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Unsinkable Courage

Apr15

Thursday 18 April 1912
(A poem said to have been written on board the RMS Olympic, April 18, 1912, following the disaster to her sister ship)

He slams his door in the face of the world
If he thinks the world too bold:
He will even curse; but he opens his purse
To the poor, and the sick, and the old.

He is slow in giving to woman the vote
And slow to pick up her fan;
But he gives her room in an hour of doom
And dies – like an Englishman!

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1855-1919)

On this day in 1912 the luxury liner Titanic sank at 2:27 AM after hitting an iceberg just before midnight the night before (the 14th). 2227 persons were on board the Titanic; only 705 were rescued from the icy waters near the site of the sunken vessel. Most of the survivors were women and children.

Some fiction books featuring the Titanic:
Tonight on the Titanic (Magic Treehouse Series, No. 17) by Mary Pope Osborne
Titanic Crossing by Barbara Williams
SOS Titanic by Eve Bunting I read this one while I was sick a few days ago. It’s OK, typical teen romance-type novel with good historical detail. There’s a steward who foresees the disaster because of his supernatural “gift.” And there’s an underlying theme of class war and class distinctions just as there was in the movie, Titanic.

March 14th Birthdays

Mar14

Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnesy, English poet, b 1844.
Albert Einstein, scientist, b. 1879. This year is the centennial of Einstein’s “Annus Mirabilis,” his miracle year of 1905, during which he created the Special Theory of Relativity and the quantum theory of light, explained in one paper Brownian motion and in another how to determine the size of atoms or molecules in space, and extended the theory of relativity to include the famous equation E-mc squared. He did all this while working forty hours a week in a patent office. I don’t have a clue what any of these discoveries really mean, but I’m impressed with the Einstein miracle.

“I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism have brought me to my ideas.” Albert Einstein

Marguerite DeAngeli, author of 1950’s Newbery-award winning book, The Door in the Wall, b. 1889. In this favorite quote from The Door in the Wall, Brother Matthew is speaking to Robin, a boy who has been crippled probably by polio:

“Whether thou’lt walk soon I know not. This I know. We must teach thy hands to be skillful in many ways, and we must teach thy mind to go about whether thy legs will carry thee or no. For reading is another door in the wall, dost understand, my son?”

 

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!

Mar2

Theodore Geisel aka Dr. Seuss was born on this date in 1904 in Springfield, MA. His first book was To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, and it was rejected by 27 puplishers before being published by Vanguard Press in 1937. Dr. Seuss wrote 46 children’s books, and my favorites are:

To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street
Horton Hatches the Egg
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins
Green Eggs and Ham

Go to Seussville for lots of cool games and fun stuff. In honor of Seuss’s birthday, the National Education Association sponsors ReadAcrossAmerica.

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Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya

Feb28

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live. –Coleridge

I read this book last week and thought it gave a beautiful, but very sad, picture of life in India for many people. It’s the story of a poor family, a fourth daughter who, because she has no dowry, cannot marry well but must settle for marriage to a landless tenant farmer who brings her home to a mud hut he built himself. Fortunately for the girl, Rukmani, her husband Nathan is “poor in everything but in love and care for me, his wife, whom he took at the age of twelve.”
Rukmani narrates the story in first person, telling of the birth of her daughter, the long wait during which the couple think they will have no more children, and then the birth of her five sons. The village where the family lives is on the edge of poverty and starvation; a bad year with too much rain or too little rain will push Rukmani’s family over the edge. Change and new economic oportunities come to the village; however, these new ideas and possibilities are full of danger too, for peasants who have nothing in reserve and are unable or unwilling to move with the times.
I wrote about a month ago about some of my favorite fantasy worlds. These fantasy worlds were first encountered on the pages of books. Then, there are historical and sociological worlds that I visit mostly in books, too. Finally, there is the actual world. I’ve never been to India or China or South America, but I have a picture of what life in those lands is (or was) like–again, from books. I think that Nectar in a Sieve, first published in 1954, will become a large part of my picture of India, along with missionary stories, the young man I met a few years ago at Baptist World Alliance Youth Conference, and other sources, such as the women I see at the grocery store here in Clear Lake dressed in saris.
Warning: The book has a bittersweet ending, but it’s realistic without being hopeless and depressing. Excellent.
These are some of my favorite books that have given me a picture of the world. Most of them are fiction.
Around the world in books:
South Africa: Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope both by Alan Paton
India: Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan
China: Imperial Woman by Pearl S.Buck, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang
Antarctica: Troubling a Star by Madeleine L’Engle
The Netherlands: The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
England (Yorkshire): All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
Lebanon: Alice by ? Doerr
Russia: The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig (And, of course, Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, although they’re more historical)
Israel: Exodus by Leon Uris
Hawaii: Hawaii by James Michener

