Category Archives: Excerpts

Longer passages

The goodness of Children, revisited.

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We all admire the intelligence of people who think the way we do.

Bruno Bettelheim wrote a book called The Uses of Enchantment designed (as far as I can tell) to defend and promote the use of fairy tales in bringing up children. Naturally it is referenced in a number of storytelling articles I have read. I have only just started the book, and so far it is quite intriguing. Here is a quote that reminds me of the arguments I began articulating earlier.

There is a widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to our very own natures– the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly, out of anger and anxiety. Instead we want our children to believe that, inherently all men are good. But children know that they are not always good; and often, even when they are, they would prefer not to be. This contradicts what they are told by their parents, and therefore makes the child a monster in his own eyes.

I have often thought about how ridiculous it is that adults continue to assert the inherent goodness of children (as one who has cared for/observed them most of my life), but I had never before considered how it must seem to the honest and thoughtful child who is aware of his or her own shortcomings.

Indeed, if a sensitive child is told that children’s goodness comes naturally, and honestly observes that his own goodness does not– I can see that being rather distressing, even if not completely “mak[ing] the child a monster in his own eyes.”

Writing and Writing

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“Where did you get your copies?”
“Out of my head.”
“That head I see now on your shoulders?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Has it other furniture of the same kind within?
“I should think it may have: I should hope–better.”

I think it was the first two books I read about novel-writing that planted the four most impactful ideas.

  1. Never save anything for your next novel
  2. Don’t expect to publish your first novel
  3. Expect writing a novel to take a long time
  4. Publishers aren’t interested in a one-book wonder. They want to create a brand.

I wonder now if these statements had the most impact on me because they were in the first books I read, or because they are what I most needed to hear.

One of the authors said his first published novel was the third he wrote, but the first two weren’t wasted because (aside from helping him develop as a writer and learn/perfect his craft) having those manuscripts proved to his publisher that he was serious about writing. Eventually he did rework at least one of them for publication.

My challenge sometimes seems to be remembering that I have enough material to make more books. I like that opening quote (from Jane Eyre) because it reflects my feelings about producing more than one work.  I continue to write because it is like moving– I can only be still so long. But more than just having something new to write, I want it to actually be better.

Mere Christianity

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To think about.

An excerpt from that book by C.S. Lewis.

…The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for a few moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through.

He [Jesus] never talked in vague, idealistic gas. When he said, “Be perfect,” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder– in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn how to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Enchantment

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I’ve started reading Orson Scott Card’s book Enchantment on the advice of some NaNo pseudo-acquaintance who read my NaNo’s premise. It’s surprised me a couple times.

And there’s a few lines I’ve liked. In the context of the protagonist’s mother (Esther) talking with his fiancée (Ruthie):

[Ruthie] might not realize it consciously, but she had let some thing slip, and Esther had picked up on it. That was the way communication was among women, most of the time; few women realized it, but they all depended on it. “Women’s intuition” wasn’t intuition at all, it was heightened observation, unconscious registration of subtle clues…Esther didn’t need to be told any of this. She knew, because she had trained herself to know these things. It was a school at least as rigorous as any university, but there was no diploma, no extra title to add to her name. She simply knew things, and, unlike most women, knew exactly why and how she knew.

Aren’t we most likely to consider brilliant those who think like us?

This has been my theory about “women’s intuition” as long as I’ve considered its existence, so finding someone else articulating it inclines me to think well of him for a few more pages. He has enough of these redeeming moments it’s been fairly easy to continue reading, even though nothing much had happen-happened yet (only things hinted at).

In the same conversation Ruthie is trying to explain to Esther’s husband (Piotr) the difference between the “Bible of scarcity” and the “feminine Bible,” an idea she was eating up in her Jewish philosophy class (all these characters call themselves Jewish); the idea that all the distasteful stuff in the bible can be separated from the nice stuff:

“It’s the Bible of scarcity that makes Jews think they have the right to displace the Palestinians. In the feminine Bible, the lamb lies down with the lion.”

“Lions are always glad when lambs act like that,” said Piotr. “Saves them all that energy wasted in hunting and chasing.”

