The Giant of all Novels

 Dear Friendishkalayas,

So I read Tolstoy's War and Peace at last---the whole thing! One, one, one, zero pages. (I’ve seen mass market paperback editions of this book with over 1500 pages.) Not that the number of pages matters so much . . . unless there are over a thousand! I read that since there are 365 chapters (all pretty short), you can read this book in a year by reading a chapter a day. Well, I didn't want to take a year, but it did take me some months, just because it was so daunting and I took breaks by reading many other lighter books simultaneously. I mean, even the pages were dense, with small print. I timed myself once and it took me over 2 minutes to read each page. Isn’t a page only supposed to take one minute? Plus, I found myself rereading a lot because I wasn’t paying enough attention and it was important to keep all the characters straight. And I didn’t even spend any time underlining like I usually do because I had a borrowed book–- a nice trade paperback instead of my mass market copy.  My daughter sold me on reading the trade paperbacks: they are bigger and heavier but are made of better paper, stay open better, more space between the lines, hold up better. Also, I wanted that copy so I could more easily use my nifty book holder (my thumb joints really hurt when I hold a book for any length of time, ever since reading 80 books that one year).

One thing you have to get quickly used to when reading Russian authors is their way of assigning innumerable endearing nicknames to everyone. Shortening, lengthening, changing a name completely, you name it.  If you don’t go with that, you’ll never know who anyone is.

In spots I thought this book was the Moby Dick of the Napoleonic war with Russia in 1805—. It was written fifty years after the war actually happened. I didn’t follow the general war intrigues very well. But he didn’t stay too long there; he wrote mostly about the actual individuals involved, their motives and movements and the details of what happened to them in the trenches in quiet times and in battles, and then always going back and forth from the war to the peace pretty regularly. The title is exactly right on. It’s about these certain interconnected people/families (aristocrats) whose young men joined up with the war and then also these individuals’ and families’ lives outside the war stuff: at home, family relations, private life, private thoughts and aspirations–good and bad, romances, marriages, children, money, mistakes, sins, selfishness, selflessness, handling estates and serfs, deaths, births, heartbreak, happiness, changes of heart . . . even  heaven. I could see why Prince Andrey’s slow death is famous in all of literature.

I disagree with Fadiman’s assessment of this gigantic novel in some ways. (Fadiman who wrote The Lifetime Reading Plan which I am in the middle of. ) I don’t  think Tolstoy was all in love with his characters or the grand spectacle of life. I think he was disgusted with a big portion of  humanity. He had at least some of his main characters very critically examining themselves, and was very critical of humanity itself, of blindly worshiped leaders, and of historians specifically. Throughout the book he goes off on these topics, and particularly the last 30 pages are a tortured treatise on what it means to be human, what war is and how it happens, why leaders get to be leaders and what they really are, what history is for, how inaccurate it is, and so on. He was obviously a serious historian himself and it bugged him to no end how historians are too lazy to search out and record what really happened and instead always come to the easiest conclusions all tied with a neat little bow. He says this happens in all disciplines or fields of study, including science, owing to people’s self-serving motives or laziness. For a simple example in this book of history being oversimplified or misrepresented, according to Tolstoy, the great capital city of Moscow was not intentionally razed by the invading French; it was just the result of strangers of all ilks occupying and living day to day in the deserted city (the Russians had mostly fled) and being careless with cooking and smoking and garbage and such, not caring enough to put out any fires that started, which ended up burning practically the whole place down. This is what humans can do! He also talks about how battles were not necessary, or were not necessarily won or lost, how leaders were not necessarily heroic, how soldiers were not necessarily informed and did lots of things on their own, how things happened that shouldn’t have happened all because of carelessness, thoughtlessness, blind ambition, greed, in fact, all those seven deadly sins. War (and even peace if you can call it that) are extremely messy because of human temptation, sin, and stupidity. Much messier than we are led to, or want to, believe.

