dual personalities

Did you know that Saturday was the Harvest Moon?

The moon cycles don’t mean all that much to me, but I do love this song. And it does feel like summer has ended and we are settling into fall. (If only the weather would catch up — we had a couple days in the humid 90s last week!)

Well, I spent Saturday writing. I have been procrastinating an article deadline big time, so I finally set a time to just finish it already.

The essay is about Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who is one of my absolute favorite nineteenth-century women, and how she depicts domesticity in heaven.

“A happy home is the happiest thing in the world. I do not see why it should not be in any world. I do not believe that all the little tendernesses of family ties are thrown by and lost with this life.”

From The Gates Ajar (1868)

I suppose the delight I take in my happy home is a little nineteenth-century, but I’m cool with that. We continue to make great domestic strides in our new apartment. At this point, all it takes is a bit of puttering around on Sunday afternoon to get another corner or two all set up. Is there anything better than puttering?

Well, the “tendernesses of family ties” are also up there. I am always happy to have a long phone conversation with my mom on Sunday, to think of my sister on her birthday, to see happy photos of the wee babes from each morning when they arrive to school. And earlier this weekend, we got a chance to see some of DN’s out-of-town relatives, which turned into a lovely evening of catching up and sharing stories.

His aunt also brought snapshots! Does it get any cuter than this?

DN always had great hair and a great polo collection

So here’s to a productive workweek — made more manageable by a return to a happy home each evening.

It’s a blustery, rainy morning again. Just so you know, I’m going to start every weekly post with the weather report so I have a record against which I can test my hypothesis that it rains every Saturday. Yikes.

We celebrated three birthdays this week — my niece (left) on Wednesday and my middle son (in the middle) and son #3’s girlfriend (right) on Thursday.

Alas, I could not be with any of the celebrants but did think about them all day! I did get to speak to son #2 as he waited patiently in Salt Lake City airport for a flight to Albaquerque for a few days vacation with his beloved. He reckoned that he would spend less time in the air than waiting for the flight, but he accepted the situation stoically. It seems to be the norm for air travel these days. I’d rather drive.

Aside from the birthdays, my week was tiring but satisfying. Nothing bad happened, classes went surprisingly well, and I only spilled coffee down the front of my white shirt once! Even so, by last night I needed to do some comfort reading, so I settled on John Buchan’s 1927 novel, The Witch Wood, which I have never read. I could tell it was my kind of book right from the prologue (I’m reading the book on Kindle, hence the screen capture):

It’s a good reminder that  long term change is inevitable and usually sad. Most of the book takes place in Scotland during the 17th century and (so far) involves the young Presbyterian minister of the village,  Loyalists (Montrose in his lonely loyalty), and Cromwellians.  I think there may be a little devil worship in there too.  Buchan is always thoughtful and much of what he says resonates today. Take, for example, his observation, “The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.” Hmm… that’s an interesting thought.

Discuss among yourselves and have a wonderful weekend!

DN here with a surprise guest post!

The semester is in full-swing in College Park, and my former dissertation director recently sent me the syllabus for her graduate course. I have started reading along with the class in private. Last week’s text was T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which sharp-eyed readers of this blog will recognize as part of the mental furniture of both DPs—particularly The Dry Salvages (1941), of course, seeing as it begins along the Mississippi River, but also Burnt Norton (1936) and Little Gidding (1942).

The church of St. John at Little Gidding

Burnt Norton, a Gloucestershire country house ruined by fire

Each of these poems takes its title from a place in Eliot’s past. Sometimes the setting arises out of the poet’s own experience—the gardens around Burnt Norton are where Eliot and his first wife, Vivienne, strolled during their courtship—and sometimes the location is a wishful projection of an ancestral past—Little Gidding was an Anglican settlement from the early 17^th century that, as an experiment in religious life autonomous from church hierarchy, Eliot presents as a possible spiritual beginning (slash false-start) for all of England. Each poem is a trek into history animated by a question about the link between personal memory and public meaning, between individual experience and collective significance.

                                     A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.  (Little Gidding, lines 233-237)

How can history inform the present? In 1940 and 1941, when Eliot composed most of the Quartets, the present felt particularly formless. What future could arise from such rubble?

