Christmas Gifts From The Sea

" . . . the small circle of home . . . the particular uniqueness
of each member of the family;
the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here.
This is the basic substance of life."
[And of Christmas!]

Shells for the Tree

For what is Christmas,
if not heaven on earth?
57 - 58: " . . . the neglect of our own inner springs. Why have we been seduced into abandoning this timeless inner strength of woman for the temporal outer strength of man? This outer strength of man is essential to the pattern, but even here the reign of purely outward solutions seems to be waning today. Men, too are being forced to look inward -- to find inner solutions as well as outer ones. Perhaps this change marks a new stage of maturity for modern extrovert, activist, materialistic man. Can it be that he is beginning to realize that that the kingdom of heaven is within?"

126: "If we stop to think about it, are not the real casualties of modern life just these centers I have been discussing: the here, the now, the individual and his relationships. The present is passed over in the race for the future, the here is neglected in favor of the there, and the individual is dwarfed by the enormity of the mass. America, which as the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future."

127 - 128: "The here, the now, and the individual have always been the special concern of the saint, the artist, and -- from time immemorial -- the woman. . . . the small circle of home . . . the particular uniqueness of each member of the family; the spontaneity of now; the vividness of here. This is the basic substance of life. These are the individual elements that form the bigger entities like mass, future, world. We may neglect these elements, but we cannot dispense with them. They are the drops that make up the stream. They are the essence of life itself. It may be our special function to emphasize again these neglected realities, not as a retreat from greater responsibilities, but as a first real step toward a deeper understanding and solution of them. When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.”

― Anne Morrow Lindbergh ―
Gift from the Sea

Previous Related Posts:
Only Collect a Few (Imprints #3)
More Gifts from the Sea (& Sky)
More Gifts from the Seashore
Trees and Shells

Thanks to Antoinette for this one:

"I must write it all out, at any cost.
Writing is thinking. It is more than living,
for it is being conscious of living."

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh ~

More Gifts from the Seashore

Thanks to Vicky, Nikki, and Katie
for these thoughtful beach souvenirs!

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gifts from the Sea is full of so much wisdom, I can't put it down without compiling yet another blog post of favorite insights. It is only a short, small book and can be read so quickly, but the content is dense with empowering mantras.
All Anne Morrow Lindbergh passages below
are taken from Gift from the Sea (1955)
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906 – 2001)
The Dilemma of Free Time
Lindbergh's vocabulary on the stressful fragmentation and multiplicity of modern (i.e., 1955) life seems to be taken straight from a 21st century podcast:

“This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul. And this is not only true of my life, I am forced to conclude; it is the life of millions of women in America. I stress America, because today, the American woman more than any other has the privilege of choosing such a life. Woman in large parts of the civilized world has been forced back by war, by poverty, by collapse, by the sheer struggle to survive, into a smaller circle of immediate time and space, immediate family life, immediate problems of existence. The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life. How long she will hold this enviable and precarious position no one knows. But her particular situation has a significance far above its apparent economic, national or even sex limitations. . . . not only . . . the American woman, but also the American man. . . . not merely . . . the American . . . but of our whole modern civilization, since life in American today is held up as the ideal of a large part of the world. (26 - 28)

"I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in America than anywhere else in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. (33)

"The room of one's own, the hour alone are now more possible in a wider economic class than ever before." (52)

The Value of Childcare, Housework, and Homemaking
Lindbergh's views of parenting in the 1950s are consistent with the current family policies of recent presidential hopeful Andrew Yang. Contemporary feminist writer Meg Conley, describes her first encounter with Yang's progressive economic vision:

"Yang wasn’t pandering to stay-at-home parents. He was preaching their good word, acknowledging their real, economic value with his platform of human-centered capitalism and policies like Universal Basic Income.

