getting really good at passing along babies, just like I'm good at catching them, but no one ever asks who the f--k is throwing the babies out the window in the first place.'

'Um . . . what baby are we talking about?

'It's not a baby, it's a metaphor,' I say irritated. 'I've been doing my job, but who cares, if the system keeps on creating situations where my job is necessary? Shouldn't we focus on the big picture, instad of just catching whatever falls out the window at any given moment?'" (449)

5. For more connections, Peg pointed us in the direction of a television series that we'd all been watching together -- For The People. In "You Belong Here" (Season 2, Episode 6, 11 April 2019), there is "another case of a universe coincidence, when the black lawyer finds out he was chosen to prosecute because he's black, a topic that this show seems to touch on quite often."

I knew the episode she meant and had definitely been reminded of Small Great Things when Leonard (the young black male lawyer in For the People) is being lectured by an older black lawyer about being chosen because he's black -- and also about being unable to understand his position of privilege (helpful parents, quality education, decent job, good health, and so forth) -- precisely becaue he has all those privileges. Yes, he has felt racial discrimination, but still he has a lot of other privileges that other blacks (and other whites) lack.

Leonard replies that he has worked for everything he has. And the older lawyer says, "Well, not exactly -- yes you worked hard, but some of it you were given, some of it was good luck." It was perfect timing to compare this conversation to the novel, where it is the young white female lawyer (named Kennedy) who has to learn this lesson from her black elders and peers.

Kennedy uses her new appreciation of the difference between equality and equity in her closing argument:

"I turn toward the jury. 'What if, ladies and gentlemen, today I told you that anyone here who was born on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday was free to leave right now? Also, they'd be given the most central parking spots in the city, and the biggest houses. They would get job interviews before others who were born later in the week, and they'd be taken first at the doctor's office, no matter how many patients were waiting in line. If you were born from Thursday to Sunday, you might try to catch up – but because you were straggling behind, the press would always point to how inefficient you are. And if you complained, you'd be dismissed for playing the birth-day card.' I shrug. 'Seems silly, right? But what if on top of these arbitrary systems that inhibited your chances for success, everyone kept telling you that things were actually pretty equal?'

" . . . 'We are supposed to pretend [race] is merely the icing on the cake of whatever charge has been brought to the table -- not the substance of it. We are supposed to be the legal guardians of a postracial society. But you know the word ignorance has an even more important word at its heart: ignore.
And I don't think it's right to ignore the truth any longer.'" (462 - 64)

6. In closing, here's one last example from For the People, not specifically about Small Great Things but about our shared certainty that the connections just keep on coming! A week earlier, the episode entitled "One Big Happy Family" (Season 2, Episode 6, 11 April 2019) -- about a corrupt judge sending teens to a for - profit juvenile detention center -- had fit right into our discussion of dominoe - effect coincidences.

The ah - ha moment takes place when some of the research team roll in a moveable blackboard that shows the entire path of connections leading from the judge to the owner of the detention center. They are missing one piece of the puzzle, but all of a sudden one of the young lawyers (can never remember all their names) holds up her phone because she remembers seeing a pic of another judge standing side by side with a relative of someone in the scam. Well -- something like that! I've probably totally scrambled it up, but you get the idea: Only connect!

You Can Read Anywhere You Go

Dinner at Sunset ~ Bay of Bangkok

The Modern Thai Philosophers
Speak to us of Reading:

If your mind is happy then you are happy anywhere you go.
When wisdom awakens within you,
you will see Truth wherever you look.
Truth is all there is.
It's like when you learned how to read,
you can then read anywhere you go.

Ajahn Chah (1918 - 1992

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Suttas are not meant to be 'sacred scriptures' that tell us what to believe. One should read them, listen to them, think about them, contemplate them, and investigate the present reality, the present experience with them. Then, and only then, can one insightfully know the truth beyond words.

Ajahn Sumedho (b 1934)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To believe straight away is foolishness, to believe after having seen clearly is good sense. That is the Buddhist policy in belief; not to believe stupidly, or to rely only on people, textbooks, conjecture, reasoning, or whatever the majority believes, but rather to believe what we see clearly for ourselves to be the case. This is how it is in Buddhism.

Those who read books cannot understand the teachings and, what's more, may even go astray. But those who try to observe the things going on in the mind, and always take that which is true in their own minds as their standard, never get muddled. They are able to comprehend suffering, and ultimately will understand Dharma. Then, they will understand the books they read.

Buddhadasa (1906 -1993)

"There is a sun within every person." ~ Rumi

“Some people are so much sunshine
to the square inch.” ~ Walt Whitman

Winter Reading Needs

Here are a few
"I've been meaning to read" titles
that came in handy during the snowy weekends
alphabetical by author, with favorite passages:
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
moderate horror, moody mystical magical realism
her specialty of course, though I prefer her family memoirs
still, you can't beat a good haunted house:

“I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village” (3).

