Book Club: West with the Night

I'm in a book club at the local library, and I love it. My grandparents are in multiple book clubs (two, I think) and read great books with fun people, so I was inspired to find my own in Madison. The book for this month was Beryl Markham's West with the Night. It was one of the best books I've ever read, although there was great controversy about it at the book club discussion. I love book club because there are so many interesting people. There can also be annoying people, intriguing people, and people with accents. There are lots of old people, and this probably contributes to how exciting it can be. The older people who come to book club can be grouped into two categories 1) those whose personalities have crystalized on the very outspoken side so you learn a lot about them throughout the course of the evening as their eccentricities leak through every word and 2) those who are quiet and nice and only say one thing the whole night. 

This was a great book, West with the Night, and I've been recommending it to almost everyone I know, so I was surprised that there was so much controversy about it. The book is a collection of stories about the author's childhood and life in British East Africa in the early 20th century. She tells exciting stories about hunting with the Masai, learning how to train and race horses, learning how to fly primitive planes and scouting elephant from the sky. She is an excellent writer and has a couple of really powerful prophetic moments. The descriptions of the land are captivating. From a writing standpoint, it was one of the best-written books I've read in a long time. To me, the most exciting part was when she described a horse race. I read it at the airport in D.C. and I could barely stay in my chair. 

The first issue raised at book club was that the book was false advertising. The title, West with the Night, was deemed too misleading by one thirty-something woman who only wanted to read about flying, not about Africa or anything interesting. Only flying. And she elaborated her point, which, when stripped down to what she was actually saying was only that she wished the book had had a different title, for about ten minutes. A lady we will call Jane who was older agreed and suggested an alternate title, "Africa Made Me," and I laughed in spite of myself, not in a mean-spirited way, I just thought it was funny, and I couldn't believe we were disputing the title and content of the book. Usually you don't spend so much time on this in lit. class. Not only were several people upset that she had written about her life growing up, but they were also a little miffed to find out that she had been married three times and failed to mention anything about it. I was sitting there thinking to myself, "she's the author, she can write about whatever she wants. It's her book, she can choose what to include and what to leave out. She obviously had reasons for making the decisions she did. It wasn't an autobiography, it was a memoir." Someone from my side said that the Africa stories were the frame/context/background/what shaped her growing up. If she had written a book just about her flight across the Atlantic, it would have been way more boring than the book she actually wrote. An advantage of writing it the way that she did was that it was believable when she wrote so nonchalantly about the trans-Atlantic flight because it matched the way she did everything else. 

I'll cover another incident involving the only woman I knew by name who I remembered from a different bookclub. She had been waiting to bring up her point, because at this book club, everyone talks, and you have to fight to get your piece in. It's Madison-- everyone is smart, and everyone has thoughts they want to share. So, my friend finally got her turn and brought up the issue of Markham being a really cold person because of the way she wrote about the people she was close to. I disagreed, citing the passages when she has to say goodbye to important people or when people that she is really close to die. She always used distancing language in those passages because I think she didn't know what else to do with her emotions. There is a really powerful passage when her, well, I won't spoil it in case you read it. Then, my friend brought up another passage where Markham wrote about a destitute woman, and my friend gave a really pointed accusation that the author was cold-hearted and there was tension in the air, and then about two seconds later, another character on the opposite end of the table started talking about something completely different that didn't answer the question at all. My friend got an expression of anger mixed with disbelief mixed with scorn on her face-- that look you get when you throw your hands up in the air and say "ugh! I can't believe that!" It was not a good moment, but I seemed to be the only one who noticed. Again, I laughed, because it was a ridiculous moment. I talked to her about it afterwards, and she had an interesting theory about why certain people liked the book and others didn't. She thought it was about projections, and the people who wanted to have adventures like Markham's liked the book, and those who didn't want to didn't like the book. That fit with me because I would love to have had half the adventures she had. 

Some people thought there were too many animals in the book: elephants, dogs, horses, parrots, zebras, wild hogs, ants, giraffes, and more. They reasoned that she liked animals so much because she couldn't connect with people. How could anyone write about Africa in the early 1900's without writing about animals? It turned out at the end that the woman who wanted the book to be all about flying was a pilot herself, and that's why she was disappointed. After that information was revealed, the book club turned into flying club and everyone asked her questions about flying and where she took lessons and where she flies to and what it's like and had she ever flown at night, etc. Coupled with this, Jane, who was by far the funniest, kept asking us questions like, "Have any of you ever been to Africa?" We said no. She said, "Well, one time I went to Kenya and this and this happened..." Or, "Have any of you ridden in a helicopter?... Well, I have and it was like this..." Or, "Have any of you ever been in a hot air balloon?... Well, I have..." It was a great time and I left feeling happy, very amused, and shocked that there was so much disagreement about a book that I loved. 

Before I left, I checked out the movie Out of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. This movie takes place in the same community as West with the Night, and watching it was like seeing the world I had read about. I was talking to Caleb the whole time we watched it, "Well, there should be telegraph lines running alongside the railroad because she talks about all the animals getting tangled up in them." Later in the movie, it showed them installing the wires. "He's in the book! He turns out to be one of the most legendary hunters in British East Africa." It was such a sad, sad story, but the Africa was the same. I wish I could do Meryl Streep's Dutch accent. She was fabulous. I looked her up afterwards, and it turns out we have the same birthday!

I must mention that I was surprised to learn how racy the society was during this time. You didn't get any of that from the book, but the discussion leader mentioned several things about it, as did another man who found a biography on Markham. The movie did a better job at revealing how the values of the society played out in relationships, and that's part of why it's so sad.

Today, I just finished reading Roald Dahl's book Boy, and it turns out that he also went to British East Africa around the same time. I want to see if he has written any books about it and if he knew any of the same people. I have discovered a new world, and now I want to learn everything about it. 

