Reflections Upon Earth

Yesterday I ran outside to check the mail in my bare feet. Hadn’t done that in a while, and I had forgotten how amazing it feels.

Most of the time, I love school and I love thinking about deep questions. But academic life behind a computer can feel so abstract sometimes. Especially in distance learning, it’s a life disconnected from real voices, real faces—in fact, from real people. It lacks a kind of experiential concreteness, which is essential to our natures.

 So when my feet touched the ground outside, I was sharply aware of a contrast. Suddenly I felt that I had come out of a Laputian, abstract head-in-the-clouds world to taste visceral reality in a way that I had been missing. (Catch the Gulliver’s Travels reference there?)  It didn’t seem to matter much whether it was the rough, untamed grass of nature or the smooth, solid asphalt of civilization. They were both of a piece in a world of real things and I loved them for it. All at once I wanted to drop to the ground and kiss it.

But I was in a neighborhood. And those dread creatures known as The Neighbors would see. So of course I didn’t do it. Such is the power of social pressure.

Really, why should we often feel ashamed of such an action as kissing the earth? We only grudgingly approve it in extreme cases, as of a soldier returning to his native land. Otherwise, it’s just…weird…and greenie…or something like that. Worshipping the earth, maybe. 

I’m glad we don’t think the same way about kissing each other. I couldn’t bear to forbid my littlest sister’s slobbery bedtime kisses to me, on the charge that she was worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.  Why can’t we love the earth likewise, without sacrilege? As the crown of God’s material creation, are we so proud as to have forgotten our roots in the dust under our feet? To avoid calling the earth our mother, I think many of us have begun to consider the earth our servant—and you don’t kiss servants much. But Chesterton once said, “The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister,” and as he adds later, “a little sister.” Quite right, for as he says, we have a common Father—a Father who made us both, giving us something more of Himself, but calling all good. We are both a part of nature and something a little more. Same and other. There is no room here for nature worship, but neither is there room for gnostic pride in our “otherness.” The incarnate God has come out in favor of both the groaning creation and the man who causes it to groan—and redeems both.

Guess what? I’ve been inspired. If I kiss the earth behind the garage, nobody will be able to see… :-)

My Confessions

Funny how a bad week or two can make a faithless blogger feel like blogging...maybe it's a stress reliever.

To make a long, harrowing story of embarrassment and sobbing on my bedroom floor short, I've been late with three papers and two Latin assignments in the past few weeks, besides having made a few posts in western lit discussion forums that I wish I could retract.

One of those papers was really late. I mean reaaaally late. I'm always a procrastinator, but I usually manage to stop procrastinating at just the right moment. Not lately, though. I'm also a perfectionist, and I just couldn't get past writers' block; plus, I was struggling with how to deal with the assignment. Every day as it got later, I began an email to my professor asking him for help, but I could never quite follow through with sending them. So I struggled on alone. One night, after I was going on five days late, I grew so desperate to get the paper done that I wrote a final pleading email in the best Anne of Green Gables apology style, eating huge doses of humble pie and BEGGING for help in the lowest possible style. (I cringe at the memory.) And I swore that if I didn't finish the paper by 8:30 the next morning, I would send the email. Well I finished the paper. (One of the worst papers I ever wrote, but though it was terribly late, it was done anyway.)

For an unrelated purpose, I had to talk to that professor on the phone the same day and disgraced myself all over again by sounding absolutely terrified. Yeah, I'm blushing even as I write that. I'll always wonder whether it was actually noticeable, or whether I'm just acutely self-conscious.

As if all that wasn't bad enough, I positively bit two of my sisters' heads off when they tried to ask me simple questions. "How d'ya spell 'Happy Birthday'?" "I DON'T KNOW; LEAVE ME ALONE!!" "Unbutton my dress for me, please?" "GROW UP AND DO IT YOURSELF." One of them went and cried, and I felt terrible but didn't pull myself away from my computer long enough to go apologize. (Incidentally, I also bit off my fingernails, and I used to have very nice fingernails.)