Tolstoy was a genius. I did want to underline some very important passages. One was about how a man eats a meal and that is sufficient for nutrition; his body is not made to eat two meals at once and that extra food would be wasted or do harm. He said marriage is like that. It is made for one man and one woman to procreate children and anything more or less (more than one man or more than one woman) would be superfluous and good for nothing and ruins the whole thing. Funny how most people knew this 200 years ago, but don’t realize it now! How many kinds of families are held up as ideal today! A little time is going to tell what havoc this departure from reality and truth and rightness will cause.

I want to get a new book just out called The Diversity Delusion I’ve been hearing about on the radio. The author, just like C. S. Lewis said, says we are going to self-destruct if we stay on this juggernaut proliferated in our universities which are bent on annihilating/recharacterizing the values and riches and wisdom accumulated by centuries of  western civilization. Who do people think they are—suddenly deciding that everyone who went before was stupid and their enduring life work suddenly worthless compared to what certain ignorant and strongly uninformed people living now are saying? As Euripides said, “What brashness has the human heart? How far will it push?”

Thank you, Tolstoy, for recording the human experience as you observed it. You got it right.

And now you have my War and Peace of a blog post!

Am I the Only Person Who Does Not Care For Potato Peel Pie???

A couple of readers have mentioned the new Netflix movie, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Netflix movie just out. I read the book almost ten years ago when it was all the book club rage and wrote about it. Here is my take from back then if you are interested, from my Jan's Journal blog. And no, there is no copy of this book in my Blue Hill Books little lending library.

August 24, 2009

I am staying with my daughter who is expecting triplets and saw a fun-looking book on her dresser, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. So I read it. It seems like everyone has read it and loves it. But I didn't. It was clever and all but the more I read the less I liked it. Which sort of annoys me because of the time invested. Here are some of the problems:

1. Oversentimental. I don't know why I hate this. Maybe it's just bad writing. The word maudlin comes to mind.
2. Exploitive. It uses the tragedies of wartime as the setting for a cutsey book. My dad was a veteran of WWII and a POW. He saw what it was like. And he didn't think Hogan's Heros (the TV comedy about a Nazi prison camp, 1965-71) was at all funny. Alongside the humor, the authors use fictional (?)war atrocities to manipulate the reader. I don't know. This bugged me, too. And yet I like historical fiction. This just didn't sound genuine. It sounded opportunistic.
3. Unrealistic. Try contrived. Stretched. Predictable. The little hints the authors dropped along the way added up until . . . how convenient! The perfectly wonderful childhood friend/editor guy is homosexual and THAT'S why the perfect couple will never marry. Duh. I'm pretty sick of "the most wonderful guy turning out to be gay so the most wonderful girl can marry the unassuming underdog" scenario. It's just too neat. And phony. The whole phony gay thing is used and overused because it gives greedy authors a whole new direction to twist the plot. It's getting mighty old. And that's just ONE of several too-convenient little twists in this book. Sort of like how kids in junior high always write fantastical stories that -- Surprise! -- end up being a dream all along. Which brings me to--
4. Anachronistic. As in historically incorrect. This story is happening in 1946. I'm pretty sure that in 1946 having a child out of wedlock and homosexuality were pretty much looked down upon by practically everybody as social ills. Even the people acting out. Hello! I really hate it when people assign the social trends of today to characters and events that happened in a completely different time, as in assigning an acceptance of sexual immorality to a time when mainstream society upheld traditional values. It makes me think such authors are misled, uneducated, have an agenda, or all of the above.
5. Demonizes religion. This is another trendy tactic that's getting really old. This book would have you think that one of the very few bad, crazy, hateful characters in the story was, you guessed it, a CHRISTIAN. Never mind the NAZIS who happened to be occupying the island and oppressing its inhabitants. The authors made the only openly religious character a horrible person whom everyone couldn't stand and made fun of. That's not only anachronisitic but pathetically politically correct. I personally have never known a single hateful Christian (hateful because of their religion). Have you? They simply are not as commonplace as our modern culture would have us think.
6. Shallow, unbelievable characters. Yes. All the good guys and girls are way better people than everybody else, so good as to be perfect except of course for their adorable, endearing, trite little eccentricities which are supposed to make us love them all the more. Gag. Perfect characters end up being predictable, flat, and boring. We don't remember them or learn anything from them.
7. Self-Serving. This is a book written by writers about a fictional writer/heroine, obviously glorifying her for all that she is: smarter, better, more observant, and just plain more wonderful than any other living being. Ugh. Oh, what a noble existence and calling! it says between the well-penned, name-dropping, literary snob-tainted lines. Ordinary people -- strangers--, at the mere thought of a writer being interested in them, write her effusive personal letters for her writing project and cannot contain their joy when she condescends to visit their island, whereupon they roll out the elegantly quirky and homey red carpet. And then they all fall even more in love with each other and the islanders give up the unbelievably darling, quirky (of course) orphaned child for her to legally adopt. Yeah. Sure.

