Something Beautiful

Pleasure in old things

Recently I read a couple of novels by Nevil Shute.  I was taken with this paragraph at the beginning of Chapter 2 of Requiem for a Wren: 

As old age had crept upon my father and mother they had reduced the scale of their expenditure upon themselves to quite a small proportion of their net income. They never had kept racehorses as many of our neighbours do, and they had outgrown the pleasures of spending money.

They got a book each month through the Book Society and they bought a few gramaphone records when they were in Melbourne, but with increasing years and infirmity they got more pleasure out of old things than new, out of old books that they had read fifteen or twenty years before and turned back to now with pleasure, out of old gramophone records, out of furniture that they had bought thirty years ago when they took over Coombargana.

It's not great literature, but I like the sentiment. It's true for me, I think, or is at least becoming more so.

Grief

I've been grieving a loss, with little let-up or relief, for the past seven months. Yesterday I suddenly remembered a passage in a book that has sometimes comforted me in the past, as to previous losses.

The book is I Heard the Owl Call My Name, by Margaret Craven, set in an Indian village of the Pacific Northwest. The passage comes near the very end, when the villagers are mourning the death of a young priest. He had ministered to their parish for the previous year, and earned their trust and affection. Marta, an elderly woman, is particularly saddened by this loss.

On the night of the day Mark died, she prays by speaking to his spirit. She uses the words of her people's tradition:

Walk straight on, my son. Do not look back. Do not turn your head. You are going to the land of our fathers.

It puzzles me, to some extent, why I should find this passage so comforting. I think it is because the passage suggests that the person whom we have lost still has a road to travel, and that he or she is on it. There is comfort in that. And it suggests that they have not so much left us as gone on before us, that they travel a road we will ourselves one day traverse. There is comfort in that as well.

I do seem to feel somewhat better about this most recent loss since remembering Marta's prayer.

Dante (& Longfellow)

In the New Year, I hope to finish reading, at long last, Dante's Inferno. In thinking about the work this evening, I was reminded of one modern novelist's statement that his motive for writing is the same as that of Beatrice in the Inferno (l. 72) --

Love moved me, and makes me speak (amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare).

Eminent critic at Dunkin' Donuts

There's just something about these photos of Helen Vendler, eminent literary critic, Shakespeare scholar, and Harvard professor, at Dunkin' Donuts in New York City.

A soldier's love

Only rarely do I read a paragraph in fiction that strikes me as so good that I must have it, that it rises to the level of poetry.   One such excerpt comes from A Soldier of the Great War, by the gifted Mark Helprin --

. . . for soldiers who have been blooded are soldiers forever. They never fit in. Even when they finally settle down, the settling is tenuous, for when they close their eyes they see their comrades who have fallen. That they cannot forget, that they do not forget, that they never allow themselves to heal completely, is their way of expressing their love for friends who have perished. And they will not change, because they have become what they have become to keep the fallen alive.

Tribute to Emerson

I like this concept -- Tribute to Ralph Waldo Emerson. (You might want to turn down your speakers; the music doesn't add much to your experience.)

Literary Resources on the Net

Literary Resources on the Net, an extensive set of links, maintained by Jack Lynch, of Rutgers--Newark.