God is gracious and forgiving. I'm thankful that the work of His Son does for me what I fail to do, and that when I fall short, He giveth more grace.

Still, I'm full of enough pride to wish He didn't need to give me quite so much.

Waking Up Our Senses

G. K. Chesterton once said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” We see some things so often, that we never really look at them, and so miss out on appreciating the marvels all around us. We live in a world of immortal beings, and we do not often treat them as such. Our senses are vitiated, and we grow tired of seeing things as they ought to be seen. We smile indulgently at a child amazed by a magnet, and yet the child is closer to the truth than we. He that would enter the kingdom of heaven must become as a little child, and much the same thing is required of the person who would enter the kingdom of earth.

This habit of undervaluing all things is, I think, very much like telling a lie. We often live as though we have weighed the world, and found the stars wanting and our fellow men not much worth our valuable time (perilously close to the sin of bearing false witness against our neighbors). But we have probably never given them the benefit of a perceptive, second look. We are often quite like the Pharisees whose ears were dull of hearing and their eyes closed, so that they could not see God in their midst.

And this is where Dr. Hake says one of the values of literature lies. “[B]ecause literature is concrete and appeals to our senses, literature can help wake up our senses. It can help us to really look at and see the things around us. It can help us to really listen and hear, smell, taste and touch.”

“If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time,” Chesterton said, and we may well say that this is what happens to us when we read an Emily Dickinson poem and for the first time “watch a beetle pass.” Good literature helps us to reach that 1000th glance at something which we finally begin to see. I dare anyone to read The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and not come to appreciate, in “Trespassers W,” something as simple as a broken sign. I hope there is no being so depraved that reading Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop does not, for one moment at least, cause him to look up and see the astonishing Dick Swivellers and Marchionesses that surround him in “ordinary” people. Literature renews us, and if indeed it should happen that a book would cause us to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and understand with our hearts, it might be that we would be converted and healed.


(Originally posted by me in my Western Lit. I class.) 

Review: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Translated into English Verse

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Translated into English Verse by Omar Khayyám




Rather odd poem celebrating the theme, "Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." Or maybe just drink for tomorrow we die.

If anyone accuses you, like Puddleglum, of being "too full of bobance and bounce and high spirits" and of needing something "to sober you down a bit," perhaps some sad lines like these would help:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and—sans End!

Alike for those who for TO-DAY prepare,
And those that after a TO-MORROW stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! your Reward is neither Here nor There."

....

Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn
My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur'd—"While you live,
Drink!—for once dead you never shall return."

Of course, if the point was to sober you down, maybe the poem is self-defeating. You'll be none too sober if you really take it's advice.



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Review: Johnny Tremain

Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Hehe, okay, everyone needs a bit of kids' stuff after a whole semester of grown-up person college subjects, right? Epistemology and metaphysics and Descartes and Hume all seem to fade into insignificance before the everlastingly sane world of children.

Johnny Tremain was an enjoyable, well-written piece of children's fiction. It should be fascinating even to a reluctant reader and will make a historical period come alive even if it doesn't teach a whole lot of history.



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Review: The Wrestler of Philippi

The Wrestler of Philippi by Fannie E. Newberry

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


The Wrestler of Philippi had the potential to be a good story. It's set in an exciting time period--the reign of the emperor Nero. It has the plot element of searching for long-lost family members, which is generally interesting. It even had a few scenes that could have been very powerful.

However, several flaws spoil the book. I might forgive the cocoa beans, though that is a serious historical error, and I might even forgive the clearly late-Victorian language of the characters, if the characters were characters at all. But they aren't. Nobody in the book is well-developed because the author tries to follow too many different threads, rather than sticking with one story. (Yes, I know Dickens could do that successfully, but few other people can.) Newberry attempts to weave in some biblical characters and events, such as the demon-possessed girl, whom Paul healed; the mesh does not work out though and only adds to the confusion of divergent story lines. The author also goes out of her way to rationalize a miracle, and then produces an ending more unbelievable than any miracle. She fails to evoke any sympathy for her characters, and in the end falls far short of any real dramatic power. Much better historical fiction for young people is out there; skip this one.



