Farewell Summer
Oh oh oh!!! Can I just say I am SO excited??!! My dad just emailed me this link.
Fifty years ago, Ray Brabury wrote a book that has trumped all others in my collection. He has just released a sequel. Amazon is getting my money today. Here is a sampling of the first chapter in the new book. (Call me a book-wacko, but I think it’s absolute music as it rolls off the tongue.)
There are those days which seem a taking in of breath which, held, suspends the whole earth in its waiting. Some summers refuse to end.
So along the road those flowers spread that, when touched, give down a shower of autumn rust. By every path it looks as if a ruined circus had passed and loosed a trail of ancient iron at every turning of a wheel. The rust was laid out everywhere, strewn under trees and by riverbanks and near the tracks themselves where once a locomotive had gone but went no more. So flowered flakes and railroad track together turned to moulderings upon the rim of autumn.
“Look, Doug,” said Grandpa, driving into town from the farm. Behind them in the Kissel Kar were six large pumpkins picked fresh from the patch. “See those flowers?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Farewell summer, Doug. That’s the name of those flowers. Feel the air? August come back. Farewell summer.”
“Boy,” said Doug, “that’s a sad name.”
Grandma stepped into her pantry and felt the wind blowing from the west. The yeast was rising in the bowl, a sumptuous head, the head of an alien rising from the yield of other years. She touched the swell beneath the muslin cap. It was the earth on the morn before the arrival of Adam. It was the morn after the marriage of Eve to that stranger in the garden bed.
Grandma looked out the window at the way the sunlight lay across the yard and filled the apple trees with gold and echoed the same words:
“Farewell summer. Here it is, October 1st. Temperature’s 82. Season just can’t let go. The dogs are out under the trees. The leaves won’t turn. A body would like to cry and laughs instead. Get up to the attic, Doug, and let the mad maiden aunt out of the secret room.”
“Is there a mad maiden aunt in the attic?” asked Doug.
“No, but there should be.”
Clouds passed over the lawn. And when the sun came out, in the pantry, Grandma almost whispered, Summer, farewell.
On the front porch, Doug stood beside his grandfather, hoping to borrow some of that far sight, beyond the hills, some of the wanting to cry, some of the ancient joy. The smell of pipe tobacco and Tiger shaving tonic had to suffice. A top spun in his chest, now light, now dark, now moving his tongue with laughter, now filling his eyes with salt water.
He surveyed the lake of grass below, all the dandelions gone, a touch of rust in the trees, and the smell of Egypt blowing from the far east.
“Think I’ll go eat me a doughnut and take me a nap,” Doug said.
To be challenged
I love being challenged. And I’ve threatened to read more Phillip Yancey for quite some time, because he’ll do just that - challenge me. This evening, while father was watching all aspects of March Madness, and bemoaning the fact that the Tarheels are losing, I found some great Yancey quotes over at Mommy Says. I’ve now added that book to my “Waiting Beside the Reading Chair” list. Don’t you love to be stretched? Wanna share about it?
Filed under Bookish | Comments (3)Thoughts on Active Reading
I’ve been struck of late by how much I miss when I read. And most of that missing occurs because I am not understanding the intent of the author. (How true in much of our communication, whether verbal, written, or physical!) I desire to use my reading time more wisely, and am pursuing the art of learning how to become a better reader first through the book How To Read a Book. I’m only in the first chapter, but it’s some good stuff, and can be applied to any type of communication, even daily Bible reading.
Filed under Bookish | Comment (0)Reading and listening are thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively engaged in giving or sending it. The mistake here is to suppose that receiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court. On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball.
Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different. If anything is passive, it is the ball.
We can take this analogy a step further. The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitch - fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers. Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible.
It is noteworthy that the pitcher and the catcher are successful only to the extent that they cooperate. The relation of writer and reader is similar. The writer isn’t trying not to be caught, although it sometimes seems so. Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader’s possession. The writer’s skill and the reader’s skill converge upon a common end.
What does active reading entail? . . . . For the moment, it suffices to say that, given the same thing to read, one person reads it better than another, first, by reading it more actively, and second, by performing each of the acts involved more skillfully. The two things are related. Reading is a complex activity, just as writing is.
Mortimer J. Adler & Charles VanDoren, How to Read a Book
The path
Filed under Bookish, Thinking | Comment (0)Discipline in and of itself does not make us righteous; it merely places us before God. The transformation is God’s work.
Richard Foster
2006 Book List
Have you ever gotten to the end of a year and wonder what you’ve accomplished. Wondered how you’ve changed and grown? I know I love to read, and love to be challenged by what I’ve read. I’ve been motivated by Randi to keep track of what I’ve read this coming year, and post it on my blog. It should be interesting to see how my tastes change and meander throughout the year. I’m hoping to make a list of “must-reads” this week, so I can just right in first week of the year.
Happy Reading!
Ordinary
There are no ordinary people. It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit.
C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory sermon
The great religious struggle is not fought on a spectacular battleground, but within the ordinary human heart, when every morning we awake and feel the pressures of the day crowding in on us, and we must decide what sort of immortals we wish to be.
Kathleen Norris, foreword to Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
