Tag Archives: Winston Churchill

The reality and rhythm of pea-planting.

my garden, reality, , , , , , , , ,

I was thrilled when my newly planted peas came up within a few days. That was one benefit of the Hot Week, when it was over 100 degrees for many days in a row. The seeds were bedded in a temporarily partly shady place behind the zinnias and parsley, so the earth stayed moist.

They are petite and very cute, growing close together next to the tall trellis where I planned to train them upward… until after they were up I read online, and then confirmed it by checking the packet, that Sugar Ann snap peas are a Bush Type of plant, and typically grow only 1-2 feet tall. I have grown peas for more than half my life, so why would I have read the description and instructions?? The packet had been a kind gift a few months ago from Hearth and Field; my thought process on rediscovering them in my box of seeds went quickly from “Oh, goody!” to “Must plant these right away!” and I did that very efficiently.

Chartwell Sweet Peas

Efficiency is not one of the guiding principles of Hearth and Field, however, and I should have embarked on my pea project more in the spirit and manner of the vision expressed on the website of that journal:

Welcome to Hearth & Field!
We are the only journal you’ll find
that makes the internet move
at the pace and rhythm of real life.

Hearth and Field also quotes G.K. Chesterton at the top of that home page, saying,

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.” 

I don’t have time to think more about how that second quote relates to my peas. [Update: I originally put something here about Winston Churchill’s Chartwell peas, which I attributed to Chesterton, which is very embarrassing, and there is no way to fix it, so I removed it. Thank you to my blessed reader Amy who noticed.]

In Real Life, “Haste makes waste,” right? But that motto doesn’t convey quite everything about how I will need to spend an extra hour today that I was not planning on. I will transplant those little starts to the middle of the planter box, so as to free up the trellis for planting Green Beauty snow peas from Baker Creek, because it would be a waste of my beautiful trellis to do otherwise. This is how “the pace and rhythm of real life” works in real life!

Green Beauty pea blossom from February 2021

I take my quotes with breakfast.

culture, quotes, writing, , , , , , , ,
9th Edition, 1909

I read part of it all the way through.
     -Samuel Goldwyn

This morning when I sat down to eat my egg scramble, I opened the Fourteenth Edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which some of my children thoughtfully gave me last Christmas. As I read some very pithy, humorous or wise sayings, I immediately began to think of how I might use them in a blog post sometime. One after another made me wonder this, and I soon realized that it’s not likely to happen. So I will just share a few random quotes here all at once, out of any context — that is, the context in which they first appeared.

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
     -Georges Braque

This “enlarged edition” I have before me is copyright 1968, so it includes many entries that I never saw in the older edition I owned for a brief while. The very first was published in 1855, and the current version is the 19th, from 2022.

Bartlett said, upon coming out with the 4th Edition, that “…it is not easy to determine in all cases the degree of familiarity that may belong to phrases and sentences which present themselves for admission; for what is familiar to one class of readers may be quite new to another.”

Shakespeare, by John Taylor

Indeed. I wonder what he would think of the challenge of assembling such a book in this era, when many people have not learned to appreciate the beauty of good writing, nor do they have a collective familiarity with a body of it, as previous generations might have had, as with the Bible or Shakespeare, for example.

Thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.
     -William Shakespeare, Henry IV

John Bartlett began his project when he managed the University Book Store in Cambridge, Massachussetts, by writing quotations in a commonplace book. He oversaw the publication of nine editions before his death in 1905. The next editions, in the 20th century, had several different editors, but at first they continued in what was considered the “ideologically inclusive spirit of the first fifteen editions.”

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
     -Winston Churchill

Hearkening to a tradition that is no more, it is unsurprising that Bartlett’s could not endure as it was, and critics have pointed out the ways in which it has devolved, as the culture from which it draws has fragmented. My public library system has the latest edition, but I don’t plan to borrow it.

This be my pilgrimage and goal,
Daily to march and find
The secret phrases of the soul,
The evangels of the mind.
     -John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater

My breakfast is long over, and though I would like to keep leafing through Bartlett’s to share more quotes with you, I must go on to other things now. Whatever time of day it is that you are reading this, I hope something here has been a nourishing snack for your own soul.

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
     -James Stephens

By Loui Jover

Poetic cooking while in fetters.

art, creativity, food and cooking, quotes, , , , , , , ,
coconut curry with garbanzos

Since my husband’s death three years ago I’ve had three long-term housemates. Two of them have moved on, so that Susan and I are the only ones here, just two of us using the cupboards and large freezer space. This situation dovetails with my own less-burdened mind, which  now is able to grasp:

Yes! The obvious thing is to clean out the larder, use up the food, and start planning and cooking interesting meals with all the bits of this and that squirreled away. Facing up to what is unusable is part of the process; the soup that got lost in the back of the freezer for too long is one of the hidden costs associated with huge life changes, and is not a cause for guilt.

kasha (buckwheat)

Chesterton’s wisdom on creativity always helps me: Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance…  economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. It is prosaic to throw money away, because it is prosaic to throw anything away; it is negative; it is a confession of indifference, that is, it is a confession of failure.