Screwtape Ch. 7 & 8

Wow, chapter 8 is amazing. I wish I could type the whole thing into this post.

It begins by exploring the theme of undulation in humans' lives. In everything we do, we have times of peaks and times of troughs, in "interest in his work, affection for his friends, his physical appetites" (pp. 37-38). Then, Screwtape talks about the differences in the way that God uses the trough periods in our lives and the way that devils use them. The following section contrasts God and the devil's driving motivations as they look at humans.

[He wants to fill the universe with] creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct. p. 39

Wow! Isn't this sweet?! That's the beauty of God, and for someone who's supposed to sound like a demon, he sure is good at proclaiming truth about God and praising him for who he is. I love these images of God because they are so freeing. They show a God who is full and flowing over-- a God of abundance who doesn't need us but wants us. The structure of the paragraph with the barrage of paired statements really makes it effective from a literary standpoint, too.

We can use this list as a measuring rod for ourselves in our relationships with people. Are we acting out the first part of the paired statements or the second part? Are we full and flowing over in our relationships or empty and trying to be filled? We can act out either of these roles, the dark role or the light role, in our relationships, and I think whichever one we act out reveals something about the state of our heart and whether or not we are living for God that day or if we are living for ourselves. It can be easy to try to suck in or control or manipulate or seek affirmation from friends, but isn't it better to already find ourselves full so that we can love them? Living a "full and flowing over" life shows evidence of the Holy Spirit in us.

I love the last phrase "united to Him but still distinct" from p. 39. We are united to him through Jesus and we have peace with God, but we are distinct because we retain our selfhood and our human will. Looking back to creation, we are united to God in another way-- we are made in his image. We are like him in whatever way "his image" refers to. From creation, we also learn that God loves to celebrate. We see a bunch of diversity in creation-- really weird animals, think about it. Creatures who are not only functional, but beautiful, and superfluously beautiful, colorful, patterned, tall, small, almost invisible. Planets, galaxies, things that humans will never see but God still made them because he wanted to. And then, think about the passages that describe the body of believers-- one body, many parts. Think about all of your friends who can do very different amazing things-- artistic abilities, musical abilities, incredible brains, incredible athleticism, people who build things and know intuitively how parts fit together. People who can see beauty, people who get math, people who are inexhaustibly kind to others. When God made humans, he didn't make them boring. His plan was never "to cancel or assimilate" (p. 39) but to celebrate. His character of freely "giving out" and blessing shines in his creative design of humans and his lavishing of gifts, abilities, and uniqueness on us.

Where does the human will come into all this? It seems to be the focus of Lewis' attention in much of this chapter-- the devil wants to take more and more ground in humans to control them, but God wants humans to freely conform their wills to his. "Merely to override a human will... would be for Him useless... His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve" (p. 39). The two ideas-- the trough period from the beginning of the chapter, and the human will-- are connected through God's felt absence. Read the fascinating and powerful passage below:

He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs-- to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual temptation, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot 'tempt' to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. pp. 39- 40 

What a faith! These ideas go back to one of the first chapters when Screwtape says something along the lines of "He leaves them to do it on their own" and this leads to less reliance on emotions. These trough times can be agonizing though. We just want to get out. We feel like we're in the dark and we don't know what, if anything, is happening to us in terms of "growth." And we don't really care about growth even if it is happening. Everyone has these periods of feeling forsaken by God. I love one of the lines from earlier in this chapter, "some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else" (p.38). The troughs offer us the opportunity to cultivate obedience, even though it hurts. But God doesn't demand that we execute the task perfectly. "If only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles."

Humidifier, Screwtape Ch. 5 & 6

I turn into a baby when I get sick. Any far-reaching vision that I had of my life including other people is immediately extinguished and all I can see is myself and what hurts. I didn't leave the apt. for three days I think? and yesterday Caleb finally forced me out to take some DVDs back to the library and to go to Walgreens to buy a humidifier and some Wether's Originals. Then, a bunch of our friends came over for the weekly waffle night, and suddenly I was better. I still have a craving to watch The Princess Diaries, though. All of my sicknesses are accompanied by a craving to watch a different Disney movie. When I stepped outside yesterday, my eyes were like, "Whoa!! there are trees. They are really green and three-dimensional. There's color and wind. Whoa." Yeah, it was weird. I watched a lot of tv including the US Open semifinal round with Rafa and Murray. We watched this movie about the Madness of King George III with the guy who played Bilbo Baggins. I read Lisa Beamer's Let's Roll! book and C and I watched the two hour 9/11 documentary on Sunday night.

It's funny what happens when you're sick-- two really good friends called that weekend both of whom I hadn't talked to since May. I got emails from friends with requests to edit creative writing pieces. I missed the Portuguese night, and the Food for All at our church. Things get so busy when you don't feel like doing anything, but when you're well, nothing. I guess that's not totally true.

I have some great memories of my childhood vaporizer-- a giant dark brown tub with a white lid and the most delicious stream of cold air that you could point wherever you wanted. I remember the sound it made while it chugged along, spouting out air. That thing was awesome. The one we got doesn't hold a candle to it, and it makes weirder noises that wake you up in the night when you're trying to sleep so you can get better...

Anyway, here's the Lewis blurb for today. Chapter five is all about war. I find it interesting how much the environment created by the war described in ch. 5 differs from the way that we think of ourselves in a war in the U.S. Undoubtedly part of that is because of the way that war has changed since WWII, this war is not being fought within our borders, there is no draft. Most Americans probably don't wake up in the morning thinking "we're in a war." If everyone did wake up thinking that, maybe we wouldn't be in one.

