Give it a whirl

by chuckofish

This weekend I started re-reading The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder and I had a hard time putting it down. Boy, is it good. Though there is a murder mystery in the novel, the main focus of the work is the history of the Ashley and Lansing families and how they cope with the after effects of the murder.

Writing about it years after it was first published, John Updike said,:

The Eighth Day was published in late March of 1967, three weeks before Thornton Wilder’s seventieth birthday. Reviews were mixed, from Edmund Wilson’s calling it “the best thing he ever wrote” to Edith Oliver’s judgment, in The New Yorker, that “none of the characters, major or minor, is essentially credible to the reader” and Stanley Kaufmann’s, in The New Republic, that “we have—from a man who has always meant well—a book that means nothing.” 

Typical New Yorker, right? And The New Republic–please. I think all the characters are believable and deeply so. John Updike agreed. Yes, it is a bit of a spiritual mish mosh, but it is a pleasure to read. I highly recommend.

Perusing my favorite booth in a local antique mall this weekend, I found a 1925 copy of The Royal Road to Romance by Richard Halliburton, about whom I had been recently reading.

Halliburton, you will recall, was an American travel writer, adventurer, and author who is best known today for having swum the length of the Panama Canal, following in the footsteps of Carthaginian general Hannibal by riding an elephant over the Alps, photographing Mount Everest from a biplane, and for disappearing in 1939 while attempting to sail his Chinese junk across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. You can read more about him here. “Halliburton was described by his Princeton classmates as “an original” who rejected his father’s pleas to adopt an “even tenor,” settle down and raise a family in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. He defied convention and expressed an unquenchable thirst for the unknown and the dangerous. He was driven by impatience, by a great awareness of the ephemeral nature of life, perhaps explained by the sudden and untimely death of his younger brother from illness in 1917.”

Well, I’ll give it a whirl.

This was an interesting article. “One of the negatives of social media is the manner in which it has encouraged us to think of life as a performance: we are all stars in our own reality TV show now.” Boy, ain’t that the truth.

And, yay, Paul Zahl has annotated another list of movies playing on Turner Classic Movies. “The performance — of the minister, I mean — [in Arsenic and Old Lace] is pitch perfect, as that is the way many Episcopal rectors really were prior to 1979: a little fuddy-duddy (yes), generally learned, mostly more or less Ivy League, kind of a tad detached from reality, but entirely benign.” (How times have changed.)

The wee babes came over with their dear parents on Sunday night and we had fun playing and talking and eating dessert. (Dinner is more problematic.)

And now it is March 1! Have a good Monday.

“We all know more than we know we know.”

Thornton Wilder