the walls of the hotel soar up into the night sky
There was nothing on our calendar for yesterday, a free Monday, no commitments. Linda meant to spoil hers by doing housework, and she may have done a bit. I invested my free day in two favorite activities, the first and most important and absolute topmost favorite of which was doing nothing, and the second was reading.
Sunday evening while the Oscars were blaring on the television behind me I read an article about Robert Frost in last week's copy of The New Yorker, my favorite magazine. As the article turned out, Frost was like everyone else: there was more and other than the homey public Being he projected, there were dark places. Robert Frost was more like us than we might have realized. Idealized and idolized, Frost to me was the, now mythical, folksy poet of my memory who used to stop by Gainesville when I was at the University of Florida (1953-1957) and charm us reading his poetry and commenting on it.
Among other things, The New Yorker essay talks about Frost's deep intellectualism and the multidimensionality of his poetry. One simple stanza, line, or word might mean four different things; and even then, the poet himself might have intended something else entirely.
Poetry is like a sermon that means different things to different people.
Wandering again. Anyway, I got out my thick book with all of Frost's poems, marked those that the essay author mentioned, and started reading them again. More yesterday, more today.
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Another section or two of Christian Wiman, I'm in no hurry to finish "Zero At The Bone," pick up and read a complete section, put down for a day or so while he soaks in.
On my computer desktop I have a file of poems I've liked and been adding to over the years, including some you have sent me, and including several slightly but significantly different English translations of Tomas Tranströmer's poem "The Couple" (he died recently, I'm glad I read some of him).
Also on my computer desktop, the short stories of JD Salinger, and icons marking two Nietzsche translations. Why Nietzsche? One reason is that Wiman keeps stirring him up; but also, if my religious faith doesn't bear challenging it isn't worth bothering to stand and say its creeds, much less giving half of my life to preaching it. Challenge and doubt is what brings it to life.
On my computer desktop there are also comic strips to read, and online solitaire games to win.
Not to mention junk I sometimes sink into on Facebook, such as watching a black widow spider crawl into a carnivorous plant's bloom and the plant snaps closed on it.
There are other spiders too, but mostly black widows, with the red hourglass on the abdomen: I don't know where all those black widow spiders come from, surely the plant owners are not catching them around the house and feeding them to the plants?
A mindless creature attracting, trapping, and devouring a living animal. This is another thing that would have shaken Charles Darwin's Christian faith in an all good, all powerful God.
We had a successful day at church last Sunday, our new rector's first services with us. My prayer is that this relationship lasts for many years, stability is important, in my mind especially at our school.
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In my email this morning, from "My Jewish Learning," a short Q&A piece about how to put up a mezuzah, why some Jews slant it. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/ask-the-expert-slanted-mezuzah/?utm_source=MJL_Iterable&utm_campaign=MJL&utm_medium=email
I'm not a Jew, but Jewishness fascinates me and Christianity comes out of it. I once considered putting up a mezuzah here on 7H door, until I read that for Christians to do that is trendy, trivializing cultural borrowing that is offensive to Jews, for whom the mezuzah is a deep proclamation of who they are.
If I were doing life over, though, and was asked to choose my sitz im leben, I might be a Greek Jew because of the two languages; and also thinking of my seminary professor's assertion that God only speaks Hebrew; that everything else is a translation, and not always all that accurate, notably, for example, Isaiah 7:14, where the Hebrew bible reads הָעַלְמָ֗ה HaAlmah (the young woman) that the LXX translates ἡ παρθένος (the virgin), and Matthew, then Luke (but neither Mark nor John nor Paul), then the Christian church codify into the doctrine of the virgin birth.
We are a religion of stories.
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As I sit here at my 7H window looking out over the Bay and the Island into th Gulf, I wish I had my camera with me, because a dove is resting on the windowsill just arm's reach from me. Sometimes the Holy Spirit comes down as a dove.
RSF&PTL
T89&c
photo 7:11 this morning from 7H: bit hazy out there