Category Archives: books

He is nothing but war.

books, culture, quotes, , , , , , , ,

Alongside my reading of The Iliad itself, I have collected a few books from the library that are commentary or retellings. When I think about how many people have translated, interpreted and commented on Homer over the centuries, I realize I can only hope to scratch the surface layer of their insights, and of the poem — or poems, if I go ahead and read The Odyssey as well.

I am really enjoying The Iliad, but at this point in my life I don’t expect to gain enough knowledge to put together a whole essay. I will, however, feel free to share little bits related to that epic that are interesting to me. One of these is from a “Bloom’s Guide,” in which the literary critic Harold Bloom gives an introduction, and assembles a few articles by various other scholars. Bloom is known for his bold statements about culture and literature, and I appreciate that style, which is often refreshingly clarifying. This is an excerpt from the introduction to his guide to The Iliad:

“The heroes of the Hebrew Bible — Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, David — have no affinities whatsoever with Achilles. Even David, the only professional warrior among them, carries on their blessing from Yahweh and so is in a position beyond tragedy, despite his many griefs that terminate in the death of his beloved son, Absalom. You can make a covenant with Yahweh and then trust in the covenant, but no one can trust Zeus. Achilles is half a god, and he says that ‘who trusts himself to the gods will gain their hearing,’ but he knows that the response to such a hearing is likely to be equivocal, and they cannot free him from war, since despite his disillusion he is war and nothing but war. The poetic strength of Achilles is that he is a man. No other purely literary figure is nearly as heroic, or is aesthetically satisfying to us, but Achilles’ otherness, in relation to us, is now his dominant characteristic.”

-Harold Bloom

Real flowers and imaginary creatures.

books, wildflowers, , , , , , , ,

 

It’s the season in California when one is likely to encounter wildfire smoke blowing in from somewhere, hopefully distant. It happened to us this week when I was up at my daughter “Pippin’s” in the way north part of the state, but it wasn’t thick enough to keep us indoors, or prevent us from going on a wildflower walk.

Tolkien

Are you familiar with the custom of the traditional walking tours that C.S. Lewis and some of his friends would take through the English countryside, about a hundred years ago in their case? The first book of the fictional Ransom Trilogy by Lewis opens with the protagonist on a solo walking tour; it sounds like a wonderful kind of recreation. I am reading a book by Humphrey Carpenter titled The Inklings, about some members of this group, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, Owen Barfield and others. Lewis’s brother Warren (“Warnie”) was one of them, too.

Here is an excerpt about how it was on these long walks:

Tolkien ought, on the face of it, to have been an ideal companion for Lewis and Barfield on their walking tours, but when he did accompany them, he found that twenty miles or so a day carrying a heavy pack was more than he liked….  Tolkien’s own idea of a walk in the countryside involved frequent stops to examine plants or insects, and this irritated Lewis.  When Tolkien spent some time at Malvern on holiday with the Lewis brothers in 1947, Warnie remarked, “His one fault turned out be that he wouldn’t trot at our pace in harness. He will keep going all day on a walk, but to him, with his botanical and etymological interests, a walk, no matter what its length, is what we would call an extended stroll, while he calls us ‘ruthless walkers.’”

I had made a point of copying that section to read to Pippin and her family this week. The relative ruthlessness of our walking styles is a continual factor to be dealt with when we are on a walk or a hike. Not just their family, but all of my children and extended family. Pippin was remembering as an example our stay in Greece last summer, when three of our group were on the ruthless side of the scale, while Pippin and I as usual lagged behind, looking at one more flower or leaf.

On this recent walk, however, it was just Us Girls. No one was in a hurry, but only two of us were paying much attention to the flora and fauna. Ivy was reading aloud to me from the book at right, Pembrick’s Creaturepedia, and trying not to stumble on the path that wound uphill through a meadow with mossy streams flowing alongside.

She’s been telling me for years about her favorite series of books, The Wingfeather Saga or Tales, by Andrew Peterson. This little encyclopedia of creatures illustrated by Peterson goes along with those stories, and the word descriptions and illustrations are all clever, well written and drawn, and often very amusing. Online I found one page from the book to show you as an example, a more poignant entry that Ivy didn’t read to us.

The narrator tells a story from his youth: While on a campout with a friend, he had foolishly eaten all the available food too soon, and was quite famished. Just then, “I spotted a bright yellow sweeft, aperched on the branch of an apple tree, and though hardly believing myself able to hit such a tiny target [with his slingshot], I knocked it from the tree with a single blow. It landed in a swump of sweefty feathers, dead. I held it in my hands and wept for shame. My father commanded me to honor the bird’s death by eating it, and thus I did….”

In each Creaturepedia entry is a description of how the animal tastes. For the sweeft, it is “Like sorrow.”

We strollers were neither hungry nor hunting that day; Pippin and I were admiring what wildflowers had not faded already, and I saw several that were new to me, including two types of yellow monkeyflowers. (Monkeyflower makes me think of the Creaturepedia again, though there is no animal in there that is named anything like monkey. I found a listing for gunkees, though…)

Though the larger landscape was blurry with smoke, we gave our attention elsewhere, to Ivy’s introduction to fantastical beasts, and making friends with the bright flowers at our feet.

