Bookish Quotes #43

“Live for awhile in the books you love. Learn from them what is worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be returned to you a thousand times over. Whatever your life may become, these books — of this I am certain — will weave through the web of your unfolding. They will be among the strongest of all threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys.”
~ Rainer Marie Rilke

 “How do you press a wildflower in the pages of an e-book?”
― Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Waxing Poetic: The Summer Rain by Henry David Thoreau

   The Summer Rain

My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read,
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men.

Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?

Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
Struggling to heave some rock against the host.

Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,
For now I've business with this drop of dew,
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower--
I'll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.

This bed of herd's grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use.
A clover tuft is pillow for my head,
And violets quite overtop my shoes.

And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,
And gently swells the wind to say all's well;
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,
Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.

I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;
But see that globe come rolling down its stem,
Now like a lonely planet there it floats,
And now it sinks into my garment's hem.

Drip drip the trees for all the country round,
And richness rare distills from every bough;
The wind alone it is makes every sound,
Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.

For shame the sun will never show himself,
Who could not with his beams e'er melt me so;
My dripping locks--they would become an elf,
Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.

The Art of Reading: An Enthralling Novel by Julius LeBlanc Stewart

Old School - Tobias Wolff

     Don't you love it when you stumble across a book that you know nothing about and fall in love with it?  That's what happened to me with Tobias Wolff's Old School.  I was attracted to the cover, saw that it was a Pen/Faulkner finalist, and decided to give it a try.  I was not disappointed.

     The novel is set in a boys' New England prep school in the early 1960's where life revolves around literature.  Each year the school hosts visiting writers and the boys are allowed to compete for a private audience with the writer by composing a poem or story.  The entries are judged in advanced by the visiting writer, making the selection of the winner an even greater honor.  Inevitably, the competitions are fiercely competitive and the boys calculating and conniving in their pursuit of the coveted prize.

     The narrator, a boy from a less prominent background hiding his Jewish ancestry, wants to become a writer and desperately desires to win an audience with one of the visiting writers.  After failing to win an audience with Robert Frost and Ayn Rand, he is determined to win the chance to meet his hero, Ernest Hemingway.  The dean of the school is thought to be a friend of Hemingway's from World War I and the writer's visit is anxiously anticipated.  As the boy struggles to compose the winning story, he is faced with writer's block.  He finally finds his "voice" and his inspiration through imitation.  When his story is selected by Hemingway, the honor is short-lived.  He finds himself disgraced and his life is changed forever.  Only years later learns of another's fall from grace at the same time.

     The book is an homage to literature and the literary life.  It's a concise little treasure of a novel that carries weighty themes of honesty, identity, friendship, shame, and redemption.  It is definitely a book for book-lovers, would-be writers, and those who see writing as an essential part of who we are as humans.

~ Frances

Bookish Quotes #42

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
~ Alan Bennett, The History Boys: The Film

 “I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.”
 ~ John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

Waxing Poetic: My Heart by Frank O'Hara

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Piccadilly Jim: Filling Out a Form for a Transatlantic Crossing

The clerk had finished writing the ticket, and was pressing labels and a pink paper on him. The paper, he gathered dully, was a form and had to be filled up. He examined it, and found it to be a searching document. Some of its questions could be answered off-hand, others required thought.

“Height?” Simple. Five foot eleven.

“Hair?” Simple. Brown.

“Eyes?” Simple again. Blue.

Next, queries of a more offensive kind.

“Are you a polygamist?”

He could answer that. Decidedly no. One wife would be ample—provided she had red-gold hair, brown-gold eyes, the right kind of mouth, and a dimple. Whatever doubts there might be in his mind on other points, on that one he had none whatever.

“Have you ever been in prison?” Not yet.

And then a very difficult one. “Are you a lunatic?”

Jimmy hesitated. The ink dried on his pen. He was wondering.

— P. G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (p. 62)

The Art of Reading: Pretty Girl Reading in the Dark - Georges Pavis

Saturday Snapshot: Squirrel Update

For those of you who have been following our blog, you might remember our squirrel photos from early this year. Well, they're still here, and now they're building a nest on our balcony!