Goethe?

Nothing is worth more than this day

One of my favorite things is reading, but it opens one of my peculiarities. If I especially like a book I tend to back off and read it more and more slowly because I don’t want it to end. It’s subconscious in a way, I don’t realize it’s happening. As I near the closing chapters I am likely to put the book down and only return to it now and then. Roger Ebert’s book Life Itself: A Memoir is such. Weeks ago I became aware the end was nearing, so laid it aside. That is, to the extent a book on Kindle can be laid aside, it’s really just a matter of clicking something else. Last evening I went back to Ebert for two or three more chapters, another chapter and a half this morning. His writing is delightful; wherever he is, and he goes many places, Roger takes you there with him and you don’t want to leave. His favorite hotel in London. Newsroom in Chicago. Some bar with his newsroom pals. Ireland to interview Sophia Loren. I’m growing old with Roger Ebert, and am not ready, don’t really want it to end.

Mornings are early for me, increasingly so with age, and I like it this way except for my nemesis the bladder, which likes to get up even earlier than I do, will not be ignored, and enjoys tormenting me until it has its way. Back to bed usually doesn’t work, so I come downstairs, turn on my coffee maker, go outside for Linda’s newspaper, then the coffee is ready to punch brew. Linda reads the paper, I don’t, after doing the crossword puzzle she lays the comic section aside for me and I get to it in due course, except the Sunday Comics I usually read Sunday afternoon or Monday. At the moment there is a stack, two or three weeks of daily comics to read at leisure. I usually start at the top and read backwards, but with comics it doesn’t matter, it’s not real anyway. Actually, it’s as real as anything else, isn’t it, once life is past it’s all just memory, same as a book or stack of comics, and you can go there whenever you want to and in whatever order pleases you.

Postscript sort of stuff --

Tile in the kitchen window says "Goethe" but attribution is cheap, especially when the name is long dead and can't speak up to correct. Karl Barth, for example is often quoted saying a preacher should approach the pulpit with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, but there's no record Barth ever said that. In my growing up days at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, the rector always started the Offertory with the sentence, "Remember the words of our Lord Jesus, how he said it is more blessed to give than to receive." As a priest long years later, I looked it up so I could use it myself and found that the Lord Jesus never said that, or at least there's no gospel account of it. It's Paul at Miletus boarding ship to head toward Jerusalem, making his long, tearjerking speech to the Ephesian elders who have come to see him off one last time forever, saying that Jesus said that. And, of course, it's Luke, whoever Luke was, writing the story in Acts chapter 20. Paul himself never writes about himself that he ever said Jesus said that. So maybe it isn't more blessed to give than to receive after all.  

T+