“Is not January the hardest month to get through? When you have weathered that, you get into the gulfstream of winter, nearer the shores of spring.”
–Henry David Thoreau, 1858
Hiroshige–“Snow Falling on a Town”
William Butler Yeats, famous Irish poet and playwright, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, was 73 years old when he died on this day in 1939.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
You can read more poems by W.B. Yeats here.
Riverfront Times photo
The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, the only sound awake ‘twixt Venus and Mars, advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.
Henry David Thoreau, A Winter’s Walk
This is the first paragraph of an essay first published in the Dial, October 1843. You can read the whole thing here.
We have more snow in our flyover state and it is good to read some HDT and imagine him walking through the woods without the benefit of Goretex clothing and Vasque hiking boots.
Stay warm!
I finished The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner on MLK Day. I think I had tried to read this book several years ago, but had put it aside. Not in the mood. When I opened it up a few days ago, however, it immediately grabbed me and held my interest. Isn’t that funny how that works? I am that much older, I guess, and receptive, therefore, to this wonderful book about a retired literary agent who starts reading his journals from a trip he took with his wife to seek his roots in Denmark twenty years earlier. Although a spring chicken myself in my fifties, I have a lot of friends who are in their seventies and eighties, and what Stegner writes struck me as very true.
“What was it? Did I feel cheated? Did I look back and feel that I had given up my chance for what they call fulfillment? Did I count the mountain peaks of my life and find every one a knoll?”
Anyway, I liked it a lot and highly recommend it. Some of the things his hero gripes about back in 1973 seem like nothing to what we put up with now. They are the same things, of course. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 1977. It always surprises me when a book I like actually receives an award.
Wallace Stegner, you will recall, was an American novelist, short story writer and environmentalist. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose in 1972. He was an Eagle Scout.
I also recently read Cider With Rosie by the English poet Laurie Lee published in 1959. I read about it in The Outermost Dream, a collection of essays by William Maxwell, the wonderful New Yorker editor who also wrote some good fiction and had impeccable taste. Laurie Lee was unknown to me, but my dual personality tells me that he is quite well known in Britain and that his aforementioned memoir is dearly loved there.
Well, who knew? Thanks to William Maxwell, I found out. Laurence Edward Alan “Laurie” Lee, MBE (26 June 1914 – 13 May 1997) was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter. And, by the way, his memoir of a bygone way of life really is wonderful.
What are you reading?
P.S. The paperwhite bulbs my brother sent for Christmas are growing–not blooming yet–but soon!
Some people, like my dual personality, have inconvenient birthdays right before Christmas. Other people, like daughter #3, have birthdays too soon right after Christmas. Hers is January 6, and what with the polar vortex dropping a foot of snow on our flyover town, we were not able to celebrate until last night.
So, darlin’, happy belated birthday! You are a good sport to come over on a Monday night for toasted ravioli and salad and mini cheesecakes! Best wishes for a fantastic year!
“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Mostly this weekend was a time for catching up. I had no social plans beyond a birthday lunch with my girlfriends and church on Sunday. We had a baptism and it was good to renounce Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness with my brethren. At the end of the service we sang the interminably long but deeply wonderful “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”. Verse 6 always brings tears to my eyes:
Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
On the literary front, I finished In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, which daughter #2 had encouraged me to read. I enjoyed it, but it was the kind of book where you are always aware that you are reading “literary” fiction. Not really my cup of tea. Great literature does not hit you over the head with its worthiness. Furthermore, I have to say that while some of the characters are engaging, they are also anarchists/terrorists. So again, how can you really care what happens to them? In point of fact, I didn’t.
I watched two movies–one was a really good one: Oscar and Lucinda (1997), an Australian movie directed by Gillian Armstrong and based on the Booker Award-winning novel by Peter Carey. Boy, I really liked it.
Ralph Fiennes plays an Anglican priest in the mid-18th century who is an obsessive gambler. His reasons for gambling are pure and his Pascalian argument for his legitimate use of it as a Christian, completely righteous. He meets Cate Blanchett, who is a compulsive gambler, on the ship going to Melbourne and they become friends. Lucinda bets Oscar her entire inheritance that he cannot transport a glass church to the Outback safely. Oscar accepts her wager, and this leads “to the events that will change both their lives forever.”
I was so impressed with Ralph Fiennes who plays the innocent and devout minister without the least bit of irony or judgement. He is totally believable and likable. Cate Blanchett is as always intelligent and precise and believable. Both are so good as kindred spirits. Plus there are lots of fine actors in smaller roles. The production is beautiful. The music is by Thomas Newman.
Just a great movie! I will have to read the book now.
I also watched Company (2011)–a filmed version of the Broadway show which won the Tony for Best Musical back in 1971.
