01.31.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:23 pm by Miracle ♪♫
The he-stranger leaned obliviously on the table - abandoned by a woman whose mere traces were but a chair and a demitasse that akin to himself, were empty. On the opposite side of the room, seated on a similar café table, was a she-stranger, waiting for a man who would never come for her.
Outdoors, the wind gushed, the trees swooned. The dead leaves, resurrected, took flight. Outside the door of the café, lay a doormat, and on the doormat, landed a moth. The forsaken man and the jilted woman took notice of nothing but the moth. No, not even each other. Only the moth.
Unmoved and unperturbed despite the powerful gales, the moth’s remarkable strength and steadfastness were what attracted the man and woman’s floorward eyesight (for it is the characteristic of the weak to be lured to the strong). Nevertheless, it was not the moth’s might that made it significant all at once: The moment the strangers’ vision touched the moth together, the butterfly’s modest and enigmatic cousin became a wing to an expanse of possibilities.
If only the drifters angled their heads slightly and realized each other’s existence. If only they would notice that they both had more than grief in common, but also identical editions of The French Lieutenant’s Woman on their laps. If only they would understand that they grieved for the wrong people. If only they –
No sooner did another romantic probability take place than a jaunty coffee-lover entered the café and trod upon the moth. The bell that hung above the door jingled. The moth died, and so did hope.
.
Retrieved from one of my abounding notepads, this is something
I scribbled in a café last year while Kendi was stuck in traffic
and the near-empty café left me with some room for imagination.
You may notice how rushed it sounds.
This was also written in circa 15 minutes - a definite
qualifier for the “AbsurDom” category.
.
Return to Home Page
Permalink
01.28.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:52 am by Miracle ♪♫
“Would Chekhov have suffered writer’s block?” Maria wondered, as the hull of the sunflower seed snapped open between her lightly clamped teeth.
Had it not been for gravity and absentmindedness, it might have appeared like a final attempt of helpless rebellion as the kernel fled in its nakedness, first escaping through Maria’s lips and slipping straight into the narrow entrance of a cowl-necked blouse, lapsing between two mounds of mysterious bosomy matter, and finally shelving itself in the black hole of the navel. There, cradled in the darkness was the sunflower seed, and it knew not what parallel or different fate it would have encountered had it slipped inside - on the other side, of that warm, heaving skin. At that moment, it knew not time nor space, it only knew of warmth, suspension, and a false feeling of relief.
Maria’s eyes swept the floor but found no trace of the seed, so she picked up another one when suddenly, an idea! A writing idea after weeks of creative standstill! She mock-kissed the second sunflower seed with glee and tossed it back on the table. “If Chekhov could eye an ashtray and tomorrow furnish a story called ‘The Ashtray,’ what tales I could conjure from a sunflower seed!”
With confident strokes of her pen she inked ‘The Sunflower Seed’ on the top of a blank sheet, and Maria wrote;
“Would Chekhov have suffered writer’s block?” Alejandra wondered, just as the sunflower seed snapped open between her semi-clenched teeth.
Of what seemed as a definitive act of impetuous rebellion, the seed fled in its nakedness, first escaping through Alejandra’s lips and slipping straight into the abyss of a cowl-necked blouse, lapsing between two mounds of mysterious bosomy matter, and at last shelved itself in a black hole which was the navel. There, cradled in the darkness was the sunflower kernel, and it knew not what parallel or different fate it would have encountered had it slipped inside - on the other side, of that warm, heaving skin. At that moment, it knew not time nor space, it only knew of warmth, suspension, and an ersatz feeling that resembled belongingness.
Maria continued to write vigorously and narrated how Alejandra’s husband discovered the mutinous seed in her bellybutton later that night and punished it by plopping it into his mouth with a teasing gleam in his eyes.
Pleased with the South American tone of absurdity in her story despite aiming for a Russian shade, and unaware that her tale was half fiction-half accidental truth, she put her pen down with a satisfying staccato. “Ah, the sound of a period!” she exclaimed. As she stood up, the sunflower seed fell to the floor, later to be identified as midnight snack by the little mouse that lived in between Maria’s walls.
.
Note: Sketches categorized under "AbsurDom" are but fifteen-minute stray thoughts.
Do not try to make sense of this.
Permalink
01.25.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 9:56 pm by Miracle ♪♫
What seemed to be an easy goal of completing the C.S. Lewis compilation at the end of the month is suddenly turning out to be very unlikely with jack-in-the-box itineraries popping up unpredictably here and there.
