dual personalities

Tag: quotes

September 23, 2013

That old September feeling

by chuckofish

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

― George Eliot

How was your weekend? Mine was very low-key. The weather was lovely. I went estate sale-ing but actually found something at one of my favorite antique malls.

I have been looking for a small desk or work table for some time now. I found a nice old slant-top desk (and a chair) for a wonderful price and snatched them up. I had to go home and get our trusty Subaru to transport it and then asked the boy to come over and get it out of the Subaru and upstairs. He, as usual, was more than willing to do so. I sure do appreciate his man-strength and his good humor.

desk

He also hung up a very large watercolor that I got at the Autumn Gallery Auction at our local auction house last week. It was their quarterly fancy auction as opposed to the monthly ones I usually go to. Sometimes I’ll just throw in a lowball silent bid to see what will happen and sometimes I win. Very exciting.

painting

We moved some things around and that is always fun.

I went to church on Sunday (five weeks in a row!) and we celebrated St. Matthew’s Day and had our annual picnic. It was a beautiful sunny day–perfect for outdoor dining, bouncy houses and bar-b-que.

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After doing some house cleaning and laundry, we wound down the day with these:

DQ

A perfect start to fall!

*The pictures from the church picnic are from the Grace church Facebook page.

7 Comments
September 19, 2013

Tout va bien

by chuckofish

Well, something nice happened to me yesterday.

I had had a long, hard day at work–leading a workshop at my flyover university. On the way home I needed to stop at the grocery store for a few things. Of course, it was raining.

It was one of those weird midwestern storms where you can clearly see the demarcation line of the storm: rain and sunny sky. It was thundering. By the time I was checking out it was pouring rain, a deluge of biblical proportions! But you could still see the sun shining off in the distance and god-rays shining down through the clouds.

Anyway, the amazing thing was–when I left the store, there were several young Dierberg’s employees waiting outside with big golf umbrellas to escort shoppers to their cars!

Dierbergs

Wasn’t that nice?

“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

4 Comments
September 12, 2013

A caged bird sings

by chuckofish

Clasped Hands of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning by Harriet Goodhue Hosmer

Clasped Hands of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning by Harriet Goodhue Hosmer

On this day in 1846 Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning eloped! You know the famous story of their love. Six years her junior, the poet Robert Browning exchanged 574 letters with Elizabeth Barrett over a twenty-month period. Immortalized in the 1930 play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier, their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. After they married, her father never spoke to her again. Gee whiz.

Anyway, she was a darn good poet, mostly known today for her famous How Do I Love Thee sonnet. But she wrote a lot more than that. Here is the beginning of Aurora Leigh (1850) and a link so you can read the whole thing.

OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine,–
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.

You can read the rest here.

And if you feel like it, you can watch either of the film versions of the famous play:

1934

1934

or

Poster_of_The_Barretts_of_Wimpole_Street_(1957_film)

(They are both pretty good. I prefer John Gielgud (in anything) to Charles Laughton, but I was never a big fan of Jennifer Jones.)

2 Comments
September 10, 2013

Worthy of consideration

by chuckofish

hermann-hesse1

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”

–Hermann Hesse

6 Comments
September 4, 2013

Everything will be all right

by chuckofish

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“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

Søren-Kierkegaard-Statue im Garten der Königlichen Bibliothek in Kopenhagen.

Søren-Kierkegaard-Statue im Garten der Königlichen Bibliothek in Kopenhagen.

I have been a big fan of Kierkegaard since I was in college and read:

“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth’s orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.”

(Journal, 1836)

His writings about the authentic individual and his criticism of modern Christendom appealed to me.

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Yes, he was an existentialist and a Christian. I could relate.

“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.”

(Journal, 1847)

I think I’ll take a walk now. How about you?

2 Comments
September 3, 2013

Just a reminder

by chuckofish

Hippopotamus, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12

Hippopotamus, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12

A pop of turquoise is always welcome in any decor. I like my hippo.

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Blue foo dogs work well too.

blog.thepinkpagoda.us

blog.thepinkpagoda.us

Or a needlepoint pillow.

blue-bird

It is the unexpectedness of the color.

But I like my hippo. Isn’t he great?

This hippo moves around.

This hippo moves around.

“Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful ” William Morris

5 Comments
August 29, 2013

The Enigma of August

by chuckofish

roller skates 1

“The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall – they fell unnoticed – seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.”