It kind of loses its punch when the girl guilts him into apologizing for it.
Later, he asks his wife what’s for dinner.

“Soup,” she said. “Can’t you smell it?”
“The house always smells like good food,” said Piotr. “It’s the perfume of love.”

How to Become a Saint While Changing Diapers

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You gotta love that title. It’s another chapter title from The Angel and the Ants (here if you want to browse the other excerpts).

Reading this chapter I felt again that twinge I get when wishing my life now showed the fruits of a more structured childhood (not that I’d want to have lived that childhood, necessarily, but it would be nice to have had all that learning and training behind me). Both musicians (Suzuki-type) and traditional Catholics are (I imagine) simply stuffed full of information at an age where there are fewer distractions to prevent its taking root.

The reason I think of this now, is that Kreeft sites several fine distinctions on the “do all as unto the Lord” idea, from broader reading than I would have found without him, and applies it to this idea of “living a life of sanctity” emphasized in his book.

“Seeds,” he calls them, and they are drawn from that sea of tradition and reading available for those brave enough to wade in:

  • From The Devine Milieu Kreeft shares the suggestion that “Not only our operatio but also our opus, not only our acts of working, but also the works we produce will somehow be used by God … We are to be doing the very best work we can because that work is to be part of God’s eternal kingdom, unimaginably transformed by death and resurrection. We are cooperating with God right now in building this new world; our pen, or shovel, or computer, is the extension of the fingers of Christ, the body of Christ.”
  • Summarizing Opus Dei, Kreeft says, its “whole reason for existence is to address the problem of the sanctification of daily work directly and explicitly. Its fundamental answer is traditional: to offer up our work to God, to pour the infinitely precious soul of a pure intention, a Godward intention, into every secular action.”
  • Kreeft observes that Vatican II encouraged Catholics to “study and profit from the wisdom in other world religions.” Here is an example he takes from the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu book (Kreeft’s words):
    • “The way to sanctity amidst activity is to work not for the fruit of the work, not out of desire for success, not looking forward, but looking backwards, so to speak, to the source and motive of the act: love and duty and obedience to God. Do what you do because it is your God-given task now. If you act out of desire for success, you bind yourself to the fear of failure. If we will only one thing– God’s will– we are free.” (emphasis mine)
  • Finally, a quote from Mother Theresa: “God did not put me here to be successful. God put me here to be faithful.”

Depending on the mood or state-of-mind I am in, any of these ideas may be the one that strikes home, and causes me to reassess my attitude and approach to my current work(s). Along with the Lewis quote I mentioned earlier, these are things I want to keep in mind.

Reference works

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Okay, I just started “using” my two favorite new reference works: Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia, and Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth.

The absolute coolest.

Okay, I was one of those (home schooled) kids who would sit down with my mom’s old set of World Book Encyclopedia and just read like crazy. To send me there to look something up for a project was to lose me for the morning.

And now I have this reallyreally cool double set of fantastical creatures, and it’s actually what you would call “scholarly:” based on research and not just a collection of one person’s ideas of things. I’m enjoying it immensely.

~~~

Anyway, I bought them initially because all my projects seem to have this element of the fantastic in them, so I wanted to be as… authentic as possible.

One interesting thing I’ve already read ties very closely to an earlier post I wrote while reading Mindhunter. It was a very long entry about werewolves (did you know there are were-everythings? Whatever animal is common in the area: panthers, hares, boar(s?), crocodiles…).

In it the author mentions a “highly publicized” incident in the late 1500s where a man in Germany “in the guise of a wolf raped, murdered, and ate humans, including his own family, as well as terrorizing the region for some twenty-five years until caught, tortured, and executed.”

The era of serial killers has been said to have begun with Jack the Ripper (late 1800s). But there really is “nothing new under the sun…”

Whew. I can see why that “werewolf” story made it across the channel. (Big story in England in 1590, according to the encyclopedia).

~~~

Anyway-anyway, fascinating books. Lots of interesting readings.

