January 29, 2025
Gleanings
- I often think about the way, way back. During the times when they didn’t know, or maybe they did. Times when the settling in of the darkness, the long nights, the waning sun, the short days, the cold, would have induced fear, uncertainty, not knowing. Maybe they feared the darkness was permanent, that the sun, the light, was dying. Maybe they didn’t know if a ‘January’ or a ‘July‘ would come. Long before times when they had lights to turn on when the sun went down, when they couldn’t jump ahead to the next thing, when they simply had to sit and be in the dark.
- This is probably different for everyone, but for me, the 50,000 word count mark is a giant sigh of relief—actually, let me break it down for you, because I have a minute, and you have a minute (I bet), and I like writing about writing.
- Anyway, no jealousy, you always gotta banish that stuff. Does you NO good whatever. Instead, as always, do what you can with what you’ve got. Share that. Dream more dreams. Shine where you are.
- So to that end, here’s my wish for all of us this week: that going forward, we consider ways we can engage in active resistance based in militant nonviolence, we express love rooted in justice, and we remember that kindness is a power move.
- There’s nothing like a natural phenomena to bring a city to standstill and to turn our attention to the sky, to each other, and to ourselves. Even ones as everyday as sunsets feel like an invitation from the universe to pause and pay attention
- So, I went to the mountains. And as I stood in the thin air, the dry snow underfoot, with the wind pushing against me—finally, I found the woman who would climb a mountain in my story. I understood how it gave her shape.
- I’m going to stash a bunch of things I’ve written here, and see if the utterly disconnected can be connected, because webs webs webs you know.
- Edith Wharton was born 163 years ago today, on January 24, 1862, in New York City. I’ve been rereading her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1933), enjoying her descriptions of the books she read when she was young. Forbidden to read a novel without her mother’s permission, she writes that the “wide expanse of the classics, English, French and German” stretched before her instead, and she “plunged at will” into “that sea of wonders.”
- You are capable of less than you thought, but also more—in some strange, ineffable way. You are soft and weepy and sturdy as a tree, all at the same time. You are someone who learns by attraction and by necessity because you are human, just like everybody else. And that feels far less lonely than trying to pretend (even to yourself) like you’ve got it all under control.
- But Doomsday Book is not just a historical novel, and though at times I wondered about the value of the time-travel framing, by the end I appreciated the layers Willis had added through it. The most obvious one was just the point that, for all our advances in science and medicine, we are not immune from catastrophes, including ones caused by mutating viruses. A more subtle and thought-provoking one was the interplay between the science fiction aspects of time travel and the religious beliefs of the 14th-century people Kivrin encounters, especially the priest, Father Roche, who tends Kivrin in her initial illness and then labours beside her as one by one the others around them fall victim to the plague—until his turn comes as well.
- Down the hallway to the right was a thickly carpeted staircase with a fish tank tucked against the wall by the bottom stair. It was filled with shiny, darting Neon Tetras and other tropical fish and it hummed and bubbled in a very comforting manner. Beside the fish was the regular lounge room door and a bathroom beside that. We watched telly and ate meals in the regular lounge room, uncles and aunties, grandparents and parents and all of us kids together in various configurations, saying grace and sipping soup.
- one of the things I love about the pool is that it is where I can always find my inner life.
- Goodnight Moon is really a work of experimental poetry — a fact that’s largely unacknowledged culturally (and not just because of picture books’ general low literary standing). Goodnight Moon’s ubiquity has desensitized us to its strangeness. We take this book for granted. It’s part of the background, the bright green wallpaper of an American childhood.
- To summarize, that is how I spent yesterday. I took care of myself.
- how the light returns after a particularly dark time, little by little (see 9), and how clear the stars and planets are on the cold nights. We are stardust, maybe 97%, and this is our moment.
- Because it’s Fitzgerald writing I didn’t expect any goodness to be rewarded, or for the powerful and selfish to do anything but succeed in their bullying. And, well, I was right. I do find her quite bleak and cynical a lot of the time. Even though her writing is sharp, crisp, acidic and never sentimental, which can be refreshing. She has an eye for the ways in which people reveal who they are, and the ways in which privilege corrupts. The insularity of this small town, and the ways in which those with connections rule the roost, even if they are unworthy of it, is finely drawn here.
- As the cold and darkness have descended, the stalwart readers of our silent book club groups have turned in particular earnest to books to warm and brighten the way through … And yes, I said “groups” because between two meetings this past month – one virtual and one in-person – we had representation from all of midtown, east end and west end Toronto and also Mississauga, all neighbourhoods that have groups and venues in their locales. It’s wonderful how these groups intersect – and our reading and reading lists are the better for it.
- And so we live, all bumping into each other with our needs and judgements, rules and opinions, sufferings and irritations and joys.
- I wrote SPIDER because I DO like mischief, tricks, surprises, comedy, and biggish ideas that I feel kids are more capable of enjoying than many adults might assume.