–James Baldwin

4 Comments
August 22, 2013

“The world was hers for the reading.”*

by chuckofish

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One of the great things about traveling is discovering new used book stores. We went to four used book stores–one in Denver, two in Laramie and one in Boulder. And, of course, I bought some books!

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They usually look like this one in Laramie. One of the small pleasures of life.

Another small pleasure? College/University bookstores!

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Don’t you love used books?

*Betty Smith wrote that in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

2 Comments
August 13, 2013

History beckons or “YOLO is just Carpe Diem for stupid people”*

by chuckofish

Somewhere in the Shiloh National Military Park...

Somewhere in the Shiloh National Military Park…

My children give me a lot of way too much grief about the vacations we took when they were youngsters. Excuse me, every trip did not involve a Civil War battlefield. (A lot did but what of it?) Just because they did not spend spring breaks in Destin or Orlando does not make them deprived children. Educational trips are the best, right?

Anyway, daughter #2 is coming home today for a few days and we are taking a little “educational” side trip to Denver, Colorado to do some family research at the Stephen H. Hart Library and Research Center at the brand new History Colorado Center.

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I have been curious to see what is included in the archive pertaining to my ancestors John Simpson Hough and John Wesley Prowers, about whom I have written on this blog. John Hough’s son Frank Baron Hough died suddenly while dancing the Charleston in the 1920s (I kid you not) and his widow left all the family letters, documents, manuscripts, photographs, etc. to the state of Colorado. I have been meaning to make this trip for years, but something always prevented me–lack of time, lack of funds, no one to go with me. In the meantime, the old museum was torn down and this new shining edifice was constructed. Determined not to put it off another year, I am going at long last!

While we are out there we are also planning to drive up to Wyoming for a few days to visit an old friend–something else I have been meaning to do for years.

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Wish us luck!

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”

― Henry David Thoreau

*Jack Black

5 Comments
August 8, 2013

Tout va bien

by chuckofish

Happiness is a care package from your dual personality!

care2

After a hard day at the salt mines, I was thrilled to find a wee package waiting for me at home yesterday. Inside were two books (a hardback copy of one of my favorites–Gilead by Marilynne Robinson–and The Bishop’s Mantle by Agnes Sligh Turnbull, which I have not read) and a small Spode votive candle holder.

Wasn’t that thoughtful?

In other news, I read on the Habitually Chic blog about the new documentary “Salinger” coming out next month:

I will hope for the best, but, as always, I’ll expect the worst*. Very few people understood old J.D.S. back in the day and that is why he went into seclusion and chose not to publish anymore. He’d had enough. Why is that hard to understand?

*I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering what the origin of that expression is. Well, I don’t know, but I always think of Mel Brooks! So here are the lyrics to the classic song by Mel Brooks from his movie The Twelve Chairs:

Hope for the best, expect the worst
Some drink champagne, some die of thirst
No way of knowing
Which way it’s going
Hope for the best, expect the worst!

Hope for the best, expect the worst
The world’s a stage, we’re unrehearsed
Some reach the top, friends, while others drop, friends
Hope for the best, expect the worst!

I knew a man who saved a fortune that was splendid
Then he died the day he’d planned to go and spend it
Shouting “Live while you’re alive! No one will survive!”
Life is sorrow – – here today and gone tomorrow
Live while you’re alive, no one will survive – – there’s no guarantee

Hope for the best, expect the worst
You could be Tolstoy or Fannie Hurst
You take your chances, there are no answers
Hope for the best expect the worst!

I knew a man who saved a fortune that was splendid
Then he died the day he’d planned to go and spend it
Shouting “Live while you’re alive! No one will survive!”
Life is funny – – Spend your money! Spend your money!
Live while you’re alive, no one will survive – – there’s no guarantee



Hope for the best, expect the worst

The rich are blessed, the poor are cursed

That is a fact, friends, the deck is stacked, friends

Hope for the best, expect the – –
(even with a good beginning, it’s not certain that you’re winning,
even with the best of chances, they can kick you in the pantses)

Look out for the – – watch out for the worst!
Hey!

THE TWELVE CHAIRS movie poster for blog

I tried to watch The Twelve Chairs recently and didn’t make it through. Not that funny. But the song is classic.

2 Comments