crazybusy

At lunch today Mum and I talked about the busy mindset we've got nowadays.  She's reading Crazy Busy, and she says that it says (figure that out, wah ha ha ha!) that having stuffed schedules - always rushing from piano lessons to soccer to SAT prep - and the push to be the best at whatever you do only really began in the 90's.  "I don't remember doing any of that stuff when I was a kid," she told me thoughtfully. "I took piano, but that was it.  We just played outside all day."  
We chatted about how the parts of my childhood that I look back on with the most fondness are the bits where I spent all day playing with the neighbors.  As much as I enjoyed dance classes and youth theatre, those other bits are now the happiest memories.
We talked about bragging. We wondered if the reason people talk about how many activities their kid does is because it makes them feel like a better parent.
We talked about guilt.  Mom said she sometimes feels like she needs to get a job.  That she ought to be doing something.  I'm only taking one college class this year, and I told her that I feel embarrassed about it sometimes. "We shouldn't." She said firmly.  And she's right.  It's ridiculous that, even though we're already busy, we feel guilty because every minute of our time isn't crammed with something.  How  did this happen to our brains?

I wondered what my generation will be like when they take control of the world.  Will we rebel against the present crazy-busy system?  I mean, a ton of kids must have grown up with insane schedules and stressed parents juggling jobs and home life and debt.   Or will we all just go on living mad lives because we've never known anything else?

Then my sister and I talked about  Inception and tried to figure out if we were happy or sad that Keira Knightley has been replaced by Carey Mulligan for the new My Fair Lady.  It was a stimulating afternoon, indeed.

postscript

"You know what it's like when you try and tell someone what your dream is like? It's so boring because it evaporates in the telling somehow. A novel for me is an attempt to build a kind of hermetic vessel that can contain this essence you've been dreaming about, this feeling that you don't want to evaporate. You keep it enclosed and you don't tell anyone about it until you build a vessel that can contain it and keep it at its maximum intensity and purity — that's the novel."  

Philip Pullman.  I don't know if I like him a ton, but this is spot on.

Mere Christianity

Hard to choose a quote from a book so infinitely quotable.

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."


C.S. Lewis is the probably the best writer (particularly theological or philosophical) I have ever read.  I don't like when writers feel they have to dumb-down ideas when they try to explain them, and I dislike even more when they show off their superior intellect by needlessly complicating things with weird sentence structure or words that sound learned.  C.S. Lewis gives the full picture in stunningly simple terms (he makes writing clearly seem so effortless!), and yet you feel the full force of his intelligence behind it. Even in the Narnia books, it never feels like he's trying too hard.  
Now that I think about it, seeming effortlessness is my favorite literary style.  Bill Bryson writes "choke-on-your-coffee funny" books, but it never seems like he's trying too hard.  And then when I try to write something in the same style I realize how ridiculously difficult it actually is.  And then I say what the heck, toss down my pencil, pick up I'm a Stranger Here Myself and vow to leave writing to people who can actually do it.

And on we march through the reading list.  Finished The Hobbit today. I wish it had taken longer.

As all things come to an end, even this story, a day came at last when they were in sight of the country where Bilbo had been born and bred, where the shapes of the land and of the trees were as well known to him as his hands and toes. Coming to a rise he could see his own Hill in the distance, and he stopped suddenly and said:

Roads go ever ever on,

Over rock and under tree,

By caves where never sun has shone,

By streams that never find the sea;

Over snow by winter sown,

And through the merry flowers of June,

Over grass and over stone,

And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar.

Eyes that fire and sword have seen

And horror in the halls of stone

Look at last on meadows green

And trees and hills they long have known. 

Gandalf looked at him. 'My dear Bilbo!' he said, 'Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.

From Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Some freakishly good writing, in my opinion.

"Was everyone else really as alive as she was?  For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was valuable to herself the way Briony was?  Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony?  Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it... Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman?  If the answer was yes, then the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone else's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.  One could drown in irrelevance.  But if the answer was no, then Briony was surrounded by machines, intelligent and pleasant enough on the outside, but lacking the bright and private inside feeling she had.  This was sinister and lonely, as well as unlikely.  For, though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers.  She knew this, but only in a rather arid way; she didn't really feel it."

