Today in History - 1066

I write these over on my xanga blog, but this one seemed particularly relevant to post over here.

Last year, my Brit Lit teacher informed my class that you can't possible love British Literature and not know what the 28th of September commemorates.


941 years ago today, in 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England, forever changing the English language and culture.
Here are several interesting links to learn more:

Wikipedia on the Norman Conquest

The Effect of the Norman Conquest on the English Language

And, of course, there is the Bayeaux tapestry! You can find several fascinating books on the tapestry, like Andrew Bridgeford's Hidden History in the Bayeux Tapestry. But there are also a huge amount of websites, like this one.

1066 was also the year of Halley's Comet and it made an appearance in the tapestry mentioned above:


The Latin words read "ISTI MIRANT STELLA."
That is, "These men wonder at the star."

It was seen as a good omen for William, but a bad omen for Harold II who died at the Battle of Hastings.

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 8:43 PM |

dead languages

Very sorry for not posting for so long. I will try and write more often over the next several months.

Do you know today (the 23rd) is the very first day of Autumn!

Happy Fall! :)

And to make this post a wee bit interesting --

I read an article this past week about how nearly half of the languages spoken today are in danger of extinction. A language actually dies about every two weeks.

Being the foreign language fan that I am (I'm currently studying Italian), this made me rather sad. You can find more info at National Geographic here and here.

Although, who said dead languages aren't cool and shouldn't be learned even if they are 'dead'? Latin, anyone?

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 11:50 PM |

I'm back!

Whew, now I have about a month to actually enjoy my summer. Haha, yes, I'm joking -- I have been enjoying it very much. But now I'll actually have time to read.

I will have some more essays up here soon, but right now I have to post this poem. It's amazing. Enjoy!

Marginalia
By
Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 3:16 PM |

Cry, the Beloved Country

Yes, I've been away -- traveling around the country (I went to Texas!) and studying at an economics seminar for a week. I'm off again this Thursday to Pennsylvania, but you can read all about that over here.

Now, for all my fellow literary-lovers that have been dying for a blog post while I've been away, here is an essay on a book that is an absolute must-read. Very highly recommended by me. Watch out though -- there are several spoilers. If you don't need to be convinced by my essay to read the book, then read the book first and then come back and read my essay. :)

A Light Will Dawn: Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country is just as passionate and socially relevant today as it was when first published in 1948. A Zulu pastor, Stephen Kumalo, searches for his lost son in a South Africa turbulently divided by racial injustice. Ultimately, the story portrays Kumalo’s spiritual journey from naiveté to a deeper understanding of his world, from confused anger to abiding peace, from a wavering faith to complete trust in the actions of God.

The opening pages are integral to the rest of the story as they describe the beauty of natural South Africa. With rich green hills and thick matted grass, it is almost a picture of Eden. Indeed, Paton writes, “Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator” (33). Yet, the “hills break down…They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare.” In relation to Kumalo, this latter description embodies his spiritual state at the beginning of the novel. His church is located in the desolate valley, not in the vast and wonderful hills. He enters the pages a broken and suffering old man. Though his character does change by the end of the book, it is not a radical transformation. In fact, he leaves the book, just as he entered, broken and suffering. Change does not happen overnight – it is a gradual process. It will take many years to renew the valley into the image of the glorious hills that surround it. It will also take Kumalo many years to change. Cry, the Beloved Country shows only the first small steps that he must take.

For a broken man, it is difficult to begin this journey. At the opening of the story, Kumalo receives a letter, urging him to come to the faraway city of Johannesburg. His sister, Gertrude, who had journeyed there once and never returned, has been found, but is very sick. Kumalo, however, is afraid to go to the city to bring her back. Absalom, his son, had traveled to the city to search for Gertrude and never returned. Saving uselessly the money that his son would have used to go to college, Kumalo has built up a wall of lies around himself, thinking they will ease his suffering. Futilely, he tries to convince himself that his son will return, though he knows in his heart he never will. This deception only breeds anger that finally spills out in this scene.

We had a son, he said harshly. Zulus have many children, but we had only one son. He went to Johannesburg, and as you said—when people go to Johannesburg, they do not come back….My own son, my own sister, my own brother. They go away and they do not write any more. Perhaps it does not seem to them that we suffer. Perhaps they do not care for it. (39)

Kumalo does finally decide to journey to Johannesburg and, eventually, he is reunited with his sister, brother, and only son. These meetings are far from happy, however. His sister has become a prostitute. His brother is a hardened man (he has lost all faith in Christ and is embittered against the white men, using his powerful voice to speak out against them at political rallies). And, most tragically of all, his son has killed a man and is doomed to die.

