Thirty-nine: 25-27

I woke up this morning with no particular theme in mind for today’s quotations. I confess that I have nearly exhausted my “collected” quotes, and now I’m quoting by the seat of my pants, as it were. So today I just picked up a few books from my shelves—remembering only that I had enjoyed them and found much to savor—and started skimming through. Here’s what smiled at me at 9:00 on a snowy Saturday morning:

25. When we describe ourselves as “sentient” beings…we mean that we are conscious. The more literal and encompassing meaning is that we have sense perception. “Are you out of your senses!” someone yells in angry disbelief. The image of someone sprung from her body, roaming the world as a detached yearning, seems impossible. Only ghosts are pictured as literally being out of their senses, and also angels. Freed from their senses is how we prefer to say it, if we mean something positive…It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full. We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully.

—Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses

26. Fantasy goes one stage beyond realism; requiring complete intellectual surrender, it asks more of the reader, and at its best may offer more…
     And what do we, and [young people] find when we read fantasy?…This time, we’re going out of time, out of space, into the unconscious, that dreamlike world which has in it all the images and emotions accumulated since the human race began. We aren’t escaping out, we’re escaping in, without any idea of what we may encounter. Fantasy is the metaphor through which we discover ourselves.
     So it is for the writer, too. Every book is a voyage of discovery…one simply sits down to write whatever book is knocking to be let out.

—Susan Cooper, from Dreams and Wishes

27. It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant…
     Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too…Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

—Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life

Second day of Christmas books

On the second day of Christmas, my mother gave to me…

Welcome to Felicity’s World, 1774: Growing Up in Colonial America by Pleasant Company. Yes, this is another picture book, in the tremendously popular American Girl series. This book is to feed my historical obsession with the American Revolution. The pictures—including drawings and photos of historical artifacts—truly are worth thousands of words, detailing period dress and all topics of daily life such as food, education, leisure time, medicine, etc. My favorite spreads are “Managing a Household,” with a cross-section of a typical merchant’s town home; and the detailed bird’s-eye view of “Plantation Village.” Of course the book gives a broad overview of the Revolution itself, but its value to me lies in its insights into how ordinary folk lived during that turbulent time.

Thanks, Mother, and Merry Christmas!

(OK, to be honest, I got this in the mail a couple days before Christmas. I opened it immediately, even though I had been instructed not to. I just really felt I should make doubly sure it wasn’t a present for one of my kids, which would need to be wrapped.)

(One more aside: It tickled my fancy that the last name of the Felicity of this book—Merriman—is also the name of the Merlin figure in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, which I have been re-reading this week. Could Felicity be a distant American cousin of the great Old One who helps Will Stanton save the world from the Dark?)

Updates & more winter beauty

First, the updates.

Reading:

1. I finished Rodney Bolt’s History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe, in which Bolt offers an alternative look at the lives and works of Marlowe and Shakespeare. In addition to being charming, fresh, and irreverent toward poor W. S., it is a fascinating look at European culture during the Elizabethan age. Not light reading by any means, but well worth the effort.

2. According to my yearly solstice tradition, I read the opening of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. This “children’s” fantasy, originally published in the 1970s, begins in England on Midwinter’s Eve, with lots of eerie foreshadowing and tension (a tattered stranger in the woods, diving and raucous rooks, for starters). When the hero, Will Stanton, wakes on Midwinter’s Day (also his eleventh birthday), it is to find the world covered in snow, his family in a deep sleep, and a primeval forest grown right up to his house. Of course there is evil abroad…

I first received Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series of five books as a Christmas gift about eight years ago. Don’t know how I missed these as a kid, but I devoured them as an adult. Great fantasy reading; The Dark Is Rising received a Newbery Honor and The Grey King the coveted Newbery Medal itself.

Writing:

I am happily trucking along in my current work-in-progress (yes—with poems!). I am playing the superstitious “make as few notes as possible” game for now. The theory here is that the story should just flow right out of my subconscious, without the tiresome effort of plotting it all out beforehand (as if I would stick to it anyway). The truth is, I’ve been trying to write this particular story in various incarnations for years, so it should be simply seeping out of my pores.

And now, the promised winter beauty. Here are some photos that I took after the recent ice storm. Now that the sun is rising on this new day, I can see that we’re getting more snow to go on top of the ice.