"Please, no," I found myself muttering out loud here and there.

What I liked about the book? It was written entirely in letters. I like those. They are clever and fun. I just finished rereading Daddy Long-Legs which was delightful. My daughter Cami and I play book games sometimes. Once we tried to name all the books we know written in letters. Too bad this book was made of letters that felt forced and predictable.

Here's something funny. One of those adorably quirky characters actually mentions that good books ruin you for bad ones. Well, yeah. Too bad the authors stuck that in there, never supposing from their perceieved ivory tower that some reader might think THEIR book was one of those bad ones. Oops.

Okay, I'm done. Sorry if I was harsh. But people who write books open themselves up to criticism. And I do wish readers would think more critically.

It's a Crime if You Don't Read Dostoevsky

I first read Crime and Punishment in high school and again some time later but I had forgotten a lot of the details. This book  can be very thought-provoking. Its shows so clearly and convincingly how a person can get wrong ideas in their head and brood on them and get arrogant about them and then actually do them. What a mess was Raskolnikov! An utter mess. It seems the author even in those days (mid-1800s) was worried about the Godless nihilism taking over the universities, and saw how prideful young students, otherwise quite sane, could experiment on it, taking it to grave limits. But then, he shows how this will never do, how we know in our hearts there are some right and wrong absolutes, how rebelling against God and His goodness just because you dare to could end up driving a person crazy. I like how even though Raskolnikov does the legal right thing turning himself in days after he committed the horrendous crime of murdering two woman with an axe (most all of the book takes place within nine days), it takes him another year in Siberia to actually repent or have any real change of heart. He was that indoctrinated and arrogant and angry. I’m sure this book is not popular these days. It is all about right and wrong, sin and repentance.


Here are some highlights:
p 450 when comfort is preached as the aim of life
p 471 Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth and nothing easier than flattery.
p 538 (the other convicts fear him because he doesn’t believe in God)
p 538-9 The dream described here sounds like in C. S. Lewis’s  The Abolition of Man—it’s happening now! A strange new plague of microbes endowed with intelligence and will attacks almost everyone. People affected did not know how to judge and couldn’t agree what to consider evil and what good, whom to blame and whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. . . Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world.
P 541 Wasn’t everything now bound to be changed? (Because he learned to love something–Sonia)

A Man Called Ove, Without the L

A Man Called Ove, Without the L

Here is my take on A Man Called Ove from a Christian worldview, which I think is fair because many people who profess to believe in and follow Christ are reading, and enjoying, this book. I’ll get to why this is happening. Let’s start with the book, with all sorts of spoiler alerts.

I don't appreciate fiction writers who use tricks to trap the reader into some current popular ideological corner. It's all too clever, condescending, and rather bullyish. By the way, I never feel tricked or trapped by Dickens, or any great classic author. No, this is a modern literary gimmick. This book has several, as if the author writes mainly to this purpose, as if he is more conscious of the message he is pushing on the reader than writing a good story. Much of modern literature is like this. 

