Monthly Archives: February 2019

Glimmers and daily bread.

books, quotes, , , ,

In regard to my reading habits of late, I am behaving much as I did during the months when my husband was sick unto death. It must be that the challenging remodeling project, combined with the physical disorder in several rooms, are taking all my resources to deal with it all, and making me hungry for literary comfort food. It’s hard to predict what I will be able to attend to, as I am impatient and flighty. The rare poem, or children’s stories of the deep and primal sort — those seem to be the best right now.

In the high school class that I help teach at church, we are are still working our way through C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, in which story George MacDonald has a part, being as he was greatly responsible for Lewis coming to faith. That got us talking about MacDonald’s books, and I was reminded of The Princess and Curdie, which I hadn’t read for a long time. I brought it into my “book larder” almost as soon as I got home on Sunday, and have been taking that nourishment.

A quote from writer Mary Karr that I read today seems pertinent: “Memorize poetry & short prose hunks. This makes language eucharistic: you eat it. You take somebody else’s passion & suffering into your body, and it transforms you.” I found this to be the case a few years ago as I read MacDonald’s Phantastes at my cabin.

When I read the words that Curdie heard Princess Irene sing, before I had run across Carr’s advice, I had immediately thought that I should learn them by heart, to be part of a laid-up treasure to draw from.

They are the kind of message that must be stored in the heart if it’s to have any meaning and use at all:

 

The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the time when the sleepers shall rise.

The ocean in music rolls,
And gems are turning to eyes,
And the trees are gathering souls
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

The weepers are learning to smile,
And laughter to glean the sighs;
Burn and bury the care and guile,
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

Oh, the dews and the moths and the daisy red,
The larks and the glimmers and flows!
The lilies and sparrows and daily bread,
And the something that nobody knows!

(I wrote again briefly about The Princess and Curdie: here.)

 

 

 

Simeon knew.

church, feasts, , ,

Lighting candles before Vigil this evening, for the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. This commemoration marks the end of the Christmas season, when 40 days after birth Jesus was presented in the temple in Jerusalem to fulfill the law of Moses. The Prophet Simeon knew by the Spirit that the child was the Christ, the Messiah, and he took him in his arms and said,

“Lord, now let Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people: a Light to enlighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel.”

Experience to Let

poetry, , ,

Last week I added a book to a tall bookshelf, and wondered, in my purging frame of mind, if there were a book in that collection that I might remove in exchange. A fat volume of Ogden Nash’s poetry caught my eye, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d looked in it, so I ended up chuckling to myself for an hour as I perused the dozen pages that I found marked with post-it’s — by me, of course. I decided to keep the book around. It’s a good one for reading by the fire when one is tired from cleaning out closets and so forth.

Just a little bit about the poet, from this page: “His first writing job, in New York, was composing streetcar card ads for a firm that had previously employed F. Scott Fitzgerald. His passion, though, was rhyme. ‘I think in terms of rhyme,’ he said, ‘and have since I was six years old.’ (He once said that he almost fell in love with a woman named ‘Mrs. Blorange’ because he was so fascinated with her name—orange being one of the few words in the language, along with silver and pilgrim—that has no standard words with which to rhyme.)”

Note: In the poem below, mulcted means swindled.

Experience to Let

Experience is a futile teacher,
Experience is a prosy preacher,
Experience is a fruit tree fruitless,
Experience is a shoe tree bootless.
For sterile wearience and drearience,
Depend, my boy, upon experience.
The burnt child, urged by rankling ire,
Can hardly wait to get back at the fire.
And, mulcted in the gambling den,
Men stand in line to gamble again.
Who says that he can drink or not?
The sober man? Nay, nay, the sot.
He who has never tasted jail
Lives well within the legal pale,
While he who’s served a heavy sentence
Renews the racket, not repentance.
The nation bankrupt by a war
Thinks to recoup with just one more;
The wretched golfer, divot-bound,
Persists in dreams of the perfect round;
Life’s little suckers chirp like crickets
While spending their all on losing tickets.
People whose instinct instructs them naught,
But must by experience be taught,
Will never learn by suffering once,
But ever and ever play the dunce.
Experience! Wise men do not need it!
Experience! Idiots do not heed it!
I’d trade my lake of experience
For just one drop of common sense.

-Ogden Nash
from I’m A Stranger Here Myself © 1938

And here is a bonus poem for you, a wise little rhyme that makes me wonder if its wisdom was for him common sense, or came by experience. From what I can tell, his marriage was till death, and there doesn’t seem to be any drama surrounding it to make a long Wikipedia post. I hope his wife enjoyed his funny verses!

To keep your marriage brimming,
with love in the loving cup,
whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
whenever you’re right, shut up.