dual personalities

Category: Quotes

January 27, 2015

Bull’s eye

by chuckofish

JOHN UPDIKE

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

–John Updike

Today is the anniversary of John Updike’s death in 2009. So tonight I shall raise a glass to this acclaimed writer and fellow Episcopalian. How about you?

I went to see John Updike speak at my flyover university back in the nineties. I didn’t work there then, but I walked over from the church where I did work which was (and is) a few blocks away. Graham Chapel was packed and I was sitting pretty far in the back. He was unpretentious and generous. A good guy–I could tell.

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January 22, 2015

Valuing the poet

by chuckofish

ceb87611cb11e3c30fe11cdd843b501e1a00e066-large

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Arisoto, filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles

 

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January 14, 2015

Stay positive

by chuckofish

kirkpatrick_sun_01

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.

–Henry David Thoreau, Walden

*Woodcut by Ethel Kirkpatrick, c. 1905

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December 31, 2014

This and that: glowing like seraphs

by chuckofish

calvinhobbes

First, I read Mabel’s Christmas letter on TitusOneNine and thought you might enjoy it too. Read the whole thing.

Second, here’s a  thought for the new year from Hay Quaker.

“The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life.You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”

― Arnold Bennett

Third, here’s a little Charles Spurgeon:

The Lord Jesus is in the midst of his church; he walketh among the golden candlesticks; his promise is, “Lo, I am with you alway.” He is as surely with us now as he was with the disciples at the lake, when they saw coals of fire, and fish laid thereon and bread. Not carnally, but still in real truth, Jesus is with us. And a blessed truth it is, for where Jesus is, love becomes inflamed. Of all the things in the world that can set the heart burning, there is nothing like the presence of Jesus! A glimpse of him so overcomes us, that we are ready to say, “Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me.” Even the smell of the aloes, and the myrrh, and the cassia, which drop from his perfumed garments, causes the sick and the faint to grow strong. Let there be but a moment’s leaning of the head upon that gracious bosom, and a reception of his divine love into our poor cold hearts, and we are cold no longer, but glow like seraphs, equal to every labour, and capable of every suffering. If we know that Jesus is with us, every power will be developed, and every grace will be strengthened, and we shall cast ourselves into the Lord’s service with heart, and soul, and strength; therefore is the presence of Christ to be desired above all things. His presence will be most realized by those who are most like him. If you desire to see Christ, you must grow in conformity to him. Bring yourself, by the power of the Spirit, into union with Christ’s desires, and motives, and plans of action, and you are likely to be favoured with his company. Remember his presence may be had. His promise is as true as ever. He delights to be with us. If he doth not come, it is because we hinder him by our indifference. He will reveal himself to our earnest prayers, and graciously suffer himself to be detained by our entreaties, and by our tears, for these are the golden chains which bind Jesus to his people.

And finally, Happy New Year! Let’s have positive thoughts about 2015!

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November 13, 2014

Let me think about that for a moment

by chuckofish

greenleaves 3

Here is some food for thought on this Thursday n November. Take a moment (or two or three) for some deep thoughts.

1. “The trouble with you,” Walter had said in a recent phone conversation, “is that you’re too prepared. You don’t give the Holy Spirit room to do wondrous things. You need to take risks now and then–that’s what makes life snap, crackle and pop.”

–Jan Karon, At Home in Mitford

2. “When I was an object of much contempt and derision in the university,” he later wrote, “I strolled forth one day, buffeted and afflicted, with my little Testament in my hand … The first text which caught my eye was this: ‘They found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name; him they compelled to bear his cross.'”

–Charles Simeon

3. “That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest.”

–Henry David Thoreau

4.

British 2nd Division at Kohima, India war memorial

British 2nd Division at Kohima, India war memorial

Discuss among yourselves.

 

5 Comments
October 13, 2014

“I can’t look at everything hard enough.”*

by chuckofish

Field of Lilies, Louis Comfort Tiffany

“Field of Lilies”, Louis Comfort Tiffany

Last week I watched The Ghost and Mrs. Muir  (1947) and cried through much of it. Then this weekend I watched Our Town (1940) and wept through the entire third act.  I must say that much of this was due to the great musical scores of both films, by Bernard Hermann and Aaron Copland, respectively, but still. They even changed the end of Our Town! (Spoiler alert) Emily doesn’t die! They softened up the hard ending of the play, but it was still effective.

Then I finished Jan Karon’s Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good and got a little weepy. It is not a sad book at all, but it reminds us all to rejoice and be glad and you know that that can make me tear up.

