St. David reposed in the Lord about the year 601.
All posts by GretchenJoanna
The shape of what you lived.
REMEMBERING
And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.
In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.
And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Whole types of thought are impossible.
The following excerpt is from an interview with poet Dana Gioia that was, but is no longer, on the Fact and Arts website of the BBC, I think more than ten years ago. Gioia has been Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and Poet Laureate of California. I’m sorry I can no longer link to the whole interview, but I think this small part is worthwhile.
F&A: You’ve said, “I don’t think Americans are dumber than they were 25 years ago, but our culture is.” Tell me how our culture is dumber.
Dana Gioia: Our culture is vastly dumber. I’ll give you an example. If you’ve got a copy of The New Yorker from 30 years ago, it would have about six times as many words as it does now. The same thing for The Atlantic. With most of our newspapers, if somebody wrote a review of a book, it was thousands of words long. People would actually think through things in print in a serious way. Even if you didn’t like The New Yorker, you had to take it seriously.
Nowadays we have the USA Today version of culture. People have been trained by TV and the Internet to want an image and a headline. The notion of careful sequential thought contextualized historically, ideologically is a vanishing skill. When we collectively lose our ability to have sustained linear attention, whole types of thought are impossible. I see this in my students who are bright kids but have read very little.
Excitement at dusk.
The rain stopped this evening, just in time for me to walk on the bike path to the bridge. This wooden bridge spans two little creeks where they join and flow on westward through my patch of suburbia. I figured out that when I have a few more minutes available than it takes to walk around the block, I can go on this more woodsy walk to the middle of the bridge and still be back in less than 15 minutes.
What got me excited was just the utter freshness of the air after days of steady rain, and getting to see the creeks fuller than usual. It’s interesting how one is so much muddier than the other. Many wonderful plant scents were in the cool and damp air, underneath the bolder smell of wood smoke.
Between my house and that bike path, one of my neighbors has my favorite color of daffodils blooming right now. Their faces were heavy with rain, so I had to stoop down to get a good view of their happiness.
Gladsome Lights 