Yet, these individual trials form the foundation upon which Kumalo is able to grow spiritually. The man his son killed was Arthur Jarvis, a white man who fought for the rights of the black people in Africa. Living in his isolated valley, Kumalo had little contact with white men. In the city, however, he is able to witness more clearly the struggles between the two races. Through the murder, he is able to meet Jarvis’ father who lives in the green hills. Though the two lived in such close proximity to each other, they never met or talked to each other before. It is as though Kumalo’s sight had been myopic, able to see only his own desolate valley. Yet, it is from the white men that restoration will come to his valley and peace to his soul. At the beginning of the novel, his friend, Msimangu, had told him, “The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief—and again I ask your pardon—that it cannot be mended again (56).” Kumalo does not fully understand this statement until he witness for himself the hostility in the city and the resentment of his brother. Later on, Msimangu clarifies his statement with the words, “I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men….desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it (71).”

Even though Absalom killed Jarvis’ son, the father reaches out (in the memory of Arthur who fought so hard for the rights of the black people) to help restore the valley. His grandson visits Kumalo and learns about the Africans’ plight. Jarvis then sends milk to the starving children and an agricultural demonstrator to teach the Africans how to farm. Slowly, Kumalo is able to see and understand Msimangu’s words as they become a reality. At first, Kumalo could not comprehend why he had to suffer so much. His heart was full of anger and hatred. If his son, however, had not killed Jarvis’ son, restoration would probably never have come to his valley. In the depths of his affliction, Kumalo had told Msimangu, “There is no prayer left in me. I am dumb here inside. I have no words at all” (105). At first, he could not see God’s perfect plan unfolding through these tragedies, but Msimangu encouraged him that “we are not forsaken” (123). As Kumalo looked around him, he suddenly realized that even in his suffering God was there. “Who gives, at this one hour, a friend to make darkness light before me?” he asked himself.

The novel ends with Kumalo waiting on a mountain on the day of his son’s execution. The anger that he felt over his suffering is gone. He now understands what it truly means in Romans 8:28, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” God used his trials to bring restoration to his valley and peace to his soul. As Kumalo watches the sun rise in the east, he begins to understand more deeply about God’s plans for his own country. Though now it seems that Africa is filled with darkness and hostility,

The light will come there. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret. (312)

Just as Kumalo could not see the ends of his suffering when he was in the midst of it, so he cannot yet see how Africa will come out of its darkness. Yet he knows that it must. For, as Msimangu had told him, God will never forsake them.

Works Cited

Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country. 1948. New York, NY. Scribner, 2003.

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 10:25 PM |

More Poetry - The Scholar's Vessel

[I wrote this earlier this year for Brit Lit when we were studying 'concrete poetry.' George Herbert was one of - if not the - masters of the form. Read his poems "The Altar" and "Easter Wings". This is such a cool form to write in. I'd love to read anyone else's attempts at it. :)]

And here's mine:

The Scholar’s Vessel

The
Sails of
My ship catch
The soft spring breeze,
And
I
Glide forward to strange lands and seas,
Bold to sail where ancient minds have pondered,
This ocean a book I freely wander...

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 8:50 PM |

GMH

I posted an essay on here several months ago about Matthew Arnold and his atheistic worldview in "Dover Beach." Then, I decided to re-write the essay for another class, pitting Arnold's nihilistic philosophy against Gerard Manley Hopkins' Christian one. You can read the original essay here. Below are several of the paragraphs I added (this is mostly an excuse to ramble over Hopkins and post some of his wonderful poetry):

Unlike Arnold, Hopkins begins his poem “God’s Grandeur” with the line “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” (1), immediately affirming the presence of a Creator. Of this presence he writes, “It will flame out like shining from shook foil” and “it gathers to a greatness” (2-3). Like Arnold, however, Hopkins had also experienced uncertainty and doubt concerning religion. Yet, he overcame this, converting to Catholicism in 1866 and going on to become a Jesuit priest. This sudden conversion made him focus entirely on his Christian vocation. He destroyed all the poems he had previously written and abandoned writing for almost seven years. It was not until after the urging of religious leaders that he decided to embark on poetry once again. It is well that he did, for Hopkins’ writings provide a strong contrast to the nihilistic philosophy of his day, offering the other side of the argument: the argument for a God and His existence in the world.

In “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins describes poets like Arnold and asks, “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” (4). If there is a god and everyone knows that he exists (even Arnold admitted a knowledge of religion), would it not be in their best interest to obey him? He argues further that men like Arnold are living in a delusion of their own making. “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; / And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil / Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod” (6-8). Yet, man cannot kill God so easily. Even though man may attempt to destroy Him by destroying the nature He has created (many abuses of nature occurred during the Victorian era perhaps as consequences of the Industrial Revolution), “nature is never spent” (9). There is still hope for man because God does exist and “the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings” (13-14).

