| December 21, 2004 | Music | Recipe Calendar | Archives |
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Readings for the Dark Time: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux.
Because Robinson has recently come out with her second novel 25 years after publishing her first, I decided to read her first novel again. I read it 20 years ago and copied many passages from it into a journal. I wanted to see if I would pick the same passages again 20 years later. It is a cold, dark, wet novel. I read much of it while tucked warmly under a comforter. It's brilliantly written and the same passages jumped out at me, like this one. This time I noticed the housekeeping as the heavy work of constantly maintaining negative entropy message. And Sylvie didn't seem crazy, but almost saintly. I'm halfway through the Gautreaux ("the Bayou Conrad") novel which I'm reading on my sister Ingrid's recommendation. Our grandfather ran a commissary in a lumber camp near Ponchatula around the time setting of this book; she said this is part of our history. At halfway through, I can sense some violent comeuppance a few pages away. Thanks to all who contributed recipes to the 2005 calendar. I am especially pleased to include one by my aunt Faye Altazan Warren (Nan) who lives in Highlands, Texas, and is still the smart one, able to spot one of her fellow Texans as a delusional weasel. |
Imagine a Carthage sown with salt and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden?
Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water -- peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries. |
