Monthly Archives: October 2010

A Chesterton Blog

books, Chesterton, church, history, people, philosophy, quotes

I’ve recently been browsing on this helpful blog, The Hebdomadal Chesterton, the purpose of which is to provide us with longer portions of G.K. Chesterton’s writings than the thousands of one-line quotes one can find online. The host takes passages from many different books by Chesterton.  I just read “Too Liberal to Be Likely,” which is still quite current, though written in 1925. It consists of a paragraph from The Everlasting Man, a book that got my head spinning delightfully God-ward many years ago when I read it the first time.

Hebdomadal, I learned, means “appearing weekly,” which the posts seemingly fail to do, as I look at the dates on the archives. But that’s not much of a problem, when G.K.C.’s ideas are so richly provoking, and keep the mind busy for much longer than a week at a time. And if one is hungry for more, there are several links to other places where similar nourishment can be found.

Stories of English – Wordstruck

books, children's books, church, history, poetry, quotes, , ,

A friend gave me a used paperback copy of Wordstruck, a memoir by Robert MacNeil, of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour that he hosted in different formats from 1975-1995 on TV. I had heard his name during those years, but our family didn’t watch television, so we didn’t pay attention until he co-authored the book The Story of English in 1986. It was quickly made into a TV series that we watched on our video player at home some time later.

I have often thought of renting the films again, because they were so fascinating in our fairly brief viewing. Now I find that Netflix doesn’t have them, and they are out of my price range to buy. There are some excerpts on YouTube.

Wordstruck chronicles MacNeil’s life up until the time he wrote the book in 1989, focusing on his love for the English language, including an account of the early influences that he thinks may have encouraged it. On the first page he describes an evening in chilly Nova Scotia when he was still a little boy, his mother reading to him while he snuggled in his pajamas on the sofa. She is reading the Robert Louis Stevenson poem “Windy Nights” that I read year after year to my own children — so I knew from the beginning that I would enjoy considering the author’s family life.

His parents loved books, and books were the main diversion of their life as “members of the large, scraping middle classes.” Mrs. MacNeil’s voice “was multi-hued, like glass fused of many bottles in a fire, with wisps of Lowland Scots and Highland Gaelic, Irish, Hanoverian German, Acadian French, and the many flavours of English deposited by generations of British soldiers and sailors,” and “She sounded enthralled, as full of wonder and close-rivetted attention as I was.”

And for MacNeil’s father, “Whatever he was doing, his books were a constant; even when he was short of cash for anything else, like paying bills, books appeared. In fact, he used books to hide the bills he couldn’t pay. Occasionally I found little nests of them when I pulled out a book. My mother said scornfully that was Irish–dealing with unpleasant reality by putting it away somewhere, out of mind. She never knew which books to look behind. It made her both furious with him and tender.”

“He always wrote on the flyleaf of each new book the date and where he was, so I can follow him: reading Chesterton just after they were married in November 1929, Scottish poets the following spring, Conrad through the early thirties, and Proust at sea in wartime….” Ah, what a life people lived before television!

MacNeil the Shakespearean actor explains how the words and rhythms and story of a poem like “Windy Nights” were so effective at training his mind to appreciate poetry without him being aware of anything except that he didn’t want his mother to stop reading. His grandmother loved that one, too, and made him memorize it on walks through the public gardens.

Stories of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter Pan; authors like Kipling and Dickens–they all contributed to a rich mental landscape, as words and word patterns populate the mind:

 “They accumulate in layers, and as the layers thicken they govern all use and appreciation of language thenceforth. Like music, the patterns of melody, rhythm, and quality of voice become templates against which we judge the sweetness and justness of new patterns and rhythms; and the patterns laid down in our memories create expectations and hungers for fulfillment again. It is the same for the bookish person and for the illiterate. Each has a mind programmed with language–from prayers, hymns, verses, jokes, patriotic texts, proverbs, folk sayings, clichés, stories, movies, radio, and television.”

“I picture each of those layers of experience and language gradually accumulating and thickening to form a kind of living matrix, nourishing like a placenta, serving as a mini-thesaurus or dictionary of quotations, yet more retrievable and interactive and richer because it is so one’s own, steeped in emotional colour and personal associations.”