For example, in the first fourth of the book the author makes us shake our heads at the cranky Ove. We are hit over the head with how petty and rude he is. The author does nothing but trash the guy. Hold on. A few more pages and we get hit over the head again. Ove is only rude and inflexible because he has had a sad and difficult life. How judgmental we turn out to be! Bad us. Poor Ove. He has a right to be a jerk. Really? Ever heard of Job? Reminds me of a Toni Morrison short story I had to read in school that stealthily manipulates the reader into believing he must be a racist even when he isn’t. It was like being hit in the face with a pie. Whatever the quality of the writing, it's a lousy agenda and a lousy practical joke. On the other hand, in Dickens I learn plenty of things about myself that convict me, that need changing, but I feel the light coming from a universality about the good and bad in human nature the author expertly portrays and my own willingness to examine myself. Dickens is funny but the jokes are not on the reader.

Even fiction needs to be somewhat believable. Where is there a neighborhood on earth where uber-quirky, multiculty, politically correct, ultra-needy neighbors surround the old-fashioned, absolutist curmudgeon, never failing to enjoy his crusty insults while expecting help from him in every situation? It's much too obviously contrived in order to further those agendas, and that makes sub-par literature.

The suicidal Ove learns to put his trust in his own magnanimity, even though he never meant to help anyone and did his good deeds grudgingly; they merely fell into his lap and the memory of his wife seemed to indicate he should do them. I like the movie Hero with the anti-hero played by Dustin Hoffman better. An act of heroism falls into his lap, too, but he doesn’t get the credit and so what? He really is a bad guy and knows he doesn’t deserve it. Secular humanism, or relying on oneself and others for our worth and importance and purpose and meaning, is a sandy foundation, as we know from the scriptures. In fact, we are told we are “cursed” if we rely on man. We should know this  from living life. Okay, it’s nice to help others. We should when moved upon. But we should bear in mind that in our efforts we might actually be causing harm. Such as the nice person who anonymously cleared the snow off our driveway one snowy morning recently. They also unknowingly shredded our electrical cord plugged into our trailer. Lucky nobody got electrocuted!

Humans shouldn’t bet on themselves. If our snow-remover did it for God, relying on Christ, that’s great. But if he did it to get any kind of buzz or check off any sort of list, oops. Try as we might, we let ourselves and each other down to some degree at some point. Ove relied on Sophie, she died, and Ove let that ruin his life—because he relied on her so much. Then all he did was shift to another sandy foundation—other people. But what if he didn't have a ladder; how could have lent one? What if he wasn't strong; how could he have pulled the man off the train tracks? See? We all have limitations. That’s the hopeless part of this secular humanist worldview. It will never be enough. And it will end. As per C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, when we get to the other side, there is no such serving others. If that’s what our god is, we won’t be interested in the Real One.

We need to know that this life is not all there is and human relationships are not the most important and mere kindness is not the highest virtue. If we claim to be religious and Christian, we are being tested for where we will spend eternity. God must come first, and truth is the highest virtue. Truth is, we’re human. We mess up. A lot. If only by way of  vanity or laziness or selfish motives. And yes, our motives matter. God sees our hearts. Nothing unclean (that is, not washed in the blood of Christ) can get to Him. Hence, truth is, we need a Divine Savior.

I had fifty pages left. At least there’s nothing gay in this insipid book, I said to myself. Maybe I can finish it. My sister chose it for our family book group after all. Maybe I’ll find something good about it in the end. I woke up the next morning before it was light, fetched the book and curled back up in bed to finish it. The first thing that met my eyes was a new character, or rather the mysterious “sooty-eyed” character we all the sudden know a little better, fully revealed in the last chapters. Gay. Who gets “married” to the obese guy next door. Really? And the icing on the cake? They adopt a child. Talk about gimmicks. Talk about an agenda. The full-on normalization of homosexuality. As Flannery O'Connor put it, "What offends my taste in fiction is when right is held up as wrong, or wrong as right."

Some  readers think this is not an important part of the story, that the gay characters are gratuitous and easily overlooked, which proves my point. The gay thing is another of those carefully placed gimmicks. Accepting homosexuality was purposely saved for last, as the final frontier for poor old traditional, conventional Ove to cross. Hence, readers are led toward the idea that now we better all do what Ove did. Oh, we can keep our harmless personality quirks, but now we have been shown that we must at least tolerate, if not celebrate, every diverse, anti-Christ, politically correct, even highly destructive whim our neighbors, friends, and family members come up with, because these people are our chief reliance.

