quotes | dual personalities

May 18, 2015

“Here are the buckets and brushes and me/Plinketty, plinketty, plinketty, plee.”*

by chuckofish

I had a busy weekend filled mostly with getting a new MacBook Pro, since my old one died on Thursday night. They kept calling it “vintage” at the Apple store. It was 5 1/2 years old for pete’s sake, but in this day in age, that is “vintage”–at least as far as Apple products are concerned.

So anyway, I have a new laptop and it is pretty great.

I worked in the yard and went to church, but when it came time to sit down and write a blogpost, I really drew a big zero.

So I give you Lillian Hoban’s birthday. Lillian Hoban (May 18, 1925 – July 17, 1998) you will recall illustrated the wonderful children’s books written by her husband Russell Hoban.

My children were big fans of Frances, the little badger with whom they could readily relate. I seem to recall that daughter #1 especially loved this character who said things like:

“Who is Alice?” asked mother.
“Alice is somebody that nobody can see,” said Frances. “And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her.” (A Birthday for Frances)

I liked Frances too. She was fun to read about.

The next day when the bell rang for lunch, Albert said, “What do you have today?”

“Well,” said Frances, laying a paper doily on her desk and setting a tiny vase of violets in the middle of it, “let me see.” She arranged her lunch on the doily.

“I have a thermos bottle with cream of tomato soup,” she said.
“And a lobster-salad sandwich on thin slices of white bread.
I have celery, carrot sticks, and black olives,
and a little cardboard shaker of salt for the celery.
And two plums and a tiny basket of cherries.
And vanilla pudding with chocolate sprinkles
and a spoon to eat it with.”

“That’s a good lunch,” said Albert. “I think it’s nice that there are all different kinds of lunches and breakfasts and dinners and snacks. I think eating is nice.”

“So do I,” said Frances, and she made the lobster-salad sandwich, the celery, the carrot sticks, and the olives come out even. (Bread and Jam for Frances)

I especially liked it when Frances sat under the table and made up songs.

Sometimes she sat under the sink.

Sometimes we all feel like doing that.

Of course, there are elements in these books which people now-a-days might find shocking–for instance, Papa Badger smokes a pipe and even threatens to spank Frances when she won’t stay in bed! Oh my gosh. Quelle shocking!

So happy birthday to Lillian Hoban and to Frances. Have a great Monday!

*A Baby Sister for Frances

3 Comments

May 5, 2015

Positing the paradox

by chuckofish

Today is Soren Kierkegaard’s birthday (May 5, 1813 – November 11, 1855). Old Soren has always been a favorite of mine.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

–Journals, 1847

Kierkegaard is like Thoreau or Emerson in that people take quotes out of context and think he is great (and that they are great for thinking so).

I have no doubt that he would hate that. Let’s try reading one of his books–the whole thing.

“Then faith’s paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal…Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence; and faith is then a temptation.”

Well, at the very least I will toast him tonight. Join me, won’t you?

P.S. Why is Kierkegaard not listed on the Episcopal calendar of saints? If it were up to me, he would be.

5 Comments

April 28, 2015

Note to self

by chuckofish

Bryce Canyon, Utah

There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person. And it can never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God, made known through Jesus Christ.

–Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées

2 Comments

April 24, 2015

Kickin’ up dust

by chuckofish

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.”

–Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Have a good weekend. Try to find some time to be quiet and think. Turn off the computer. Take a break from social media.

Read some Buechner. Read this.

Watch A Thousand Clowns (1965): Remind yourself why you were “born a human being and not a chair.”

I plan to read some more old letters which I have unearthed in my ongoing basement reorganization/clean-up. Here’s a tidbit from a letter my mother wrote in 1979 when I was in graduate school and my dual personality was at Smith:

It’s around 5 o’clock and I wish you were here to share some sherry and nibblies with me and have a good chat. It’s times like this when I miss you the most. I haven’t had any sherry since you left–it’s the sort of thing I have to have with someone in order to enjoy it.