Obviously MacNeil’s mind has a very thick matrix, and the book is full of his sharing various experiences of his life in all its cultural wealth, riches I think are made more valuable by being able to speak and write articulately about them from a broad knowledge background.

So far I’ve just drawn from the introductory chapters, but there are a few incidents later on that I want to mention. During WWII when he was still a boy, MacNeil paid ten cents for a tour of a captured German fighter plane, and while he sat in the cockpit the inspection of the inside “convinced me that Germans were real people, human beings….The few instruments had German labels and the realisation that the man who flew this had to be able to read the words which I could not made him intelligent, alive–a real person with a name. So were the Germans who had designed and built this beautiful machine, even if it was no match for our Spitfires, of course.”

From singing in the choir in the Anglican Church:

“There was poured into the porches of this child’s mind a rich echoing soup of sound which made literal sense only when recollected years later. If scientists could examine my brain, as they do the contents of murder victims’ stomachs, they would find that I had gorged myself when young on plum puddings and fruitcakes of this seventeenth-century prose; each word simple in itself, the combination rich and fruity, loved for the taste on the tongue, through years in the digesting; words for their own sake. That was particularly true of the often-repeated passages from the Book of Common Prayer, paraphrases of biblical verses that constitute English worship since the sixteenth century.”

“All this exposure to the King James Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the hymns seasoned me with the words and the forms that had launched British navies and armies into battle and imperial civil servants on their missions; the words that had christened the babies, married the daughters, and buried the dead of the Empire….It was like the tannin of English tea staining our souls for life. You do not lose it ever.”

God willing, His words have not stopped their work on the soul of this man who loves them so dearly as mere words, and not for His meaning that they carry. MacNeil tells us also about many of his favorite non-church words, like reek, and how they came to be and to change over time. He says of Old English: “The words are usually small, like nuts, with strong vowel sounds for flavor and a hard shell of consonants.”

In school the author was good at public speaking and reciting poems, and acting in plays. Then at seventeen, he fell in love–with Shakespeare. “On a winter afternoon in 1948….I didn’t find God but I found William Shakespeare, a piece of God’s work so extraordinary that he comes close to divinity itself.”

“The ironic cast of Shakespeare’s words released me a little from the prison of my self-absorption, and hooked me into a wider, grander scheme of things. They made me larger, freer.”

Of course, it is the language and literature of Shakespeare that MacNeil loves — but he also loves every other variety of English from limericks to slang. Being the author of The Story of English, he’s not afraid to acknowledge that language is always changing, and quotes Otto Jespersen, who wrote in 1905, “The English language would not have been what it is if the English had not been great respecters of the liberties of each individual and if everybody had not been free to strike out new paths for himself.”

There are some changes that do concern MacNeil: he wonders if we are losing our ear for the language because we have consigned good English to the printed page, and also started to depend on computers to choose our syntax and vocabulary. This makes us “more remote from the sound of our language, and therefore from a feeling for the weight of words.”

“There must be some living connection between the weight of words and truth….Today, it seems, words increasingly mean nothing to the person using them….The public words of public men seem to be used increasingly like aerosol room fresheners, to make nice smells.”

It was a very agreeable acquaintance to make, of Robert MacNeil and his love for the English language. I do like him, and spending time with him I was reminded of my own efforts to give my children a rich literary diet in their youth. I certainly did love to read to them; I even made them memorize poetry. But I know I haven’t loved the language as much as this man.

I’m impressed with his writing skill and glad to meet someone who rejoices in so many aspects of his humanity, but it is the Creator of us humans who ultimately deserves our adulation and love. For a fact, Shakespeare and even Robert MacNeil are examples of God’s handiwork and make us know something of the divine, because they are made in God’s image. I can’t revel in the language very long before I start to praise the God who gave us the gift of language and speech.

Just thinking about speech and language brings Psalm 19 to mind. I pray that the literature of the Psalter is a powerful part of the matrix of my own children’s minds and hearts — now I feel that we didn’t read from it enough. Here is part of that particular psalm to help me bring my review to an end:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
….Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.