Ove’s name happens to be Love without the capital L. That is telling. This book is a fractured fairy tale. There is no real Love in it. It's about what people get out of each other. Sure, helping others might relieve people of their grouchiness and troubles for a minute, but if done solely for that purpose  actually draws people one more step away from Real Love, Pure Selfless Love, the Love of God. And away from Christ who embodies that Love.

So why is this book so popular, especially among people who go to church every Sunday and attend temples engraved with “Holiness to the Lord” and profess to love God and follow Christ? That’s easy to answer.

People today have been brought along to think Jesus Christ is merely a good friend who would bring you chicken soup if you had a cold. This is at the least ignorant and ultimately heresy. Jesus Christ himself said he was the Son of God who came to save us from our sins. Sad to say, people would rather believe anything but the fact that they are sinners and need saving, even those who believe they are headed for heaven. Christ was hated, spied on, sought out and killed, and not because he did nice things for people. He was hated because he pricked people’s consciences and claimed to be the only remedy for the fallen nature of mankind. Representing Jesus as merely an example of rendering material, temporal services to one another is a dumbing down of the gospel to the most boring, gimmicky, contrived, godless, hopeless level, wherein we are our own judges. The service Christ offers God’s children is of a divine type, of a spiritual nature. He is our Judge, and our Divine Deliverer, our Rescuer, our Redeemer. And those who resist a sense of sin will never take advantage of the greatest, most wonderful, most interesting gift ever offered.

Sure, we serve others. Drive them to the hospital, loan them a ladder, take them a warm loaf of bread. But at least let’s be honest about it. Most of what we do for others in this time of conveniences and plenty is just fluff. These days people rarely need life-changing acts of gratuitous service, except maybe in third world countries or war zones. Admit it: we do nice little things for people at least partly to make ourselves feel good and needed and popular and important and worthwhile. To top it off, we tell the world via the internet about what we did! It is so easy to forget the first commandment, to love God and give him all the glory. It is so easy to put other gods before Him: our comforts, our deeds, our human relationships.

Want to know how to serve others best? The greatest service you can ever render is to testify of Christ as the Savior of the world, as in the sins of the world, as in our own sins, if we’ll only repent and trust in him. Sadly, only people who are desperate for forgiveness will be interested in serving or being served in this way. But He died even for those few. What a glorious Story. What a glorious Truth. What a glorious Love with a capital L.

A Man Called Ove? Chicken soup for the Godless soul.

Lights, Camera, Action: Great Books Made into Movies

Lots of books have been made into movies, and for good reason: the original book was pretty great. A bunch of people thought the book was worth going to all the trouble and expense to make into a movie. Many of these movies have become classics in and of themselves.

The current special collection (Books in the Bin) in my little library on the curb are books made into great movies, which I have enjoyed both reading and watching lately. It's best to go back to the original source, isn't it? And there is added motivation for reading a thick book when you get the extra reward of watching a film version or two when you're done and your eyes are really tired of reading. Plus there's always popcorn.

Even if you have read the book or seen the movie in the past, it's fun to reread and then rewatch with the book fresh on your mind. All that work of picturing in your mind's eye the landscape, the faces, the architecture, the clothing, is done for you. You find yourself saying, Yes, this is how I saw him or her, the setting, the time, the relationships. Or not. You feel like an expert critic after reading the book. You engage your mind and make judgments. Did the film succeed in capturing the essence of the story and characters?  Which character is most accurate? Which is least? Which actors would I have chosen to play the parts? Did the film communicate the author's sentiment, or did the film miss it or change it? How many films or series versions has this book been made into?