Some things never change! (Although I have no problem drinking by myself!) Ah, a toast to mothers everywhere who miss their daughters!

4 Comments

April 16, 2015

Good grief, Charlie Brown

by chuckofish

One of the blogs I follow–Interesting Literature–had a post on 10 Rare But Useful Words Everyone Should Know. The first word is “UHTCEARE“ meaning ‘lying awake before dawn worrying’. I think this should be on my license plate or something. I mean, I do that all the time. All the time.

Do you?

I try to remember the “have no anxiety about anything” commandment:

Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. (Philippians 4:6)

And Jesus was very clear when he said:

Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? (Matthew 6:25)

And, of course, there is my favorite:

“Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:34)

I know that if I just trust in the Lord, all will be well. But we puritan types have a hard time letting go of taking responsibility.

Well, I guess we can take some solace in the fact that old St. Paul probably had some sleepless nights too:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ¹⁶Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. ¹⁸For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. (Romans 7: 15-20)

Sigh. In the early morning when I cannot go back to sleep, I sometimes just get up and read.

I am working on being more happy-go-lucky.

Any suggestions?

4 Comments

April 9, 2015

Just saying

by chuckofish

“It was like I was empty. Well, I’m not empty anymore. That’s what’s important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what’s wrong for what’s right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don’t change the truth none. There’s right and there’s wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you’re living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you’re dead as a beaver hat.”

– Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (1960)

I have an event-packed calendar today, so I need a little John Wayne to get me started. That and a little Philippians 4:13.

Have a great day! Tomorrow’s Friday!

3 Comments

March 31, 2015

Tuesday’s message

by chuckofish

“St. Paul Preaching in Athens” by Raphael

Wonderful words for Tuesday in Holy Week:

The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

(1 Corinthians 1:18-31

The Bible speaks to us in the 21st century. Selah.

2 Comments

March 27, 2015

“There’s nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you’re trying to be twenty-five.”*

by chuckofish

Today is the birthday of Gloria Swanson (March 27, 1899 – April 4, 1983).

I suggest we watch Sunset Boulevard (1950) in her honor. Gloria was 51 (!) when she made this movie about a has-been silent movie star. You know: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

Gloria is pretty great in it. She plays the part of Norma Desmond with great gusto to be sure. She was nominated for an Oscar, but lost out to Judy Holliday in her first movie–quelle ironic. Also nominated that year was Bette Davis–also chewing the scenery as a fading star in All About Eve. It’s funny how that works out sometimes.

Anyway, William Holden, a favorite of mine, is also in the film playing the part of a hack screenwriter who writes a screenplay for a former silent-film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity. He was nominated too, along with Erich von Stroheim and Nancy Olson in supporting parts. Billy Wilder won for story & screenplay, but not for direction. The film won for art direction and for music. It lost the Best Picture prize to All About Eve.

Side note: The Third Man won that year for cinematography but nothing else. This was also the year The Furies–another favorite of mine–was nominated for cinematography. Quite a year for black and white movies! And whoever said they didn’t write good parts for women in mid-century America? All the aforementioned films had dynamite parts for middle-aged actresses.

So a toast to Gloria Swanson, actress and Episcopalian (although a lifelong Lutheran, she is buried at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side.)

Have a great weekend!

* Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (1950)

6 Comments

March 19, 2015

Preaching to ourselves

by chuckofish

Then at last we see what hope is and where it comes from, hope as the driving power and outermost edge of faith. Hope stands up to its knees in the past and keeps its eyes on the future. There has never been a time past when God wasn’t with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom, as whatever it is in our hearts–whether we believe in God or not–that keeps us human enough at least to get by despite everything in our lives that tends to wither the heart and make us less than human. To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

–Frederick Buechner (A Room Called Remember)

2 Comments

March 10, 2015

“You’ve got brains in your head You’ve got feet in your shoes You can steer yourself any Direction you choose”*

by chuckofish

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”