How Not to Use the Vernacular

books, church, quotes, the language, , ,

In those long-ago days when new cars had built-in cassette players and we were a large homeschooling family, I invested in a set of tapes of the New Testament, narrated by Alexander Scourby. Those were the only straight readings of the Bible I heard until last week, when I popped The Message into my CD player.

Eugene Petersen is a man whom I admire and respect. The first I ever heard his name was as the author of a book with a compelling title, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. To hear him speak, as I have recently on the Mars Hill Audio publications, is to know that he has received a goodly share of grace and wisdom from God. In introductions to the recordings he explains that his motives for writing The Message paraphrase of the Bible were to make it accessible to the everyday English speaker as a “reading Bible,” to introduce them to God’s words and God’s ways, with prayers that they would go on to read a study Bible, and learn to participate in the life of God.

A couple of years ago I read a few passages in the printed version of his translation, as he loosely calls it, and was neither impressed nor offended. But I’m past the stage of needing an introduction, so I didn’t pay much attention. I bought the recording because it was the least expensive experiment I could make in a newer format, and I didn’t imagine that the experience would be so far removed from listening to Alexander Scourby.

It was only a year ago that Scourby read the entire gospel of Matthew to me while I was driving to the mountains and back in my old car. It was a flood of God’s blessing to hear that much of the earthly life of my Lord — His words, His being the Word — in one sitting, and I thought my heart would burst with the overflow. The several hours’ drive was over before I knew it.

But the narrator of The Message series makes me remember why we always chant or sing the Scripture in the Orthodox Church. The first portion I listened to was Matthew’s gospel, in which John the Baptist and Jesus appear early on, and the narrator gives them the voice and intonation of an actor over-dramatizing his role. In tone, it is so not the vernacular, unless you are a football coach at half-time when your team is losing, or a political talk-show host on a rant. To have the words of Christ spoken that way is to make Him out to be a cheerleader or an ad-man. Even the most Pentecostal preachers I have heard do not speak with such urgency through their whole sermon.

If only Eugene Peterson had been the one to read aloud his rendition of the Bible. He would not have been capable of such a style, nor would he have thought it necessary. He knows that the words of God do not need hepping up. Let your yea be yea and your nay, nay. But he speaks more slowly even than Scourby, whose pace sacrifices speed to dignity.

I had to dig out our old cassettes to check who the narrator was, and then I googled his name. Wikipedia says, “Although Scourby made voice recordings of over 500 different books, he considered the Bible to be his most important,” saying “‘…it is the one book that has the power to inspire, encourage, comfort and change the life of the person who hears it.'”

The Orthodox believe that worship services should be in the language of the people, the vernacular, so priests and missionaries through history made great efforts and sacrifices to translate the Bible and prayer books. St. Innocent is one I have heard the most about; he traveled by kayak all over the frozen north to minister to the native peoples of Alaska, and learned several languages besides his native Russian.

But we do not read the Scriptures aloud in church in the tones of our everyday speech, even though the words are in our respective languages. If you do that, it is nearly impossible not to emphasize one word over another and lend changeable meaning to the sentences depending on who you are and what assumptions and personality, not to say errors and misunderstandings, you bring with you. The only way to let the words speak for themselves is to chant or sing them without emphasizing one over another.

Scourby was Greek and baptized Orthodox. I wonder if he had a sense of how to read the Bible from hearing it chanted or sung in his youth. His reading resembles the way many ministers in Protestant and even Evangelical churches used to read, and I’m sure some still do, not with a lot of expression, but clearly and reverently.

And why did someone decide to intersperse jaunty electronic quiz-show music in between some tracks? Is that supposed to be the vernacular as well? Petersen says that he wants people to become familiar with “the way God speaks,” and he wants us to be mindful that God in the Incarnation did not take “the role of a sophisticated intellectual.” The style of The Message‘s narrator may not be sophisticated, but it is affected and distracting.

Not that I would give anyone even Alexander Scourby’s Bible readings with the thought that they could know from them alone what Petersen calls “God’s grand rule of love and justice.” God has spoken through His Son, the Word, and the words of the Bible testify that it is the Church, not the scriptures, that is “the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” (Ephesians 1:23) The Church is the only context in which one can learn and live the full meaning of Holy Scripture.

