A cold but cozy first night.

home, work, ,

Several years ago I realized that my wood stove was becoming dysfunctional in a couple of important ways. I thought that I should probably change to having a gas fireplace insert, now that I am older and my back is not as strong as it used to be, for carrying the firewood and bending over the stove to build and tend the fire.

I also thought, mistakenly, that I was not allowed to install a new wood-burning insert in our area. When I learned that it was only for new construction that the building code forbids them, I was elated.

And during that time my housemate Susan began to carry wood and build fires, too. Many times when I came home from a trip or just a late-afternoon outing in the winter, I walked into a house that had been all cozied up by her ministrations. These various factors persuaded me to buy a new wood stove, with the help of my son who shopped all over town with me.

I’ve been enjoying the fires very much this past winter, and my back has been up to the work involved, because I’ve been doing my “strengthening exercises.” (Isn’t that what Tigger also does?) The recent rains came with milder weather overall, and I haven’t had a fire for a week — until this cold, cold evening of the beginning of spring, when my feet would not get warm. It was late before I got on task, but now the logs are blazing and my toes are toasty.

The new stove

For the last two months, though, I have been the only wood-carrier-fire-builder around the place, because my last housemate has moved out, and I am living alone for the first time since the summer just after my husband died. God brought me three housemates during those years, and they were all wonderful people to have around. For awhile there were three of us women living here. But now it seems it has been given me to live alone (with God) in my house, which has been more of an adjustment psychologically than I expected. I got through the transition and I am loving it.

Happy Spring!

Books are needy.

books, nature, quotes, , , , ,

“Books you have read share a deep ontological similarity with books you haven’t: both can be profoundly fuzzy. At times books you haven’t read shine more brightly than those you have, and often reading part of a book will shape your mind more decisively than reading all of it; there is no inherent epistemic superiority to having read a book or not having read it.”

-John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds

After my first and second postings of quotes from this book that I still haven’t read, I found this declaration from the author quite generous, even if he does use both ontological and epistemic in one paragraph. In 2016 and 2019, which seems ages ago now, several of my readers said that they had been prompted to order the book, or at least put it on their TBR list. Did any of you pursue it further?

The Artist’s Wife by Henry Lamb

I know very well by experience what he is talking about here, how impactful books can be just by their presence on my shelves. I read the intro to The Marvelous Clouds twice already, and it evidently did not shine brightly enough in my mind for me to remember anything of it, or to continue.

I found the quote above on Goodreads, where I do quite a bit of mining from time to time. Reading a few quotes from a book is certainly a very small part, but these bits can provide a lot to chew on. Here is another thought provoking passage from the book that I also got by cheating:

“Schopenhauer remarked that buying books would be better if you could also buy the time to read them. Books are different from natural objects in that they can overwhelm us in a way that nature’s abundance rarely does. There has always been too much to know; the universe is thoroughly baffling. When we walk into a bookstore, it is easy to feel oppressed by the amount of knowledge on tap. Why don’t we have the same feeling in a forest, at the beach, in a big city, or simply in breathing? There is more going on in our body every second than we will ever understand, and yet we rarely feel bothered by our inability to know it all. Books, however, are designed to make demands on our attention and time: they hail us in ways that nature rarely does. A thing is what Heidegger calls zunichtsgedrängt, relaxed and bothered about nothing. A plant or stone is as self-sufficient as the Aristotelian god or Heidegger’s slacker things, but books are needy. They cry out for readers as devils hunger for souls.”

It could be that somewhere else in the book Peters mentions the different kinds of knowledge. When you are walking in a forest you are getting to know the trees and the air in a non-intellectual way, and that makes all the difference. It would be a shame to know rocks and trees and clouds only by reading about them.

A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. ~Jeremy Collier

I had intended to think and write more about all of this, but just now ditched that plan and am headed out to see the clouds with my own eyes. It might happen that while I am gazing up there, the contents of the cloud will empty on my bare head and give me an even more intimate knowledge of its wet self. I’d rather not get experiential knowledge of the rocks along the path by tripping on them, but you never know what might happen when you get your nose out of a book.

Dear to our hearts is our home.

home, quotes, ,

“… for dear to our hearts is our home, although it be the humblest cottage, or the scantiest garret; and dearer far is our blessed God, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. It is at home that we feel safe: we shut the world out and dwell in quiet security. So when we are with our God we ‘fear no evil.’ He is our shelter and retreat, our abiding refuge. At home, we take our rest; it is there we find repose after the fatigue and toil of the day.”

-C.H. Spurgeon

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown…

history, poetry, time, ,

TO A POET A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

-James Elroy Flecker

Lesen, by Ulrich Bittmann