nothing can touch us
This morning's exam was SHITE and I plan to down my sorrows later in a delicious bowl of tom yum gai.
For now, have some excerpts from my favourite-book-of-the-moment, Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger.
(p.12) Jasper never dominated my life. He was significant, but that is another matter. He was central to the structure, but that is all. Most lives have their core, their kernal, the vital centre. We will get to mine in due course, when I'm ready. At the moment I'm dealing with strata.
(p.41) We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum around in our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes -- our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around in my mouth like marbles -- tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant. Learning by heart, chanting at the top of my voice -- 'Lars Porsena of Clusium, By the Nine Gods he swore, That the great House of Tarquin, Should suffer wrong no more...' Gloating over Gordon who could not spell ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM, the longest word in the dictionary. Rhyming and blaspheming and marvelling. I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently -- it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable.
(p.57) So how am I to present Him -- this invisible all-pervasive catalyst? How I am to suggest to my reader (no informed enlightened reader -- a visitor from outer space, let us say) the extraordinary fact that for much of recorded time most people have been prepared to believe in the presidency over all things of an indefinable unassuageable Power?
I shall take a building. A building shaped like a cross, furnished neither for habitation nor defence. I shall multiply this building by a thousand, by ten thousand, by a hundred thousand. It may be as small as a single room; it may soar into the sky. It may be old or it may be new; it may be of stone or it may be of wood or it may be of brick or of mud. This building is in the heart of cities and is in the wild places of the earth. It is on islands and in deserts and upon mountains. It is in Provence and Suffolk and Tuscany and Alsace and in Vermont and Bolivia and the Lebanon. The walls and furnishings of this building tell stories; they talk of kings and queens and angels and devils; they instruct and they threaten. They are intended to uplift and to terrify. They are an argument made manifest.
The argument is another matter. What I am trying to demonstrate at this point is the amazing legacy of God -- or the possibility of God -- by way not of ideas but of manipulation of the landscape. Churches have always seemed to me almost irrefutable evidence. They make me wonder if -- just possibly -- I might be wrong.
(p.86) Claudia types. She has to pause from time to time to shake sand from the typewriter. She types partly from expediency and partly to exorcise what is now printed on her eyeballs. She tries to reduce to words what she has seen and thought. She types also because she is dog-tired, thirsty, aching and bad-tempered, and if she does not occupy herself she might give away some of this, and be ashamed.
(p.103) Tom Southern contemplates her. 'History,' he says. 'I used to be ratehr keen on history myself. By which I mean I enjoyed reading it. Positively sought it out. I daresay I'll come back to it, in the fullness of time. Right now I feel rather differently. When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy. I'd rather like to go back to fantasising.'
(p.110) Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realise that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.
(p.133) The aftermath of war is disorder. An example, incidentally, of the misuse of language: aftermath is a decent agricultural term, it has a precise meaning -- the aftermath is the second crop of grass which appears after the mowing of the first. The aftermath of war should, correctly, be another war; it usually is. But the conventional aftermath is the struggle to set straight that which is awry: the taking stock, the counting of the living and the dead, the drift of the dispossessed back to their homelands, the apportioning of blame, the extraction of penalties and, at last, the writing of history. Once it is all written down we know what really happened.
(p.200) To whom it may concern. C., I hope. Myself, maybe, in some future that at the moment seems frankly incredible. We all talk about 'after the war' but it seems almost an incantation -- a protective device: touch wood. One thinks about it, one day-dreams, makes plans -- something like the day-dreaming of childhood: When I'm Grown-up. So I say to myself: when I'm grown-up in this mythical world in which there are no more tanks, guns, mines, bombs, in which sand is stuff on beaches and the sun is something one appreciates -- when I'm let loose in this playground I'm going to... What am I going to do? And then the mythologies take over because what one conjures up is a place stripped of imperfections, a nirvana of green grass, happy children, tolerance and justice which never existed and never will. So one shoves that out of the way and summons up more wholesome stuff like hot meals, clean sheets, drink and sex. All the things one took for granted a bare three years ago which now take on almost holy significance. Which seem at times to be what we are fighting for.
For now, have some excerpts from my favourite-book-of-the-moment, Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger.