Lewis has a great essay as part of his collection The Weight of Glory called "Learning in Wartime" in which he outlines thoughts similar to the ones in this chapter. One great insight from "Learning in Wartime" is that being in a state of war reveals to us the condition that we are always in. War keeps us from dissociating and in the mindset that we could die at any moment. "Normal life" is insular and creates a feeling of safety in individuals. Oh yes, of course everything will always go on in this way. But wartime shows us that we are always, always, on the brink of life and death. War puts us in that state of mind and ensures that we prepare our hearts for what could lie ahead. For this reason, Screwtape says that war benefits the Enemy (God):

Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy's party, prepared. How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition! And how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever. pp. 23-24

I love the phrase "contented worldliness" (If you take the phrase itself out of context, I would argue that  Lewis doesn't even believe there is such a thing because he knows that you can never be truly content by filling yourself up with the world because it is empty. Contented worldliness is a never-ending quest. See Lewis' book Surprised by Joy or my blog post about it from years ago). Here I think it means "the belief that life will go on as it always has" without the need to change anything or answer any serious questions.

This is not to say that the desired state for living is a constant state of non-dissociation. In one of my psych classes last semester, we talked about anxiety disorders stemming from an inability to dissociate. Example: every time you get in an elevator, you think it's going to plummet to the bottom. Every time you get in a car, you think it's going to crash. Every time you do something that has become normal in our society, but when scrutinized, could have potential dangers... I am actually very familiar with these types of fears. I am the only one who will go hide in the pantry when a tornado is near by.

I think Lewis is saying that for the fear to be brought up is a good thing in that it forces us to remember ourselves as temporal beings on earth. But, the fear is meant to bring you to a point of resolution i.e. trust in God and the knowledge that your spirit is safe with him in the event of disaster, emergency, or death.

In chapter six, he explains that we are not to conquer the thing we are afraid of, but only our fear of it. The fear coming to us is the true reality, while the "thing" we dread is still out there in the future and largely immaterial. "It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of" (pp. 25-26). Most of the things that I spend time being afraid of will never happen, and the real enemy is the fear itself, not the various scenarios I can concoct in my head. It is to my and our advantage to recognize when we are entering "a state of fear, anger or lust" so that we can then go in the other direction.

Reflection over, time to plan meals for the week and go to the store. Tune in next time for ch. 7 & 8...

Screwtape Letters, Ch. 3 and 4

This morning I read chapters 3 and 4 at my favorite breakfast place in downtown Madison-- Marigold. The content in chapter three didn't jump out at me as much as chapters one and two. It's all about the patient's relationship with his mother and the things that can go wrong in interpersonal relationships when people live together-- focusing on quirks, believing that the person is trying to irritate you on purpose when they're not even aware that a particular action annoys you, attacking the person and then getting upset when they express that they feel attacked.

The best part was pp. 11-12 when Screwtape talked about getting the patient to think, pray, and be concerned only about his "inner life" and his mother's soul vs. her actual needs or his behavior towards her. Then he talked about separating the actual person being prayed for from the prayers on their behalf. There's this great and tragic line, "I have had patients so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's 'soul' to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm" (p.13). In his kind of prayer, the pray-er's vision of the person they are praying for becomes distorted, and the compassion that would ordinarily spring up for that person in prayer doesn't spill over when you encounter the real person.

Chapter four was all about prayer. Some of the insights from this chapter have stuck with me since I first read the book in high school. Sadly, I do not practice them as often as I should.

First, Screwtape explains that re-converts can be persuaded not to have regularity in their prayers if they remember how rigid their childhood prayers were. He says:

 In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean in a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguely devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. One of their poets, Coleridge, had recorded that he did not pray 'with moving lips and bended knees' but merely 'composed his spirit to love' and indulged 'a sense of supplication'. This is exactly the sort of prayer we want...

He then mentions the actual physical posture used during prayer, "they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls" (p.16). I am not in the habit of kneeling when I pray, but I wonder if he has a point here, somewhat relating back to what he said in earlier chapters about getting distracted by "real life." If I wanted to get more out of "real life," would I get on my knees more to try to create a definite break with the "normal"?

Another way to prevent good prayer is to "turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves" (p.16). Screwtape talks about the pray-er looking inwards too much and trying to create different moods in himself. "When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and never notice that this is what they are doing (pp. 16-17)." He goes on to say, "Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never let them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment."

Here's the emotion piece again. Both in the first example with trying to create a feeling or 'composing the spirit to love' and in the second with measuring success by feelings, he's right, it's pretty vague. It's about how we feel vs. who God is. This is why we have to look at him and not at ourselves. True worship has the quality that we see God, and, seeing him, everything else mysteriously fades into the background. It returns to where it has belonged for the whole time, but we haven't been able to keep it in perspective and God in his rightful place in our hearts.

In the next section, Screwtape actually talks about how humans see God, or don't see him. He talks about composite images and pieces stuck together and urges his nephew to keep his charges praying to "it," the made up image, rather than God himself. He says:

For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers 'Not to what I think thou art but what thou knowest thyself to be', our situation is, for the moment, desperate. Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their mere subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it-- why, then it is that the incalculable may occur. In avoiding this situation-- the real nakedness of the soul in prayer-- you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose. There's such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!

I realize I'm quoting huge sections of the book, but that's because it's so good. How can you add to it?

From what he said in the first chapters and what he's saying now, it seems that there is a new area that we need to find in terms of real life, real needs, and spiritual needs. In the earlier chapters, Screwtape distracts a man from thinking about matters of eternal consequence by getting him to think about his lunch instead, but in this chapter, he wants the man to think/pray about his mother's soul instead of remembering her actual felt needs and sufferings. The first man escaped his eternal thoughts by "a good dose of real life." He saw newspapers and buses and the world outside. He was distracted by the present moment. But perhaps the difference is that "the world outside" didn't have a claim on him in the same way that a person's mother has. The first man needed to attend to his own questions and the second man needed to care about his mother's rheumatism more than her soul, or let caring for her physical needs be a means of caring for her soul? In the section with the mother, Screwtape says, "his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous." This is where the chasm gets created and the person in prayer and in real life are completely different. Is he saying that when it comes to another person, it's better not to make assumptions about their soul but to go on what we know and pray for that?

