George MacDonald's Poetry

I'm enjoying George MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul:

Here are some of my favorites:

Be thou the well by which I lie and rest:
Be thou my tree of life, my garden ground;
Be thou my home, my fire, my chamber blest,
My book of wisdom, loved of all the best;
Oh be my friend, each day still newer found,
As the eternal days and nights go round!
Nay, nay – thou art my God, in whom all loves are bound!

Come to me, Lord: I will not speculate how,
Nor think at which door I would have thee appear,
Nor put off calling till my floors be swept,
But cry, “Come, Lord, come any way, come now.”
Doors, windows, I throw wide; my head I bow,
And sit like some one who so long has slept
That he knows nothing till his life draw near.

Were there but some deep, holy spell, whereby
Always I should remember thee – some mode
Of feeling the pure heat-throb momently
Of the spirit-fire still uttering this I!
Lord, see thou to it, take thou remembrance’ load:
Only when I bethink me can I cry;
Remember thou, and prick me with love’s goad.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp. It has been named International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Why Study Latin Part II

This post is a follow-up to a previous post about studying Latin.There's another reason to study Latin. Well, it worked out well for the 16th century playwright Ben Johnson. I'm reading a very funny and entertaining book called,

The Know-It-All, One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

by A.J. Jacobs. Here is what he reveals about Ben Johnson:

I knew a lot of things could save your life -- a helmet, a good lawyer, cholesterol medication -- but this one was new to me: the ability to read Latin. If you know you E Pluribus from your Unum you'll live a lot longer. At least if you're an accused criminal in 16th - century England, as was Ben Jonson.

I remembered Jonson vaguely -- he was the second most successful Elizabethan Playwright after Shakespeare, the Pepsi to the Bard's Coke. What I didn't know was that he was a rascal -- an angry, stubborn man with a homicidal temper. In 1958, the same year he had his first big hit play -- Every Man His
Humour -- Jonson killed a fellow actor in a duel.

The strange part, though, is how he escaped capital punishment. The accused playwright invoked a legal loophole called "benefit of clergy." The concept of benefit of clergy started in 12th century England when the church convinced the
king to offer immunity to priest and other ecclesiastical officials. By the 16th century, however, the definition of "clergy" had stretched to include anyone who could read the Fifty-First Psalm in Latin.

On the one hand, this is a crazy law -- elitist, unjust, arbitrary. On the other hand, it's kind of nice that reading and scholarship were once so highly valued that they had the very tangible benefit of stopping a hatchet from removing your head from your shoulders. It's beautifully clear-cut: You read Latin, you live. You don't read Latin, you'll soon be experiencing a nice case of rigor mortis (though you won't know the definition of rigor mortis, you illiterate jackass).

See it pays to learn Latin.Which is why I'm still plodding through Wheelock's Latin.

Connection of the Day

I love the World Wide Web. It works the way my mind works. Try as I might to stay on a sequential course in my thought life, my mind is constantly darting off to chase a rabbit down a hole. Which brings me to my connection of the day. Alice in Wonderland and Liddell, of Liddell Scott Greek lexical fame. (Let me digress just a moment to mention last night's episode of Gilmore Girls. I love the dialog in this show. Lorelai's monlogue last night on her thoughts jumping around was masterful and strangely apropos to my subject.I wish I had a transcript of it, maybe I'll sit down and transpose it from the TiVo recording, Nah, maybe I can find it online.)

I was browsing through I book I just bought called The Smithsonian's Book of Books. (List Price around $25, on sale for $12 which was further marked down to around $6 because the B. Dalton bookstore in the local mall is going out of business and everything in the store is half price. I picked up a bunch of books, more later on this, maybe.) Anyway, I came across a picture in the book similar to the one above of Young Alice Liddell, who was the "muse for whom Oxford deacon Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, created Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)." I thought, "That name, Liddell, sounds familiar." It's the first part of a Greek lexicon that I own called Liddell and Scott. Actually there are several of them, I have the "Little Liddell" and the big Liddell, the pint sized version and the big, heavy tome that is the standard for classical Greek lexicons.

So I googled Alice Liddell ,and she is indeed the daughter of Liddell who was dean of Oxford and a friend of Lewis Caroll, who btw, was also a good friend of George MacDonald, another author I'm currently reading. George MacDonald's children are said to be the ones who encouraged him to publish Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Isn't life grand! At some level everything is connected, some connections are just more obvious than others.

