Category: quotes

Out of Africa Weather

Karen

Late spring and early summer here in the foothills is just lovely. The mountains are still green, with snow higher up, and the light is still clear–not the long gold light of July and August. The cloud shadows on the mountains always, always make me think of the opening of Out of Africa:

The chief feature of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. […] The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigor to it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. […] Up in this high air, you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.

Friday Unrelated Information

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1. Here’s a facsimile of a long, typewritten letter from Rose Wilder Lane to her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, about the early draft of By The Shores of Silver Lake. As I learned only recently, Rose was the editor–probably even the ghostwriter–of the Little House series, and an editor and author in her own right. She and her mother had a difficult relationship, so there’s a little of that, but mostly blunt (good) editing advice about finding a theme and leaving out what you can’t explain easily.

2. And here’s a quote from a memoir/cookbook I just finished (A Homemade Life) which follows a recipe about a cake named “The Winning Hearts and Minds Chocolate Cake”:

What it all comes down to is winning hearts and minds. Underneath everything else, all the plans and goals and hopes, that’s why we get up in the morning, why we believe, why we try, why we bake chocolate cakes. That’s the best we can ever hope to do: to win hearts and minds, to love and be loved.

Mrs. Dalloway

Karen

The Writer’s Almanac tells me that Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway was published today in 1925. It’s my second-favorite of hers (To The Lighthouse is the first) but, like all her work, it’s a little hard to get a pithy, blog-length quote out of it. But here’s this:

She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, far out to the sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary…She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.

Only Connect

Karen

Here’s a thought from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End to start your week off:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

“Only connect” is also going to be the tattoo I’ll get when I turn 35 (much to my best friend’s chagrin).

Attention, Hemingway Style

Karen

I just found this (here) and it ties in nicely to the “attention” part of the year’s goals. It’s also a good way to secretly train to write that novel you keep talking about.

When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.

Happy Birthday, Jack

Karen

It’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday today. I’ve said before that The Dharma Bums is not only my favorite of his books, it’s responsible for my hippie tendencies. (It’s also his happiest book. His others are hard for me to read because he’s so sad.)

Since it’s the book I know and love best, there’s no surprise that I have Dharma Bums in my head a lot, whether it’s looking at the mountains here and thinking “You know to me a mountain is a Buddha” or remembering this going up a trail in the forest:

We went on, and I was immensely pleased with the way the trail had a kind of immortal look to it, in the early afternoon now, the way the side of the grassy hill seemed to be clouded with ancient gold dust and the bugs flipped over rocks and the wind sighed in shimmering dances over the hot rocks, and the way the trail would suddenly come into a cool shady part with big trees overhead, and here the light deeper.

…it seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of that trail, from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greenness, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I’d lived before and walked this trail…

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.

Happy Birthday, John Steinbeck

Karen

This is from Cannery Row (my favorite) and is more than a little bit hippie:

On the black earth on which the ice plants bloomed, hundreds of black stink bugs crawled. And many of them stuck their tails up in the air. “Look at all them stink bugs,” Hazel remarked, grateful to the bugs for being there…”What they got their asses up in the air for?”

…”I don’t know why,” [Doc] said. “I looked them up recently–they’re very common animals and one of the commonest things they do is put their tails up in the air. And in all the books there isn’t one mention of the fact that they put their tails up in the air or why.”

Hazel turned one of the stink bugs over with the toe of his wet tennis shoe and the shining black beetle strove madly with floundering legs to get upright again. “Well, why do you think they do it?”

“I think they’re praying,” said Doc.

“What!” Hazel was shocked.

“The remarkable thing,” said Doc, “isn’t that they put their tails up in the air–the really incredibly remarkable thing is that we find it remarkable. We can only use ourselves as yardsticks. If we did something as inexplicable and strange we’d probably be praying–so maybe they’re praying.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Hazel.”

Outside Again

Karen

Remember when I used to go outside? Between a product launch, two rounds of head colds, and a vacation, I realized that I hadn’t been up in the mountains since New Year’s Day. So I fixed that:
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I didn’t do anything fancy, trail-wise–I need to get back into condition and there’s still avalanche risk higher up–but it was good to be out in the watery light and see how much has melted. Spring’s on its way.

 

Unrelated, it would have been Steve Jobs 59th birthday today. Not one to miss a chance to quote the old hippie, here’s something to ponder for Monday (via):

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

 

Happy Birthday, Wallace Stegner

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Here’s my favorite quote from him (last posted in 2009; this blog is getting old):

“Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands and liked where I came from. I was used to a dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors–tan, rusty red, toned white–and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush and the sight of bare ground.”

The Writer’s Almanac told me today that he started the creative writing program at Stanford, something I did not know. His students there included Larry McMurtry and Ed Abbey.