Screwtape Letters, Ch. 1 and 2

I picked up The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis) to supplement my reading this morning. I haven't read it since I was in high school, and I always love going back to a book full of wisdom to see what will jump out at me that I didn't take note of the first time or that I have since forgotten. Here are some observations from the first two chapters. For those unfamiliar with the premise of the book, it is a series of letters written from one demon to another, his nephew, on the subject of tempting humans. It is written from their perspective and so refers to God as "the Enemy" and the devil as "Our Father Below." The chapters are short but packed full of insight into the human condition and spiritual life and realities.


The first thing that struck me was that the tempters know what is true themselves, at least, in a twisted sort of way. I had been under the impression that they were always trying to persuade humans to believe what they believed, but that's not the case. They try to keep humans from God, but they themselves know that there is a God and that he is powerful, etc. They are trying to keep people from the truth, not persuade them to believe in what demons believe in, because even they acknowledge the existence of God (and shudder, James 2:19). So what they're trying to sell fits into a different category and I'm not sure what to call it. I don't think it's a positive thing like "belief in x," but more of a negative thing like "any way of living or believing that does not acknowledge God." As long as that criterion is met, they would probably be happy, because, no matter what kind of life a person lives, in the end that determines who has victory over a person's life. Their job is distraction and distortion...

In a passage on p. 2, the uncle Screwtape says:

By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can forsee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'.

Here is a fascinating passage. Screwtape goes on to relate the story of a man he tricked out of thinking about deeper issues by getting him to go eat lunch instead. He's distracting people from the unseen with what is seen and felt. But the problem with that for people is that what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal (2 Cor. 4:18). "Real" life, our surroundings, can be deceiving.

Another example of the difference between the seen and unseen occurs on p. 5 when Screwtape talks about the church:

One of our greatest allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate...

How often do we forget the true image of the church or trade it for the image we see on Sunday mornings?

He goes on in this chapter to describe the people in the church, their faults and areas of inadequacy to the human eye, but also their appearance to him, "you may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side" (p.6). In this book, and in The Great Divorce, Lewis does an excellent job at contrasting the reality that is seen with the eye to the eternal reality. In The Great Divorce, there is a section describing a seemingly ordinary woman, who in heaven is completely transformed, or rather, revealed in her true form of beauty and grace. We are at a great disadvantage when it comes to seeing things as they really are. We cannot recognize "great warriors" when they sit in the next pew.

My favorite section from the first two passages touches on some of the themes I've been exploring in this blog, namely, discipline and getting where you want to go. Lewis calls it "the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing." Here is the section:

Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His 'free' lovers and servants-- 'sons' is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to 'do it on their own'. And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.

God doesn't force us. He leads us to the path and then the rest is up to us. Perhaps it takes a little longer, but there are lessons for us along the way-- the lessons of hard work and the lesson Lewis points out-- less dependence on emotion. That's a big one I need to learn. Sometimes emotion can't be trusted and it just needs to be put aside. I wish there were an easy way to do this. God's goal in this is our freedom. How interesting.

Tune in next time for chapters 3 and 4, or, go pick up the book yourself and read it along with me. It's quick in the reading, but provides thinking material to occupy hours and hours...

Waiting

Hebrews 6:12 "We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised."

This verse has never stood out to me before, but today I find it intriguing because I have been feeling pretty lazy. I've been comparing myself to a cat and wondering which of us would be getting more done, or which of us would be happier about what we were getting done. The cat probably wouldn't be upset with itself for spending its days lounging on the windowsill.

I don't like waiting to hear back from jobs I've applied for. I wonder if I will ever hear back at all. I wish they would at least guarantee a "no" so I could move on. The temptation in the meantime is to cross over into this sort of mind-laziness and just give up, turn to despair (this sounds so melodramatic).

This passage strikes me because on the surface, it doesn't seem like there are many differences between the way that laziness looks and the way that faith and patience look. I could be sitting on my windowsill drinking a cup of coffee and you wouldn't know which one I was wearing that day. I have always thought that the opposite of laziness was doing everything you could think of all at once. If you don't want to be lazy, you have to get up and move, get going, generate as much energy as the Tennessee Valley Authority.

But it doesn't say that. The verse doesn't say, if you're tired of waiting for something, here are all the things you need to DO to get it. Waiting can be one of the most passive and difficult things to do, because it means doing nothing. We've already done everything we can do towards getting what we want, and now we have to wait for someone else to do something. This is so hard for me! I want results and I want them NOW. When we are in a situation of waiting, we can respond with attitudes of laziness or we can respond with attitudes of patience and faith.

When I think of the word patience, I see this woman who is about fifteen years older than me, and she's a little bit weathered, but she has this smile on her face, this small little smirk in her eye like she knows something. She's the kind of mother who says, "Oh, ok," knowingly to her children's wild ideas and you know she's wise. She doesn't mind the waiting because she has belief, the faith element. She is secure, whatever comes. I love that the word "inherit" is in this verse because who ever did anything to earn their inheritance? "Inherit" takes the focus off of us and our "doing" and puts it back on the Father who is the giver of our inheritance.

I realize that I am talking about waiting for a job, while a lot of other people are waiting for things that are a lot more heartbreaking to wait for-- a child, to be loved or in love, a sense of belonging, to be seen and valued as a person of significance. Through patience and faith, God offers us a peace that we cannot manufacture on our own. The peace doesn't take away the desire or the felt pain, but it takes the worry and fretting out of it. This is the gift or the fruit of patience and faith, and this is what doesn't look any different from our conception of laziness. This is the look of the woman. She isn't disturbed and running around, frantically trying to put things in order. She is calm and her heart is at rest. She could be sitting and reading a book like one of those "typical lazy people."