Many wonderful things.

books, church, food and cooking, home, my garden, , , , , , , , ,
The turtle is an old pool toy.

As summer warmth makes the lizards and bees busier, so it works on me. The point of Too Much Heat might lie ahead at some point, but evidently I am still on the continuum with no end in sight. New opportunities and fun things have recently come into my life, so that my calendar has been over-full for a couple of weeks, and my heart the same. So far I haven’t reached the stage where I am craving empty days… but today I am a little bit at loose ends, and probably distracted by the wildfire smoke that is drifting south from the Woodside Fire up on the coast, not close to us, but making the air unhealthy.

I don’t like having to keep the house closed up against smoke, but I am glad the indoor spaces had cooled off the night before the smoke blew in; I had closed all the windows and shades that morning, and in the evening it was still cool, so we didn’t open the windows when the sun went down. Our only “AC” is the marine air that almost always flows into the neighborhood in the evenings or at least at night. So far, the heat (about 90 degrees at the moment) has not seeped indoors very much.

Leaving comfort behind me, I walked out the door into the smoky heat to add water to the fountain, to see new things that have bloomed, and to deadhead a little. I tend to focus on garden “problems” that need fixing — transplanting, weeding, trimming, irrigating. But when I don’t have it in me to do actual work, I usually can remember to just look around and be thankful — for my patch of paradise.

At church, we had a funeral this week, and I was able to participate in commending a 90-year-old child of God to her Father. Our funerals are so nourishing to the soul, as the hymns and prayers acknowledge our grief, and help us grieve in what is ultimately a healing way. The Church and her sacraments are truly full of Christ, His Life and Love, and I come out of every funeral full to the brim.

I told my priest that I wish I had a book into which I had transcribed over the years all the short homilies he has given at the end of funerals. Each is unique to the person and the situation, but they all are incredibly rich and edifying. Next week will be another funeral, for a priest dear to me, and I am very interested to learn how that is different from other funerals in the Orthodox Church.

I trimmed all the lavender but two bushes that the bees were still visiting, though they are faded quite a bit. Another purple note showed up in soup I made, using gifted carrots, cabbage from the freezer, a few ingredients from my garden: Painted Lady beans, kale, parsley, and tarragon.

I have joined a small in-person book group reading The Ethics of Beauty (by Timothy Patitsas) together every week, and an on-line class to study Universal History. I’m planning a trip to see my granddaughter Ivy in a youth musical production, and will continue visits about once a month to the nearby house of a family at church, to read stories to three young children. This is one of my very favorite activities, and it’s so sweet how this arrangement benefits all of us.

My new housemate Bea has been with me now for about a week. We are already having a good time brainstorming about various events we’d like to collaborate on, around books, high schoolers, tea, cooking… She’s baking a cake at this moment, and almost every day she is playing the piano, and that makes the house feel right.

Our usual women’s book group continues, and we have been reading Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger. It’s the second time I’ve read it, and I love it still. I’ve been reading Death Comes for the Archbishop over and over, because the narrator and the story are very calming, when I wake in the night and can’t go back to sleep on my own. For the first time ever I’m reading The Iliad in the original (translated), and that has been satisfying. Because I haven’t read the whole of the Odyssey before, either, I’m a little reluctant to jump into watching the new movie based on it. But I’ve read plenty of interesting reviews!

My large Nodding Violet plant I have been planning to give away as soon as it started blooming again, which is Now! If you live nearby and want it, let me know in a direct message. It needs protection from frost, so I bring it indoors in winter, but many people in my area leave them under a roof outdoors.

Here is a clearer photo of it from a year ago:

At the moment I can’t remember what this plant is… I think a salvia. But it is the one that pulled me outside this afternoon when I saw it out the window. One of the bright and wonderful things in my life right now.

Peaceful breath and perfect pie.

books, food and cooking, pie, poetry

LEMON PIE

I struggled ten or fifteen years
To make good lemon pie.
The crust was thin, the paste was thick,
And the meringue was dry.

The crust was thick, the filling thin,
The top was limp and flat!
I thought, I’ve met my Waterloo–
I’ll never master that!

But I toiled on while bitter tears
Fell often on my board.
And now I’ll draw a peaceful breath–
I’ve reaped a rich reward.

I heard the village gossip say,
Today as I passed by:
“I never liked her, but she makes
A perfect lemon pie.”

-Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I made a lemon meringue pie only once, and wrote about it here: Pie Amusement

You might think from the way I talked about pies ten years ago that I would have made dozens more by now, at least one a month, right? I have not. But, maybe I will this week — haha! I truly have been wanting to bake some kind of dessert so that I can call — or more likely, text — the neighbors and ask them for dessert on one of these long evenings. For me, baking a pie is a monumental event, and I don’t know if I can change my perspective at this stage of life.

This poem is from the poetry collection Songs of a Housewife, but you might be more familiar with the poet as the author of The Yearling. If you’d like to read more about the housewife-poet Rawlings, Sandy’s Chatter featured a post about her some time back, and shared another poem, “Prize Jelly.”

Showing the good side of my lemon meringue pie.