I’m getting the impression it will be the same type of information as the names I choose. That is, many of the names my characters have actually mean something related to their role or personality. This is nothing I expect a reader to know. It’s sort of a game I play with myself, a kind of “in” joke or story, for my own benefit and mental exercise.

Yes, it looks like I’ve got the new-book giddies. It’s fun. I haven’t had that for quite a while.

A unique look at some mutt-mixes

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From Mutts: America’s Dogs that I mentioned earlier:

  • The Chesapeake Bay Retriever mix: A lab in a Leather Jacket
  • The Golden retriever-setter mix: If it’s Irish or Gordon setter, beware a beauty over brains blend
  • Lab-Australian Sheppard mix: “A young lab is a runaway boxcar and an Aussie outfits the chassis with Boeing engines. This dog has to have something to do…Something. Anything. Repeat often until tired. (Warning: you will tire far sooner than the dog.)”
  • Irish Setter mix: the gorgeous airhead of the dog world.
  • Greyhound-Lab mix: A beautiful creature mentally, physically, and spiritually, unless you’re a squirrel. Continue reading »

What’s so bad about a crutch?

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More from Kreeft’s The Angel and the Ants.

…But it is a stronger answer to say that faith is not a hypothesis at all. It is more like a crutch. People used to accuse religion of being a crutch. The answer is: Yes. That’s exactly what it is. What’s more necessary for a cripple than a crutch? And if you don’t think you are a cripple, you must have been on a long vacation from the real world for the past few decades.

From the chapter Some Common Christian Sense about Suffering

Boredom

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I’ve started reading Peter Kreeft’s The Angels and the Ants again (didn’t finish it the first time). I’m not Catholic (Kreeft is), but I like the way this guy thinks; this is the most useful book about combining sanctity with daily living that I have ever found. One chapter is entitled, How to Become a Saint While Changing Diapers. I’ll probably share some excerpts from that one later.
I started typing this excerpt to respond to another blog, and decided to include it here (in a more complete/expanded form), since I was writing it up already.

~~~

From the chapter entitled:

Boredom.

Every serious social problem that is tearing our society, our families, and our lives apart today– drugs, promiscuity, violence, infidelity, divorce– can be explained by this motive…

Here is an amazing fact: “The word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. No one knows its etymology,” according to the acclaimed novelist Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos.

Almost the same thing can be said of atheism: it hardly existed at all before the eighteenth century.

The relation between the two is evident: Only God and the attributes of God– Love, wisdom, beauty, joy holiness– are infinite and inexhaustible; therefore, without God everything is eventually boring.

Weren’t people bored before the eighteenth century? They got tired of cutting wood for ten hours, but they didn’t get tired of everything. That’s what boredom means.

The only possible explanation for this modern madness is this: It is not the world that is boring, but the self. Since it simply isn’t true that everything real, everything in objective reality, is boring, therefore the source of boredom must be within. The bored self projecting it’s own inner emptiness onto reality…. It reduces the big world to a small world by projecting its own littleness onto its world…

Heaven is not boring. In fact, only heaven (and heaven’s colonies on earth) is not boring…

The alternative to boredom, the cure for boredom and the cure for all the ills of the modern world that are rooted in boredom– is sanctity.

Sanctity– a relationship with God– is essentially letting God be present, letting heaven rule its colonies, establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth, in human hearts and human lives. Sanctity is essentially “the practice of the presence of God,” as Br. Lawrence put it in the title of his little classic.

Saints “do all for the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31). Sanctity is not only willing to do God’s will, it is also thinking God’s thoughts. We are to love God with our whole mind as well as our whole heart (Mt 22:37). Sanctity means seeing everything has a purpose– in fact, that everything has the same purpose, that “all things work together for good” (Rom 8:28); and that that purpose is the most joy-filled, glory-weighted purpose any heart has ever imagined: receiving and giving back infinite, absolute, unconditional divine love forever.

~end of excerpt~

This is definitely a challenge to examine ourselves before we complain of our environment.

from Moon Tiger

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I haven’t read the book, but I loved this excerpt when I came across it:

“I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around in my mouth like marbles– tabernacle and Pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant.”

— Penelope Lively