"The Rochester house was the loveliest in town and had once had a walnut-panelled library and a second-floor ballroom and a profusion of roses along the veranda; our mother had been born there and by rights it should have belonged to Constance.

". . . When I was a child I used to believe that someday I would grow up and be tall enough to touch the tops of the windows in our mother's drawing room. They were summer windows, because the house was really intended to be only a summer house and our father had only put in a heating system because there was no other house for our family to move to in the winters; by rights we should have had the Rochester house in the village, but that was long lost to us. The windows in the drawing room of our house reached from the floor to the ceiling, and I could never touch the top; our mother used to tell visitors that the light blue silk drapes on the windows had been made up fourteen feet long. There were two tall windows in the drawing room and two tall windows in the dining room across the hall, and from the outside they looked narrow and thin and gave the house a gaunt high look. Inside, however, the drawing room was lovely. Our mother had brought golden-legged chairs from the Rochester house, and her harp was here, and the room shone in reflections from mirrors and sparkling glass" (4, 23).

Two - Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
by Madeleine L'Engle
autobiography of a writer; tribute to an actor; city vs country life
found amongst the free book from Chapel of the Good Shepherd!

"Life on this planet in general is not very humorous" (122).

Q: "Why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another?"
A: "Why should my love be powerless to help another?" (186).

"Nevertheless, the future is still very uncertain.
But I am not called to project into this still-unknown future;
I am called to be fully in the moment" (209).

"And how could I call myself a writer? I had a few poems published in a very small magazines. I sold two stories during that decade . . . and one novel . . . which was published (after a number of rejections) by Lippincott and disappeared with hardly a trace" (158).

Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses
by David Lodge
academic humor, British - American sabbatical swap
suggested by my brother Dave
I started this one back in 2001 and somehow got distracted,
but this time I picked it up again and read straight through.

"In Morris Zapp’s view, the root of all critical error was a naive confusion of literature with life. Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was an open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be about: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel considerable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn’t about how the guy could kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought that Jane Austen’s novels were about finding Mr. Right). The failure to keep the categories of life and literature distinct led to all kinds of heresy and nonsense: to 'liking' and 'not liking' books for instance, preferring some authors to others and suchlike whimsicalities which, he had constantly to remind his students, were of no conceivable interest to anyone except themselves" (62-3).

Sweet Will
by Eric Malpass
historical fiction, bioigraphical novel, nearly true
life of Shakespeare based on a handful of available facts
suggested by my highschool Shakespeare teacher a mere
44 years ago; a long delay, but I finally got around to it!

"The water meadows dreamed in the moonlight. The summer night was soft, heavy with the scent of may blossom. The stars were diamonds on a velvet tray. The young poet stared at the moon. The moon stared at the poet. It seemed that they had known each other a long time. Theirs was a love affair that went back through the slow ages of man. William inhaled deeply, as though to take into himself this rich and silver loveliness. 'On such a night,'he murmured, 'on such a night as this --' Someday, at more leisure, he would recollect this moment" (35).

[In Stratford - upon - Avon], "The dragon - flies shimmered and darted over the Avon, the willows dreamed, there was the scent of growing green things.

"While in London -- stench, filth, noise. A respected glover, a respected father, a loved husband; friends . . . good, solid tradesmen, with their carerful wives . . . All this could still be his his. O God, methinks it were a happy life -- A big fish lording it in a little pond. Whereas in London -- a minnow among carp: carp with savage teeth.

"But of course there could be no question. And that night he spoke the words Anne had been dreading. 'I must go back to London, Anne. There is much to do'" (209).

"What had Dick Field said, all those years ago?
If you were true to yourself, you could not betray anyone else.
Something like that" (231)

"They were like three famished men,
desperately scraping a bowl, the bowl of hope.
And the bowl was almost empty" (284).
Touchdown Jesus:The Mixing of Sacred
and Secular in American History
by R. Laurence Moore
a sociocultural study of the separation of church and state
suggested by my brother Bruce

Since the 1960's some politicians have warned Americans that they are enaged in a great culture war, one that pits religion and goodness aganst atheism and immorality. The truth is that the quarrels of recent years are not between religion and no religion, but aongh religious Amerians who disagree about the proper way to display religion in public. . . . the people who oppose the public display of religion are not necessarily secular humanists. They are religious men and women who wonder whether their God [or their country] is well served by presidents who take their oath of office with their hand on a Bible and refer to God in their inaugural adresses [NOT APPROPRIATE!]" (29).

"If Americans have not learned to treat religious beliefs as equal, then they are not likely to perfect equality in any other area of civic society. Because religion in America is a form of social capital, because it is suffused in so many areas of public life, public officials should never use religious belief in a nations until Americans at long last catch up with Article Six of the Constitution: 'No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States'" (189).

Touchdown Kitti