dual personalities

I have been re-reading some old favorites.

First I read One Fine Day by Mollie Painter-Downes, which I highly recommend. You will recall that between 1939 and 1945 Mollie Panter-Downes covered the war from England for the New Yorker. The action of this novel takes place all on one day in the summer of 1946 in a small village in England. It is a quiet meditation on how things change and how we adapt and how we still have so much to be grateful for.

“The country was tumbled out before her like the contents of a lady’s workbox, spools of green and silver and pale yellow, ribbed squares of brown stuff, a thread of crimson, a stab of silver, a round, polished gleam of mother of pearl. It was all bathed in magic light, the wonderful transforming light in which known things look suddenly new.”

Now I am re-reading the wonderful Gilead by the great Marilynne Robinson. Basically it is a meditation by a dying minister, writing to his young son about his life and what it has meant to him.

“I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.”

It is all about the beauty of the world and our lives here on earth. Wow.

“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.”

The new Jan Karon book, Come Rain or Come Shine, is out and I have ordered it. In this installment Dooley has graduated from vet school and opened his own animal clinic and is getting married. Sounds good to me.

What are you reading?