I cried in my kitchen. Someone saw my work."
*************

Compare to Anne Morrow Lindberg in 1955:
"I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly. What we fear is not so much that our energy may be leaking away through small outlets as that it may be going 'down the drain.' We do not see the results of our giving as concretely as man does in his work. In the job of home-keeping there is no raise from the boss, and seldom praise from others to show us we have hit the mark. . . . many women hardly feel indispensable any more, either in the primitive struggle to survive or as the cultural font of the home." (46 - 47)

Duration of Joy
Lindbergh writes of life's small pleasures that bring refreshment but not permanence, shells that are beautiful but too fragile to last:

“Beautiful, fragile, fleeting, the sunrise shell; but not, for all that, illusory. Because it is not lasting, let us not fall into the cynic's trap and call it an illusion. Duration is not a test of true or false. The day of the dragon-fly or the night of the Saturnid moth is not invalid simply because that phase in its life cycle is brief. Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. . . . The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things.” (76)

Fleeting but not illusory. Edna St. Vincent Millay says the same thing in one of her sonnets. Love is always valid, even holy, no matter how brief:

When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting,
That this was love? When did I ever, I say,
With iron thumb put out the eyes of day
In this cold world where charity lies bleating
Under a thorn, and none to give him greeting,
And all that lights endeavor on its way
Is the teased lamp of loving, the torn ray
Of the least kind, the most clandestine meeting?

As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy,
Upon the name of love however brief,
For want of whose ill-trimmed, aspiring wick
More days than one I have gone forward slowly
In utter dark, scuffling the drifted leaf,
Tapping the road before me with a stick.

~ from Huntsman, What Quarry?

Literary Allusions
Gift of the Sea is filled references to numerous other writers, including William Blake, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Rilke, Plotinus, Saint-Exupery, and Viriginia Woolf. Lindbergh writes, perhaps in defiance of her own reality, that "We all wish to be loved alone," quoting the Andrews Sisters ("Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree") and W. H. Auden:

It is true of the normal heart
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
I would add to this discussion the movie Choose Me and the wish expressed on the tombstone of American poet Raymond Carver:

Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

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

If you're craving some peace
of mind as the holidays approach
give yourself an early gift ~ a copy of Gifts from the Sea.
Give yourself an hour to read & find your own connections.
There are so many!

Egon Schiele: Houses by the Sea, 1914

More Gifts from the Sea (& Sky)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the
day, of work, of details, of intimacy -- even of communication,
one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of
stars [or jack - o - lanterns], pouring into one like a fresh tide.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906 – 2001)
Gift from the Sea (1955)

As I mentioned earlier this month on my Fortnightly blog post, I have long been a fan of Anne Morrow Lindbergh but had neglected to appreciate the continued timeliness of Gift from the Sea, first published in 1955. In 1975, a 20th Anniversary Edition includes her expression of surprise and gratitude at the book's ongoing popularity:

"The original astonishment remains, never quite dimmed over the years, that a book of essays, written to work out my own problems, should have spoken to so many other women."

If she was astonished then, perhaps she'd be astounded now; for the relevance of her work has continued well into the 21st Century. In 2005, along came the 50th Anniversary Edition [with a new introduction by her daughter Reeve], which even now, another sixteen years down the road, offers wisdom entirely applicable to life on our planet, post - 9 / 11 and midst - COVID. Her concerns from five decades ago are so contemporary, they could have been expressed this very year.

In 1955 -- before the internet, before cell phones -- she wrote:

“Today a kind of planetal point of view has burst upon mankind. The world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts and sufferings even in the outermost circle touch us all, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.

But just how far can we implement this planetal awareness? We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world; to digest intellectually all the information spread out in public print; and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather — for I believe the heart is infinite — modern communication loads us with more problems than the human frame can carry. It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to be stretched, but body, nerve, endurance and life-span are not as elastic. My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old age. Our grandmothers, and even—with some scrambling—our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.

Faced with this dilemma what can we do? How can we adjust our planetal awareness to our Puritan conscience? We are forced to make some compromise. Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass. Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves. But can one really feel deeply for an abstraction called the mass? Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present? Can one solve world problems when one is unable to solve one’s own? Where have we arrived in this process? Have we been successful, working at the periphery of the circle and not at the center?” (124 - 26)

In 2021 -- feminist minister Nadia Bolz - Weber expresses a similar dilemma in her essay, "If you can't take in anymore, there's a reason: it's all too much"!

