Not an empty longing. A full longing.

Forest Interior, 1850, Barend Cornelis Koekkoek

When I saw this picture it reminded me of Little Dorrit. 

And suddenly my heart was overflowing.  My spirit welling up.

Oh, how I sometimes long to be in an imaginary place, in a world whose volume is all Love; where shadows do not express darkness, but serve to prove the Light; where the falling leaves, and the sear and sallow garden reveal a Beauty strong and abiding; where I am among the book people, favorite characters, deathless and True.

The longing is so full it grows to an ache that stops my senses and becomes a focus in itself, a concentration to see and understand such a multidimensional fullness.

Spending many moments in that world of Love and Light and Beauty and Truth makes it difficult to re-enter the "real" world.  This old here-and-now seems flat and queerly fluorescent-lit and artificial.

Yet I am so grateful for the glimpse of the wide, full world.

Jerusalem, my happy home,
When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end?
Thy joys when shall I see?

O happy harbor of the saints!
O sweet and pleasant soil!
In thee no sorrow may be found,
No grief, no care, no toil.

... Our sweet is mixed with bitter gall,
Our pleasure is but pain:
Our joys scarce last the looking on,
Our sorrows still remain...

"Jerusalem My Happy Home" -- "The orig­in­al man­u­script in the Brit­ish Mu­se­um, dat­ed around 1583, is in­scribed, “A song made by F. B. P. to the tune of DIANA.” The au­thor is thought to have been a Ca­tho­lic priest who based the hymn on the writ­ings of St. Au­gus­tine."   [ from CyberHymnal ]

What I am reading . . .

War and Peace. 

Because I want to.  Because I am now old enough to meet some of the characters (Pierre) with less sympathy than when I was a student. 

The translation I am using is Project Gutenberg EBook #2600 (posting date January 10, 2009).  The text version says the translators are Louise and Aylmer Maude.  So far it seems much easier to read than the Rosemary Edmonds translation in the Penguin Classics version I first used in college in the Great Books program back in the 1970s.  The Maude translation for the Kindle has some of the trickier French phrases asterisked and translated in a slightly different font at the end of the current paragraph, rather than having to click a footnote.  The Maudes' English seems more free of affectations of haute couture than Edmonds'.

I love my Kindle.  Kindle Keyboard 3G.  I can embiggenate the text.  The effect is much easier for my eyes to focus on.  Plus the Kindle text is black on white, not grey on beige (in 6-point Badly Kerned Olde Booksquiggle).

At well over half a million words, War and Peace is a big book.  But the title (and the content?) must be more intimidating than the size.  It's shorter than Atlas Shrugged, and there are plenty of people who are happy to buttonhole you and tell you all about Atlas Shrugged. 

Anyway, I'm having fun with it. 

You mean "Biology" does not mean "The Life of Words"?

When I hear authors and intellectuals say that they cannot remember a time when they could not read, I wonder: a.) don't they carry in their hearts the beautiful memory of parents reading to them as children?; and b.) were they rebooted (dropped on their head) at some point? 

I can certainly remember not being able to read.  I cherish the memories of my mother reading picture books to me. 

My mother would read aloud any text I pointed to.  It was probably safer in 1960, especially the supermarket tabloids.  I pointed to words in cook books, magazines, newspaper headlines.  Later on she would painstakingly parse the phonics of each word; what took the most time was explaining that in English, that's just the way people say it. 

I can remember my eyes being just the height of the work surface of the sewing machine cabinet (three and a half years old? four?), and sounding out in my thoughts the word on the sewing machine: "Puh-Fuh-Aa-Fuh-Fuh?"  Over and over again, and finally saying it that way out loud.  Mom laughed.  "No, it just sounds like 'Faff' -- it's a German name."  Then the explanation that not is spelling weird and arbitrary in English, but also in other languages. 