My Stabilo and I have only gotten as far (or as nigh) as Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, but before anything else, let me affirm for myself what the rest of you C.S. Lewis admirers already know – he is wonderful! To use one’s unique sagacity for God’s glory is rare in this world, and we are indeed blessed to be able to learn from this man through his illuminated writings, and since most of you have one-thing-I’ve-learned’s when speaking of C.S. Lewis, mine is the modeled potentiality of knowing how to answer or approach different arguments about Christianity.
However, this entry might turn out to be one of the most difficult blogs I shall write for two reasons: One is because I’m supposed to be doing something else right now, and the other is because I am about to disagree with a certain view that C.S. Lewis has in Mere Christianity. By doing so, I am subjecting myself to ridicule, scoffing, or criticism, but I find that this particular view has perturbed me even though I have shifted to another portion of the book already and I do not think it will leave me unless I write it down.
Now who am I to question C.S. Lewis? Nobody. In fact, I am bound to believe that the reason I am troubling myself over this portion that might seem insignificant to others is because I am not an intellectual as most C.S. Lewis readers are.
As for you, dear reader, I am not asking you to agree with me but to enlighten me if you deem me to be in the shadows of this matter.
C.S. Lewis writes, “It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a…Christian soldier to kill an enemy.”
I am certainly not claiming that soldiers are not Christians, but may I ask where in all this does “love your enemy” come in? Alright, they might be merely following orders and are thereby killing only and not murdering if we technically trace it back to the Hellenic language. But is this not the part where one soldier is asked to choose between God’s commandment and man’s orders? Forgive me, but I simply cannot reconcile this with “love your enemies” no matter how C.S. Lewis puts it. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” [Ephesians 6:12 (KJV)]
And suppose we come to the argument of self-defense; is not God more than enough as our defender and protector?
What is this topic to me? I wish to equip myself and be ready to answer him who asks of this matter in the future the same way C.S. Lewis’ other words will continue to help me confidently answer other questions about Christianity.
.
Permalink
01.23.09
Posted in On Books and Reading at 5:39 am by Miracle ♪♫
At this late hour of the world’s history books are to be found in every room of the house - in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. And in some houses they have collected so that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap books in paper - one stops sometimes before them and asks in a transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create, from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print? Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it.
One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.
The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Defoe to Jane Austen, from Hardy to Peacock, from Trollope to Meredith, from Richardson to Rudyard Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, to be thrown violently this way and that. And so, too, with the lesser writers. Each is singular; each has a view, a temperament, an experience of his own which may conflict with ours but must be allowed to express itself fully if we are to do him justice. And the writers who have most to give us often do most violence to our prejudices, particularly if they are our own contemporaries, so that we have need of all our imagination and understanding if we are to get the utmost that they can give us. But reading, as we have suggested, is a complex art. It does not merely consist in sympathising and understanding. It consists, too, in criticising and in judging.
The reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge. And this second process, which we may call the process of after-reading, for it is often done without the book before us, yields an even more solid pleasure than that which we receive when we are actually turning the pages. During the actual reading new impressions are always cancelling or completing the old. Delight, anger, boredom, laughter succeed each other incessantly as we read. Judgment is suspended, for we cannot know what may come next. But now the book is completed. It has taken a definite shape. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in several different parts. It has a shape, it has a being. And this shape, this being, can be held in the mind and compared with the shapes the essays of other books and given its own size and smallness by comparison with theirs.
But if this process of judging and deciding is full of pleasure it is also full of difficulty. Not much help can be looked for from outside. Critics and criticism abound, but it does not help us greatly to read the views of another mind when our own is still hot from a book that we have just read. It is after one has made up one’s own opinion that the opinions of others are most illuminating. It is when we can defend our own judgment that we get most from the judgment of the great critics - the Johnsons, the Drydens and the Arnolds.