For some of these places, all my ideas about the culture come from the book I listed. For others, I am certainly indebted to the book for most of my information. Can you suggest any books that capture the culture and living conditions of a country in either fiction or biography? I do prefer and learn more from stories.

Careless

Feb22

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

I’ve finished re-reading The Great Gatsby for my American Literature discussion group, and my first thought is that some people lead very sad and empty lives. Hunter S. Thompson, inventor of “gonzo journalism,” shot himself on Sunday. Somehow, even though I don’t know too much about Thompson, this apparent suicide seems to fit in with Gatsby and Tom and Nick and Daisy and the lives of, not quiet, but rather loud desperation they all led.
Unfortunately, I see a lot of carelessness in our society. People carelessly have abortions or get divorces or hop from relationship to relationship leaving mayhem and confusion behind them. They carelessly retreat into drugs or alcohol or they commit suicide, leaving others to mop up their mess.
Of course, some people, like Gatsby, care tremendously. But they care about the wrong things. Gatsby thought he could find meaning in Daisy, but the green light at the end of her dock that became an object of worship for him was really a mirage. Daisy herself was a siren, not a goddess, and she had nothing to give except disilusionment and death.
The kicker is that we’re all desperate: we’re either desperately lost in sin and idolatry and ultimately despair, or we’re desperately dependent upon the Only One who can save us and mop up our messes and redeem our carelessness. And where our desperation finds an end matters not only to each of us but also to those whom our lives touch.

A Couple of Books

Feb14

I read a couple of books while I was recuperating from the creeping crud last week, and I’m just now getting around to writing about them. The first was The God I Love by Joni Eareckson Tada. The book is basically a re-telling of Joni’s life with more emphasis on her childhood and her life after the publication of her first, very successful, attempt at spiritual autobiography, Joni, written about 30 years ago. For those who haven’t been running in evangelical circles for as long as that, Joni Tada is a beautiful Christian author and artist; she is also a quadriplegic, injured in a diving accident when she was still a teenager. Joni writes about growing up as the youngest of four daughters in a home where her father was “bigger than life.” She also remembers horseback riding and playing the piano, travel and discovering family secrets, teenage rebellion and, of course, The Accident. She gives hope to those dealing with depression by telling about her own bouts with depression and anxiety. And she ends the book with a statement of purpose:

“Ah, this is the God I love. The Center, the Peacemaker, the Passport to Adventure, the Joyride and the Answer to all our deepest longings. The answer to all our fears, Man of Sorrows and Lord of Joy, always permitting what he hates, to accomplish something he loves. And he had brought me here, all the way from home–halfway around the earth–so I could declare to anyone within earshot of the whole universe, to anyone that might care, that yes—
There are more important things in life than walking.”

The other book I read doesn’t really fit in the same post with this one, but I suppose the contrast could be instructive. I discovered the name Olivia Manning while researching author’s birthdays a few months ago. She was an Englishwoman who married a British Council lecturer in Bucharest, Romania just before World War II. She later wrote The Balkan Trilogy (The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, Friends and Heroes) based on her experiences during the war. The back of my library paperback copy of the trilogy says that Masterpiece Theatre made this story into a TV series called Fortunes of War starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. This information sounded hopeful; I can’t imagine Kenneth Branagh and EmmaThompson making a bad movie. Unfortunately, I also can’t imagine what even those two could have done with the material in this book. There are a few intriguing characters: Prince Yakimov is an impoverished White Russian emigre who lives off his experience in aristocratic circles; Sasha is the sheltered son of a Jewish banker who is conscripted into the Romanian army. The main characters, Guy and Helen, are, like the author and her husband, a British lecturer and his new bride. The problem is that after 924 pages, I still didn’t really like any of the characters, except for maybe poor Yaki. I think the idea of the book is a “portrait of a marriage under stress,” but by the time I got to the end, my thought was that this marriage was one that should never have been consummated in the first place. I was as tired of Helen and Guy as they were of each other, and I doubt even Kenneth and Emma could breathe new life into these characters and make them interesting again. I wanted to tell these guys, “There are more important things in life than your personal convenience, and there were things going on in Europe at this time more important than the petty politics of a second-rate English school.”