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Review: The Well and the Shallows

The Well and the Shallows by G.K. Chesterton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the ways in which G. K. Chesterton really impresses me throughout this little book of essays is in his deep understanding of the right relationship between Christians, and social and economic concerns. Too often we tend to catch on to something, such as democratic-republican government, and make it part of our religion. We sometimes act similarly about capitalism, forcing ourselves to defend its faults as though it was straight out of the Bible instead of straight out of the Enlightenment. Or we may go in another wrong direction, and say Christians should have no concern in "worldly" affairs. One system is as bad as another and all of them are fundamentally none of our business.

The truth is that neither of these standpoints correctly represents Christianity, which is in its nature, both extremely other-worldly, and extremely concerned with this world also. Chesterton put it quite well in the essay "When the World Turned Back": "We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things." We should, by all means, be actively involved in all the concerns entailed by the command to love our neighbors as ourselves, whether politically or socially or what-have-you, but we should never come to a place where we forget that any man-based system is capable of going wrong.

In this little book, Chesterton wrote words that should be the motto on the door of every Christian activist: "Try a Monarchy if you think it will be better; but do not trust a Monarchy, in the sense of expecting that a monarch will be anything but a man. Be a Democrat if you like (and I shall always think it the most generous and the most fundamentally Christian ideal in politics); express your sense of human dignity in manhood suffrage or any other form of equality; but put not your trust in manhood suffrage or in any child of man. There is one little defect about Man, the image of God, the wonder of the world and the paragon of animals; that he is not to be trusted. If you identify him with some ideal, which you choose to think is his inmost nature or his only goal, the day will come when he will suddenly seem to you a traitor."

As Chesterton suggests in the title of the book, it is the world that is shallow, and Christianity that has the well of truth. We may acknowledge that the puddles of the world may hold some good water, and we may pour into them of the "living water," but we should never mistake the puddles for the well.

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Christmas Break

Partial list of my activities since the end of the term:

1. watched "Miracle on 34th Street"
2. sewed Christmas dresses for two small sisters
3. watched "The Bells of St. Mary's" (second favorite Christmas movie)
4. sang "What Child is This?" in church Christmas program (dreadful experience)
5. met a fellow Distance Learning classmate
6. finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
7. watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (favorite Christmas movie)
8. read "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" by William Blake
9. read Rasselas by Samuel Johnson
10. sewed Christmas potholders (harder than Christmas dresses)
11. joined Mom in dancing the chimney sweep dance from "Mary Poppins"

Shall We Devote a Whole Month to Christmas?

"All the old wholesome customs in connection
with Christmas were to the effect that one
should not touch or see or know or speak of
something before the actual coming of Christmas
Day. Thus, for instance, children were never
given their presents until the actual coming of the
appointed hour. The presents were kept tied up
in brown-paper parcels, out of which an arm of a
doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally
stuck. I wish this principle were adopted in respect
of modern Christmas ceremonies and publications.
The editors of the magazines bring out their
Christmas numbers so long before the time that
the reader is more likely to be lamenting for the
turkey of last year than to have seriously settled
down to a solid anticipation of the turkey which
is to come. Christmas numbers of magazines ought
to be tied up in brown paper and kept for Christmas
Day. On consideration, I should favour the editors
being tied up in brown paper. Whether the leg
or arm of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude
I leave to individual choice."
--G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered


Dear Mr. Chesterton,

Humbly acknowledging the vast superiority of your intellect to mine, I must beg to differ with you here.  Why should Christmas be restricted to one day? We look forward with anticipation to the commemoration of the birth of our holy Saviour; why therefore should we repress our celebration? Let us bring out our tree the day after thanksgiving and watch our Christmas movies--the modern equivalent of your Christmas magazines--every other day from now until then.  Your own church, Mr. Chesterton, holds an Advent season every year; and if we begin early to pray, may we not also rejoice?