To make up our own minds we can best help ourselves first by realising the impression that the book has left as fully and sharply as possible, and then by comparing this impression with the impressions that we have formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of the mind - the shapes of the books we have read, like clothes that we have taken off and hung up to wait their season. Thus, if we have just read, say, Clarissa Harlowe for the first time we take it and let it show itself against the shape that remains in our minds after reading Anna Karenina. We place them side by side and at once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as the angle of a house (to change the figure) is cut out against the fullness of the harvest moon. We contrast Richardson’s prominent qualities with Tolstoi’s. We contrast his indirectness and verbosity with Tolstoi’s brevity and directness. We ask ourselves why it is that each writer has chosen so different an angle of approach. We compare the emotion that we felt at different crises of their books. We speculate as to the difference between the 18th century in England and the 19th century in Russia - but there is no end to the questions that at once suggest themselves as we place the books together. Thus by degrees, by asking questions and answering them, we find that we have decided that the book we have just read is of this kind or that, has this degree of merit or that, takes its station at this point or at that in the literature as a whole. And if we are good readers we thus judge not only the classics and the masterpieces of the dead, but we pay the living writers the compliment of comparing them as they should be compared with the pattern of the great books of the past.
Thus, then, when the moralists ask us what good we do by running our eyes over these many printed pages, we can reply that we are doing our part as readers to help masterpieces into the world. We are fulfilling our share of the creative task - we are stimulating, encouraging, rejecting, making our approval and disapproval felt; and are thus acting as a check and a spur upon the writer. That is one reason for reading books - we are helping to bring good books into the world and to make bad books impossible. But it is not the true reason. The true reason remains the inscrutable one - we get pleasure from reading. It is a complex pleasure and a difficult pleasure; it varies from age to age and from book to book. But that pleasure is enough. Indeed that pleasure is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it. When the day of judgment comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick - the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this - we have loved reading.
¤ ¤ ¤
Permalink
01.17.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 9:23 pm by Miracle ♪♫
Since the infancy of my blogging days, someone would chance on my blog every now and then and ask me whether I have majored in philosophy. What suggests this conception, I do not really know for I am barely toe-deep on the banks of philosophy. For all I know, I might even be in the wrong shore.
Ironically, my puerile attitude towards philosophy used to be very negative that I have avoided philosophy books and philosophy majors alike and was even unable to sleep on the night a friend announced that he would take up philosophy in college. Out of “concern” and curiosity, I skimmed through backgrounds of philosophers and read the elementary Sophie’s World. Furthermore, I was to learn later on that the people whom God would use to influence/alter my life and thoughts greatly would be philosophers. Of course, I still know nothing of philosophical arguments but the philosophical impression has certainly provoked me to yearn for wisdom and knowledge and live a more meaningful life.
Nevertheless, I still retain residues of my former stance and deem that philosophy can be dangerous especially when it concerns religion particularly Christianity. The Bible also warns us of these philosophies of which some can be strikingly or subtly compromising. Zarathustra and such remains unconvincing to a high degree and varying ideas on art can barely affect one’s spiritual life, but when it comes to Christianity, I am extra cautious and guarded. This is one reason why I have not read much of C.S. Lewis’ spiritual writings despite the positive and admiring feedback. I believe that if one wants to experience Christianity, there is no other place to look than in the Bible because it is complete and needs no supplementary readings.
…and yet, being the curious reader that I am and finding my first C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves) to be enlightening, I finally decided to read his deeper spiritual masterworks – but not without a skeptic’s Stabilo on hand. Can one be too careful or afford to be too lax when it comes to matters of Faith?
I am now in between the covers of a C.S. Lewis treasury and I aim to accomplish Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man, The Great Divorce, The Problem of Pain, Miracles, and A Grief Observed by the end of January. An unprecedented occurrence of which I am not inclined to publicly announce may hinder me from posting blog entries until February. There may or may not be public notes afterwards, but I am absolutely looking forward to discussions about the man and his devout epistles.
.
Permalink
01.14.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 5:42 am by Miracle ♪♫
“Intense?” asked Papa immediately after the thud of my cell phone on the wooden floor brought me back to the real world. I must have looked silly as I clutched the fat book and allowed the phone to slip from my hands carelessly, and Papa’s slightly teasing smile manifested that he was already expecting something of that sort to happen.
Like a wide-eyed little girl transfixed in an astronomy class, I engaged myself in Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before, but instead of speaking of the captivating book, my stream of thought channels toward the conditions in which this book was read.
The day I embarked on my journey to The Island of the Day Before, I woke up to an ominous silence. Little did I know that for the following days, I’d be waking up to the same silence. Soon enough, I learned about the bombing of the National Transmission Corp. tower in Lanao del Norte, and while attempts to restore power are underway, we only have a few hours of electricity daily while we spend the night’s “peak hours” – my reading time – in blackness. Thank God there were no casualties in the bombing. Mindanao would rather lose electricity for a few days than lose a life to another bestial explosion.