"I used to live in a very old apartment building with super sketchy electrical wiring. Were I to audaciously assume my hair drier could run while my stereo was on, I would once again find myself opening the grey metal fuse box next to the refrigerator and flipping the breaker. My apartment had been built at a time when there were no electric hair driers, and the system shut down when modernity asked too much of it.

"I think of that fuse box often these days, because friends, I just do not think our psyches were developed to hold, feel and respond to everything coming at them right now; every tragedy, injustice, sorrow and natural disaster happening to every human across the entire planet, in real time every minute of every day. The human heart and spirit were developed to be able to hold, feel and respond to any tragedy, injustice, sorrow or natural disaster that was happening IN OUR VILLAGE.

"So my emotional circuit breaker keeps overloading because the hardware was built for an older time.

And yet, when I check social media it feels like there are voices saying “if you aren’t talking about, doing something about, performatively posting about ___(fill in the blank)___then you are an irredeemably callous, priviledged, bigot who IS PART OF THE PROBLEM” and when I am someone who does actually care about human suffering and injustice (someone who feels every picture I see, and story I read) it leaves me feeling like absolute shit. I am left with wondering: am I doing enough, sacrificing enough, giving enough, saying enough about all the horrible things right now to think of myself as a good person and subsequently silence the accusing voice in my head? No. The answer is always no. No I am not. Nor could I. Because no matter what I do the goal of “enough” is just as far as when I started.

And yet doing nothing is hardly the answer.

So I wanted to share something with you. Every day of my life I ask myself three discernment questions I learned from one of my teachers, Suzanne Stabile:

What’s MINE to do, and what’s NOT mine to do?

What’s MINE to say and what’s NOT mine to say?

And the third one is harder:

What’s MINE to care about and what’s NOT mine to care about?

To be clear – that is not to say that it is not worthy to be cared about by SOMEONE, only that my effectiveness in the world cannot extend to every worthy to be cared about event and situation. It’s not an issue of values, it’s an issue of MATH."

Writing 66 years apart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Nadia Bolz-Weber draw the same conclusion: however infinite we might like our hearts to be, our resources are limited. We must use our energy wisely, stay focused, and use our wits to solve the problems at hand. Without a sure focus . . .

"a singleness of eye . . . that will enable [us] to carry out these obligations," we will spill away "in driblets . . . seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim. . . . With our pitchers, we attempt sometimes to water a field, not a garden" (Gift from the Sea, 23 45, 52)

When it comes to staying focused on the time and task at hand -- the garden, not necessarily the entire field, Pastor Nadia says it so well:

"Because actual reality is also the only place where actual joy is to be found. If joy is delayed until a preferred future comes about, we set ourselves up for despair. But if there is hope in THIS day. Joy in THIS reality. This life. This body. This heart, then certainly we can prevail."

Somebody somewhere mentioned
this earlier, water-color edition . . .

Once Upon a Cat

~ AND BOOKS! ~

[2023: See Halloween & Christmas]

LESTER & FUQUA
Just Hanging Out in Their Citrus Boxes

One of the polydactyl cats at the
Ernest Hemingway House
JUST HANGING OUT IN KEY WEST
Digital photo taken by Marc Averette

For some readerly feline fun:

Hemingway's Cats
by Lindsey Hooper

a lighthearted novel
featuring cute cats with funny names such as
"Pawpa Hemingway, the grumpiest cat in Key West" (141)
&
Ernestine Hemingway, Lady Bratt Ashley, Kilamanjaro

Hooper loves a good pun, as she describes the cats (& humans)
hunkering down to wait out the frightful weather event:
"When Hurricane Harry met Tropical Storm Sally"
[More Wise Cats!]

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

Following last month's heroic (real life) Book Woman,
this month's reading included a notable (fictional) Book Man,
Jean Perdu, the Literary Apothecary,
who seeks to heal his friends and clients
through prescribed reading.

