Two Quotes for Lenten Reflection

This post is exactly what the title says. Both quotes are from The Spiritual Life by Evelyn Underhill:

We mostly spend [our scattered lives] conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual--even on the religious--plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life. [20]

And:

The action of those whose lives are given to the Spirit has in it something of the leisure of Eternity: and because of this, they achieve far more than those whose lives are enslaved by the rush and hurry, the unceasing tick-tick of the world. In the spiritual life it is very important to get our timing right. Otherwise we tend to forget that God, Who is greater than our heart, is greater than our job too. It is only when we have learnt all that this means that we possess the key to the Kingdom of Heaven. [97-98]

A Month without Facebook

I've been threatening to quit Facebook for years, but I finally got up the nerve to pull the plug on December 1. Not a Facebook diet. Not a Facebook fast. A no-turning-back, burn-your-bridges, lose-your-data Facebook abandonment. Why December 1? I really don't know. It seems like January 1 is the date to make a sweeping dramatic gesture. But as I mentioned at the beginning of my "month of blogging" in July, I am nothing if not arbitrary, and I fixed my gaze on the start of December.

So it's been a month since I've logged on to Facebook. How is life different?

A Year in Reading: 2012

I don't know what compelled me to start, but in 2008, I began listing every book I read in a composition notebook, aptly titled "BOOKS." I have four guesses as to why I started doing this:

1. I like lists, and I especially like going back over lists because it jogs my memory and helps me relive experiences I might otherwise forget.
2. A friend of mine had a list like this, and I wanted to copy him.
3. The first book that I finished in 2008 was Les Miserables, and let's face it: after you've read over 1200 pages of a book, only 700 or so of which were worth your while, you want to make sure to record that accomplishment for posterity.
4. Abby had by this point been commenting on how many unused composition notebooks I had purchased, and I had better start filling them to mask my shame.

I'm not sure which of these explanations is the primary one, but I'm sure there's some truth in each. Whatever the reason, I began this practice in 2008, and I have enjoyed going over the list at year's end (or mid-year, or several years after the year, as the case may be) and setting goals for the next year. (One year, for example, I set out to read spiritual autobiographies--but I still failed to get through The Seven-Storey Mountain.) Usually I enjoy this practice by myself, as posting all the books you've read on a blog can be seen as self-serving or pretentious. But since one of my college professors has done this (and I don't think he is either of those things), and since I've been recording most of my reads on Good Reads anyway, and since this year's list is nothing to shame anybody, I decided to indulge in the public practice.

Cooking with Grandma

One of the things that occupied my time during my blogging holiday was the update of my family's cookbook. The original cookbook--the name of which acknowledges our Swiss heritage with pride and sounds to outsiders like "Newest Wonder"--turns thirty this year. For those of you who are counting, that is a few years older than I am. My dad's branch on the included family tree is missing one of its (dare I say important?) twigs. But despite its age, this cookbook has remained a stalwart kitchen companion.

My Life in Books: The Man Who Was Thursday

Everyone encounters their favorite author in a different way. For some, it is the first sentence which grabs them. Others are wooed in gently over time. Still others, like any romantic comedy you've ever seen, have a strong aversion that works itself into attraction. This last category is the closest corollary to my experience with G.K. Chesterton, who has become one of my favorite--if not my favorite--authors.

The Book of Job: "The Riddles of God Are More Satisfying Than the Solutions of Man"

That was some July, huh?

...

The purpose of July was to reinvigorate my writing and hopefully renew a more regular habit, but as soon as the pressure wore off, a few days' break turned into a few more, and a few more, and a few more, and then a full-on holiday. Sorry about that. I really will try to be better.

In the meantime, lots of things have happened (maybe subjects for future blog posts?). Some of you may remember that I began writing a series on the Book of Job (post 1, post 2) two years ago, but I dropped off before getting to the hard bit. Well, yesterday the hard bit was the lectionary reading for the week, and I attempted to deal with it. Here's the audio of the sermon on Job 42 if you're interested.

The Spark

I'm not sure why I first read Muriel Spark--I think it was because James Wood, in an excerpt from  How Fiction Works, kept praising Jean Brodie as a character and Muriel Spark as her author. In a chapter about praising the best characters, he devoted what seemed to me, as someone who had never even heard of Muriel Spark, an inordinate amount of space to a minor character in the "Western Canon."

But even though I never read the rest of Wood's book, I'm so glad that I read Spark's (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Incidentally, Maggie Smith stars as the title character in the movie, though I've not seen it).

I'm reading another book by Muriel Spark now (my fifth, I believe), The Girls of Slender Means. Here are five things I like about it so far (and that are illustrative of what I like about the author in general):

• The book has a fantastic opening line: "Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions."
• Muriel Spark is the queen of dry wit. Her prose is very skeletal, and thus dry: the humor comes almost more in what she doesn't say than it what she does.
• She is also adept at running gags, but without making them feel like running gags. Hard to imagine and describe, but it's true.
• Spark is a master of showing, not telling. This keeps the writing interesting all the way through.
• There is a hint, a tease, right at the beginning that all is not right. Something is happening, but it's uncertain what exactly that is.

Another thing to like: her books are generally very short and very readable. Makes a book like this easy to squeeze in when you're reading for prizes.