From "Nine Notes on Book Covers" by Orhan Pamuk

I'm reading Other Colors at the moment, and it's definitely one of the best books I've ever encountered.  It just sucks you in.  But, anyways, here are some truths I enjoyed this morning:

• If a novelist can finish a book without dreaming of its cover, he is wise, well-rounded, and a fully formed adult, but he's also lost the innocence that made him a novelist in the first place

• Detailed depictions of heroes on book covers insult not just the author's imagination but also his readers'. 

•  When designers decide that The Red and the Black deserves a red and black jacket, or when they decorate books entitled Blue House or Chateaux with illustrations of blue houses or chateaux, they do not leave us thinking they've been faithful to the text but wondering if they've even read it.

•  If, years after reading a book, we catch a glimpse of its cover, we are returned at once to that long-ago day when we curled up in a corner with that book to enter the world hidden inside. 

From the Guardian Books Blog

By Tom Edge - Does size matter?

It occurs to me that the simple definition of novel versus novella could usefully be updated to account for ultra-sized works of fiction, those titanically-proportioned books so often taken to be the defining criterion for admission into the Serious Novelists Club.

Ulysses, The Corrections, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: All are books wide enough to carry the author's name horizontally across the spine when shelved.

HP and the Order of the Phoenix, Infinite Jest, Moby Dick: These are the kind of books that furniture removal men hate, but which can also be used as furniture (small stools, door stops and so on).

At present we have the short story (small), novella (larger, but still small) and then the novel. Perhaps we need a new word for the type of 600 pages-plus book that will concuss a Chihuahua if knocked from the kitchen table...

Like comedies at the Oscars, short works often seem overlooked in the canon of Great Novels, physically dwarfed on the bookshelf and struggling to compete for critical attention. We seem impressed by marathon efforts. Short stories, on the other hand, get relatively short shrift.

The organisers of NaNoWriMo say "we don't use the word "novella" because it doesn't seem to impress people the way "novel" does." They're right. Which is a shame, as there are some wonderful writers out there who rarely, if ever, overstep the 300 page mark.

"When someone tells you there is no such thing as truth, they are asking you not to believe them.  So don’t."

Michael Ramsden

At the Back of the North Wind.

When he knew he was coming awake, he would sometimes try hard to keep hold of the words of what seemed a new song, one he had not heard before—a song in which the words and the music somehow appeared to be all one; but even when he thought he had got them well fixed in his mind, ever as he came awaker—as he would say—one line faded away out of it, and then another, and then another, till at last there was nothing left but some lovely picture of water or grass or daisies, or something else very common, but with all the commonness polished off it, and the lovely soul of it, which people so seldom see, and, alas! yet seldomer believe in, shining out.

"Could it be all dreaming, do you think, sir?" he asked anxiously.

"I daren't say, Diamond," I answered. "But at least there is one thing you may be sure of, that there is a still better love than that of the wonderful being you call North Wind. Even if she be a dream, the dream of such a beautiful creature could not come to you by chance."

Care to read it yourself? Project Gutenberg is so nice.

"Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing"

"This day was only the first of many similar ones for the emancipated Mole, each of them longer and full of interest as the ripening summer moved onward. He learnt to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water; and with his ear to the reed-stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them."

"There is a gigantic difference between earning a great deal of money and being rich."

yet again, semi-serious. what's the deal these days?

Davy died in A Severe Mercy today.  Something must be seriously out of whack in my brain.  Hormones or indigestion are the only things I can think of that could reasonably explain this excessive weepiness and generally soppy mood I'm in.   I didn't cry the last time she died - but my eyes totally welled up today.  Where is my Ice Queen persona going?  Am I just super, super tired?  I mean, I even got a bit choked up while watching Catch Me If You Can this afternoon! WHAT?! And I never, EVER cry in movies. I've gone round the bend.
Reading A Severe Mercy in the bath this evening, I came to this bit about time:

"I saw with immense clarity that we had always been harried by time.  All our dreams back there in Glenmerle had come true: the schooner Grey Goose under the wind, the far islands of Hawaii in the dark-blue rolling Pacific, the spires of Oxford.  But all the fulfillments were somehow, it seemed to me, incomplete, temporary, hurried.  We wished to know, to savor, to sink in-into the heart of the experience - to possess it wholly.  But there was never enough time; something still eluded us."