Monsieur Perdu would no doubt agree
with (real life) journalist Will Schwalbe:

"Books can’t do anything by themselves.
They need us.
Today we need to read more than ever.
And we need to act now more than ever."

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

Thanks to a few of my personal Literary Apothecaries:
Steven for Hemingway's Cats,
Katie for The Little Paris Bookshop
-- such fun presents for a girl who loves books & cats!

And to Igor, who says:

"This is a bookshop! We'll fight them on the Seine!

My favorite quote from
The Little Paris Bookshop:

"Do you mean: 'Sorry, I haven't finished what I wanted to say' or 'Sorry for being in love with you and only giving you headaches'?"

"Both. Any request for forgiveness. Maybe you've got used to feeling guilty for everything you are. Often it's not we who shape words, but the words that shape us." (37)

~ Nina George ~

Sorry, sorry, sorry . . .

Book Women

Thanks to Barbara McFadden for sending this vintage
photo of a reading, writing, bicycle - riding
Book Woman with Typewriter

Reading The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek [Kentucky] will open your eyes to a few things. First of all, you must brace yourelf to the nearly incomprehensible reality that this story takes place in 1936. The desperate living conditions for so many of the characters seem more like 1836. One way you know it's the 20th Century is the Pack Horse Library WPA Project.

These devoted librarians and their amazing steeds traveled to remote but inhabited areas, delivering novels, magazines, almanacs, newspapers, picture books, scrapbooks, recipes, medicinal advice, and even occasional treats of special food, such as herbs, teas, and fruit for the school children.

Thanks to my sister Diane for recommending this very inspiring historical novel which is introducing a new generation of readers to the Pack Horse Librarians -- and to the Blue People of Kentucky. We had no idea!

You would be a well on your way to completing a Great Books Course if you devoted a summer or a semester to reading all of the classic titles that nineteen - year - old Cussy Mary Carter delivers to her patrons -- Peter Pan, Peter Rabbit, Robinson Crusoe, Brave New World. Despite her own tough road in life, Cussy (named after her great - grandfather's birthplace in France) is determined to raise the consciousness and the literacy of the citizens of Troublesome Creek. She distributes not only the standards but also creates scrapbooks of unique selections from her own eclectic reading:

"The poetry section I'd made filled several pages, and I paused to reread one of my favorites, 'In a Restaurant' by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. I loved how I could hear the music of the violin he'd written into it. Beside it, I'd pasted 'Trees in a Garden' by D. H. Lawrence. The poem was a pretty one about trees, and I could almost smell the naked scents of woody barks, budding leaves, and fruits." (52)

Out of curiosity, I just had to look these poems up and share them here:

Trees In The Garden

Ah in the thunder air
how still the trees are!

nd the lime-tree, lovely and tall, every leaf silent
hardly looses even a last breath of perfume.

And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of leaves
white, ivory white among the rambling greens
how evanescent, variegated elder, she hesitates on the green grass
as if, in another moment, she would disappear
with all her grace of foam!

And the larch that is only a column, it goes up too tall to see:
and the balsam-pines that are blue with the grey-blue blueness of things from the sea,
and the young copper beech, its leaves red-rosy at the ends
how still they are together, they stand so still
in the thunder air, all strangers to one another
as the green grass glows upwards, strangers in the silent garden.

Lichtental

D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)


***************
In a Restaurant

He wears a red rose in his buttonhole,
A city-clerk on Sunday dining out:
And as the music surges over the din
The heady quavering of the violin
Sings through his blood, and puts old cares to rout,
And tingles, quickening, through his shrunken soul,

Till he forgets he ledgers, and the prim
Black, crabbèd figures, and the qualmy smell
Of ink and musty leather and leadglaze,
As, in eternities of Summer days,
He dives through shivering waves, or rides the swell
On rose-red seas of melody aswim.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878 – 1962)

***************
I learened that Gibson was best known for his poem "Flannen Isle," based on a true story of the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse workers. My first thought was, Hey, that sounds like it would make a good movie! Sure enough that show exists: The Vanishing, a 2018 psychological thriller that I only came across because of reading The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek.

