Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
Nigel Slater, in The Kitchen Diaries, reminds us that there’s good stuff out there:
“On grey January days we must make our own fun. Today is a flat day that only seems to come to life when I go shopping, returning with bags of Italian lemons complete with their bottle-green leaves… People get down about this time of year, but even today there were…clementines heavy with juice and bunches of narcissi to cheer us up. There is good stuff if you are prepared to go and find it.”
It’s time for my favorite part of December : The Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Count down to the 25th with a new picture every day and be mind-boggled.
(Galaxy cluster Abell 68)
Since I shared the calendars for 2009, 2011, and last year with quotes, here’s one for this year:
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. […] The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
(by Dr. Sagan, my science boyfriend, in The Demon-Haunted World)
Like Franny and Zooey, The Dharma Bums is my happy place. Because who doesn’t want to be on a camping trip in the Sierras with Kerouac and Gary Snyder, having camp tea?
Japhy got out the tea, Chinese tea, and sprinkled some in a tin pot, and had the fire going meanwhile, a small one to begin with, the sun was still on us, and stuck a long stick tight down under a few big rocks and made himself something to hang the teapot on and pretty soon the water was boiling and he poured it out steaming into the tin pot and we had cups of tea with our tin cups. I myself’d gotten the water from the stream, which was cold and pure like snow and the crystal-lidded eyes of heaven. Therefore, the tea was by far the most pure and thirstquenching tea I ever drank in all my life, it made you want to drink more and more, it actually quenched your thirst and of course it swam around hot in your belly.
‘Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea,’ said Japhy. ‘Remember that book I told you about the first sip is joy the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.’
I came across a quote from Lemony Snicket and now I guess I’ll just have to read all 13 books in the Series of Unfortunate Events so I can also read The Beatrice Letters, where this is from. (His prose rhythm is contagious!)
“I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. […]
I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world.”
(Believe it or not, there’s even more. It’s all delightful.)
Today’s inspirational quote is very deep:
This work week has already made me bolster myself with these two Hemingway quotes:
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
and
When you work all day with your head and know you must again work the next day, what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whiskey?
Papa understands.
It’s been pushing 105 here, which hasn’t happened in years. So I picked up the “hot” chapter of Dandelion Wine, when Douglas gets sick from the heat and from “too many things happening to him that summer” and the junkman saves him with magic bottled air. (It’s Bradbury. It works when you read it.) Anyway, here is the junkman reading the list of the ingredients of the magic cool air:
He lifted one bottle into the light. “GREEN DUSK FOR DREAMING BRAND PURE NORTHERN AIR,'” he read. “Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April,1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one days in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring.”
“Now the small print,” he said, and squinted. “Also containing molecules of vapor from menthol, lime, papaya, and watermelon and all other water-smelling, cool-savored fruits and trees like camphor and herbs like wintergreen and the breath of a rising wind from the Des Plaines River itself. To be taken on summer nights, when the heat passes ninety.”
Remember that one of my goals for the year was to “give people the benefit of the doubt“? I didn’t elaborate much, but this sums up what I mean pretty well. It’s David Foster Wallace, from a commencement speech he gave in 2005 (found via BoingBoing):
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.
I’m thinking about the horse-and-alpacpa-and-goat ranch/yoga retreat/organic farm I want to retire on lately, and, since it’s me, I’m also thinking, “What does one wear on the imaginary ranch?” Good thing My Friend Flicka can tell us what Nell wears:
When Nell walked up to the stables she was dressed in well-cut jodhpurs made of carefully softened and faded blue-jean denim…A darker blue jersey polo shirt with very short sleeves left her brown arms bare; she wore pigskin gloves, a round blue linen hat with a narrow brim to pull down over her eyes and stick on against the Wyoming winds…and on her feet, under the straps of her trousers, soft tan jodhpur boots.