I’ll speak circumspectly of whose machinations these were, and note on how the absence of electric-powered machines cause such extraordinary silence. Gone were the whirrs of artificiality and all one could hear was nature. For the ear accustomed to manufactured sounds, the lingering silence could be creepy, but for the nature-lover, it is music. The evenings are remarkable; that’s when I play Träumerei, or listen to Papa’s guitar, or read by candlelight and pause from the pages and wish I were a composer so I could convert to notes the syncopating raindrops, the moaning wind, the steady and reflective rhythm of every page turned, the ethereal glow of the eight candles – whirling dervishes resisting the chilly gales, the stalactitic creeping of the candle wax, and its melody, the night.
These are the circumstances in which Eco was read. As for the book? Fascinating, fascinating! Mindanao was even mentioned. One can depend on Eco to feed a person’s flights of fancy and enhance the vocabulary – even to extinct and non-existent words. He transports you to a lateral and literal universe of imagination and ideas. What an extremely brilliant author Eco is. But through it all, my astonishment lay in the motifs of philosophy, creation, metaphoric dwarves, double identities, time, space, the spheres, the cosmos, the island itself and the orange dove which echoed
Maya…
Maya…
maya…
Echo…
Eco…
eco…
.
.
Permalink
01.13.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:39 am by Miracle ♪♫
For why should we
Ponder the world’s end
As tragedy?
.
.
.
.
Permalink
01.10.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 3:58 pm by Miracle ♪♫
“With a delicious shudder, I felt streaming toward me from these books the cool but pungent fragrance of a life not of this world yet real nonetheless, a life whose waves now pounded where it sought to realize its fate – in my ecstatic heart. In my reading nook in the attic… there the characters of Shakespeare’s and Goethe’s worlds walked in and out. The sublime and the laughable aspects of everything human were revealed to me: I realized the enigma of the sundered unruly heart… the mighty miracle of the spirit that transfigures our brief stay and through the power of reason raises our petty lives into the realm of fate and eternity,” thus spake Hermann Hesse through Peter Camenzind the moment he discovered literature. Ah! Yes, any bookworm/polybibliogamist can identify with kindred feelings, but Hesse states it oh so beautifully! Beauty: such is the texture of this book.
The nature-loving Hesse of this first opus presented himself differently from the Hesse I experienced in Demian. Like Demian, a bildungsroman, the book sums up Peter Camenzind’s journey through the joys and sorrows of earthly and spiritual life, but absent were Demian’s dark chthonic nature and rigorous themes, and in their stead, a light, idyllic, extremely poetic, and un-disturbing though bittersweet temperament. The novel’s purpose is revealed near the end but I would not even dream of relaying it better in my own words and would rather share these priceless mnemonic paragraphs from the poet Camenzind/Hesse himself.
“As you know, it had been my hope to write a work of some length in which I intended to bring closer to people the grandiose and mute life of nature, that they might love it. I wanted to teach people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are children of the earth, part of the cosmos. I wanted to remind them that night, rivers, oceans, drifting clouds, storms, like creatures of the poet’s imagination and of our dreams, are symbols and bearers of our yearning that spread their wings between heaven and earth, their objectives being the indubitable right to life and the immortality of all living things. Each being’s innermost core is certain of these rights as a child of God, and reposes without fear in the lap of eternity… I also wanted to teach men to find the sources of joy and life in the love of nature. I wanted to preach the pleasures of looking at nature, of wandering in it, and of taking delight in the present.
I wanted to let mountains, oceans, and green islands speak to you convincingly with their enticing tongues, and wanted to compel you to see the immeasurably varied and exuberant life blossoming and overflowing outside your houses and cities each day. I wanted you to feel ashamed of knowing more about foreign wars, fashions, gossip, literature, and art than the springs bursting forth outside your towns, than of the rivers flowing under your bridges, than of the forests and marvelous meadows through which your railroads speed. I wanted to let you know what a golden chain of unforgettable pleasures I, a melancholy recluse, had found in this world and I desired that you, who are perhaps happier and more cheerful than I, should discover even greater joy in it.
Above all, I wanted to implant the secret of love in your hearts. I hoped to teach you to be brothers to all living things, and become so full of love that you will not fear even sorrow and death and receive them like brothers and sisters when they come to you.”