Eliot in 1956, standing before a textured glass partition in his Faber office

The general consensus is that Four Quartets tries to answer these questions via meditation. Knotting the reader into metaphysical quandaries, the poems arrive at enlightenment by challenging the very sense of its own sentences. This kind of poetry is hit-or-miss. It feels incredibly abstract until, after a few re-readings, parsing syntax again and again, some sort of sense emerges. But did this meaning come from the poem, or was it imposed by your own will to find meaning? In the face of the present’s formlessness, the poems make you self-aware of your own participation in supplying meaning. The Quartets’ abstraction fuels these sorts of questioning meditations, and they lead to idiosyncratic responses and interpretations for each reader.

The church of St. Michael in East Coker, where Eliot’s ashes reside today

The one poem from the Quartets not yet mentioned on this blog, East Coker (1940), the second in the series, is my personal favorite. I find the poem’s articulations of personal bewilderment very moving. The way that it uses rhythm to shuttle the reader between confusion and understanding is masterful. Below, for example, Eliot examines the life he lived between WWI and WWII, and he finds it wanting. The poet was fighting a losing battle against language. Paradoxically, nearly every phrase is quotable.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I love the extended metaphor of one’s relationship to language as a struggle to marshal a disorderly army. I love the tone of the disillusioned commander putting on a brave face. For Eliot, the village of East Coker, from which his ancestor departed England for America in the 17^th century, was both a literal and figurative starting point in the fight against disorder. But neither Thomas Stearns nor Andrew Eliot knew the outcomes of their respective endeavors. They simply set off (into language, into the Atlantic) with the hope of finding something meaningful.

Reading East Coker is like that too. The poem places me “in the middle way” such that understanding seems suspended just beyond reach. All too appropriate, given that I am no longer a student but that I am also not not reading for a class that I will not be attending. Eliot would appreciate the uncertainty.

We had a very perfect weekend: sleeping in, drinking iced coffee, reading outside, walking on the trail, shopping at the farmer’s market. The weather was ideal, and our apartment feels more and more like home, especially because I have finally been able to hang a few things on the walls.

It was marred only by a terrible book I managed to finish: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. I grabbed it from the giveaway basket at my mom’s office this summer because I had read (and not hated) Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, a book which is now being made into a television series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kelly Washington. (Honestly, that might tell you enough — Ng writes that very specific genre of women’s-thriller-posing-as-literary-fiction that makes Reese Witherspoon see dollar signs.) I drafted a lengthy post detailing every reason why Everything I Never Told You is awful, but I decided against posting it. Who needs that kind of negativity on a Monday?

Instead, I’ll focus on cheerful bouquets and balcony snacks!

Here’s to a good week — and better luck with giveaway books!

Well, I made it through the first week of classes and it all went well.  I had my first year students answer a couple of questions as a diagnostic exercise to tell me whether they can follow directions and write a coherent sentence. Anyway, I asked such gems as “what current issues do you feel passionately about?” and “what are your pet peeves?” The first question elicited predictable responses including the environment, immigration and gun violence (though responses to the last two fell on both sides — everyone loves the planet). Answers to the second question were much more entertaining. Pet peeves included:

1.  Seeing someone eat string cheese the wrong way (biting rather than pealing)
2.  Toilet paper installed the wrong way round (i.e., so it unrolls underhand instead of overhand)
3.  Bad grammar, spelling and usage
4.  When anyone scratches Styrofoam
5.  People who chew with their mouths open or too loudly
6.  People who walk slowly when it’s too crowded to pass them
7.  When someone is rude, interrupts, or doesn’t pay attention
8.  People who don’t use their turn signal when turning
9.  Hypocrites
10.  Incessant cell phone use

I was impressed and a little horrified that (with the exception of the string cheese, Styrofoam and toilet paper peeves) I agreed heartily with all of them. Clearly, I am an extremely peevish person!

To offset my peevishness I listened to a lot of calming music. Here are two of my favorites, one I’ve loved for a long time,

and one I just discovered (I like this version of the song — close your eyes and listen):

That’s about it for my week, other than a faculty potluck last night. The weather cooperated and it was pleasant but being the peevish sorts that we are, we left as soon as we could. We’re hosting coffee hour after church tomorrow, so I’ve got baking to do today. Otherwise, it’s just the usual class prep and puttering. Have a wonderful weekend and don’t fall prey to your pet peeves or set off anyone else’s!