During his lifetime, Arnold refused to call himself an atheist, hiding in the supposed comforts of agnosticism, believing in neither the existence nor the nonexistence of God. Yet, he rejected religion as superficial, blinding to true reality. “Dover Beach” may, in fact, be his only writing that conceded religion was an answer to chaos in the world: it was deceptive, but it did offer relief and a feigned security. Yet, Arnold insisted on freeing himself from this self-delusion and wallowing in the despair and darkness of the real world. Nevertheless, Hopkins argues that Arnold has actually thrown away reality for the self-delusion. In the Epistle to the Romans in the Bible, Paul wrote that sinful men “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans, I.18). Further, “they [become] futile in their speculations, and their foolish hearts [are] darkened. Professing to be wise, they [become] fools” (I.21-22). Arnold believed a world of happiness and peace must be a delusion and embraced what he thought was a reality of misery and horror. Indeed, to the unbeliever it is their reality – a “darkling plain” where fools will fight to reject God and hide from the light and truth. It is this light and truth that Hopkins still offers them in “God’s Grandeur.” For “though the last lights off the black West went / Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs” (“God’s Grandeur”, 13-14).

And here's some of that wonderful poetry I promised. :) Hopkins used a technique called 'sprung rhythm.' The Victorian Web describes it as term for a complex and very technically involved system of metrics which he derived partly from his knowledge of Welsh poetry. It is opposed specifically to "running" or "common" rhythm, and provides for feet of lengths varying from one syllable to four, with either "rising" or "falling" rhythm.



God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush ;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing ;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue ; that blue is all in a rush
With richness ; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy ?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Go here for more:

http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/hopkins.htm

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/gmhov.html

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 10:24 PM |

Conviction

Every time I visit the Schola Tutorials homepage, I am convicted. Mr. Callihan, my Great Books tutor, has this excellent quote posted:

"If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come."

--C. S. Lewis, "Learning in War-Time", The Weight of Glory

Amen to that.

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 10:10 PM |

The Deep Heart's Core

The Theme of Alienation in 20th Century Irish Literature

Read "The Dead" here and "Lake Isle of Innisfree" here.


The twentieth century saw a new modernist strain in literature. Among its various characteristics, Modernism emphasized the alienation of certain individuals within an industrialized, urban world. While unique in certain aspects, this feature was merely an extension of its predecessor Romanticism. This earlier philosophy had developed the idea of the noble savage – how man is sinless at birth, but gradually the industrialized world corrupts him. Only in Nature can man remain perfect. In “The Dead,” James Joyce explores the effects of urbanization upon an individual; conversely, William Butler Yeats in his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” contrasts how a return to Nature can essentially purify and restore peace to a person’s soul.

Famed for his complex character studies and utilization of the stream-of-consciousness technique, Joyce is one of the most famous writers of the Modernist era and of Ireland. His collection of short stories, The Dubliners, displays his immense talent. “The Dead” is the last story in this collection and perhaps the most famous and the most powerful. The main character is a young married man, Gabriel, who struggles with his identity as an Irishman during that country’s political upheavals. At a dinner party, one of the guests invites him to visit the Aran Isles on the west coast of Ireland. Gabriel protests that he would rather go to France or Germany and then admits in an outburst of passion, “To tell you the truth….I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (2515). His disgust for his homeland, however, stems from his disconnection with his Irish heritage, rather than a true dissatisfaction with the country. Indeed, his answer was provoked after the dinner guest had exclaimed, “And haven’t you your own land to visit….that you know nothing of, your own people, and your own country?” (2515). Later on, Gabriel continues to evince his anger over the loss of his heritage by declaring in his speech,

But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humor which belonged to an older day” (2523).

The Irish heritage primarily centered on the importance of the land, for the Irish had always been farmers. By living in the city of Dublin, Gabriel is alienated from the real Ireland of lush green fields and rolling hills. His schooling has drowned him in the intellectual and philosophical thought of his age, but has given him nothing of his own culture to hold onto. The tension grows when one of the guests begins to sing an old Irish song, awakening strange passions within Gabriel. He knows that the song has some sort of symbolic meaning, but he cannot quite discern what it is. After returning home, his wife begins to tell him of a boy she had known long ago who used to sing the same song to her: a country boy who died of love for her. As he listens to his wife’s story, he suddenly realizes that he has never truly loved her before – he realizes the wall that seems to stand between him and her, between him and the old Ireland.

His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling (2534).

The country boy symbolizes the purity of Nature, the purity of the true, old Ireland. Gabriel is the new Ireland, oppressed by British rule and raising children who know only of the present urbanization. This last quote shows that Gabriel has no identity in this urban world and no one ever can. Only in that old Ireland could the qualities of humanity and kindly humor exist; only in that old Ireland could he have truly loved his wife as the country boy did.

