Thursday, February 28, 2008

Gaining Personality By the Minute



As Nora gets older (3 months now), she aquires, or is given by her adoring family, more and more personal traits, items, and nicknames. Because her general expression is one of wide-eyed wonder, we call her Baby Owl or Wol. Because she talks with her eyebrows and often scrunches them in puzzlement at us, we call her the Disapproving Chairwoman who is about to pronounce on our antics. Privately, I also call this her "Queen Victoria" look ("We are not amused").

Her parents have bestowed upon her a small whitish animal doll, which they call Cuddle Bear. I asked Jess why, and she said that "Every small child ought to have a favorite stuffed animal or blanket or something." They are doing their best to make this object indispensable to her.

Friday, February 22, 2008

We're Sitting (Propped) Up!


Watercolor Day in a Hole

You have seen watercolor paintings. This day is one of them, all blended gray, white, and black. It is smudgy at the corners, but some details stand out in sharp, startling definition: for example the pinprick holes left in the snow by ice or rain (which one, no one knows, save God).

I was to teach this morning. I was to lift my voice in the musical cadences of seventeenth-century poetry, and try to reveal its beauties to a group of students, and talk with them about it, and laugh, and revel in artistry. But the ice (or rain) pricked my snowy plan, and the colors smudged, and the class was cancelled. I am sorry, yet not sorry, for who that loves God can think it right to be vexed by His sovereignty?

Therefore I shall spend my day at home, at quiet work. I shall be lost in the world of the imagination, where I enter each morning by a magic hole on an obscure hill that I know. The hole is black print and the hill is paper. The wood between the worlds is my library, and today's pool is Pride and Prejudice.

They are all waiting for me there. Lizzy is ready with a sparkling remark, Darcy will shake hands gravely, Bingley is all cheerfulness, and Jane will look more sweetly lovely than ever, for she told me yesterday that she means to wear her blue muslin gown.

Lydia is gone into the north, of course. I hope I shall have a half-hour before tea to see Mr. Bennet's new folio (I understand from Mary that it has arrived), but I'll take care that we go to the book-room to see it, while Mary is not present to pronounce her opinion and Kitty---poor girl!---need not make an effort to look interested.

Mrs. Bennet, I dare say, will want me to stay to tea, and I have no objection. Whatever her other faults may be, she keeps a good table and her hospitality is delightful. After tea there will be cards, but as I do not prefer cards, I shall stand by and watch instead. How bright their faces will be in firelight! How they will laugh and tease and exclaim over their winnings!

I love especially to watch the four lovers; between them there is not only wit but tempered wit, softened by affection, experience, and wisdom. Their eyes are brim-full of joy. Jane's white hand rests momentarily on Bingley's sleeve, and Darcy is smiling down at Lizzy (he is a great tall fellow).

It will be hard to leave them, but at last I shall rise from the corner of the sopha [sic] and make my adieux. The comfortable old brick facade of the house will bid me a warm, but moon-and-ice-silvered farewell as I drive away. Lulled by the clatter-roll-dip-clatter-clop-clop-clop-snap!-creak-jingle-clatter of the carriage and the horses hooves, I will not know whether I am falling asleep or simply falling, falling up out of the hole and the pool, up into the wood between the worlds, my library.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

The Office: Season 7 -- "Driven to Chocolate"

“She was driven to chocolate” – David, in the same tone in which one might say “She was driven to drink.”

“You told me to IM you back! And I am a peach.” – Amy to David

“I am totally crying…” – Amy, who has been laughing too hard.

“Brittainy, when you get to the section on morality…” – Christy
“Skip it!” – interjection by David

“I feel, and I think you will agree with me, that spawning conversations are the best.” – David

“I think your work with lapbooks has affected your judgment.” – Christy to David
“Actually, I feel that I benefited from that time.” ::pause:: “Like Purgatory.” – David

“I feel needed… I feel special….” – Nate
“Good!” – David
“….I feel used.” – Nate

“David, I just ruined what you did. Aren’t you proud of me?” – Mom

“Mother. What can I bring you to fill your stomach and your heart with joy?” – David
::the office laughs::
“What?! There’s nothing wrong with that sentence! I like it.” – Mom

“Muzzle not the aspidistra!” – Mom

"One crisis at a time: my simple plan for world domination" - Dad

Friday, February 15, 2008

Mourning Song

Tonight I began a movie because I wanted to laugh at it. But in the end, I found that it had chosen its faults well, and I really could not laugh at them. Indeed, quite the opposite. I found myself strangely touched---moved by that queer, exquisite, aching flutter which tells us that someone has struck a chord in our hearts, and disturbed with their stone the smooth unruffled surface of our beings. It was humbling, to be so stirred by a movie that I had intended only to ridicule. I repeat, it was humbling. It was also instructive.