In honor of the showing of Jane Eyre on PBS tomorrow, here is the text of a recently discovered letter from Charlotte Bronte's father, The Rev. Patrick Bronte. The letter was written shortly after the death of Charlotte. Charlotte was the last of Patrick's six children to die. The 78 year old minister had buried his wife and all six of his children. The letter sheds new light on his love for his children. For more on this see:
Bronte's Father not so Savage and the BronteBlog post:

And Now They are all Gone

Letter of Patrick Brontë to Charles Longley, Bishop of Ripon, later Archbishop of Canterbury.Lambeth Palace Library MS. 4545, ff.208-209
Haworth,nr. Keighley,April 10th 1855

My Lord Bishop,Amongst the various letters of kind sympathy which we have received, Your Lordships Letter gives us especial pleasure – It is worthy of One who is justly esteemed the Father of His Clergy, and I will retain it amongst my most valued treasures, as long as I shall live. “A word in due season, how good is it”. And most assuredly, if a season of sorrow, needs a word of consolation and support ours is that season. I have lived long enough to bury a beloved wife, and six children – all that I had. I greatly enjoyed their conversation and company, and many of them were well fitted for being companions to the wisest and best. Now they are all gone. Their image and memory remain, and meet me at every turn – but they themselves have left me a bereaved old man. I hop’d and wish’d that the Lord would spare them, to see me laid in my grave, but the Lord has ordered it otherwise, and I have seem them all laid, in that place “where the wicked cease from troubling And the weary are at rest”. I have not only my own sorrow to bear, but I am distress’d for Mr. Nicholls whose grief is very great. His union with My Daughter was a happy one. They were well fitted for each other, and naturally look’d forward, to future scenes of happiness for a long time to come – but the Lord gave, and the Lord took early away. May we both be able from our hearts to say blessed be the name of the Lord. But I have often found and find in this last sad trial, that it is frequently extremely difficult to walk entirely by faith, and sincerely, to pray, “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”. Mr. Nicholls, who is every thing I could desire, to the Church and to me, intends to stay with me, during the brief remainder of my life. May we beg that your Lordship will sometimes remember us in your prayers?

I remain, My Lord Bishop,Your Lordship’s MostObedient Humble servant,Patrick Bronte

BBC's Jane Eyre on PBS

A new version of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is making its US debut this weekend on PBS. Part one of the four-hour miniseries will air this Sunday, January 21. (Locally on KCET at 1pm and 9pm.) I for one am looking forward to it.

Answered Prayer

When I started this blog over a year ago, one of the goals I had was to reconnect and stay connected with friends and family across the country and world. I’m very thankful that I’m now in touch with my cousin Judy, who lives in Baton Rouge, by email and through this blog.

About a week ago I received an email from a dear old friend named Patty. I haven’t seen or heard from her in I don’t know how long, probably twenty years or so. Patty and I were missionaries together in Alabama in 1979. She was the best thing going for me in what was quite possibly the worst year of my life, the year that my mother died.

It was really a thrill to hear from her. She apparently googled me and found me on my previous employer’s website and then my blog. It’s working! Patty, let’s stay in touch!

Who dat?

Go SAINTS!

My parents would be so happy! Finally, after forty NFL seasons, the New Orleans Saints have won a playoff game.

Saints give New Orleans another reason to smile.

SAG Awards

I'm very proud that both of my children are members of the Screen Actors Guild. As members, they are entitled to vote for the SAG Awards recipients. They recently received their ballots to vote for the awards. I also discovered that they were eligible to RSVP to request an invitation to purchase tickets to attend the awards show. I'm not sure, but I think they missed the deadline to RSVP for the ticket lottery. Let's see $1200 for two tickets... Here is the info from the SAG website for purchasing tickets.

Tickets are not available to the general public, and are by invitation only.Tickets are $600 each. If you are an active paid-up SAG member and would like to request an invitation to purchase tickets, please complete the online form below. Invitations will be mailed in December. Due to the limited seating in our venue, we will place all returned RSVPs into a drawing that will be held in January. Members drawn will be notified. Members not drawn will receive a refund. There is a limit of two tickets per member.

The Screen Actors Guild award show will be shown live on TBS and TNT on Saturday, Jan. 28, 1007. I think I'll wait until I get an invitation to the Academy Awards.

Organizationally Challenged

I want to be neat and perfectly organized. I really do. Every Tuesday I spend the day with a woman who epitomizes organization to me. She has six children who are all home-schooled (well except the baby, who is almost one). Her house is beautifully decorated and always clean and neat. Everything is in its place. I want to be like her but somehow it's an elusive goal for me. We go to her house every Tuesday for a homeschool co-op.

I'm not giving up on my quest to be more organized. I want a neat and tidy house. I want a well-planned schedule. But I did notice with great interest a book I came across at Barnes and Noble's last week called: A Perfect Mess - The Hidden Benefits of Disorder: How crammed closets, cluttered offices and on the fly planning make the world a better place.

The New York Times mentions the book in an article entitled: Saying Yes to Mess. Here's an excerpt from the article:

But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An anti-anticlutter
movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your
disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid
signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than
those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably
better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a
movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat
people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible
prigs, and have way too much time on their hands

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to call my organized friends prigs, and I'm not prepared to "embrace my disorder". But I'd gladly settle for a higher salary and accept the "more creative" moniker. Actually, I prefer order, but I'm sure I'd do a better job of keeping order at home if I didn't stress over it so much.