"We shall come back, we said, and find it... But there wasn't enough time to go back, way leading onto way.  And if we had gone back, there wouldn't have been time enough then, either, for ahead there would be a terminus. Always."

"Time is our natural environment.  We live in it as we live in the air we breathe.  And we love the air - who has not taken deep breaths of pure, fresh country air, just for the pleasure of it?  How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments.  Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it."

"C.S. Lewis, in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet?  Or if they did. would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?' Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest?"

"... it may appear as a powerful proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home."

Now, sure, this is lovely - and I've always appreciated the logic behind C.S. Lewis' statement.  But, with recent changes in my ideas, this has all taken on a new significance.
My picture of Heaven will always - like everything else in my life, apparently - be tinted by Narnia.  The final chapter of The Last Battle, "Goodbye to Shadowlands" (Oh dear, forgotten how to punctuate chapters. Italics?), gave me chills as a kid.  Still does.  I strongly recommend giving it a read, if you already haven't.  You'll never have so much as a passing thought of harps again.

Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan.  And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

"There was a railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used to call it in the Shadowlands- dead.  The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.  And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after.  But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

I'm very quote-happy tonight.  But, anyways, I have no problems imagining how lovely Heaven will be. But, as a silly kid, I always imagined that Heaven, the promise of eternal life, meant less to me.  Less in the sense that it wouldn't be the main thing that drew me to God if I weren't a Christian already.  Meaning, knowing there's a reason and explanation for existence, meant more to me.  Heaven was like a very, very nice perk in an already great package. I'm sure half of this was due to simple lack of capacity - the scope of eternity is a bit too much for me to grasp - the temporal concerns of my life on earth are a bit easier to figure out.  But, with all this thinking about idleness and time, the eternal stuff suddenly means more.
The quotes from A Severe Mercy, above, are a very nice (drat, what's the word?  Explanation? No. Something like it though.) picture of unformed, half-recognized ideas I've recently been mulling over.  Even as I imagined my own ideal life, debt-free, in a Wind in the Willows house, or saw future pictures of myself lazily reading in a lovely wooden canoe, or even gliding along in a shining Grey Goose with a "comrade-lover" by my side, I knew somehow, in the back of my mind, that the manifestations of the dreams would never be as good as the dreams.  I can't escape from time.  And, this evening, at this time in my life, the weight of it has never thundered down on me with such force.  I began thinking; all the true idlers i've been reading about - and according to Sheldon Vanauken, many poets, too -  seem desperate to be free, wishing for more time to live. "O for an age so sheltered from annoy/That I may never know the change of the moons". 
But, in this world, there will never be enough time.
It's slightly pathetic that I never put this together until now.
Do you see why, suddenly, heaven has a new significance for me?  Talk about timeless!  Never having to run off to this, no going home in a week, no slogging back to workplace drudgery, no ending. The ultimate idlers' paradise, literally!
This is another post I ought to delete, but shan't.


P.S.  But no way does this mean my idling visions for my little puff of life are a waste of time.  Why not make the best of it?  It may be short, but this life is still important.

"When we emerged onto the busy High with the traffic streaming past, we shook hands, and he said: 'I Shan't say good-bye. We'll meet again.' Then he plunged into the traffic. I stood on the other side, watching him.  When he reached the pavement on the other side, he turned round as though he knew somehow that I would still be standing there  in front of the Eastgate.  Then he raised his voice in a great roar that easily overcame the noise of the cars and buses.  Heads turned and at least one car swerved. 'Besides,' he bellowed with a great grin, 'Christians NEVER say good-bye!'" - A Severe Mercy, on parting with C.S. Lewis.

Walden

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

"By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break in and steal.  It is a fool's life, as they will find out when they get to the end of it, if not before."

