Once We Were All Colonials

Once upon a time there was no United States of America and no Canada, just a lot of British North American colonials.  Funny about that.

Internet, Take Me Away!

I just checked Facebook, three times, and read through all the Tweets that came in while I was at work today.  That took about nine minutes.

People of my Internet, if you do not come up with something better and more of it, I am going to be forced to go "run" on my treadmill, and believe me, I am not in the mood.

So now you're asking, well, what have you done for us lately? Fair enough, a little quid pro quo may be in order.  What might I have for you?  Hmm.  This morning, I was moved to tears by a bit of Paradise Lost.  I was full of fine thoughts all the way to work as a result.  I could tell you which passage did the trick, but I think it will be more fun for you to guess.  Don't you? That way you can go read it yourself! I'll see you back here in, let's say, April?  (You wanted occupation, you got it).

I am reading PL in a copy of Milton's Collected Works that was printed in Boston in 1850.  I got the book for a few dollars at a library sale a couple of years ago.  It has leather covers, tiny type, and lovely, brown spotted, high cotton content paper.  There are a few engravings to enliven things.  Here's one.

Three different owners names written with fountain pen on the fly leaf.  (Not mine, yet).  It seems the right way to read Milton.  I dip in for a few verses here and there thinking that every line contains at least one excellent book title.  I read it out loud to myself.  It's like a spell.

I was also very pleased with myself on the evening that I realized that Milton was the Proto and the Ultra Fan Fiction writer, using all God's main characters and filling in their back stories and all the missing bits from the entire story of Creation.  I say ridiculous things (I think them more than I say them) about how grateful I am for the birthright of the English language but I mean it.  I really mean it.

All right.  I made some green tea that I forgot about while I stopped in here.  Tea and treadmill it is, unless one of you has posted something great on FB or one of the blogs I follow. Well? What are you waiting for?  I have obviously held up my end.

The Beauty of 8 Degrees Fahrenheit, and a Light Breeze

In the hour between getting to the bank and the town dump, and school dismissal, I went out for a walk on my snowshoes.  The town recreation path is conveniently located between the dump and the school and every nickel of our tax dollars is very well spent on it.  Don't you agree?

Too Cool Shopping

I was catching up on back episodes of Portlandia as I took down the Christmas stuff today.  This was a highlight.  (You've seen this store, right?  I never have the nerve to face down the two girls or to look at their two shirts).

As the World Turns...

One last spin for 2012.  We are back up at the Last House after too long away for a very modest New Year's Eve celebration.  It will feature Italian Sparkling Wine Product at midnight.  Wooo hooo! The Infanta is off at her own New Year's Eve celebration, a sleep over with friends (one last first for 2012).  So it is just Whusband, Shackleton, Maisy and I.  No complaints though. The snow is fluffy and knee deep here and the world is all pewter and white.  A standing rib roast is in the oven, Maisy is under my feet (in the gap between the wing chair and the footstool).  A fine farewell to 2012 and best wishes to all for the year ahead.

"The Weary Time Between Dinner and Dark"

Hi all (three of you).  Sorry for the inactivity here.  The dust lies deep and crisp and even.  But I am back! And with a little bit of thrillingly well-composed English prose for you.  (Not mine, as if!).

I have posted a few of my favorite passages from classic books here, very occasionally, and I am back with one more today.  I have been re-reading The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, which I have not read since high school.  Hardy became one of my enthusiasms way back then, and re-reading him now I find more (great insight into the human condition) and less (plot device overreaching) to admire about him.  He was a poet as well as a novelist and it shows.  I bookmarked many passages as read, but this one was so wonderful I felt it my duty to share.  Here he is describing the losers of Casterbridge, the distinctions between them and the distinctions between town bridges to which they repair in their bad moments:

There was a marked difference of quality between the personages who haunted the near bridge of brick and the personages who haunted the far one of stone.  Those of lowest character preferred the former, adjoining the town; they did not mind the glare of the public eye. [...]

The miserables who would pause on the remoter bridge were of a politer stamp.  They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called "out of a situation" from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of the professional class--shabby-genteel men, who did not know how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark. The eye of this species were mostly directed over the parapet upon the running water below.  A man seen there looking thus fixedly into the river was pretty sure to be one whom the world did not treat kindly for some reason or other.  While one in straits on the townward bridge did not mind who saw him so, and kept his back to the parapet to survey the passers-by, one in straits on this never faced the road, never turned his head at coming footsteps, but, sensitive to his own condition, watched the current whenever a stranger approached, as if some strange fish interested him, though every finned thing had been poached out of the river years before.

I am not much of a joiner, but if there were a society for the defense of well-written novels, I would join.  I know they are still out there, but the huge successes of E.L. James and her ilk has me depressed.  Happily, I do find lots of gems are there to be discovered, often in books now in the public domain.  Since no one has a financial interest in promoting them anymore, it seems they go largely unnoticed and aren't read unless under compulsion of an English teacher.  The good news is that they are often FREE on Kindle or on the internet if you have an interest.

I am always looking for recommendations.  I prefer works of staggering genius.  Contemporary writers are welcome but no mediocrities please.  Best wishes for the week ahead...

My Letter From Robertson Davies

I know at least one thing that Robertson Davies did on June 9, 1987.  He wrote (well, probably dictated) a letter to me.   

I have been moving pictures around these last months and this letter, in the cheap plastic box frame in which it has been housed for 25 years, just came up for rotation.  I re-read it yesterday and got quite choked up.  Davies once said: "A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."   Likewise, a great letter.  

I was thrilled at 22 to have a little notice from the great man.  At 47 I am touched by the kindness he showed to an earnest and rather ridiculous 22-year-old.

I can't remember just what I wrote but his response refreshes my recollection. I finished my B.A. at old McGill in the Spring of 1987.  My "Honours" essay (the scare quotes are for the English/Canadian spelling and for what I imagine was the quality of the essay) was about the way Davies' sets up his characters for their punishments or rewards in his famous Deptford Trilogy.  (Goodness and badness are complicated matters there - much to do with spiritual courage and psychological honesty rather than any outward do-goodism).   I felt deep sympathy for Davies' worldview (and still do). When I finished the paper, I was compelled to write to him about it and to tell him how much his books had meant to me.  Good, kind, wise man that he was - I found this in my Schenectady mail box a few weeks later.  

He is responding in the first paragraph to what I said to him about my feeling for McGill.  I went there following a freshman year at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  I loved McGill - an English Colonial dream of a university - from the moment I set foot on the campus.  Binghamton was an important experience too, but a (foolishly) romantic girl who thought college = Brideshead Revisted could not find a lot to love in the Rockefellerish prevent-a-student-riot aesthetic of the buildings and the pragmatic good-value-seeking student body.  Not a clock tower or a grey stone in sight and no one who would have wanted to pay for one even if available.  (Many very bright people were there, though, and I know that is really more important but, as noted, I was a little deluded).

Robertson Davies died in 1995 and it seems to me that he is fading (unjustly) into obscurity.  I re-read his best and most famous book, Fifth Business, this summer.  His observation about the benefit of a lifelong involvement with a good book was wholly borne out.  
After I re-read the letter yesterday, this relic from a the pre-internet age, it seemed to me almost a duty to share it.  I hope you will like it too.

As a few of your regular-stoppers-by know, I have been engaged for years in writing a book of my own.  (Coming January 2013-Watch this space!).  A central character is my own Professor Davies - Morgan Davies, that is, a time traveler with a biography wholly different from R. Davies, but very much inspired by his example - and looking just like him.