Books

This is a picture from the Thomas Jefferson building of the Library of Congress. It has the Latin quote, "Liber delectatio animae", which means, "books, the delight of the soul".

Liber Delectatio Animae

Don't you hate it when people write Latin quotes without translating them? I could write a whole post on that subject but it's not what I'm writing today. In fact I think I'll leave the whole translation for another post because I have more to say about it.
I've attempted to write a list of the books I read in 2006. I don't know if I've got them all but all the ones that I noted in my journal or that I remember are here. They're in no particular order except sort of chronological, except I started with the ones I read recently and then I went back to my journal from the beginning of the year and started from the beginning. Anyway, it's an interesting (to me anyway) mix of biographies, classics, some science, children's books and lots of books about books. I count about eighty. I tried to only put books that I actually finished but quite a few are books that I've read before and reread this year. I'm working on another list of books I started and didn't finish.

Books read in 2006:
Jane Austen, A Life by Claire Tomalin
Emily Bronte by Winifred Gerin
Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
The Genizah at the House of Shepher by Tamar Yellin
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl
Rebecca by Daphne DuMarier
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton
The Outside World by Tova Mirvis
Isaac Newton by James Gleick
Such a Strange Lady (bio of Dorothy Sayers) by Janet Hitchman
Mark Twain Mysteries by Edith Skom
Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley
Old Books Rare Friends by Leona Rostenberg and Stein
Bibliomania, A Tale by Gustave Flaubert
As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto
The Crucible by Arthur Miller
Greco-Persian Wars by Peter Green
The Professor by Charlotte Bronte
Amo, Amas, Amat and all That by Eugene Ehrlich
Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell
Mathematics, Is God Silent? James Nickel
The Lighthouse by P.D. James
Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenbert
QED The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman
The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman
National Velvet by Enid Bagnold
Where Books Fall Open by Bascove
The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble
Rereadings by Anne Fadiman
Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
The Gift of Friendship, C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkein by Colin Durziel
On Literature by Umberto Eco
Negotiating with the Dead –A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood
Mimesis by Auerbach
The Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle
Reading in Bed by Steven Gilbar
The Luck of Nineveh by Arnold C. Brackman
The Right to Heresy, Castillio against Calvin by Stefan Zweig
Can a Smart Person Believe in God? By Michael Gullen
So Many Books, So Little Time, A Year of Passionate Reading by Sara Nelson
Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
A Man of My Words by Lederer
Who Killed Homer?
The Friendly Jane Austen
A Passion for Books Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan
Ungodly; the Passions Torments and Murder of Atheist Madalyn MurrayO'Hair by Ted Dracos
T.S. Eliott Selected Essays
Emma by Jane Austen
The Story of English by McCrum, Cram and MacNeil
Borges, A Reader
Labyrinths by Jorge Borges
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Foucalt’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Raising a Reader by Jennie Nash
Sleuthing in the Stacks by Rudolph Altrochi
The Scholar Adventurers Richard Altick
A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte
I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
Bookman’s Promise by John Dunning
Booked to Die by John Dunning
Sign of the Book by John Dunning
The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
Death’s Autograph by Marianne McDonald
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone
The Friar and the Cipher by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone
Warmly Inscribed by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary: Or Why Can't Anybody Spell by Vivian Cook
God’s Equation by Amir Aczel
The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
The Book Thief by Mark Zusak
Taking the Quantum Leap by Fred Wolf

So long to the classics..

Libraries are dumping the classics to make room for DVDs and Harry Potter. No wonder I can't find the books I want at my local library. You can read about it in the WashingtonPost.

Christmas Cards

Did you get a Christmas card from us this year? No. Well, you're not the only one. That's one of the things that didn't get done before Christmas came this year. I still have plans to send out New Year greeting cards but it's getting later every day. Chuck's mom graciously took several for us when we visited her in Sacramento. I had it all set up online from Sacaramento but it wouldn't be ready until January 11. Then Eric saw the picture and hated it. So we retook more pictures and I reordered the cards. This time I was able to put a rush on it but unable to preview the card online. I went ahead and ordered them but I was a little concerned about not being able to preview the card online. Rightfully so, because when we picked up the cards yesterday the top of Chuck and Eric's heads were cut off. That's what happens to tall people, I suppose. We may just send them out anyway. So if you get a late card from us with a bit of the tall people in our family's heads missing, you'll know that it's the thought that counts, right?

A Trip to Great Britain

My friend Donna, the socalmom is travelling in Great Britain. Anyone who uses the word "peckish" in their blog should be read.

Actually, I think peckish is a great word. When I read it in her blog, I had to look it up because I thought it meant something like irritable or easily annoyed. It turns out that it does mean this but also the British meaning is "somewhat hungry". This is how she uses it in her blog. Of course you have to use the British meaning when you're travelling in Britain.