Henry David Thoreau

The Rat sculled smartly across and made fast. Then he held up his forepaw as the Mole stepped gingerly down. 'Lean on that!' he said. 'Now then, step lively!' and the Mole to his surprise and rapture found himself actually seated in the stern of a real boat.

'This has been a wonderful day!' said he, as the Rat shoved off and took to the sculls again. 'Do you know, I've never been in a boat before in all my life.'

'What?' cried the Rat, open-mouthed: 'Never been in a—you never—well I—what have you been doing, then?'

'Is it so nice as all that?' asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

'Nice? It's the ONLY thing,' said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. 'Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,' he went on dreamily: 'messing—about—in—boats; messing——'

'Look ahead, Rat!' cried the Mole suddenly.

It was too late. The boat struck the bank full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.

'—about in boats—or WITH boats,' the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. 'In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not. Look here! If you've really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together, and have a long day of it?'
The Mole waggled his toes from sheer happiness, spread his chest with a sigh of full contentment, and leaned back blissfully into the soft cushions. 'WHAT a day I'm having!' he said. 'Let us start at once!'

"One of the wonderful books of the world" - The Wind in The Willows

Chapter One

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gaveled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, 'Up we go! Up we go!' till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

'This is fine!' he said to himself. 'This is better than whitewashing!' The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow...

Pen and watercolor is too lovely.

idle ill

I woke up at 4 this morning, flailed about in the dark trying to find my cup, took a drink of water and thought, "Hm.  I'm going to have a cold tomorrow." And guess what? I hab a cold.

I always enjoy bouts of mild illness. Bring on headaches and runny noses - to me, it's worth it.  During my elementary years, sick days meant a blessed reprieve from the agony of school - but any kid knows this. I always, always watched Honey I Shrunk the Kids, ate meals on trays decorated with flowers in little bud vases and, all in all, had a keen time.  And even as a homeschooler (my sainted mother schooled me from sixth grade on through high school and I adored nearly every minute of it - the minute I did not enjoy being the one in which we dissected a silkworm), waking with a stuffed-up head still had its perks.  I looked forward to getting my wisdom teeth yanked out in December - envisioning days of contented slumber, Jamba Juice and DVD rentals.  (To be honest, it really wasn't very fun.  I barfed a lot. But after that I had a swell time.)

Imagine my delight this morning when I came upon a chapter in How to Be Idle entitled, "On Being Ill."  How perfect is that?  Possibly even more suitable than reading Death in the Clouds during a plane flight the other day. 

It turns out, I am not the only adult who appreciates a good cold now and then.   I remembered reading somewhere that C.S. Lewis enjoyed, "to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read... eight hours of each happy day."

And I bet wearing a dressing gown as magnificent as this one couldn't have been unpleasant either

Or Jerome K. Jerome, in "On Being Idle", upon being "ordered to Buxton for a month":

"I pictured to myself a glorious time--a four weeks' dolce far niente with a dash of illness in it. Not too much illness, but just illness enough--just sufficient to give it the flavor of suffering and make it poetical. I should get up late, sip chocolate, and have my breakfast in slippers and a dressing-gown. I should lie out in the garden in a hammock and read sentimental novels with a melancholy ending, until the books should fall from my listless hand, and I should recline there, dreamily gazing into the deep blue of the firmament, watching the fleecy clouds floating like white-sailed ships across its depths, and listening to the joyous song of the birds and the low rustling of the trees. Or, on becoming too weak to go out of doors, I should sit propped up with pillows at the open window of the ground-floor front, and look wasted and interesting, so that all the pretty girls would sigh as they passed by."

Maybe minus the pretty girls for me personally, but precisely the right idea. 

Although, in How to Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson brings up a good point which I myself have often sadly shaken my head over: "What happened, I wonder, to the doctors of the turn of the century, who used to recommend long periods of inactivity on the South Coast for minor ailments?  These days doctors just sell you pills, but there used to be a wonderful medical prescription known as the "rest cure' - in other words the only way we can cure this is for you to do as little as possible for as long as possible."