It is tempting to say that you can't wait patiently if you don't have faith that God will come through in the end, but hopefully, what we learn through this exercise is that it isn't about us getting what we want. If "God coming through" means that I get exactly what I wanted every time, there is a problem. The second gift of patience and faith is that we are more focused on God than we are on ourselves. We are closer to him through calling out to him from a place of pain and longing. We believe and know that he has the power to answer us, however it looks when he does, and, turning full circle back again, this gives us the courage to have faith and patience.

I will always remember this quote, "There's no music in the rest, but there's the making of music." In music, there are notes where sound is produced, but there are also rests where no sound is produced. Although sound isn't produced in the rests, the pauses are necessary for the music to sound the way that it does because music is made of sound and the absence of sound. Waiting for something you really want can suck. But, waiting is also an opportunity to receive rest from God, to stop doing and try to be for a while. To listen.

I have this great love-hate relationship with mornings. I hate waking up, but I love having woken up early. It's the same thing with writing sometimes. Some famous writer says that writers hate writing, but they love having written.

I've just spent about four and a half hours writing. And boy, is it a good feeling. Now, I am sitting down to blog with a perfectly toasty grilled-cheese sandwich. Yum. Haven't had one of these in a while.

Last night, I couldn't sleep. We try to go to bed early because Caleb has to get up so early, but usually I don't get up with him, but, if I sleep in till 10am, I can't go to bed at 10pm. Thus, I found myself wide awake from the hours of 10pm to 1am. Some of that time I spent lying in bed thinking, and then I got up and went to my favorite night time reading place-- the bathroom, specifically, the bath mat with my back to the tub.

The book of the week, The Hours, by someone whose name I forget right now. Michael Cunningham? M something C something. Blame it on the sandwich. This book supposedly won a Pulitzer, but it's full of name dropping and way too much meaningless description. I actually skipped an entire paragraph which I don't think I have ever done in my life. I made those astute (lol) observations before I notice the "Pulitzer" on the cover... I've just always wanted to see the movie. I don't like when people name drop awards and other famous authors-- it's too much showing off. That's great that you're talking about Merwin and Rich and the two other people, but get back to the story! If I wanted to hear about them, I'd have picked up an anthology or something. I also don't like it when authors make sweeping generalizations about entire groups of people like "Christians with acoustic guitars" or the large two page section speculating about gay men and what they do.

But, there was a great section that was all story, no fluf, from the perspective of Virginia Woolf. It talks about her getting up in the morning to what she knows will be a good day of writing. As a writer myself, I loved every word. I could picture her in her dressing gown with her cup of coffee, going up the stairs to her room and sitting at a desk overlooking the window to the street with the red brick building.

I eventually got back into bed and my mind drifted off to the Dominican, as it usually does, and I was thinking about Virginia Woolf and writing, and Danielle's comments that I should write, and my long-time desire to write about the Dominican coupled with someone's comment at waffle night last night, "what do you do all day?!"And I heard the words in my head "you have a story to tell." So I decided that if God would let me fall asleep, I would start writing. I did this very morn.

Thanks to M.C. and the author of the cooking book for being critique-able yet strangely inspiring. Too often, I see what I would change in other books, but I've lacked the guts to actually try something myself. If other people can write books, so can I. I realize this is effectually giving the finger to the professionals out there who actually make money from their craft, but I figure starting with defiance is better than not starting at all. I know it will be hard and I won't want to keep doing it after a while, and it will take way, way, way longer than I want it to or think it will. But then the other part of me thinks that it's already written. I have written it like a hundred times in my mind and I wrote it while I was there in my journals and I wrote it again after that in class presentations and research papers and powerpoints and cooking for people and training other people who are going there. I know this story like the back of my hand. The hardest part will be cohesion, tone, the discipline to keep getting up in the morning. The dialogue, Spanish-English stuff, like what language do I use for what and how much Spanish should I put in, how do I get the old to fit with the new, how do I talk about injustice in a way that's enjoyable to read? Those things. Bahhhh I'm excited! I do love a good challenge and a big project that seems impossible.

Time for the rest of lunch. Feel free to ask me how it's going/tell me to keep going. I don't know how long it will last...

The Mystery of Cooking

I'm reading a book about food, love, and friendship called The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister. I picked it up for $4 at Barnes & Noble in the sweet used book section we have in Madison (the B&N is the size of a warehouse). Unfortunately, reading about food isn't making me into a better cook, yet. Ironically, I read the chapter about baking after I baked four dozen or so cookies (it took me three hours). I sort of cringed when I read the part about baking being more like a science than other kinds of cooking. The recipe called for 2 1/4 cups of flour, and I sort of eyeballed the 1/4 on top of the 2 cups. The cookies turned out pretty good, I guess. The thing I don't like about cooking is that you never know what you did wrong. The first tray of cookies were huge; I took the heaping tablespoon a little too literally, it seems. Then, all the subsequent trays got too toasted, even after I moved the oven rack one level lower because I thought they might be too close to the top. I put them in for only seven minutes, and they were too gooey to take out, eight minutes and they were brown. The recipe said 9-11 minutes. Everything burns in our oven, even cornbread. I've made that twice, and put it in for the minimum amount of time, but the edges still got browner than I would like.

A rookie can't spot the errors. Does our oven just cook too fast? Is it the food? Is it all in my mind? Get this-- one time, we were making brownies in our new "brownie pan," that's what they sell it as, a "brownie pan." We poured the batter into the pan, and it didn't even cover the whole surface of the pan. I ask Caleb, "Doesn't the box say 9x13?" "Nope." "But how? This is supposed to be a brownie pan!" Now who's at fault here, me, or the so-called brownie pan that you can't even cook brownies in?