The first week of first grade, the teacher went through the first five letters of the alphabet.  She ended with a smile and, "Does anybody have any questions?"  My little hand was the only one that went up.  "I can already read," I explained sadly, "When are we going to learn how to SPELL?!"  The teacher may have been a little shocked or disbelieving when she said, "That comes later."  But by the end of the second week I was enjoying two reading lessons a day.  First some private (get-out-of-my-hair-you-ask-too-many-questions) reading time (I got to go to the third grade classroom to borrow books).  But also reading to the other kids, and tutoring the slow ones.  In the first grade. 

At some point I was so glad to be learning to spell that I invented the game of spelling all my thoughts to myself.  And of trying to spell out to myself what the teacher was saying.  Especially good as an exercise when the speaker is particularly boring and pedantic. 

I learned Greek to a certain extent when I was in college.  Ever since Greek, I can't trust my alphabet.  "A-B-C-D-E-F-G-Zeta-Eta-Theta-Iota-Kappa-Lambda... Wait a minute..."  I also learned in college that writing that you care about takes a lot of work.  This year I am trying to convince myself that writing can be play.  Like my spelling-it-all-out game, but for somewhat-more-grownups.  Perhaps in the course of blogging away, I will accidentally "spell out" some thoughts in a way I (and you) can understand. 

This year in reading

One of the decisions I took as 2011 drew to a close was to do some non-internet reading every day. Little did I know that Christmas of 2011 would bring to me the gift of a Kindle e-reader! My Amazon Kindle Keyboard has made it easier for me to read without fatigue.  The ability to read narrow columns of large text takes me past the disability of my binocular dysfunction. As a result I might justly be accused of spending too much time with my nose buried in an e-book. (Witness the countless number of "home improvements" left undone.)

Be that as it may. 

Here's what happened in 2013.  The books are in reverse chronological order.  I'm not going to bother to put the titles in italics.

In progress and due to be done by end of year:
The Wouldbegoods - E. Nesbit
Soldiers Three Part Two - Rudyard Kipling
A Christmas Carol (with historical annotations) - Charles Dickens (Kathleen Helal)

These are done:
Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
The Story of the Treasure Seekers - E. Nesbit
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll
Darkness Rising: Book One of the Catmage Chronicles - Meryl Yourish
Soldiers Three - Rudyard Kipling
Draw One In The Dark - Sarah Hoyt
Actions and Reactions - Rudyard Kipling
Christian Science - Mark Twain
Martin Chuzzlewit - Charles Dickens
Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Stucture - Nick Schulz
Hard Magic: Book I of the Grimnoir Chronicles - Larry Correia
Cricket Learns to Sing - Michael A. Hooten
The Buffalo Runners A Tale of the Red River Plains - R. M. Ballantyne
The Scent of Metal - Sabrina Chase
The Gorilla Hunters - R. M. Ballantyne
Terms of Enlistment - Marko Kloos
The North Pole, Its Discovery in 1909 Under the Auspices of the Peary Arctic Club - Robert E. Peary
A Few Good Men - Sarah Hoyt
Norsemen in the West - R. M. Ballantyne
Five Children and It - E. Nesbit
Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - R. M. Ballantyne
Darkship Renegades - Sarah Hoyt
The Categories - Aristotle
Darkship Thieves - Sarah Hoyt
St. Winifred's (or, The World of School) - Frederic Farrar*
Hukata - Mike Weatherford
Puck of Pook's Hill - Rudyard Kipling
Heroes of Asgard / Tales from Scandinavian Mythology - A. & E. Keary
Erling the Bold - R. M. Ballantyne





Yes, there are a lot of "young reader" books in the list.  So? 

- - -
*WARNING:  Do not read St. Winifred's except as a penitential or academic endeavor! What a dreadful "improving" book.  In my case, the undertaking was academic, as it is mentioned in Stalky & Co.
- - -

What is in store for 2014?  War and Peace, Plato's Republic, Mao's little treatise On Guerrilla Warfare, and more Kipling and more Kipling!  And probably Erling again.  And I'm hoping Sabrina Chase will finish another book!