Here are the books in the bin:

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis
The Black Stallion, Walter Farley
The Giver, Lois Lowry
Anne Franke: The Diary of a Young Girl
Daddy Long-Legs, Jean Webster
Emil and the Detectives, Erich Kastner
The Yearling, Rawlings

Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw (My Fair Lady)
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
One Hundred and One Dalmations, Dodie Smith
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Cheaper by the Dozen, Gilbreth

And some on my to-read pile:


Ben Hur, Lew Wallace
Anna and King of Siam, Margaret Landon
The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Pierre Boulle
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
The Monuments Men, Robert M. Edsel

Enjoy reading and then watching!

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

This may be my favorite novel of all. I don't think of it as gothic or overly melodramatic, as it is usually characterized these days. It's symbolic of real life to me. I have read it many times and love it more each time. I just love Jane, who I think is really the author, Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), or who Charlotte knew was the right person to be. I love the words, I love the tone, I love the sentiment, I love the humility, I love the humanness, I love the faith, I love the strength, I love the good in this book. Characters, story, time period, writing, I love it all. I love it from the first nuanced line, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”. . . to the very last three words in the book: “Come Lord Jesus.”

To begin with, we have Jane, the plainest name, symbolic of everyman (or everywoman). We have Eyre, similar to the word error. Charlotte read Dickens and Trollope and perhaps noted their meaningful name choices for their characters. I think she also chose her character names for good reason. Jane Eyre is about our frail, erring, but striving human nature, being meek and lowly and true and grateful and real and submissive to God, come what may. She tries to be longsuffering, sacrificing, forgiving, loving, in fact charitable in all the most important, Christ-like ways. And yet she is still led into error just as we all are. Edward Fairfax Rochester? Fair facts? As in truth, good and evil, right and wrong, God.

I always have a point in the book when I doubt Rochester, which I suppose Charlotte means us to do. He comes across as such a heartless flirt. But then as the story goes on we become more charitable, as in more patient and understanding of this abused, wildly passionate, deep, brooding, suffering man, and we, like Jane, begin to pity him to our heart’s core. His nobility wins out in the intense heat of great trial, and we see he is all that Jane percieved he was underneath his rough, casual exterior.

The crux of this story is that this meek young intelligent person who was slighted and treated cruelly and unjustly for several years  of her young life, who finally found a home and love and purpose and interest and joy, gave it all up –everything– in her own intense heat of great trial; and she gave it all up for truth, righteousness, God. It's a fiction, yes, and overdramatic, people say. But such temptations and dilemmas and the principles and choices behind them are very real and applicable to anyone's life, always have been, always will be.

Very few people in this world today would even imagine this kind of sacrifice. To give up everything for God? To walk—no, run—away from every earthly connection, comfort, convenience, sustenance, position, institution, livelihood, human affection, human belonging, human desire— because of the undeniable existence of rightness? And yet she did that. Come what may. Even though she was innocent when it came to wanting to marry Rochester, she admits she erred in idolizing him.  Would she stay with a man she loved, even wrongly idolized, who she suddenly learned was technically married, legally and morally tethered to another woman? No, she would not, not for any other reason than it was wrong in the sight of God and man. There I plant my foot, she said, and besides walking away from the outward evil she also learned to relinquish the false idol in her heart. Isn't this what God requires of us?

Today most people do the exact opposite: compromise, rationalize, essentially abandon God and truth and righteousness to keep hold of every earthly connection, comfort, convenience, sustenance, position, institution, livelihood, human tie, human belonging, human desire. We see this in the concessions people make, in the lies people invent, in the games people play, in the “rights” people demand, in the money and positions people go after, in the evils people propagate, in short, in the defining lusts of our times. 

I never tire of reading and learning about the remarkable Bronte family. I’m so grateful to my husband Stephen for driving me on that wild goose chase through the winding hills and vales of  the English countryside to find Charlotte Bronte’s home on a business trip to England. Several times I suggested we give up the search. But he wouldn’t have it. We arrived just minutes before the museum was to close, and the nice lady let us in. It was like stepping back in time. Haworth probably hasn't changed much since Charlotte's time. I remember the calm, sad, enduring feel of the parsonage house, the Bronte children’s tiny handmade, handwritten books, Charlotte’s tiny-waisted dress and ancient, slim, thin-fingered gloves, like a fairy’s, like a spirit's.