The Scourby readings were, it seems until recently, available for listening for free online. They have been replaced with readings by another man; I haven’t tried them yet.  Audio-Bible provides those new readings online and sells recordings of Alexander Scourby’s Bible in various modern formats. I can see making that investment at a future date. And for the present, I have a portable cassette player for playing my valuable antiques.

Essential Aromas

my garden, philosophy, , ,


When Debbie at Artful Aspirations posted about her sweet-smelling bush, I suspected a near relation, perhaps even a twin, to my Osmanthus fragrans. She said she bought her plant because of its common name Tea Olive; I had only known mine as Sweet Olive.

Not many days later M.K. at Through a Glass, Darkly, who was not a follower of Debbie’s blog, posted photos of her “holly bush,” with descriptions of its “heady and rich” scent reminiscent of gardenia.

The challenge of describing various scents is always of interest to me. I wonder if an individual flower is easier to pin down than a whole rain forest. We usually have to say that any given smell is something like another. Having grown up in an orange grove, I didn’t confuse osmanthus with orange blossoms, but upon my first encounter I did envision some woman along the route of our neighborhood stroll setting an apricot pie to cool by the window.

Surely osmanthus is its own heady aroma that nothing else is quite like. Last year, at the end of a post about how various other scents link to my grandmother, I tried to describe its effect on me.

One website that sells many essential oils for their aromatherapy benefits describes Osmanthus fragrans as “Friendly, lively, intriguing, what’s new, what’s next, early morning excitement, setting out on a whole new journey.”

Peet’s has blended a black tea with osmanthus blossoms, which might add some extra excitement to those mornings when I choose it over plain black or green.They say “its pleasant aroma could be described as a combination of apricot, chamomile, and orange flower.” They don’t make it all year long; stocking up would be necessary if you want to be assured of having it when you want.

After she heard about osmanthus, M.K. began to wonder if her hollies might actually be Tea Olives. In the meantime I had been reading about fragrant holly bushes and found that there are hundreds of types of holly, and some of them do look a bit like osmanthus. One osmanthus looks so much like holly that its common name is False Holly. Wikipedia mentions that osmanthus flowers can be various colors, even dark orange, and that in China it is traditional to mix some osmanthus jam into millet gruel.

You can see on that page a photo of an orange-flowered osmanthus taken in Japan. All of the photos here on my blog were taken just this week in my yard.  B. and I planted the bush about 20 years ago on the advice of  horticulturist friend. If we had known how big they get, we’d have started it out farther from the house.

Wikimedia also has this whole page of related photos.

Some of my other favorite botanical scents are lemongrass and rose geranium. I have a big bush of the geranium in a pot on the patio, and in my cupboard some essential oil of lemongrass to add by drops to hand soap. So far I’ve only enjoyed my osmanthus when it happens to fill the air with its essence, and that occasion always takes me by surprise and humbles me by the extravagant gift. “The osmanthus is blooming!”  I will announce, if someone is around. This happens at least twice a year; do I really need the oil extraction at other times?

The people on the planet of Perelandra in C.S. Lewis’s novel by that name had an admirable way of making the most of every experience. They considered an actual event in time to be only the smallest part of anything that they did or that happened to them. The anticipation was also to be enjoyed for all it was worth, and the memory of the incident or act would be savored into the future. In this way even the most lovely and desirable events were completely satisfying whether or not they took place more than once in a lifetime.

When one comes upon a strong aroma, say, walking into a house where bread is baking, or walking out one’s front door to the scent of osmanthus, if the stimulus continues for a time the olfactory receptors get desensitized or something; in any case, you stop noticing, until you go out and come back again. So I don’t know, if I had only smelled osmanthus once, if I could have made much of the experience. I’m not too good at paying attention, if that’s what’s necessary.

But I’ve had decades of being enveloped by the sweetness and the love that the Sweet Olive aroma signifies to me. I think I’ll just try to bask in it for a few seconds longer next time I pass by, or sit on the step and drink it in as long as my nose will keep sending the message to my brain. And if we move to a colder climate I’m sure I’ll be busy enough sniffing the air in that place without trying to import gifts that belong to the memorable past.