Your devoted reader,
Sarah

Review of The Story of the Other Wise Man

     Since its first publication in 1895, Henry van Dyke’s novella, The Story of the Other Wise Man, has been an annual Christmas favorite and has been reprinted in a new binding nearly every year. Often considered a story for children, but enjoyed by adults as well, this poignant tale follows the adventures of Artaban, “the fourth wise man”, as he searches for the One foretold by the star he has seen, and how in not finding—he finds.
    The book was well researched and as a result, is rich with the flavor of the Orient.  Older readers may enjoy the first part of the book the most, where Artaban explains the reasons for his quest, and find the ending a little clichéd though still well handled.  Younger readers may find the late nineteenth century writing style difficult to read, but with a little patience, they should be able to understand and appreciate it.
    Making a great holiday read-aloud, this thought provoking story reminds us that the real story of Christmas does not end with Jesus’ birth.  For those who still seek Him, that is only the beginning.

All Roads Lead to Rome, but Only One to Heaven

 After the removal of an old Roman altar, and shortly before Christianity became the official religion of Rome, Quintas Symmachus wrote to the Senate, requesting the restoration of the Roman gods:

"We ask, then, for peace for the gods of our fathers and of our country. It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road." (Sources of The Making of the West)


I'd guess that Symmachus had never tried hunting for buried treasure, without having the treasure map, otherwise he would have known how important it is to have the right road.  
But there is nothing new under the sun is there?  People still express that idea today, though rarely do they put it as beautifully as Symmachus did. 

Truth and Fiction

"Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it." --G. K. Chesterton

Hmm...I wonder if Beowulf really did swim in his armor.

Typing Troubles

Woe is me.  I must apologize for the brevity of this post.  My typing capabilities have been sadly inhibited by the sudden removal of my long fingernails.  I broke one while I was doing laundry this evening, so I decided to take them all off.  Sadly, my fingers are in a strange state of shock, and I am finding it difficult to punch the keys correctly.


And I have a pile of block quotes to type for a rough cut outline due tomorrow.  Oh, woe is me.

Scribblings

A crazy piece of a story I was working on once...

Supremacy

“Go West!” Greeley said. And we have gone west. We have gone to the farthest places of the earth. We have gone even to the moon. And why should we not go to the red planet also? So here I sat, in the Santa Maria of the 21^st century, waiting to set foot on the New World. My eyes eagerly peered from my window, wandering in delighted admiration over the vast frontiers of the unexplored continent, and I thought that I had never before beheld such unparalleled grandeur. I thought to myself, “This then is the supreme entity—land—the ground beneath a man’s feet. What is there greater in the universe? What is more truly the basis of civilization than the ground on which it is built? And who greater than the men who discover it?” In my mind, I reviewed the names of all the explorers of whom I had ever heard. Erickson, De Gama, Columbus, Magellan, Livingston, and Armstrong passed in a great parade before me till the last in the line held out his hand to me and I became one of them.

With this thought it occurred to me that I was looking in the wrong direction. Surely, it was not land that was greatest, but the men who conquered it. I turned my eyes from the window, to the interior of the spaceship. The majesty which I had at first seen outside, now seemed to be outshone by the glory of ourselves. The men who surrounded me seemed to radiate it, but I thought myself the brightest. The thought flashed through me that at last we had conquered the Olympus of the gods and had ourselves become gods.

The order came to land, and instantly there was a great rush for the door. I had thought we were gods; now I wondered if we were even men. We became almost beasts each in our wild efforts to be the first to set foot on the new territory. I struggled as hard as the rest, but though I bit and scratched, it was my misfortune to be the smallest of the party, and I stepped out last.

Immediately, I was oppressed with a sense of my own insignificance. Could I actually have made a god of such a puny creature as I? Quickly, I looked at my companions. They seemed to have shrunk to half their former size. I found that I was afraid—terrified—a small child alone in the dark. If this was Olympus, then we had not conquered it, nor the god of it. I turned to flee to the spaceship but it also had shrunk. Where could I hide from the glory to which I had foolishly climbed? I fell to my knees and cried, “Oh God, when will we reach the bounds of our habitation? How long till Thou sayest ‘Thus far and no further’? Have we not built Babel high enough?”

