There are certain things you never forget.
Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading. -- Children who have never heard a story read to them, who never hear words that rhyme, who never imagine fighting with dragons or marrying a prince, have the odds overwhelmingly against them.
She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.
Early photo of me on a lunch break (circa 1989).
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory -- meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion -- is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take.
Well, the first day of my second vacation of the year is going swimmingly.
And, on a sad note -- this morning Jack Layton passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer. This is why the flag is at half-mast on Parliament Hill. This photo was taken again, from my balcony.
It doesn't matter how beautiful the guess is, or how smart the guesser is, or how famous the guesser is; if the experiment disagrees with the guess, then the guess is wrong. That's all there is to it.
Dear Friends, please forgive me for not blogging much lately. I would not blame any of you for not even reading this current blog here, I am so inconsistent. And not only this, but I don't visit your own blogs nearly as much as I want to.
I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.
There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.
When I arrived at work this morning there was a note on the door saying I had just missed a delivery from a courier company. I work all alone at a satellite building [no, we don't make things that go into outer space] but what I mean is, my warehouse is one of several in our company. So I called my supervisor at headquarters on the radio to advise him of the circumstances and he said he'd call to reschedule the delivery of the items. But he needed the reference number on the ticket. It was a long number and began with a few letters. I proceeded to rifle them off but he was like "Wait. Wait. Give me the letters slowly."
Life is oblivion erupting, for a brief moment, into non-oblivion in order so that oblivion may proclaim: 'I am.' The assumption being, of course, that living things are aware enough to make such a proclamation. Let us suppose that they are. Let us suppose that they are, to a degree, self-aware. This makes for the possibility of life recognizing itself, yes, but not as oblivion, only as life. In order for life to recognize itself as a fleeting pulse of oblivion, self-awareness must be refined into pure awareness, which is observation unimpaired by either ego or preconceptions.
A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand upon those mysteries.
How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?
We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.
To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.
Well friends, my holiday is over. It was a wonderful two weeks of fun and frivolity on the west coast of this awesome country of mine. Tomorrow begins a stint back at the ol' salt mines! However, in three weeks or so I have another week off, so….. all is not lost, regarding this summer.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, to the extent that it makes me interested in other books by this author. This one follows the adventures of an American missionary family as they find themselves in the Belgian Congo, [early '60's] trying to foist the Word of God on the people there. To put it mildly -- things do not exactly go favourably for their evangelistic efforts. Kingsolver tells the story in such a unique style, each chapter alternating between five narrators, [the mother and the four daughters]. Interestingly enough, the main reason they are all in Africa in the first place [the father, who is divinely "called" to be there] is not allowed a stint as narrator. According to the account of the rest of his family, he is one of the most mule-headed religionists I have ever heard of, in fiction or in real life. It is agonizing to read of his stubbornness. It is impossible to summarize such an epic, sweeping story -- but I'll let the words of two of the daughters approach a summation:
It is a rare thing for me to give up on a book, but I did so with the book that I picked up after the Kingsolver one. I actually regretted taking it along with me on my midnight flight home -- because I found that no matter how hard I tried, I just could not get into it.