This book I'm reading, they do everything from scratch in the cooking class, even the pasta. And they don't even use a pasta machine. The lady who runs the cooking class just pours in the ingredients, and everything turns out alright. The book is filled with descriptions of decadent food and the memories and images and feelings different spices provoke in those who smell them. I don't get any of those images or feelings burning into my brain when I take a whiff of oregano. The one thing I do get, when I smell the Rosemary, is the memory of playing video games (Dynasty Warriors) with my brother while eating Rosemary-flavored veggie stix.

However, the book is sort of like magical realism, which could explain how the food is really more than food. The restaurant owner, Lillian, has magic food powers that she acquired through a strange childhood with a single mother who read aloud constantly; she knows instinctively what to do. The food they make in the cooking class each month brings a sort of healing to one of the characters in the book, but not as extreme as Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) when the protagonist's emotions are conveyed through the food she cooks so that the diners also experience her feelings.

Last night, I attempted to cook gnocchi for Caleb's first day at work. I personally don't like the stuff, but Caleb loves it. Everything seemed to be going well. The water boiled (you know it's a bad situation when that makes the list for things that go well), the sauce was heating up, I remembered I wanted to cook veggies and garlic bread, too. It was all done by the time Caleb got home and still hot for the most part. But the gnocchi was gross. Too chewy. Followed by the internal barrage of questions, "Did I cook it too long? Was it a bad package? Is this how gnocchi is and I just don't like it? Was it the cheese sauce?" I choked it down, vowing silently never to attempt it again. Caleb kindly reassured me and said that it was packaged and not really the real thing. I hope so. If that's what the real thing tastes like, why would anyone ever eat it? Also ironically, gnocchi was mentioned in passing in the chapter I read after dinner. And this is the same day as making the cookies, then reading about baking.

I like the book because of the way the character's stories are intermingled with the cooking classes. Each character has a chapter, and each chapter happens at a different cooking class with insights into that specific character's story. I like the unusual words she uses like "indiscriminate" and "luxuriantly," two words I apparently can't spell, according to spell check. I also enjoy the profound aphorisms that conclude certain sections of the chapters, like, "Carl was a bird watcher; he knew that not all sticks in a nest are straight" (p.81). Here, she uses an analogy: people are like birds and homes are like nests. It's a beautiful aphorism at this point in the story. It makes you think a little bit, but not too much. If she used fewer similes and metaphors, the reading would be much less clunky (or, there would be fewer lumps in the batter of her book!). Her description alone is often sufficient to create the image, but then she goes ahead and tacks on a simile anyway. This does add to the magical realism element, however.

I got a cookbook as a birthday gift with about 300 recipes, but frankly, I don't know where to start on the thing. Someone said casseroles are the way to go when you're first married because they are fast, easy, and you can eat them again. Perhaps I will start there. This person also said not to worry-- there's always time to start cooking later. She didn't really get into cooking into fifteen years into her marriage. This is good news for me. I don't have to be a pro right now.

Now, it's two o'clock, and I still need to eat lunch. But I am so desperately bored with food and with its disappointments that I have no motivation to go over into the kitchen and heat up some leftover taco meat. I love food, and I wish that by reading a book about loving and cooking food I could cook food better. But, I think this book is just setting up unrealistic expectations for a young cook in her first month of actually cooking. Taco meat, here I come.

Reflections on Last Summer: "Un Libro"

I'm headed back to the Dominican in two weeks, and, as I was making a list on my clipboard tonight of various things to do and to pack and to buy before I leave, I stumbled across a list of stories I wanted to incorporate into my final project for Senior Seminar-- a long, thirty page collection of stories and thoughts and poems from my summer in the DR that I wrote in November and December. As I prepare to go back in a couple weeks, it seemed appropriate to explore some of those memories and ideas and write about them a little bit. So, here is a reflection...

Everyday while we were still eating lunch together, a boy named David would come up to us and say, “un libro, un libro,” “a book, a book.” We would tell him “later, later” for a while and finish our lunch, until one of us had to go read to him. I loved reading to him. We would walk over to the bookcase in the main office and choose a book. Usually, I chose the book. Some of the books my mother had read to me during my childhood, like The Cat in the Hat. I was delighted to find such books there, on the bookshelf in the office. One day, I chose the book Ping, that my mother had read to me. I remembered her doing the call of the master of the boat “la la la la lei” in a sing song voice, and I couldn’t wait to read it to the kids. The children who asked for books were younger than the ones in my classes—they were probably four or five—and they would cuddle up on either side of me, sweaty and sticky. They would climb on each other and struggle so that they could see the pages, and they would talk through a good portion of the reading. My voice would get tired, or I would get frustrated at them talking or fighting with each other to see or trying to turn the pages before we were finished with that page. I wanted them to read the book my way, and sometimes it became a struggle of the wills. Are we going to read this book the American way or the Dominican way? They wore me out. Sometimes they broke the rule and went into the office themselves and took down the books. Once, a kid took a book and wouldn’t give it back to me, no matter what I said. I became like a third grader, and he teased me, roughly pulling the book just out of my grasp even while I said, “a book is a privilege, you can’t treat it like this.” Sometimes I had no idea what the books said. I said the words, but I had no idea about the rhythm of the phrasing or what I was actually saying. Towards the end of the trip, I found The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on the shelf, and I asked if I could borrow it. I thought it could help me learn more Spanish. I read probably only the first three chapters before the end of our trip. I talked to Wander about it. He asked me what I was reading, and what a wardrobe was. I told him that he should read the book. When I go back this summer, I want to bring a book for all the fifth graders, but I don’t know what’s appropriate for them to read. I don’t know how the magic of Narnia plays out in a Hatian cultural context with a real witch doctor living across the creek in the batey. Would the gospel come through, or be distorted? What’s a good book for these children to read? Because they need to be reading and writing.