The Most Important Book I Read in College

Jan18

Lessons from a Bear of Very Little Brain by Sam Torode.

“In four years of college, the most important thing I did was read Winnie-the-Pooh. My saying this will surprise many of you, and it is with no small shame that I admit it. How, you ask, could I have made it through childhood, and all the way into college, without reading Winnie-the-Pooh?”

I linked to this article in Boundless last year on A.A. Milne’s birthday (b.1882), and this year I can’t resist it again. What was the most important book you read while in college? I think I read some of C.S. Lewis for the first time while in college, and if so, I would have to count those as my most important books. However, maybe I read all of C.S. Lewis while still in high school; in which case I would choose Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I stayed up until 3:00 AM to finish Les Miserables, and I had an 8:00 AM class that morning. For me, staying awake until 3:00 in the morning was an unusual occurence; my head usually hit the pillow at 10:00 PM every night. Only a very good book could keep me turning pages until the wee hours. Anyway, back to Pooh, I agree with Mr. Torode that for one who was never introduced to Pooh as a child the meeting would be a Momentous Occasion.

Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926.

The Biscuit

Jan15

I finished reading Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand today, and I must say it’s been a good read. I really like nonfiction that tells a story, is rich in detail but doesn’t get bogged down in meaningless facts and figures. Seabiscuit, as everybody already knows because of the movie, is the story of a race horse. Most of the action takes place just before World War 2, 1936-1940. The book is about the horse, his owner, Charles Howard, his trainer, Tom Smith, and his two jockeys, George Woolf and Red Pollard. They’re a colorful lot. Seabiscuit himself is almost deformed in the knees, a horse that loves to eat and sleep–and run. One of his jockeys is blind in one eye; the other has chronic diabetes. Smith the trainer is eccentric, to say the least, and Seabiscuit’s owner is a self-made millionaire from San Francisco who started out as a bicycle repairman. All of these characters come together to create an unforgetable episode in American history. I’ve never been interested in horseracing, but I am interested in people and in history. I thought Hillenbrand captured the personalities of the people in her book (and even of the horses) and made me want to know what happened to them. What decisions did they make? How did each of their life’s “races” turn out?
Pollard, for example, was a Canadian, “an elegant young man, tautly muscled, with a shock of supernaturally orange hair. . . he lived entirely on the road of the racing circuit, sleeping in empty stalls, carrying with him only a saddle, his rosary, and his books: pocket volumes of Shakespeare, Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, a little copy of Robert Service’s Songs of the Sourdough, maybe some Emerson, whom he called ‘Old Waldo.’ The books were the closest things he had to furniture, and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.” Don’t you already want to know what will happen to a man like that when he meets up with Seabiscuit, a championship horse with so many quirks that only Pollard, and his friend Woolf, understand him well enough to ride him to victory?
Seabiscuit showed me a whole subculture that I knew nothing about, the horse racing world. And it was a fascinating world.
Some other worlds you may want to visit:
One Child by Torey Hayden–The world of mentally disturbed children and their teacher.
Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder–The world of computer geeks and computer wizards.
Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone–The world of the Wild West; a readable history of Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and California.
Small Victories by Samuel Freedman–The scary world of public high school in New York City.
A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Van Auken–The world of a very special marriage.
The Conquering Family by Thomas B. Costain (and its sequels, The Three Edwards, The Magnificent Century, and The Last Plantagenets)–The world of medieval England and its royal family.

So there you have it, some of my very favorite nonfiction worlds.

Rot

Dec31

I found this quote serendipitously while looking for something totally different:

Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.
John Alexander Smith, Speech to Oxford University students, 1914

Yes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, when I finish homeschooling eight children, each and every one of them were equipped with an excellent rot detector? I would be vindicated.

Cartoon King

Nov26

He was born on November 26, 1922, and his friends called him “Sparky.” He became “the highest paid, most widely read cartoonist ever.” The very first Peanuts comic strip, written by Charles M. Schulz, appeared in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950.

A few good words from Sparky:

There’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.

I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.

I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.

All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.