The movie is "Becoming Jane." I had been led to expect that it would include strident feminism and sexual innuendo. There were those things in it. At several points I was glad to be watching with a remote control and the ability to mute or fast-forward scenes. But these things, though egregious, are not always the sum total of a movie. In the story which I intended to mock for its shallowness and anachronisms, I found an element of depth and historical---indeed, universal---accuracy that far exceeded its regrettable accessories.

Boy meets girl. Both are penniless. All hopes of a respectable union are dashed, one after another. He weakens; they part; each becomes engaged to someone else. They meet again, by chance. The agony is unbearable, and so they decide to run away together. On the journey, however, she discovers that his family is dependent on him for money. She cannot bear that their love should be the means of making so many so unhappy, and thereby turn to bitterness. This time, it is she who breaks matters off. She returns home. He marries someone else. Many years later, they meet in a public room. His eldest daughter is with him; he has named the girl after her. She reads her book to his daughter, and in the chosen passage we hear an infinity of what might have been, but without complaint. Then she folds her hands over the book, and is still.

You see, this is a story about pain, and its most unusual feature is that it does not try to hurt you, but cannot avoid doing so, because the reality which it portrays is an open wound. In its best elements I believe is a mourning song, all the more powerful because restrained and quiet, as deep grief so often is. When we are in pain, sometimes we run mad. But those times are rare; more frequently we sit, and rock ourselves, and hold it in, betrayed only by the occasional, shuddering breath. Our minds cry out to us, but our lips are silent. Our bodies shake, but we are also still, too fragile to move for fear of breaking altogether. That is what this movie is like---it is like the stillness of a bowed head and a grief accepted, endured, overcome.

Sometimes I reflect to myself that human beings were not formed for pain. We were not created to suffer it. It bewilders us. But I think that God, in pity, has given us means of suffering without annihilation. We have tears. We have the rituals of lamentation. Our ancestors tore their clothes and cut their hair and covered themselves with ashes. We wear black and shut ourselves away for a time. I wonder, often, whether their methods were not better than ours. Surely it is wiser to express a grief, that it may be removed. Surely that which can describe our pain adequately (there is no such thing as perfection in a matter like this) deserves our thanks.

For we all must feel---and those who do not are the worse for their lack---that evil has entered very deeply into us. We must feel that the tearing of hearts which I witnessed in this movie tonight is not what was created to be. God sovereignly willed it; that is enough for me. But God has also given us means of enduring it, through mourning, and I am grateful for this movie as a lament. Let there be a lament for all the young girls whose hearts have ached to love and found no outlet. Let there be a song of grief for all the young men who overflowed with the desire to love, and were stayed. Let there be mourning for all the hands which stretched but did not grasp.

To those who, like the couple in the movie, loved not without sin, and were sundered by one of the evils that plagues our race: separated by greed, by deceit, by anger, by pride, by selfishness, or by a bullet or disease or a freakish accident, my heart is with you. Have I not sinned? Have I not known pain partly or wholly of my own making?

But if my heart is with these poor sinners (such we all are), then what do I owe to those few who loved more rightly, not in selfishness for the greater part, but in self-sacrifice, and were yet in God's wisdom parted? What does my heart owe to the truly great among lovers? To you, shining ones, I say "My heart stands before you in awe. I would learn of you, you men and women who loved fully and yet gave away freely when the beloved was required of you. I wish to learn how to surrender the friend of my soul, and yet trust God. From you, from you I would learn to grieve. For you have made grief beautiful in its time, because you set your heart on God."