My fifth graders from last summer:

Scott Cairns, Why we make art

This was so good and profound that I had to put it up here. It comes from Scott Cairns' book The End of Suffering that we're reading for creative nonfiction. 

He says, 

our taking pains to make anything well could be understood, in one sense, as a consolation for things around us that appear to be poorly fashioned. 

Any well-made thing--whether held in the hand or viewed from afar-- stands in stark contrast to the shoddy around us: a manifestly disastrous economic system, for instance, or criminal corporate strategies and structures, or cyclical erosions of our political and legal institutions , or-- just so you don't think I'm simply pointing fingers here-- the chagrin of our own faltering, sputtering lives, dissipated in self-defeating habits and distractions. 

Good art is something of a consolation; good art is potentially something more-- bearing what might turn out to be a corrective, a remedial agency. 

Good art certainly serves as a consolation for those relatively few who make it, especially for those exceptional folk who struggle to make it well. Laboring over the wheel, the canvas, the written page, or the musical score can being to the laborer a powerfully consoling sense of purpose... (he quotes and summarizes some Steiner and the transcendent)... 

For Steiner, then, the act of making art, of writing literature, and of composing music demonstrates an implicit expectation of a reality that abides beyond (and perhaps within) what is apparent, a reality that provides the necessary context for any significance, any meaning making. 

For the artist of any art, therefore, it is not surprising that these labors can provide a deeply satisfying consolation, giving witness to one's own subconscious hope, one's own implicit-- avowed or disavowed-- faith. 

From pp. 26-29. Read more. He goes on to talk about the benefits of art for the ones receiving it/viewing it. 

Dialogue on Market Values and Joy

I'm reading two books that are nicely dialoguing with each other. C.S. Lewis' Surprised by Joy and Cornel West's Race Matters. 

In the first chapter of West's book, he describes nihilism in black America, partly caused by corporate market institutions (25). Institutions want profits, and they convince people to consume. The goal of consumption is pleasure. Here's West on pleasure: 

"In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation... especially evident in the culture industries-- television, radio, video, music..." (26) 

"These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values-- love, care, service to others-- handed down by preceding generations" (27) 

Why is this "market-inspired way of life" chosen by so many people? Consumerism thrives because we aren't satisfied.  

In Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis tells the story of his growing up and conversion to Christianity, and in one of the chapters,  he describes getting Joy and pleasure confused. 

"At the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or any other) was not what you had been looking for. No moral question was involved; I was at this time as nearly nonmoral on that subject as a human creature can be. The frustration did not consist in finding a "lower" pleasure instead of a "higher." It was the irrelevance of the conclusion that marred it. The hounds had changed scent. One had caught the wrong quarry. You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of. I did not recoil from that erotic conclusion with chaste horror, exclaiming, "Not that!" My feelings could rather have been expressed in the words, "Quite. I see. But haven't we wandered from the real point?" Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. Sometimes I wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy" (170). 

I haven't finished the book yet to know how Lewis talks about finding Joy in the end, but I'm guessing it has something to do with God. When we're not with God, we become vulnerable to other things that promise to satisfy us. They all lie, of course. This lie fuels advertising and marketing and business and provides jobs, but it also keeps a lot of people miserable. The problem with a "hedonistically driven present" is that we lose sight of everything that actually matters. We forget who we are. The life that we were meant to life isn't about pleasure as it's described by West. 

Like Lewis says, we can go to any of those other pleasure givers, it doesn't make a difference which one we choose. Afterwards, we know it doesn't meet the need or the desire that we have. Sometimes we get stuck in the trap of going back over and over again because we believe that it will, if we only give it one more try. 

Are all pleasures substitutes for Joy? How would our bank statements change if we were finally satisfied? How would we spend our time? 

We can't live like the market tells us to live. We need to recover "nonmarket values," love, care, and service to others. 

The problem I see in pockets of the Christian community is the loss of Joy and the sell out to pleasure, the objectification of the opposite sex, and an obsession with consumerism at the expense of the forward call of God and discipleship. We've settled into the nest of our culture, and we've chosen its worst parts. 

To get back to contentment and life in nonmarket values, we need to address the roots of our deep dissatisfaction and identify the lies that we believe, say with King David, "Restore to me the joy of your salvation" (Psalm 51:12a). 

Restless Much

It's getting dull in the house, not for lack of doing things. Today I did three lessons in Rosetta Stone. In between that I did my laundry, wrote and recorded a song, watched a Star Trek movie with the fam. that was hilarious because of how old it was, well, it seemed like I did more than that. Today was a French toast morning with my grandparents, and I love those. Great food, great company. 

In seventeen days I leave for the DR, ready or not. We've gotten more of the details of where we'll be-- today I watched some videos online of the school and the town, it made it feel very real, and very overwhelming. All those questions came up, those doubting questions that play on fear, and I realized for the first time how hard it's going to be, how uncomfortable at first. I think I thought I would just fall right in without any difficulty (and maybe I will and it will get hard after two weeks like Biculturalism class says culture shock will do to a person). The other scary part was realizing that I have expectations- I want to like it, love it. I saw that I do want to get some things out of this trip- some direction. There's temptation to become anxious about all of the different areas like the teaching, the Spanish, the spiritual side, but I'm keeping it at bay for the most part. One day, then the next. I'm glad I'm not going alone! 

A Recipe for an Uprising

It seems to me like bad economic times unveil what was there all along, the flaws show up brighter, a bad situation becomes worse.   

Global Crisis 'hits human rights' 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8071347.stm#map

World Bank Warns of Social Unrest 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8066037.stm

Some Thoughts for the Day

Some things I'm thinking about. 