After viewing the movie, we followed up with a documentary that gave additional background, perhaps more factual, though much remains unknown. For example, the three lighthouse keepers probably did not kill each other; more likely, they were swept away in the storm. Still, you never know what facts or fictions may be revealed, or how one title will lead on to another, when you are being guided by the reading list of a learned Book Woman!

All - loving, tender - hearted Book Woman
Photo by Jay Beets

Me as Book Woman:
Likes to read aloud!

P.S. Try to find later:
Book Woman link
Read aloud link

Sacred Ground

~ Book Benches ~
Burgas, Bulgaria

Q: What do books stores & grief have in common?
A: "Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground."
~ Oscar Wilde ~

The Magic of the Book:
~ Hermann Hesse on Why We Read and Always Will ~

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

Summer Reading So Far

Two old favs by E. L. Konigsburg:
Silent to the Bone & Outcasts of Schuyler Place

Two old favs by Muriel Spark:
A Far Cry From Kensington & Memento Mori

Two new mysteries:
Kiss of the Moonflower by Joe Benevento
Careless Love by Steve Zettler

Three sci - fis:
Recursion by Blake Crouch
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster (2022 ~ Great Books)

One biography:
Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess:
The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland

Ariadne

A sad tale, no matter how it is portrayed . . .

Ariadne in Naxos ~ 1877
by Evelyn De Morgan ~ 1855 - 1919

from the novel Ariadne
by Jennifer Saint
~ My birthday present from Ben & Cathleen! ~
~ Highly recommended summer reading! ~

Dionysus: "I did not speak of my burning questions . . . the need to ask why. Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing. Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled. And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief" (176 - 77).

"But I have told you, Ariadne, that the other gods are not like me. I have walked among mortals for many years and I know the dizzying joys of humanity: the fragile, ferocious power of human love and the savage force of grief. When I share wine with mortals, we celebrate together and I feel the clustered hopes and yearinings, the pain and fears that you all share. In those sacred rites, as simple and ancient as the world itself, we raise a cup and we drink together, and our souls are freed from the constraints of the everyday. We find what unites us, what we have in common with one another. I have felt the gaping wound and the bruised, ragged edges of grief. I know that human life shines more brightly because it is but a shimmering candle against an eternity of darkness, and it can be extinguished with the faintest breeze" (178 - 79).

Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus ~ before 1782
by Angelica Kauffmann ~ 1741 – 1807

More about Ariadne & Dionysus

Bacchus and Ariadne ~ 1522–1523
Titan ~ 1488/90 - 1576

Indoors Outdoors

Thanks to my friend Nikki for sharing this one:
Sunshine in the Living Room, 1910–1912
by Peter Ilsted (1861 - 1933)

So beautiful to read indoors on a late Spring day . . .
equally lovely to sit outside . . .

Springtime or The Reader, 1872
by Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)

Taurus ~ Shakespeare's Birthday

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

Gemini ~ My Birthday
An excellent birthday quote that most likely remains
true no matter what the ages in question:

"The truth is, your mother doesn't know any more
about being forty than you do about being twenty."
from A: A Novel ~ by Alan Lindsay

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

Reading selection for a lush afternoon:
Rules of Civility ~ by Amor Towles

A few favorite passages:
93: "'Absolutely.'

"A neutral observer would probably have raised an eyebrow at my answer. There wasn't much jingle in my delivery, and one-word responses just have that way of not sounding very convincing. But the thing of it is, I meant it. Every one word of it."

156: "Dicky . . . took relative pride and absolute joy in weaving together the strands of his life so that when he gave them a good tug all the friends of friends of friends would come tumbling through the door."
[Similar to Mrs. Dalloway!]

323-24: "Life doesn't have to provide you any options at all. It can easily define your course from the outset and keep you in check through all manner of rough and subtle mechanics. To have even one year when you're presented with choices that can alter your circumstances, your character, your course -- that's by the grace of God alone. And it shouldn't come without a price. . . . I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss."