I value "Becoming Jane" because I believe it is a true lament; but I will turn elsewhere to learn the way of grieving, because though in that movie the heart goes on, it does not rejoice. And we were made, after the darkness, to rejoice.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The Great Turnip Conversation

Tis the season of bridal showers, and soon this year's crop of June weddings will be upon us. It seems that everybody I know (including myself) is due to don the festal garments and attend upon brides and grooms in short season. I don't mind. I like weddings. Where else, after all, can you get a full-blown pageant with ceremony and music and ritual and living imagery of Christ and the Church and beautiful clothes and idyllic settings, not to mention first-time-smooching, which is always sweet and often humorous? Personally, I'm a fan.

Meanwhile, Valentine's Day looms over the singles community, clothed with an awful and dreaded power. (For most of us; somehow I always either forget what day it is or else associate it with failing my first driving test and with my mother's enjoyment of pranks.)

Also meanwhile, but in a more routine sort of way, there are opinions sloshing back and forth across the internet about finding a spouse, or picking a spouse, or loving a spouse, or how you know you've got hold of the right person, or how you know that you are the right person, or whether there is a right person, or what you should do with a person who you think might be right.... etc. etc. and so forth ad infinitum.

Sometimes I wish the singles community would take up a new pet discussion topic, like maybe turnips. "Consider the turnip," somebody might say. "I believe that it is a good gift, and that somewhere out there is a turnip ripe enough to eat, which is provided for me."

"No!" Someone else will howl, "The turnip is an Unclean Plant and a Temptation to All Manner of Evil. I'm pretty sure the Old Testament says so! We had much better abstain from turnips in order to devote ourselves to Better Things!"

"I would be willing to eat a turnip," another chimes in, "if only they grew in my climate. But they do not; there are neither turnips nor turnip-growers in my church community."

This from the first fellow who began by praising turnips: "Don't be limited by geography! Go out and find another location where there are turnips. Try the internet."

Another, seeking to calm the situation, says "If God has a turnip for you, He will bring it along at the proper time."

After this the comments crowd in thick and fast, thus:

"God helps those that help themselves! You can't wait around like an idle sloth waiting for the turnip to find you; you must find your own turnip!"

"There's this great book on turnips, which tells how long to grow a turnip before eating it and has a color chart showing which variety of turnip is right for you and everything! It makes choosing a turnip easy."

"I've read that book. It stinks. Turnip-eating is a process that can't be designed or planned; you've got to just go out in a field and test one turnip after another until you find one that seems right."

"I've tried to grow several turnips but they all died on me. Honestly, man, you don't want the pain of turnip-loss. It'll eat your heart out. Forget the turnips."

"I'm a young single and this whole concept of finding a turnip that's right for me is scary. Also, I don't consider myself very attractive and wonder whether there is a turnip that would like me. Does anybody have advice about this sort of problem?"

"Like I said before, you should try this book on growing turnips. It has a whole chapter explaining that you don't have to be outwardly attractive to a turnip as long as you connect with it on the level of character and shared values."

"The truth is that we all have a turnip-shaped hole in our hearts and nothing but the right turnip will ever fill it. Do you want to go around all your life like that, or do you want to get out there and find your perfect turnip?"

"I don't care who you are, you're never going to find a 'perfect turnip' that agrees with you about everything. The main thing you've got to do is learn to compromise with your turnip, and always be willing to say you're sorry."

"I thought that eating a turnip means you never have to say you're sorry!"

"Sometimes association with a turnip does mean having to say you're sorry. But I also agree with Alfred Tennyson, who said,

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."

"I agree! And when you really do find the right turnip, it's amazing. You feel like a falling star who has finally found its place next to another in a lovely constellation, where you and your turnip will sparkle in the heavens forever."

"I think that sticking with a turnip is a choice we make from moment to moment. You can't decide once and forever that you will love just this one turnip, but you can make that decision every day like it was the very first time."

"Whatever else we might disagree on, we should agree that we all need turnips."

Ah yes, I can see it now... the Great Turnip Conversation....

(Disclaimer: It is not my intention to mock either the honorable state of matrimony or the sincere efforts of Christian singles to understand how they shall go about entering that state with wisdom and integrity. It's just funny to me, sometimes, how much we stew about it all---especially since there are so many other things in life to think about. For example, turnips. :-))

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Starbucks Personalities, Law, and Worldviews

I am in the midst of a Starbucks craze, which means that I spend a few evenings a week working at Starbucks instead of at home. This happens about twice a year; the coffeeshop ambiance calls to me, siren-like, and for the duration I am more likely to be productive if I answer the Call of the Bean. Fortunately for my pocketbook, sanity, and home life, this Call never continues for more than a few weeks.