Rosetta Stone. 

I really like Rosetta Stone. It makes me happy. 

I'm working on it to bolster my Spanish. It's interactive software that teaches you the words for things without using English at all-- it's like immersion learning. You speak and listen and type and it does grammar somehow, I'm amazed. All the pictures are really beautiful and I want to go to the places in them. I'm amazed at the artistry of some of the photos-- one of the "la puerta" pictures is a blue door with a brown wall and it's gorgeous. All the color photos are cool textures that they took with a camera with a lot of megapixels, pictures of feathers or elephant skin. They didn't have to be so creative with everything, but they are. I wonder if that helps you to remember somehow-- if it stops you from associating with the thing itself. If I saw a grey square, maybe I would translate it into English. But if I saw some elephant hide, maybe I wouldn't? I wonder about the people whose jobs are to take the pictures for Rosetta Stone. Where do they live? Do they get to travel to all the places, or are there photo contributors everywhere who send the pictures in? How long does it take to get all the photos? How many photographers are there? It's fascinating to me. How do they choose which pictures to use? And then, this is the coolest, they have milestone exercises at the end of the lessons where you actually have conversations with people (not real other people). And these pictures are the most dynamic-- you feel like you're in a movie. My adrenaline gets going when I can't automatically think of what to say back. I get into it! I want these people to be my friends. They are all so happy. Everything is nice in Rosetta Stone world. lol. This is the way to learn a language. 

Books. 

I could start this one the same way: I really like books. Books make me happy. 

I went to Barnes & Noble today, and I think I could live there. I like finding good things. that you didn't know existed. Without thinking of any books beforehand, I could go into B&N and find ten things that I wanted to read, probably most from the fiction section. Today I bought Peace like a River (Leif Engar) and No Man is an Island (Thomas Merton), both were recommended by a friend who also likes reading and spiritual things. Here's a clip from No Man is an Island's "Author's Note" that I liked: 

I consider that the spiritual life is the life of man's real self, the life of that interior self whose flame is so often allowed to be smothered under the ashes of anxiety and futile concern. The spiritual life is oriented toward God, rather than toward the immediate satisfaction of the material needs of life, but it is not, for all that, a life of unreality or a life of dreams. On the contrary, without a life of the spirit, our whole existence becomes unsubstantial and illusory. The life of the spirit, by integrating us in the real order established by God, puts us in the fullest possible contact with reality-- not as we imagine it, but as it really is. It does so by making us aware of our own real selves, and placing them in the presence of God. 

Merton was a Catholic monk/theologian(?) who wrote a lot on contemplation. The books calls him a "world-renowned religious philosopher." He wrote poetry, too. I think we would get along great. 

That's all for now 

Culture, culture, culture

I'm in a biculturalism class this semester, and I'm learning incredible things already. We read chapter five called "Cultural Assumptions of Western Missionaries" from Paul Hiebert's book Anthropological Insights for Missionaries, and so many things stood out to me. We had to write a summary of the article and mine ended up being five pages or so long. I will put up the highlights-- the two things that stood out to me most about myself and the way that I am are self-reliance and need to be liked. Maybe you will relate. If you would like a copy of the summary (that is not particularly well written) facebook me, or find the book yourself. It's incredibly eye-opening. I was thinking as I read it, "What would happen if everyone in the world read one of these about their culture in relation to other cultures?" Maybe there would be less war, fewer disagreements, who knows. Before reading this article, I wasn't even aware that people could think about things differently in certain areas, but I'm learning that a lot of the way I think and react to things is because of my Western/North American culture. Whoa.

Self-reliance
“At the heart of a North American’s identity is self-reliance. Francis Hsu, a Chinese anthropologist, points out (1961:248) that the greatest fears Americans have are to be dependent on others and to be without money. When our car breaks down, we hesitate to call friends for help. And when we need money, we would rather borrow from a bank than beg a loan from a brother or cousin. On the other hand, when others ask us for help, we take the request seriously, just because we know it is not made lightly. But we resent it when people constantly ask for loans, for help in baby-sitting, and for transportation. We expect people to take care of themselves.

Need to be liked
“North Americans place a high value on being liked and see it as a sign of success in social relationships. Since we worry over how others feel about us, we read acceptance or rejection into every coment and gesture they make. The glad handshake, the ready smile, the slap on the back, and the word of praise have all become our normal behavior. Without such expressions of friendship and popularity, we are confused and unsure of ourselves because we are denied one of the requirements for personal assurance in a highly individualistic society. Social success is an important measure of achievement. Stewart (1972: 58) notes, “Americans tend to judge their personal and social success by popularity—almost literally by the number of people who like them.” To be liked means we are worthy of love. It does not necessarily mean we need to like others in return or that our relationships with them will result in friendships” (126).

Bingo

It's been raining for about three days. There have been discussions today about how Americans don't like rain, how we should be thankful for it because it means that there is food, how we are only sad because of the flooding. 

The almost inevitable Sunday afternoon/evening homework is upon me. I'm sitting with Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty, a book for my poetry class-- Ekphrasis writing, poetry in response to art and music. I was already thinking on page two, hmmm a book about one paining, I bet Mom would like this. I'm on page 7 now, and I've gotta put this up here because it's such a cool thought. He says, on the question of whether intimacy is the highest value:

"But then why resist intimacy, why seem to flee it? A powerful countercurrent pulls against our drive toward connection; we also desire individuation, separateness, freedom. On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world. 

A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them-- but how to live in connection without feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear." 

I love to write in my books. I am an underlined as opposed to a highlighter and I like to write my own comments out to the side. To the right of this section I wrote "BINGO." If he ever solves it, I'll put up some more on here, as well as any other insights gained from the book. I've got to read it before class on Tuesday, but I don't think that will be a problem ; )