P.S.
"You have learned something.
That always feels at first
as if you have lost something." 

from Major Barbara
by George Bernard Shaw

Flat Stanley

Flat Stanley takes Little Darby for a Walk

Many thanks to my great - nephew Judah for asking me to participate in the The Flat Stanley Project. Similar to the travels of my Panama Bag or the famous travelling gnomes who are kidnapped and taken on trips around the world, the idea is to send Flat Stanley out to meet new people and see new places. Then he returns to the schoolchildren to share his various adventures of life beyond the classroom.

If this is the first you've heard of the Flat Stanley books by Jeff Brown, now is the time to add these fun titles to that all - important summer reading list! Summer vacation is the perfect time to check out Stanley's Original Adventure, as well as the entire series of sequels. (You can also watch on youtube.)

Here's what Flat Stanley and I got up to
when he came for a visit in my neck of the woods:

First, meeting the pets . . .

Flat Stanley get a kiss From Darby.

Flat Stanely pets the cats, Lester and Fuqua.

Flat Stanley encounters another kind of cat --
and admires the very creative sidewalk art!

Second, some local highlights . . .

Flat Stanley has breakfast at our favorite restaurant:
Town & Gown Bistro.

Historic Amtrak Station in Lafayette, Indiana.

Flat Stanley crosses the pedestrian bridge
over the Wabash River. Lafayette on one side,
West Lafayette on the other (Indiana).

Welcome to the Renewable Energy House --
a perfect fit for Flat Stanley!

Third, a visit to campus . . .

Flat Stanley flies the flag at Purdue University,
West Lafayette, Indiana.

Flat Stanley goes for a “Spin” around the campus!

Flat Stanley has a chat with Neil Armstrong,
sitting by the Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering

American Astronaut
Neil Armstrong
BS Aeronautical Engineering 1955
Honorary Doctorate 1970

Fourth, a well - earned rest . . .

After a busy afternoon, Flat Stanley
takes a nap in the stroller with Baby Ellie.

Biobooks from Friends

'Oh time where are you?'

Self Portrait ~ Time Flies ~ Frida Kahlo

Looking through some old reading journals,
I recently came across this line from 1981:

"So many things to read!
Or, as my dear, wise friend Diane says,
'Oh time where are you?' "

Thanks to my readerly friends who sent me the following
selections, life stories from various times and places,
which have enriched the first quarter of 2021:
Shuggie Bain (2020)
by Douglas Stuart (b 1976)

" . . . every single one of her children was as observant and wary as a prison warden" (51).

"Now, as the taxi pulled out into the main road, Agnes made a show of looking back and waving mournfully through the rear window with a long, heavy blink. She thought it was a cinematic touch, like she was the star of her own matinee" (90).

" 'Why the f--k did you bring me here?'

'I had to see.'

'Had to see what? . . . I thought this is what you wanted.'

'I had to see if you would actually come.'

She had loved him, and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good" (110).

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)
by Trevor Noah (b 1984)

" . . . Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson.

"I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don't have that the Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that's really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It's harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren't counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal?

"So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he's just another strongman from the history books . . . (195 - 96).

George S. Kaufman [1889 - 1961]: An Intimate Portrait (1972)
by Howard Teichmann (1916 - 1987)

"Edna said she's rather work with George than anyone else . . . Later in their collaboration Miss Ferber acquired a country house, and for a while they worked there. Frequently, however, an impatient buzzer would sound; Edna would excuse herself and leave the room. A few minutes later, she'd return, work would resume, and then the buzzer would sound again.

"Infuriated by these interruptions, George demanded an explanation. 'Well, here in the country, help is so hard to get that I don't ring for the servants,' she said. 'When they want something, they send for me.'

"'They're acting like actors, Edna,' he bristled. 'Pretty soon they'll want their names above the title of this play'" (89).

"'Edna,' he once said, 'reminds me of a Confederate general. And I'm from Pittsburgh'" (90).

"Another time, when things weren't going too well with Strike Up the Band, Ira Gershwin saw two elegant Edwardian - looking gentlemen buying tickets at the box office.

"'That must be Gilbert and Sullivan coming to fix the show,' Gershwin quipped.