(p.12) Jasper never dominated my life. He was significant, but that is another matter. He was central to the structure, but that is all. Most lives have their core, their kernal, the vital centre. We will get to mine in due course, when I'm ready. At the moment I'm dealing with strata.
(p.41) We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum around in our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes -- our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around in my mouth like marbles -- tabernacle and pharisee and parable, trespasses and Babylon and covenant. Learning by heart, chanting at the top of my voice -- 'Lars Porsena of Clusium, By the Nine Gods he swore, That the great House of Tarquin, Should suffer wrong no more...' Gloating over Gordon who could not spell ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM, the longest word in the dictionary. Rhyming and blaspheming and marvelling. I collected the names of stars and of plants: Arcturus and Orion and Betelgeuse, melilot and fumitory and toadflax. There was no end to it, apparently -- it was like the grains of sand on the shore, the leaves on the great ash outside my bedroom window, immeasurable and unconquerable.
(p.57) So how am I to present Him -- this invisible all-pervasive catalyst? How I am to suggest to my reader (no informed enlightened reader -- a visitor from outer space, let us say) the extraordinary fact that for much of recorded time most people have been prepared to believe in the presidency over all things of an indefinable unassuageable Power?
I shall take a building. A building shaped like a cross, furnished neither for habitation nor defence. I shall multiply this building by a thousand, by ten thousand, by a hundred thousand. It may be as small as a single room; it may soar into the sky. It may be old or it may be new; it may be of stone or it may be of wood or it may be of brick or of mud. This building is in the heart of cities and is in the wild places of the earth. It is on islands and in deserts and upon mountains. It is in Provence and Suffolk and Tuscany and Alsace and in Vermont and Bolivia and the Lebanon. The walls and furnishings of this building tell stories; they talk of kings and queens and angels and devils; they instruct and they threaten. They are intended to uplift and to terrify. They are an argument made manifest.
The argument is another matter. What I am trying to demonstrate at this point is the amazing legacy of God -- or the possibility of God -- by way not of ideas but of manipulation of the landscape. Churches have always seemed to me almost irrefutable evidence. They make me wonder if -- just possibly -- I might be wrong.
(p.86) Claudia types. She has to pause from time to time to shake sand from the typewriter. She types partly from expediency and partly to exorcise what is now printed on her eyeballs. She tries to reduce to words what she has seen and thought. She types also because she is dog-tired, thirsty, aching and bad-tempered, and if she does not occupy herself she might give away some of this, and be ashamed.
(p.103) Tom Southern contemplates her. 'History,' he says. 'I used to be ratehr keen on history myself. By which I mean I enjoyed reading it. Positively sought it out. I daresay I'll come back to it, in the fullness of time. Right now I feel rather differently. When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy. I'd rather like to go back to fantasising.'
(p.110) Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realise that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.
(p.133) The aftermath of war is disorder. An example, incidentally, of the misuse of language: aftermath is a decent agricultural term, it has a precise meaning -- the aftermath is the second crop of grass which appears after the mowing of the first. The aftermath of war should, correctly, be another war; it usually is. But the conventional aftermath is the struggle to set straight that which is awry: the taking stock, the counting of the living and the dead, the drift of the dispossessed back to their homelands, the apportioning of blame, the extraction of penalties and, at last, the writing of history. Once it is all written down we know what really happened.
(p.200) To whom it may concern. C., I hope. Myself, maybe, in some future that at the moment seems frankly incredible. We all talk about 'after the war' but it seems almost an incantation -- a protective device: touch wood. One thinks about it, one day-dreams, makes plans -- something like the day-dreaming of childhood: When I'm Grown-up. So I say to myself: when I'm grown-up in this mythical world in which there are no more tanks, guns, mines, bombs, in which sand is stuff on beaches and the sun is something one appreciates -- when I'm let loose in this playground I'm going to... What am I going to do? And then the mythologies take over because what one conjures up is a place stripped of imperfections, a nirvana of green grass, happy children, tolerance and justice which never existed and never will. So one shoves that out of the way and summons up more wholesome stuff like hot meals, clean sheets, drink and sex. All the things one took for granted a bare three years ago which now take on almost holy significance. Which seem at times to be what we are fighting for.