Books are Delicious

from Charles Lamb, quoted in Patrick Madden's Quotidiana:


"I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave."


And, from Joseph Smith, quoted in Eugene England's Dialogues with Myself, which, if the introduction is any indication, is going to be incredible.  I already wish they would have issued it to me at baptism.

Joseph Smith, 1844, just before his martyrdom: "By proving contraries, truth is made manifest."

Okay, and a third quote, so you can have some context for how England draws on what Joseph Smith said:

"Part of the Prophet Joseph's moral and spiritual heroism is focused for me in his growing insight (and willingness to risk all, including his life on that insight) that tragic paradox lies at the heart of things and that life and salvation, truth and progress, come only through anxiously, bravely grappling with those paradoxes, both in action and in thought."         

Alone in a Good Way

I keep meaning to post this bit of business from Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate and very smart lady. I bought an anthology called Poem in Your Pocket, put out by Academy of American Poets, edited by Elaine Beakley, with an introduction by Kay Ryan. The book's concept is sort of cool: the pages are held together at the top like a notepad so you can tear the poems out easily and carry them around with you. In, like, your pocket. Get it?!

Okay, anyway, maybe it's a touch heavy-handed or cute, but I dig it. And the truth is, although there are some good poems here, I bought the book because of Ryan's short, delicious intro, which says this astonishing thing. I read it in the bookstore, and stood at the table holding the book, jaw dropped and the room ever-so-slightly buzzing and spinning with the truth of it:

"On some level poems can, of course, do good works and bind us together. Everybody will tell you that, but I'm never very interested. I'm convinced, rather, that poems bind us apart. They disconnect us from that pestering illusion that we are almost connecting to the world.

Oh, what can that mean? Well, we are alone, and poems make us feel more alone. But wait, I don't mean "alone" in the bad way, what we feel when we know that spending all the money in the world isn't going to keep the shimmer on life; I mean "alone" in the good way.

Alone in the sense of experiencing inside yourself a cascading series of exquisite discriminations and connections which leave you in the fullest possible possession of your self while simultaneously providing the most intimate escape from self, as though the twisted double helixes of your secret code got some blessed breathing room from each other for a minute.

And strangely enough, it is during the private murmured conversation between the poem and the reader, both agreeing that the world cannot be known or contacted, that it is."

Truly.

What I Told My Students About Reading

In my syllabus, for the Into to Lit course I'm teaching. I think I'm going to expand it into a longer sort of lecture and handout, but I was pleased with what I said so far. I prayed before I started working on it, and I think He helped me say what I meant, what I've been trying to say since I started teaching. Not that this is particularly profound, but it's what I mean.


A Note on Reading: Reading is hard work. One of my hopes for the class is that you’ll enjoy it, but the best way to enjoy it is to work hard at it. All semester we’ll be practicing reading slowly and carefully with the idea that these habits will rub off on the way you read in general. Take notes in the margins, ask questions, get in the habit of putting yourself in the character’s shoes, be both generous and critical when you evaluate their choices, laugh when it’s funny, cry when it’s sad (if you’re the crying sort), pay attention to the feeling you get when something is beautiful or true. For me that feels like a literal, small swelling of the heart.