Some quotes:

Helen Burns: “Hush, Jane! You think too much of the love of human beings; you are too impulsive, too vehement; the sovereign hand that created your frame, and put life into it, has provided you with other resources than your feeble self, or than creatures feeble as you. Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world , and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, and recognise our innocence (if innocent we be . . . ), and God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death so certain an entrance to happiness . . . ?”

Jane: “Distrust it, sir; it is not a true angel.”

Janie: “That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir; because one can see at once that it is liable to abuse.’

“Sir,” I answered., “a wanderer’s repose or a sinner’s reformation should never depend on a fellow- creature. Men and women die; philosophers falter in wisdom, and Christians in goodness: if any one you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend and solace to heal.” 

Jane:“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their [the laws and principles] rigour; stringent are they, inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth–so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, ti is because I am insane–quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.
    I did.”

Me: The above passage is hardly understood today, either that or it is twisted to support the popular sophistries. Now those inviolate certainties, laws, principles, opinions, determinations, she is referring to here are gone from us. Our moral foundation is ground to dust. How do people choose the right when there is no right held up to be seen, when they haven’t been taught it, when evil principles, laws, opinions, determinations  have replaced righteous ones? This development probably never even crossed her mind.

Jane: “It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate; and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get–when our will strains after a path we may not follow–we need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden food it longed to taste–and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.”

St. John: “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus.” 

Janice Graham


P.S. And I love her other three novels too.

My New England "LiteraTOUR"

Well, we did it! Husband Steve and I took our little Tab trailer, bikes, and two-seater kayak across the country and found the roots of some of my favorite American authors I've been reading lately in my Lifetime Reading Plan. We went almost 7,000 miles in 3 weeks. The leaves were just changing and the weather was balmy (although a bit unseasonably warm and humid at times. Luckily we have AC in the Tab).

When we got home one of my first thoughts was of my Little Free Library and how to share my  experiences. So I decided to use my book bin to highlight treasures from my New England "litera-tour." (Don't I have a nice husband to take me on wild-goose chases while listening to me read aloud and rave on? He did this for me when we spent some time in England, too, which I should write about later.)

This was a long-dreamed-about trip, but actually came to be on the spur of the moment. We decided to do it only two days before we left. This was because we had to get to the Value Voters Summit in Washington D. C. in five days. Our daughter and her family live near there and we always fly and stay with her for this conference which we have attended every year since it started 11 years ago. At the last minute we decided to combine everything into one road trip.

Beyond getting to Maryland to our daughter's house our plans were not concrete. It was more like me saying, Hey, do you think we can go to Orchard House or Walden Pond? And my husband saying, Sure! It ended up being more than I ever dreamed.

The conference was very good (Matt Walsh had me at C.S. Lewis), we took in Shenendoah's gorgeous Skyline Drive one day with our family, and then said goodbye and headed north-ish. (We saw a lot on this trip, as in Niagara Falls, but for the purpose of this post I will highlight the author sites.) Pulling into the Minuteman campground near Concord, Massachusettes, hidden in a beautiful forest of tall trees, we unhooked the Tab and headed for perhaps the most author-dense pinprick in the nation.

First up, Orchard House, plain and brown, where Louisa May Alcott lived and where she based Little Women. We enjoyed a nice tour of the house which included a lot about U.S. history and Louisa's family and life. Little Women came to life. I must read it again keeping in mind how autobiographical it really is. We stayed a couple hours and then took to our bikes on the nearby Minuteman trail for several miles. Next, the Old Manse, across the street from Orchard House, so named by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose book Mosses From an Old Manse I had read less than a year ago and so loved. This creaky 300-year-old house once belonged to Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose glorious writings I also read recently, who invited Hawthorne to stay. I was invited to play a few bars on the parlor grand piano and saw these great writers' rooms and views from their windows, even love-poem etchings on the window glass done by Hawthorne's wife with her diamond ring. I soaked in as much as I could of the times and souls and thoughts that had passed through that house. We didn't have time to tour Wayside House nearby, where Alcott, Hawthorne, and a little later, Margaret Sidney (who wrote The Five Little Peppers series) lived. But we weren't done with Concord yet.