"'Why don't you put jokes like that in your lyrics?' Kaufman countered" (108).

"'You've heard of people living in a fool's paradise?' Kaufman inquired. 'Well, Leonora has a duplex there'" (125).

Five People in Heaven (2003)
by Mitch Albom (b 1958)

"Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from the inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. . . . You need to forgive" (141 - 42).

Carnival

Mardi Gras . . . Ash Wednesday . . .
"The farewell to flesh.
I dressed in feathers. Pointed beak and glitter.
How we danced, through lights and confetti.
The good-bye to the body.

Not forever, but for now." (66)

~ Carole Maso ~ from AVA ~

[More on The Quotidian Kit]

Mardi Gras ~ Cat Mask ~ Previous Post

"'CARNAGE!,' the headline screamed above a full - color picture of a train carriage that was almost broken in two. Carnage from the Latin caro, carnis, meaning 'flesh,' Same root as carnival. 'The taking away of the flesh.' You couldn't really get two more different words than carnival and carnage. Everywhere -- well, perhaps not everywhere, not in Bangladesh, for example, but certainly in an awful lot of places -- they had some kind of carnival before Lent, but in Britain all you got were pancakes. (171)

"When he woke up, they told him about the train crash again. A nurse showed him the front page of a newspaper. 'CARNAGE!' it said. He couldn't remember what the word meant. Nothing to do with cars, he supposed. . . . It was mere luck that he was alive when others weren't, a momentary lapse in concentration from the Fates that had led to him surviving and not someone else. (182, 310)

"Reggie wanted to say that it was nothing to do with her, but it would have sounded churlish given the circumstances -- carnage, et cetera. (187)

" . . . a wedding ring that strangled your finger . . . Strangled, estranged . . . the words were very similar." (322)

~ Kate Atkinson ~
from When Will There Be Good News?

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

P.S.
2023

The Kiss (1870)
Auguste Toulmouche (1829 – 1890)

See also Raoul & Marguerite

Some Old Things for the New Year

Plus a new little avid reader!
Sometimes a baby just needs to catch up
on her favorite magazines!

So far, Little Ellie has only new favorites,
but I have a lot of recurring favorites.
Here is a random list of things that have re-
crossed my mind lately or come up in conversation:

"Although speakers and listeners, writers and readers, are in one sense engaged in a cooperative effort to understand one another, they are also in conflict over the amount of effort that each will expend on the other.  That is, the speaker or writer wants to say what he has to say with as little energy as possible and the reader or listener wants to understand with as little energy as possible. . . . Thus anything that facilitates the transfer of  meaning is important in this tight economy of energy."

Mina P. Shaughnessy (1924 - 1978)
from Errors and Expectations, pp 11 - 12
1. More about writing:
"On Keeping a Notebook" by Joan Didion

2. About spirituality:
Nearly anything by Richard Rohr

3. About reminiscing:
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

4. About the meaning of life:
The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead
by David Shields

5. About de-cluttering:
The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning:
How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter
by Margareta Magnusson

6. About reincarnation:
The Search for a Soul: Taylor Caldwell's Psychic Lives
by Jess Stearn

7. About visions:
Lying Awake by Mark Salzman

"She knew that it was better to have a dream, and pay a price for it, than to be lukewarm. Sometimes the price of following a dream includes confusion. . . . Sister John thought: I can't bear the thought of going back to who I was before. I prayed and scrubbed and went through the motions with no feeling of love, only a will to keep busy. If the surgery were to take my dream away, everything I've goone through up to now would seem meaningless. I wouldn't even be able to draw inspiration from the memeory of it; I couldn't face that desert again, not this late in my life." (137 - 38)

8. While we're on the topic, a great poem that goes
along with the theme of the novel Lying Awake:

Monet Refuses The Operation

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights of Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)
German born American poet
Pultizer Prize for Poetry, 1997

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

Ironically, a year ago we joked that 2020
was going to the year of clearer vision,
as in 20 / 20. Haha!
But, alas, it was not to be.

Here's to better luck in 2021!

Re-read some old favorites and
may our minds be stronger tomorrow!