“It is a privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it well?”
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p. 142
Talk about a great summer read! Pick up Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and enjoy….
The facts about John Huff, aged 12, are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He could jump six-foot orchard walls, swing up branches and come down, fat with peaches, quicker than anyone else in the gang. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. His hair was dark and curly and his teeth were white as cream. He remembered the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. He knew the names of all the wildflowers and when the moon would rise and set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p. 102
It is better to be modest and earn one’s living
than to play the grandee on an empty stomach.
—Proverbs 12:9, REB
Build not an empire where everything is perfect. “Good taste” is a virture of the keepers of museums. If you scorn bad taste, you will have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens. You will have acted like an over-squeamish man who never goes out for fear of being soiled by contact with the earth. At the core of your perfection will be emptiness, and you shall have no joy of it. Nay, rather build an empire where all is zeal.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Wisdom of the Sands
… the flower you single out is a rejection of all other flowers; nevertheless, only on these terms is it beautiful.
For a long time I’ve wanted a copy of Antione de Saint-Exupery’s Citadelle (Wisdom of the Sands in English). I recently received copy for my birthday—even though it’s about as far from my birthday as you can get in the calendar. Anyway, it’s a treasure, and I’ll pass on some of the wisdom as I’m able. If I can muster up some of my own reflections without clouding his, I’ll offer those up as well.
But no promises…
I just finished my third reading of C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. I read it first in 1993, then in 2003, then today. It may seem strange to return so often to a book of literary criticism—but for me it is a way to keep me grounded, to remind myself why I read. For example:
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realize the enormous extension of our being that we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense, but he inhabits a tiny word. In it, we should be suffocated. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others.
A few years ago my friend Greg gave me a copy of of Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. He didn’t just give it to me—he went to the trouble of shipping it to me in Slovakia, so he must have felt strongly that I would dig it.
Dig it I did! [Has anyone ever written such a sentence as that?] It’s a work of literary crticism, demonstrating that Lewis organized his Narnia books around the seven planets of medieval cosmology [Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Saturn]. That may sound a bit esoteric, and obviously millions of people enjoy the books without knowing this hidden key. I certainly have. But I’ve read just about everything of Lewis’s that I could get my hands on—fiction, essays, apologetics, literary criticism, poetry, autobiography, letters, letters, and more letters—and I think it’s fair to say I’ve gotten to know him as well as I could. And from what I know of him, Ward’s thesis is not only believable, but convincing.
Let’s put it this way: if you understand the title of this post and see how it relates to the topic, you will certainly dig Ward’s book.
Marilynne Robinson is brilliant and her project in her new book Absence of Mind is noble:
What I wish to question are not the methods of science, but the methods of a kind of argument that claims the authority of science or highly specialized knowledge, that assumes a protective coloration that allows it to pass for science yet does not practice the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished.
I’ll add that her book made for one of the most challenging reads I’ve had in a long time. In fact, I think I pulled a muscle in my brain trying to keep up with her. I was in over my head.
… Soft breathes the air
Mild, and meadowy, as we mount further
Where rippled radiance rolls about us
Moved with music—measureless the waves’
Joy and jubilee. It is JOVE’s orbit,
Filled and festal, faster turning
With arc ampler. From the Isles of Tin
Tyrian traders, in trouble steering
Came with his cargoes; the Cornish treasure
That his ray ripens. Of wrath ended
And woes mended, of winter passed
And guilt forgiven, and good fortune
Jove is master; and of jocund revel,
Laughter of ladies. The lion-hearted,
The myriad-minded, men like the gods,
Helps and heroes, helms of nations
Just and gentle, are Jove’s children,
Work his wonders. On his white forehead
Calm and kingly, no care darkens
Nor wrath wrinkles: but righteous power
And leisure and largess their loose splendours
Have wrapped around him—a rich mantle
Of ease and empire.
—the Jupiter [Jove] section of “The Planets,” C. S. Lewis