Romanticism probably influenced Yeats more than it did Joyce. Indeed, Yeats drew his poetic inspiration from Shelley and Blake, even editing several of Blake’s poems. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (Innisfree is a small island in western Ireland) almost seems like a tribute to these earlier writers with its idyllic atmosphere. It describes a person in either a town or city, yearning to “arise and go /…to Innisfree” (1). The person of the poem is not alienated from Nature like Gabriel, however, but rather he is alienated from the city where he lives. The reason why he decides to return to Nature is because he cannot escape from it.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core (9-12).

Gabriel was faced with a similar dilemma in “The Dead.” He also was constantly haunted by this sound “in the deep heart’s core” but he decided that there was no solution to his problem. Gradually, this old world of Nature would fade away and people would be left hopeless and in despair. Yeats, however, still shares a glimmer of hope. Nature is not destroyed and there are still places that will welcome the solitary traveler, places like Innisfree and Gabriel’s Aran Isles. Just as Gabriel had drawn the conclusion that only in the old Ireland could he have truly loved his wife, so the speaker in this poem declares that he can only find peace in Innisfree, “for peace comes dropping slow, / Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings” (5-6). But his peace is truly tangible for his Innisfree exists whereas Gabriel’s old Ireland did not.

The word ‘alienation’ often has bad connotations, but the Merriam Webster dictionary defines it simply as “a withdrawing of a person's affections from an object or position of former attachment.” Romanticism showed that there were two types of alienation in mankind, one that was bad and the other good, and no middle ground in between. The Modernists delved even more deeply into these themes, oftentimes reaching very different conclusions as Joyce and Yeats did. To many, the past was lost and irrecoverable. Like Gabriel, they could only picture themselves as shadowy ghosts living in a world merely the faint outline of its lost glory. But others, like Yeats, still rejoiced in the hope that was offered to them – for the beauty and peace of Nature could never fade as long as it abided in the “deep heart’s core.”

Works Cited

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” 1914. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. 8th edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006, pgs. 2507-2534.

Yeat, William Butler. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” 1890. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. 8th edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006, pg. 2391.

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 12:02 PM |

Chesterton on "Cyrano De Bergerac"

Cyrano De Bergerac, a verse drama in five acts, was performed for the first time in 1897 and published the following year. Set in 17th-century Paris, the action revolves around the emotional problems of the noble, swashbuckling Cyrano, who, despite his many gifts, feels that no woman can ever love him because he has an enormous nose. It is one of my favorite plays. And it was one of Chesterton's favorite plays too.

In his essay "French and English," G. K. Chesterton comments on several French plays. Then writes, "I do not know much of humanity, especially when humanity talks in French. But I know when a thing is meant to uplift the human soul, and when it is meant to depress it. I know that Cyrano de Bergerac...was meant to encourage man."

Now, you know if Chesterton liked something it had to be very, very good. So go run down to your bookstore or library and grab a copy of Cyrano De Bergerac. It really does uplift the human soul.

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 11:16 AM |

A Letter from C. S. Lewis

A letter from C.S. Lewis to his best friend, Arthur Greeves, written when Lewis was seventeen:

I have had a great literary experience this week. I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle--our very own set: never since I first read 'The well at the world's end' have I enjoyed a book so much--and indeed I think my new 'find' is quite as good as Malory or Morris himself. The book, to get to the point, is George Macdonald's 'Faerie Romance', Phantastes which I picked up by hazard in a rather tired Everyman copy [...]. At any rate, whatever the book you are reading now, you simply MUST get this at once: and it is quite worth getting in a superior Everyman binding too.

Of course it is hopeless for me to try and describe it, but when you have followed the hero Anodos along that little stream to the faery wood, have heard about the terrible ash tree and how the shadow of this gnarled, knotted hand falls upon the book the hero is reading, when you have read about the faery palace--just like that picture in the Dulac book--and heard the episode of Cosmo, I know that you will quite agree with me. You must not be disappointed at the first chapter which is rather conventional faery tale style, and after it you won't be able to stop until you have finished. There are one or two poems in the tale--as in the Morris tales you know--which, with one or two exceptions are shockingly bad, so don't TRY to appreciate them: it is just a sign, isn't it of how some geniuses can't work in metrical forms--another example being the Brontes.

I quite agree with what you say about buying books, and love all the planning and scheming beforehand, and if they come by post, finding the neat little parcel waiting for you on the hall table and rushing upstairs to open it in the privacy of your own room. Some people--my father for instance--laugh at us for being so serious over our pleasures, but I think a thing can't be properly enjoyed unless you take it in earnest, don't you? What I can't understand about you though is how you can get a nice new book and still go on stolidly with the one you are at: I always like to be able to start the new one on the day I get it, and for that reason wait to buy it until the old one is done. But then of course you have so much more money to throw about than I.

Talking about finishing books, I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say 'at last', I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he hoped to do--so much have I enjoyed it.

[C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume I, Letter of 7 March 1916]

Posted by Nicole Bianchi at 11:03 AM |