I was talking to someone at work awhile back and I said I hadn’t ever seen Company and the next thing I knew he had brought it in for me. He said I’d like it. Well, I finally got around to watching it and I did not like it. Stephen Sondheim’s negative take on marriage and relationships (and women in general) is very cynical and “sophisticated”.
Puff puff. But there is not one likable/relatable character in the bunch. The main character, played by one of my least favorite actors–Neil Patrick Harris–is a jerk. Poor Mr. Sondheim. I feel that he was writing from experience.
On the home front, I took down our outside Christmas lights. It was 60-degrees yesterday so it seemed like the smart thing to do. I was impressed with what a good job the boy did putting them up. I guess he isn’t an Eagle Scout for nothin’!
Golden Globe update: FYI June Squibb is from Vandalia, Illinois. You go, Flyover Girl!
And I thought Diane Keaton was lovely.
* “Ladies Who Lunch” by Stephen Sondheim
The Snow-Storm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, naught cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
Yes, yesterday we had a blizzard.
I ventured out in my trusty college boots, but the snow was way over the rolled cuffs of my jeans and the wind was howling so I headed back inside.
I put away the rest of the Christmas decorations–back to the basement–and tidied up. A blizzard is a great time to get one’s house back in order.
I also responded to some new interest in my old blogpost on the Sand Creek Massacre. The comments section was blowing up! I heard from a Japanese-American who lived as a child in the Amache Internment Camp during WWII and also from a retired history teacher who lived in Lamar, Colorado. It is amazing how the internet connects people.
Blizzards are also excellent for encouraging reading without guilt. I finished re-reading Sackett by Louis L’Amour. L’Amour, you will recall, was the author of 89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction and was considered “one of the world’s most popular writers” during his lifetime. A lot of what he wrote is not that great, but I like Hondo and Sackett. As I have said before, sometimes you are just not in the mood for great literature and need a good yarn.
“People who live in comfortable, settled towns with law-abiding citizens and a government to protect them, they never think of the men who came first, the ones who went through hell to build something.
“I tell you, ma’am, when my time comes to ride out, I want to see a school over there with a bell in the tower, and a church, and I want to see families dressed up of a Sunday, and a flag flying over there. And if I have to do it with a pistol, I’ll do it!”
Sackett–a man after my own heart.
Today, of course, is a snow day as there is no getting out of our driveway. Daughter #2 and I shall attempt to clear it. Onward and upward.
*e.e. cummings
The blogosphere, as you can imagine, is all about new year’s resolutions right now. Lists of resolutions: lose weight, quit smoking, save money, get fit, drink less, manage stress. You get the picture. Well, no thanks. January, I will admit, is a good month to get one’s closets in order, to edit one’s stuff, to clean house. But so is every month. You gotta keep up with these things or you can be buried alive.
That goes for a lot of things.
When it comes to New Years Resolutions, we can do better. I suggest we read the Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards– all 70 of them.
According to the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, the Resolutions were Edwards’ guidelines for self-examination. Puritans set great store by biblical injunctions to submit themselves to divine searching and to monitor their motives and actions. On a community level, congregations were exhorted to practice introspection as a duty of great consequence.
Edwards lays out the Resolutions in a matter-of-fact style, treating them much like scientific principles. Of the seventy resolutions, the first one dated, No. 35, was written on December 18, 1722, when the Diary begins. The last, No. 70, was composed on August 17, 1723.
Let’s resolve to be more self-examining. We can do better.
“There are always two sides to every story, and it is generally wise, and safe, and charitable, to take the best; and yet there is probably no one way in which persons are so liable to be wrong, as in presuming the worst is true, and in forming and expressing their judgement of others, and of their actions, without waiting till all the truth is known.”
― Jonathan Edwards, Charity & Its Fruits
*Alfred Tennyson
“Well done!” he said. “And remember: Worry about nothing, pray about everything.” He’d gotten this message from a wayside pulpit somewhere–a sermon and a half in a half dozen words, and a splendid exegesis of the Philippians passage.
Shepherds Abiding, Jan Karon
I highly recommend reading some Jan Karon during this holiday season. It has a calming effect. And it reminds us that we shouldn’t take everything quite so seriously.
I have been slowly but surely getting things done around my house.
After a few false starts my little tree is up. The old man and I could not, between the two of us, wrestle it into its stand. We gave up, amid a shower of pine needles and exclamations of “goddamit!”, convinced that we needed a new stand. So after work on Tuesday I stopped at our neighborhood hardware store and had a meaningful conversation with the man there. He advised me to wrap the trunk of my tree with electrical tape and try again. Which I did when I got home. I am proud to say that I got the tree in the stand (without the aid of Mr. Goddammit). Later in the evening I put the lights on and decorated it.
Pretty nice, don’t you think?
I wrote my Christmas letter and mailed it to my out-of-town friends and family this week. I also mailed my Christmas package to my dual personality. Check and check.
We are cooking with gas.
dual personalities 