.
.
Permalink
01.08.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 2:11 pm by Miracle ♪♫
The beauty of John Fowles lies not in his plots, nor in his romantic language, it is found in the complex enigma of his ideas – where the depiction of everything from the obvious to the tiniest or most ambiguous detail is pregnant with philosophical erudition, may it be a main character, glass, a dead weasel, burning books, a thought, or a gesture.
He was nominated for the Nobel in 1999 but Günter Grass inherited the prize that year. Fowles is not for everyone as much as other authors are, and regrettably, in my little niche of the world, he is underrated – or worse, unread. In fact I personally know of only two people who esteem Fowles, and both fortunately and unfortunately, knew of him through me. Fowles’ work is espresso, and while it has its fair share of popularity, it remains an acquired taste. Fowlesian novels ooze with that rich and mysterious quality with lingering throes of bitterness, topped with the perfect tiger-striped crema of wonder and imagination, and except for his religious orientations, I’m addicted to everything Fowles.
Franz, one of the two people mentioned above, was darling enough to furnish my hungry shelf with The Ebony Tower during his trip here several days ago. The Ebony Tower is a series of five short novels set in different time frames but with recurring medieval themes: The Ebony Tower, Eliduc, Poor Koko, The Enigma, and The Cloud. Fowles originally called this medley, Variations. The whole book is as mystical as a Pisanello painting or a Celtic myth, but an “art book” is what I’d dub this treasure.
If I could, I’d retype all of his books, but that does not even seem plausible. So I’ll settle with some of the lines I’ve highlighted in the hope that they will spread ripples of Fowles appreciation.
¤ ¤ ¤
The Ebony Tower
No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.
How did one get silence into paint?
The moth battered minutely again at the lampshade. There were others loosely constellated on the glass outside the window…pale fawn specks of delicate, foolish organism yearning for the impossible. The cruelty of glass: as transparent as air, as divisive as steel.
The art predicted a sensitive and complex man; and almost everything outward in him denied it. *Casts a knowing look at Mika*
“You really a painter? Or just a gutless bloody word-twister?”
“That’s all. Just paint. That’s my advice.Leave the clever talk to the poor sods who can’t.”
How impatient it was of barriers and obstacles, how it melted truth and desire of all their conventional coats; one desired truth, one truthed desire…
Perhaps it was happening in the other arts – in writing, music. David did not know. All he felt was a distress, a nausea at his own. Castration. The triumph of the eunuch. Turning away from nature and reality had atrociously distorted the relationship between painter and audience; now one painted for intellects and theories.Not people; and worst of all, not for oneself. Of course it paid dividends, in economic and vogue terms, but what had really been set up by this jettisoning of the human body and its natural physical perceptions was a vicious spiral, a vortex, a drain to nothingness, to a painter and a critic agreed on only one thing: that only they exist and have value. A good gravestone; for all the scum who didn’t care a damn.
He suffered the most intense pang of the most terrible of all human deprivations; which is not of possession, but of knowledge.
¤ ¤ ¤
Eliduc
The Romantics turned minstrelsy into an irredeemably silly word; but what little evidence we have suggests a very great art, one we have lost now beyond recall.
The long evolution of fiction has been very much bound up with finding means to express the writer’s “voice” – his humors, his private opinions, his nature – by means of word manipulation and print alone.
¤ ¤ ¤
Poor Koko
I sat distraught, with the flames and malevolently licking shadows; with the acrid smell, surely the most distressing of all after burnt human flesh, of cremated human knowledge.
¤ ¤ ¤
The Enigma
“This writer of yours – has he come up with a scenario for that?”
“That’s just a detail. I’m trying to sell you the motive.”
The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma, human or divine, can diminish or demean – indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.
¤ ¤ ¤
The Cloud
O, you must wear your rue with a difference.
Little islands set in their own limitless sea, one crossed them in a minute, in five at most, then it was a different island but the same: the same voices, the same masks, the same emptiness behind the words. Only the moods and settings changed a little but nothing else.And the fear was both of being left behind and going on: of the islands past and the islands ahead. One is given to theories of language, of fiction, of illusion; and also to silly fancies. Like dreaming one is a book without its last chapters, suddenly: one is left forever on that last incomplete page, a loved face kneeling over wild orchids, a voice breaking the silence, a stupid crack – transfixed, for ever and ever…
The most frightening is not wanting love from anyone, or ever again.