Then we sang hymn #624 in church–“Jerusalem the Golden”–and I was done (or undone as the case may be).

Well, you know what Frederick Buechner says about tears:

You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay close attention.

They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.

(Whistling in the Dark)

So keep your eyes and your heart open as you go forth into the world this week. Thanks be to God.

*Emily in “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder

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October 7, 2014

The Era of the Wild Apple

by chuckofish

In the Orchard by Winslow Homer

“In the Orchard” by Winslow Homer

“To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labeled, “To be eaten in the wind.” It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit. . . The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England. I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor soul, there are many pleasures which you will not know! . . . the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.”

– Henry David Thoreau

How right you are, Henry!

Claude Monet, 1878 "Apple Trees in Bloom at Vetheuil"

Claude Monet, 1878 “Apple Trees in Bloom at Vetheuil”

Winslow Homer "Green Apples"

Winslow Homer “Green Apples”

Well, it is apple season and, although I can’t pick them wild off a tree, I do buy some pretty good ones at my local Dierberg’s. And you know what they say about an apple a day, right?

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September 24, 2014

No God?

by chuckofish

Bierstadt 2

Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) “Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California” (1868), Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

“Beloved brethren and sisters in Christ, I think that you and I can say, that to us the surest fact in all the world is that there is a God. No God? I live in him. Tell a fish in the sea there is no water. No God? Tell a man who is breathing that there is no air. No God? I dare not come downstairs without speaking to him. No God? I would not think of closing my eyes in sleep unless I had some sense of his love shed abroad in my heart by the Holy Ghost. ‘Oh!’ says one, ‘I have lived fifty years, and I have never felt anything of God.’ Say that you had been dead fifty years; that is nearer to the mark. But if you had been quickened by the Holy Spirit fifty minutes, this would have been the first fact in the front rank of all fact, God is, and he is my Father, and I am his child. Now you become sentient to his frown, his smile, his threat, or his promise. You feel him; his presence is photographed upon your spirit; your very heart trembles with awe of him, and you say with Jacob, ‘Surely God is in this place.’ That is one result of spiritual life”

(C. H. Spurgeon, Sermon No. 2267, “Life from the Dead,” delivered March 13, 1890 at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington)

Here is some mid-week food for thought this Wednesday. Discuss among yourselves.

spurgeon

Note: Charles Haddon Spurgeon was one of the foremost 19th century English preachers. You may recall that the 15-year old Spurgeon was on his way to a scheduled appointment when a snow storm forced him to cut short his intended journey and to turn into a Methodist chapel in Colchester where God opened his heart to the salvation message. The text that moved him was Isaiah 45:22 – “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else.”

3 Comments
September 18, 2014

Another turned page

by chuckofish

dual pumpkins

Fall is in the air. I wore black tights for the first time yesterday. Away we go!

“[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”

–Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

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August 26, 2014

Dedication to a mountain

by chuckofish

I was reminded recently that Herman Melville dedicated Pierre: or, The Ambiguities to a particular mountain, which I saw every day when I was a student at Williams College. I climbed Mt. Greylock one Saturday with members of the Mountain Club and enjoyed the view which encompasses five states.

Mount_Greylock_Massive

It was always in the background of all our shenanigans.

mt greylock

Kite flying in the spring of 1977 with Spud and Emmett

I miss those mountains, and I suppose those big-hearted football players.

Anyway, here is Melville’s most gracious dedication:

To Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty

In old times authors were proud of the privilege of dedicating their works to Majesty. A right noble custom, which we of Berkshire must revive. For whether we will or no, Majesty is all around us here in Berkshire, sitting as in a grand Congress of Vienna of majestical hill-tops, and eternally challenging homage.

But since the majestic mountain, Greylock–my own more immediate sovereign lord and king–hath now, for innumerable ages, been the one grand dedicatee of the earliest rays of all the Berkshire mornings, I know not how his Imperial Purple Majesty (royal born: Porphyrogenitus) will receive the dedication of my own poor solitary ray.

Nevertheless, forasmuch as I, dwelling with my loyal neighbours, the Maples and the Beeches, in the amphitheatre over which his central majesty presides, have received his most bounteous and unstinted fertilisations, it is but meet, that I here devoutly kneel, and render up my gratitude, whether, thereto, The Most Excellent Purple Majesty of Greylock benignantly incline his hoary crown or no.

Don’t you just love old Herman? I mean really.

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