September 19 dawned very muggy and wet, the very day we planned to visit Thoreau's Walden Pond. I had read Walden not long ago and found it spiritual and moral and uplifting, perhaps contrary to the purely granola way it is represented today. Ever since I read it I have tried, as Thoreau advised, to appreciate the sunrise/sunset as one thing that can be relied upon to help keep hold of one's sanity. I also use wonderful quotes from him on my Blue Hill Books bookmarks. "We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention." And "Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage."

Thoreau being in a state of mourning at the death of his brother, Emerson offered his land as a retreat. Thoreau decided to build a tiny cabin, write, and live off the land, which he did for two years. The original cabin is long gone, but a charming facsimile has been constructed, as per his detailed description in Walden. And rain or not, after we delightedly learned that the pond (part of the state park) is available for recreational use, we went to the pond (which is more like a lake) and launched the kayak. Even in the rain the verdant, isolated place felt blessedly serene. We had it practically all to ourselves except for a few intrepid swimmers. After rowing its circumference, I decided to

take a swim myself. The rain had abated, the air was warm, the water was only a bit cool, and I swam the half mile across with Steve rowing the kayak alongside. See what I mean about better than I ever dreamed? Can soaking up the atmosphere of the place get any better than swimming in quiet soft glassy cool Walden Pond?

Due to intermittent tour hours we missed seeing the inside of the stately white Emerson house, where he also lived, but walked around the charming gardens. Next was Concord Museum where we saw Thoreau's green desk and so many other interesting things that we were late checking out of our campground and had to pay a late fee!

On to Hartford, Connecticut. We had been to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's childhood home, years before, but since viewing Ken Burns's wonderful documentary, I really wanted to see the big fancy house Samuel Clemens built for himself and his beloved family when he finally settled down.

Set downtown on a bit of a hill, surrounded by towering leafy trees, what a dark house it is, a man's house I'd say, with dark walls, dark floors, dark furnishings, dark staircases, dark carved embellishments and, among some white marble sculptures, even dark works of art. They had the lighting set as if gas-lit as per the times, and I felt I was going a bit blind. Even the children's schoolroom was dark and full of dark furniture, toys, and books. The children's bedrooms were lighter and sunnier. (Sorry, no photos were allowed inside.)

Twain's third-floor man-cave fit him to a T, with its billiard table and masculine writing desk and accoutrements. His happiest family times and most productive writing took place in this house. But I felt its darkness was an omen of the sadness that was to come. He failed financially because of speculations in a printing machine, had to leave the house, worked hard to make back his fortune by lecturing around the world, and outlived his cherished wife and all but one of his four beloved children. The museum next door was the biggest, fanciest museum I've ever seen built for one man. Did you know that in his time he was the most famous American on earth? I have a goal to read everything he wrote. So far I've read and reread: Tom, Huck, Joan, Yankee, Prince, Pudd'nhead, and some stories. Innocents Abroad, here I come.

Next door was none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe's house. Here was the little woman who started the big war, as Lincoln put it, by writing Uncle Tom's Cabin. We were running out of time and did not take the house tour, but wandered the gardens a bit. At least we had visited the Harriet Tubman house just days before in Auburn, New York--what a great tour and lecture they have there.

My husband made a valiant effort to get us to Sunnyside House, the home of Washington Irving in Tarrytown, New York, but when we finally got there a scary woman in the back of a truck loading up garden refuse warned us off. It was closed on Wednesdays! I think I'll read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow again anyway. Somehow it fits.

So there's our New England Literatour.  I've stuffed my special book bin in my little library with books from these great authors. As soon as we got home I read a thin volume of Louisa May Alcott's short stories. What beautiful writing and how firm her foundation in goodness. Remember, what we read matters. Be careful what you feed your mind!

Books are the best of things, well used: abused, among the worst. Ralph Waldo Emerson.