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!