The most prosaic thing about the house is the dustbin, and the one great objection to the new fastidious and aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a moral menage the dustbin must be bigger than the house. If a man could undertake to make use of all things in his dustbin he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare.

Another development since I returned from India is that I can’t go back to the weird eating habits I had fallen into as soon as I no longer had anyone to cook for routinely. Eating normally and very tastily for eight weeks cured me forever, I think, of my go-to frozen chopped spinach that I had been eating as the main part of every meal. Yesterday I used the last of it with a little container of likewise defrosted meaty red sauce and a (fresh) egg, to make a perfect breakfast:

These limitations I have placed on myself made me remember other things Chesterton said about art and painting and limits, and that led me on an interesting path through fields of quotes on the topic. Talk about limits and people will argue that they only exist in your mind, and must be “dropped,” if you are “to go beyond them into the impossible.” Even Winston Churchill is reported to have said, “The vistas of possibility are only limited by the shortness of life.” But he wasn’t trying to get dinner on the table in an hour.

Modern man seems especially prone to this delusion, but there are many sage exceptions, like Robert Browning: “So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!”

In matters of food and cooking, even if you had unlimited money you have limited time, and limits on whom you might find to prepare the ingredients, the choice of which is always limited to some degree, and on and on. I know you all know these things; this is my philosophical rambling you’re reading.

“Untitled” by Richard Diebenkorn

I am not advocating for an unhealthy fear of trying something new, but actually the opposite. As George Braque said, “It is the limitation of means that determines style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible.”

And though Richard Diebenkorn was talking about painting, this word from him is empowering when considered at the beginning of any creative work: “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.”

Yesterday I found several very ripe bananas in the freezer, and I did not want to waste them, even if their monetary value at purchase was minimal. You can imagine what they looked like after being there for a while; I’m sure I couldn’t have found a neighbor who wanted them. Anyway, part of my “style” is to stay home. I avoid going shopping, and knocking on doors for any reason. If only I had got my hoped-for worm bins set up, I would have given them to the worms!

But various baking supplies were sitting in the refrigerator begging to be used, so I put everything together into an unusual banana bread. It started from a “paleo” recipe with almond flour, but when I substituted egg replacer for the eggs I created a Grain-Free Vegan Chocolate Chip Banana Bread.

It is a work of super enjoyably edible art!

Reading letters by the fire.

books, history, , , , ,

Pippin and The Professor gave us a book for Christmas, Letters of Note, letters of notea compilation by Shaun Usher, whom I might call Usher the Gusher, he is that enthusiastic a promoter of his book. I wish he would let the letters speak for themselves, but his glowing commentary doesn’t detract too much from the delightful pastime of reading the letters.

It’s the best kind of browsing book, and makes me want to dig up and display cherished letters I have been blessed to receive over the years from relatives and friends. It also makes me want to write more letters myself…I actually should be writing some Christmas thank-yous right now!

This evening I’m very tired in body and mind, and am so happy to have such reading material — it could only be improved by being in two volumes so that a weary woman could more comfortably hold one while sitting in a straight-backed chair by the fire. The wind is blowing icily here these days, and it seems that windy cold is better than still because it is chasing the pollutants away and making it o.k. for us to burn wood.

Nixon letter from boy crp

So far I have read at least a couple dozen letters including some from children to government leaders, e.g. Fidel Castro to FDR, and the one pictured above, in a very different spirit; letters from widows and widowers to their deceased spouses, e.g Richard Feynman and Katherine Hepburn;  and a letter from Clementine Churchill to her husband advising him to rise above his stressful situation and be a nicer man (below).

Clementine to Winst crp

Many of the letters are shown in a facsimile of their original typed or handwritten form, like this one from Ray Bradbury responding to a letter from someone who had concern about the effects of robots on society.

Ray Bradbury letter - robots

One of the most compelling so far is from Lucy Thurston, who endured a mastectomy without any anesthetic. In the 19th century she was a missionary from Massachusetts to Hawaii along with her husband. After the surgery in 1855 she lived another 21 years. This letter of which I show a small part is to her youngest daughter:

mastectomy report

mastectomy survivor
Mary Thurston

The book includes 125 letters, but when I run out I can go to Usher’s website, also called Letters of Note, where 900 missives await my discovery. Some of those no doubt are printed in the book, but that still leaves 775….

Going now to stoke the fire.