People are always going abroad or having rest cures or "convalescing" when they're sick or worn out in Agatha Christie books.   I've always envied the girls of Ballet Shoes, who, when afflicted with whooping cough, whatever that is, get to leave London and stay in a lovely cottage "in the middle of a common in Kent." And how Petrova gets to blow her influenza nose in Mr. Simpson's new, clean handkerchief with "beautiful initials embroidered on it." 

People really knew how to be ill back then.

I am constantly appalled by ads for cold medicine or Claritin where, in the first scene, a person is miserably blowing their nose and, in the next, happily off to work or riding their bike or something equally ghastly, smiling so hard my face hurts in sympathy.   While chatting with a friend after Christmas, I tried my best not to look horrified as she told me about a bought of sickness she just powered through - only staying home on Christmas day, and then trotting off to work the next day.  What fun is that?  None! That's gross.  Miserable.  Unimaginably wretched.  I mean, I would hate having her job to being with - but having to work a mostly unpleasant job while sick?  Ugh.  Gives me the shivers.  That poor, poor girl.
It's very sad, the way people are guilted into working or doing things when they're unwell.  I mean, if you don't give your body some time to recoup, it stands to reason that your cold or flu or whatever will take longer to go away. I am a firm believer in staying home and sleeping.  Plus, if you stay at home, your germs stay at home with you.  No one else has to suffer.  Unless, of course, they too are pining for a few days of restful loafing.  Then feel free to hack all over people.

I will never understand "working through it".  But, let us toast - with toast, the traditional fare of the unwell - the hard workers who labor on, come headache or high fever.  Please, idle ailing ones, lift your slice. Slaving, sniffling hordes, we do not envy you, but we salute you.

A Severe Mercy

This is the only book, ever, that made me cry when I read it for the first time.  I bawled. Even sobbed a tiny bit.  I mean, who wouldn't cry! It's not just a love story - it's a story about a love.
Back cover: "Sheldon 'Van' Vanauken and Jean 'Davy' Vanauken were lucky enough to discover that radiant love so often written of in books, so seldom found in real life."

"Rather suddenly, without previous reflection on the matter, it began to appear to me that heart-shaped faces were perhaps the best kind.  She was not very tall, and I was; but now I wondered whether, after all, small girls were not more - well, more adorable, sort of.  Especially when they had shining brown hair and low lovely voices and beauteous eyes."

"Thus, rather improbably, began what I must call, judging by others I've known of, a rather remarkable love.  It's remarkableness lay, not in our falling quite desperately in love - many have experienced that glory - but what we made of that love."

"A beam of sunlight slanting through one of the tall windows fell upon my head and shoulders, turning my light-brown hair to gold. I was smiling at her. She paused in what she was saying, then said in a low voice: 'My golden one!'"

"The Shining Barrier.  The Shield of our love. A fence around a tree to keep the deer from nibbling it.  A fortified place with the walls and watchtowers gleaming white like the cliffs of England. The Shining Barrier - we called it so from the first - protecting the green tree of our love. And yet in another sense it was our love itself, made strong within, that was the Shining Barrier.

"But why does love need to be guarded? Against what enemies? We looked around us and saw the world as having become a hostile and threatening place where standards of decency and courtesy were perishing and loomed gigantic.  A world where love did not endure.  The smile of inloveness seemed to promise forever, but friends who had been in love last year were parting this year.  The divorce rate was in the news...We raised the Shining Barrier against creeping separateness, which was, in the last analysis, self.  We also raised it against a world of indecencies and decaying standards, the decline of courtesy, the whispering mockers of love.  We would have our own standards."

"Ten days later, in Miami, we were masters of a sturdy, teak-built, gaff-rigged sloop named Gull....We lived aboard and sailed the waters off the southern tip of Florida, exploring the keys and inlets..."

"When she (Grey Goose) was launched, Davy christened her, breaking a bottle of wine against the lovely-curving bow, and crying as the schooner slipped into the water: 'Keep us out of the set ways of life!'"

Oh dear.  Quotes can't convey even a smidgen of the loveliness of this book.  I could gush unintelligibly, but instead I will just strongly recommend that you pick it up if you haven't read it before. Heck, I would mail it to you, whoever you are!  It's so painfully good.