Sunday, October 28, 2007

The Blue Flower


I was looking through my online pictures and came across this one which Chuck took in our backyard last Spring. It reminded me of a C.S. Lewis quote that I like from "Surprised by Joy":

"They taught me longing - Sensucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower."


I recently read Alan Jacob's biography of C.S. Lewis, The Narnian. He explains Lewis' quote as being a reference to a German romantic writer by the penname of Novalis. Here is the quote from pg. 40 of the Narnian:

In his first reference to it in his autobiography, he calls it by a more common name: remembering his youthful response to the sight of the Castlereagh Hills from his nursery window, he writes, "They taught me longing - Sensucht; made me for good or ill, and before I was six years old, a votary of the Blue Flower.

He is thinking of Novalis - the pen name of the German Romantic writer Friedrich von Hardenberg, who died in 1801 at the age of twenty-nine. The protagonist of Novalis's unfinished allegorical novel Heinrich Von Ofterdingen becomes obsessesed by a vision of a blue flower, which he first encounters in a stranger's tales and then in dreams:

There is no greed in my heart; but I yearn to get a glimpse of the blue flower [aber die blaue Blume sehn' ich mich zu erblicken]. It is perpetually in my mind, and I can write or think of nothing else . . .
Often I feel so rapturously happy; and only when I do not have the flower clearly before my mind's eye does a deep inner turmoil seize me. This cannot and will not be understood by anyone. I would think I were mad if I did not see and think so clearly. Indeed since then everything is much clearer to me.


He "yearns" or "longs" (sehn) for the flower - and yet nothing that he can grasp seems so desirable as that longing itself. This is the paradox of Sehnsucht: that though it could in one sense be described as a negative experience, in that it focuses on someting one cannot possess and cannot reach, it is nevertheless intensely seductive. One cannot say it is exactly pleasurable - there is a kind of ache in the sense of unattainability that always accompanies the longing - and yet, as Lewis puts it, the quality of the experience "is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction."

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Wildfire Update

Good news for the Santa Clarita area today:

from the santa-clarita.com website:

October 24, 2007 - UPDATE - 10am:

Buckweed Fire: (Santa Clarita, Agua Dulce areas) This fire is now 94% contained. There are no deaths as a result of this or any of the fires in Los Angeles County. A total of 5,500 homes were threatened and over 38,000 acres have burned.

Magic Fire: (Magic Mountain and Stevenson Ranch areas) This is 100% contained, no structures were lost or threatened. A total of more than 28,000 acres burned.


The news from San Diego is not so good..

Monday, October 22, 2007

Wildfires


The view from my front porch earlier today

Sunset in Stevenson Ranch


This was the scene at my son's high school today:
West Ranch HS threatened by flames

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Amish Grace

It was one year ago today that a horrific act of unprovoked violence was perpetrated against a schoolhouse full of young Amish children. By the time it was over 5 innocent Amish girls were dead and 5 more seriously injured by a gunman seeking to take revenge on God for the stillborn birth of an infant years before.

What set this tragedy apart from other unprovoked violent attacks, of which tragically there have been more than a few, was the unprecedented grace of forgiveness which was offered to the murderers and his family by the families of the victims. Their actions set the media abuzz with discussions of forgiveness.

Read more here: Amish Grace and the rest of us