So to Starbucks I hie me after dinner and work hard for several hours, until, like an alarm clock, something goes off in my head and I begin to notice people instead of whatever it is that I am studying. Then I ponder, and write, and finally go home happy, having had a thoroughly eclectic experience.

Tonight there are two middle-aged men in the armchairs across the room, who sit still and stare at nothing. Absolutely nothing. They have no books, no computers, not even a cell phone as far as I can tell. What are they thinking about? Why do they sit there, legs crossed, stirring the air with a single foot, in a state of quiet and watchful agitation? Do they wish that someone would talk to them? Or are they lost in memories? Will my eyes ever be as wise and experienced as theirs? They inspire in me a sort of reverent compassion.

That is the view ahead and to my left; to my right, against the plate-glass windows, sit three members of the opposite end of the spectrum: young friends who alternately go outside to smoke and then come inside to gossip. They are vivacious and comfortable with each other. One reads aloud from another's textbook... something about self-esteem that sounds like psychobabble. They seem tired but happy, kicking down the cobbled streets of well-worn conversation.

Directly across, under a foursquare of poster/plaques, sits a representative of a species that I know quite well. It is a student, complete with laptop and headphones and notebooks, working away at who-knows-what. We are comrades, and there is a certain unspoken familiarity between us. Behind and to the left, beneath the slate-colored plaques covered with mildly incoherent writing (I call them the Tablets of the Worship of the Bean), sit a young couple talking. Her knees are drawn up to her chest; he is leaning across and listening intently. I smile at them---why not? The world is full of lovers, and the world loves them.

Finally, in front of the coffee table (the only real coffee table in this Starbucks) sit two women chatting. I have seldom seen an odder pair. Though clearly friends, one looks like an academic and the other is a... a study in contrasts. The academic's long brown hair is pulled straight and a little untidily back. She wears glasses and a thick grey shirt. The other woman's haircut is sharp, short, and slanted. The platinum blondeness of it is clearly a dye, and her eyes are so thickly, blackly made up that they look like two holes in her head. She seems vaguely self-conscious. Her friend the academic looks thoughtful.

And then, I suppose, I am here too. I sit with my feet propped up on a chair, in "studying sweats," at a table scattered with an assortment of books from various time periods and on different subjects (The Universe Next Door, The Knowledge of the Holy, Pride and Prejudice, The Romance of the Rose, and the Bible), a pocket watch (English), pens (blue), an ipod (nano), a leatherbound portfolio for notes, altoids, and my tiny laptop.

(Amusing Interjection: This laptop is called "The Companion of My Future Life II," successor to another of that name, which causes me to chuckle every day with the shutting-down question "Do you want to turn off 'the Companion of My Future Life'?" This name or phrase is also particularly appropriate to the study of Pride and Prejudice, since it originally belonged to Mr. Collins.)

I am in the middle of making notes on Pride and Prejudice when I notice the quote on my Starbucks cup. (Hazelnut caramel, by the way. The barista helped me to invent it a few days ago, and I heartily recommend it.) The quote goes like this:

"The Way I See It #271"

"The law, for all its failings, has a noble goal -- to make the little bit of life that people can actually control more just. We can'd end disease or natural disasters, but we can devise rules for our dealings with one another that fairly weigh the rights and needs of everyone, and which, therefore, reflect our best vision of ourselves." - Scott Turow, Author of Presumed Innocent and Limitations.

Hm.

That's all it takes. My mind is off and running, fueled by the teachings of my father (a constitutional lawyer) and my last few days of studying worldviews (The Universe Next Door is a worldviews catelogue which I have been using for literary studies).

"First," I remark to myself, "that is not how I would define the goal of the law. The first precept of the law, if memory of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin serves, is to cherish good and punish evil. Or am I mixing up my philosophers? Well, I THINK that's what they said. Suppose it is; and if it is, then that goal is subtly different from "make our lives more just," though justice is, I suppose, a noble goal."

"Second, the assumption about how much we can or cannot control seems post-Renaissance and post-modern. It assumes that we can control something, but also that what we can control is severely limited. Interesting. What would change about this gentleman's goal of law if he had a theistic view of human capacity to control?"