Then I looked at the blackness of space around me and I laughed. The universe was not large enough to hold the Eternal and had I thought that I had reached His dwelling place? We had not come so far. We were but human and the creation stretched beyond Mars. 

...kinda fun making the poor guy go through so many wrong attitudes towards man and the cosmos before he hits on the right one.

A Piece of Poetry

One day I was sitting in a rocker comfortably reading Marcus Aurelius (this was in the days when I still read philosophy for personal enjoyment), when one line suddenly popped out at me.  I had to write a poem on it at once, which I did, and hear it is.  

The End of the Play

“For what shall be a complete drama is determined by him who was once the cause of its composition, and now of its dissolution: but thou art the cause of neither. Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied.”

--The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

When Shakespeare cries out “Finis”

Who will say he doeth wrong?

Will Romeo plead for one last kiss,

Or Falstaff one last song?

When Rostand ties the curtain fast

Who will argue with his will?

Will Cyrano wave his nose and blast,

“I’ve three more men to kill"?

Shall love and laughter bind us

Close to the props and the stage?

Will sham-fight thrill and glory case us

In plastic armor’s cage?

Chekhov ends his one-act play,

And who will rise to his height?

Not justly so will the actor say,

“Playwright, the play’s not right.”

But short or long, the play’s the thing.

We the players must be tried.

Then play your part, the author watching,

May watch, well satisfied.

Don Quixote

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.” Shaw was wrong. Don Quixote was a gentleman by birth, long before he began to read. And as for the accusation that believing what he read made him mad, I deny that it ever had any such effect. He simply had an extraordinarily keen sense of chivalry and romance, and was unfortunately born in an age of people who were lacking in that faculty. That he saw giants where others saw only windmills, was not a sign of his supposed mental degeneracy, but of the rest of the world’s blindness. The giants were not imaginary. Can anyone fail to see in those windmills, a symbol of the growing power of science and technology, and fault Don Quixote for wanting to take them down a peg or two? Do we blame him because it happened that the windmills took him down instead? Don Quixote was one of the great people who are able to find adventure even in common experiences, but let us hope that he is not the last. To look at a broken down nag and say “Rocinante”—not the nag that you were, but what I will make of you now—what is that but to follow in the footsteps of the Highest? Let there be more such men.

My Blogging Debut Speech

Today begins a new epoch in my life.  I have become a blogger.  At this juncture, I am moved to analyze the causes leading to this revolution.  Why have I become a blogger?  I never even liked blogs before.  And I've never kept a journal for longer than three months.  Why have I suddenly decided to take on the burden of maintaining a blog?

Mainly because I have become a college student, I believe.  On the surface, it may appear that a college student would have even less time for blogging than anyone else.  Which is quite true.  But it isn't a matter of time.  It's a matter of what college does to your mind.  The intellectual strain must find relief somewhere--hence my blog.  After research papers and history exams have worn me thin, this blog shall be an escape into random musings.  What traces of brilliancy may appear here, will be G. K. Chesterton's, not mine. 

Which brings us to the question of Chesterton.  Why is my blog so heavily devoted to him?  I shall list several reasons, in the order in which they occur to me.

1.  Chesterton is the reason I survive in college.  He can be consulted beneficially on every subject.  He deserves a blog in his honor.
2.  Chesterton can provide interesting posts for me, when I am too lazy to come up with anything of my own.  (Yes, Prof. C., they will be properly referenced.)
3.  If I post Chesterton, I will actually enjoy reading my posts.
4.  If I didn't devote this blog to Chesterton, I would still end up bringing him into it anyway.  I might as well do it at the beginning officially.
5.  Because I want to.  And I shouldn't live with unfulfilled desires should I?

This concludes my presentation speech.  As my mouse arrow moves toward the "publish post" button, I say a bittersweet good-bye to my pre-blogger life, and embrace the new blogger life before me.