Nuclei, electrons. Seurat, the atom is all.
The voices, movements; kaleidoscope, one shake and all will disappear.
.
Permalink
01.06.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 7:39 pm by Miracle ♪♫
To you, bestfriend of she who is part of me:
Who am I? I have no name. Unlike some, she refuses to christen me a fancy identity for she does not think of me as another entity but believes that I am a constituent of her. Dear Sir, would you name this arm Abelard and the other Heloise? This eye Romeo and the other Juliet? This leg Tristan and the other Isolde? Certainly not. Therefore I am hers and I am her. I am not writing you for this matter, however. I only wish to thank you.
Yet, you may continue to wonder. Who am I? I am the voice that ceased to be her voice throughout the last couple of days, and who has been your voice in the course of those days. Aha! That is a rather blatant clue right there, dear sir. Thank you for lavishing her and me with precious time and lending us your voice, your music. If truth be told, she was not so disappointed when she learned that you left my relative across the seas, because as a result, you produced from me the voice she longs to procreate with me. Vocalise. Her Rachmaninov, her unsung voice, and you sang it for her, through me…and she is thankful, I am thankful, inspired, happy. We will treasure the memories and the music.
Who am I? Did she not tell you before that your fiddle shall be her fiddle and vice versa?
Sincerely yours,
Her Violin
Enclosed is a note from her:
Dear Shmuckie,
I’m reading Fowles now and enticed by his beauty once more. Thank you for the book, the music, the friendship and everything that comes along with it. Come back soon. We’re missing you already.
“Ever thine, ever mine, ever ours.” =)
.
Permalink
01.05.09
Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 6:39 am by Miracle ♪♫
Owing to The Namesake, a flood of unliterary activities, and with only a few minutes to spend with a book since the new year began, I sentenced these modest minutes to my inexpensive little red book of The Best Russian Short Stories, compiled and edited by Thomas Seltzer.
The pages have been previously browsed through and considered lightly, but as these stories accumulate years and so do I, I have found more substance in them other than my juvenile description, “depressing.” Of course, they still fall in that category technically as the Russian literary giants Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy have proved even in the first five stories of the book. But despite the few laughs that I allowed to slip during The Overcoat, I still felt how much these authors of Russian literature’s golden era were preoccupied with death’s shadow. Their open acceptance on how death plays an enormous role in life along with human frailties allowed their literal portraits to possess richer emotional depth. Surprisingly, I no longer felt “depressed” afterwards, but rather, more satisfyingly familiar and acquainted with life itself.
¤ ¤ ¤
“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,” quoth R. L. Stevenson. As an ardent lover of books, I have neglected this saying deliberately, but the past few days have shown me that there is indeed truth to it. While I spent more time speaking with people I love, sharing thoughts with them, making music with them, reading did not seem to beckon as much as it used to, and now, the Bible exempted, and with slight reluctance, I agree with this quotation. Stevenson continues, “And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.” Now, ain’t that counsel enough? The reality of other people’s thoughts inhabiting my mind instead of my own should also be balanced well. Hmmm… I should take reading a bit (but just a teeny bit) easily. I think the space of twenty four looooong hours between two books is quite good enough. ;-)
Permalink
01.01.09
Posted in 2009 Medley at 8:42 pm by Miracle ♪♫
As the pyrotechnic fanfare illuminated the sky, I squeezed myself in between Papa and Mama; smiled at my two brothers and our bible study brethren, wished them a lovely new year, thanked God silently, retreated to an isolated corner of the room and inhaled 2009. Little did I know that I was being observed until someone commented amidst the gust of lights and sounds, that my eyes were evidently betraying a phrase - a phrase that sighed, “I wish you were here.” I will not remark further on her statement other than the event that her mention of the eyes brought to mind, although in an entirely different frame of reference, a line by Marcel Proust: “The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
New eyes! What perfect things to acquire on the dawn of a new year! But what kind of new eyes?
“The eyes of a child,” answered a thought. Oh, to have eyes full of faith and wonder with the daily miracles of life, unbiased, forgiving, innocent, trusting, hopeful, hungry for wisdom, pure! Let this be our aim/resolution and New Year’s wish for each other.
Happy New Year, Happy New Eyes!
.
.
“Seek the wisdom of the ages, but look at the world through the eyes of a child.”
~ Ron Wild ~
.
Permalink