"Third, I wonder why he set up 'needs' beside 'rights.' Perhaps the elevation of 'needs' is due to a 'state of nature' view of law?"

"Fourthly, to 'reflect our best vision of ourselves' is an exercise in futility, from a Christian perspective, but is also curiously postmodern, since postmodernism seems to be, on one level at least, all about perception. If the gentlemen took a more objective view of both truth and humanity, would he alter his statement?"

All this train of thought, I now consider, is derived quite without intention from the side of a Starbucks cup and the miscellanious impressions of law, political theory, philosophy, and worldviews, left in my brain after sixteen years of education.And then I began to laugh at myself, for after all I do sometimes feel ridiculously overeducated and like a pompous armchair commentator; and not only that, but as if the knowledge in my brain is disorganized and riddled with holes and flawed memories.

Then, however, I sober... and this is my final thought: "If people really believe the sort of thing that that quote says, then what will be the result of it? Where will we end, if we base our political decisions on such precepts?"

It made me want to pay better attention to the political races now going on around us, not out of anxiety or a belief that God won't direct America as He sees fit, but because I have a responsibility as a citizen to think about these things, and to vote with intelligence, humility, and a biblical perspective.

For the price of ten minutes or so of thinking, I believe that such a reminder is a worthwhile acquisition. And the opportunity to observe and spin mental stories about Starbucks personalities is always worth its weight in beans.

Friday, February 01, 2008

We Moved the Press

The Development Team at Lampstand Press has been relocated. We are now in our comfortable, climate-controlled basement, with a full kitchen upstairs!!! We are immensely happy about this, and Production, though they envy and miss us like the dickens, is happy to be growing into our old space in the warehouse. They visit us on every pretext, and we feel loved.

So, from our joyous new comfiness, here is the first posting of quotes for the new season (season seven) of The Office. I'd like to dedicate it to Peter, our most recent hire. Keep the faith, man... and the footnotes. ;-)

“You know, if you strictly take the outline of Shakespeare’s face, he looks like Princess Leia.” – David

“Let’s talk about the customers first, and then we can talk about killing Christy. I do appreciate that we don’t want to kill the girl that lays the golden discussion script.” – Mom

Christy, on moving directly from frantic work to finish Year 2, to frantic work to finish Loom documents: “But Rabbit, I wasn’t going to eat freedom! I was just going to taste it!”

“Samuel de Champlain is my facial hair hero.” – David

“Aww, look at the snow! It’s so cute!” – Lauren

“I’m going to write this book when I finish Tapestry…” – Mom
“I thought that when you were finished with Tapestry you were going to stay home, fondling your koi or whatever.” – David
…. Several gasping moments of laughter, accusation, and protestation go by….
“Okay, well, feeding your koi. Whatever!” – David

“That’s of course what I meant.” ::pause:: “Tra-la.” – David

“Easy for you to say…you’ve never gone and just forgotten the definitive literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages!” – Christy, bewailing her own idiocy in leaving Dante out of a list of epics, to Mom, who is attempting to soothe her
“That’s because I’ve never tried to deal with the definitive literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages.” – Mom, imperturbably

“Okay, I love you.” – David, hanging up with Casey
“Why?” – Christy, asks, totally randomly, to the air in general
“Because she’s beautiful, and funny, and godly, and pretty… which is like beautiful, but more casual… and adventuresome. And she thinks she’s a pirate… except for the times when she thinks she’s a monkey… except for the times when she thinks she’s a princess… except for the times when she thinks she’s a rock.” – David, assuming that Christy meant to ask why he’s in love with Casey

"It's okay, Christy. You can name your first child 'Eidelweiss.' I'll let you." - David, out of nowhere
"Wow, you finally relented. I thought you'd never come around." - Christy
"No, I've actually seen the light. It's okay now." - David
"Actually, it's because I bribed Casey to convince you." - Christy
"You want to name your child 'Eidelweiss'?" - Lauren
"No, honey, they're being completely facetious." - Mom, reassuring Lauren
“Casey only convinced me because she tied my seven braids to a loom and then cried out, ‘David! The papyrus designers are upon you!’” – David (He hates the font called “papyrus”).
"That would explain why your hair is so short now." - Christy